On boundaries

I have been thinking a lot about boundaries today as its become apparent to me that healthy boundaries help me feel happy and protect my life energy from others who may want to lay claim to it.  I can also see how in the past, my own narcissistic wound made me a bit of a vampire or a puller on other’s energy, not in a totally negative way, what I am getting at is that because I did not feel a great sense of inner love or value or self esteem I could so easily feel that my source for these things needed to lie outside of me. I started to think more about it yesterday after watching two You Tube videos I provided links to.  Those of us whose needs were not met in childhood and learned to get attention by pleasing and adapting often suffer from a stunted or collapsed sense of self.  We crave that missing love from outside, the wound of which lay in childhood and can never be healed in adult life by another person, (well only by a person who respects our boundaries as unrecovered narcissist will not do.)

I remember reading in Robert Hand’s book Planets in Youth that those of us with Venus (planet of relationships and self value) square to Neptune often give out of a sense that we do not have value and can only acquire it by giving or doing or being what others demand of us.  When we give into these demands or requests and allow ourselves to be manipulated by conditional love from another unrecovered person we then grieve inwardly. I learned this lesson on Friday after saying No to a request from Scott and being pushed and then told I was not the true love of his life if I didn’t do it, getting scared then collapsing my boundary when after agreeing to do it, I found myself crying and feeling like I could not breathe.  Luckily something intervened which meant I did not end up doing it anyway and I immediately felt better but the feeling of grief I had after collapsing my boundary was a clear sign that what I had done was not healthy and it scared me as in my last relationship my ex was always demanding I do, or be, or feel differently and I would be threatened with the silent treatment often when I would not do it.  And this triggered something my parents would do, withdraw love when I wasn’t living up to their demands.

I am glad that I got the lesson again on Friday.  Scott had promised if I was not comfortable with doing something he would not push but then went on to push.  I stood up to him and was manipulated a bit but now he has apologised and backed down.   But the entire incident has made me do a double take on all the boundary events in my life from the past where I have been in hot water and do some inner reflection which is all spot on cue now that retrograde transiting Venus is moving towards the square with my natal Mars Saturn Moon in the sixth house.

The issue with Scott is complex because what he is asking for is just a temporary thing and in the end I will be repaid.  But there are other boundary issues with us too.  As an empath I am a person who needs a lot of quiet introspective time.   Being on my own allows me to return to my source and my True Self, I can be easily overwhelmed in crowds because my energy body picks things up.  I get exhausted by to much time in purely ‘human’ or man made environments.  I need a daily time of touching base with nature and I don’t know honestly if I will ever be able to live 24/7 with another human being. Scott on the other hand is different in this regard.   He says once we are together he wants to be with me 24/7 and just the idea of it makes me hyperventilate.  Yesterday the inner critic was giving me a serve after listening to a video on withholding and emotional unavailability.  I started to think I am the one who has problems with emotional availability due to the fact I need a lot of quiet time but really today in a clearer space I see it isn’t like that at all.  I really can be there emotionally for others I just have to be very careful with what I take on board when I am with others.

I can depend only to a degree on others in my life.  I know I must in the words of the 12 step fellowships be self supporting, it doesn’t mean that others cannot ever help me nor I them but it does mean that my source of connection is primarily with my own centre and spiritual source.  I know in a deep relationship this separateness is surrendered for moments at a time, say in intense sexual experiences and when we extend our hearts and bodies to feel the suffering of another human being, so at times I do get confused on where I begin and others end and vice versa.  Am I being too rigid in expecting my demands for ‘space’ to be understood.  I am grateful to have a person around me now who says they will accept this.  For so long I have felt I wont ever be able to live with another human being again due to my high sensitivity and empathic nature.  I would be interested to hear if and how others struggle with this issue, so if you feel like it, please leave me a comment in the section below.

The devastation of the silent treatment

It took me a long time to understand and heal from falling in love with a person who had narcissism around 11 years ago.  I was in the relationship for just under 4 tough years and was often subject to the silent treatment.  He would throw a tantrum and walk out on me, or if I was also in an angry state which (at that stage of my wounded psychological development, expressing repressed feelings was impossible) he would also immediately walk out and not speak to me for days.  I would get so terrified and triggered into my abandonment depression that I would bel literally begging for any kind of contact and to get it I had to admit how wrong and bad I was.  I look back now and even writing about it is retraumatising all these years later.

It is next to impossible to explain to someone who has secure attachment how extremely annihilating and traumatising being left in this way or given the silent treatment is for someone with insecure or unstable attachment trauma is.

Anyway after he dumped me just under 8 years ago I finally got help and I was lucky enough to come across the work of Kim Saeed on this site who herself has recovered from a traumatising relationship with a narcissist and now does healing and provides information for others who suffer.  Her site is well worth a look and today I am sharing this post on the effects of the silent treatment, to help anyone who is on the receiving end of it. Its also something my mother used on me more than once and left me so, so deeply fearful and insecure as a teenager and young adult.

https://letmereach.com/2014/06/09/the-deafening-brutality-of-the-narcissists-silent-treatment/

https://letmereach.com/2018/01/17/10-surprising-facts-silent-treatment/

Silence

Silence will leave you guessing

May fill you with an emptiness

That is an echo of those times separation distance or silence was used

To prevent you expressing something

Others did not understand or want to hear

But silence can also be such a soothing balm

It can provide a healing place for a tired or damaged soul

Emptied out and made weary by the cacophany of this world

And its at times soul scalding profanities

Its all in what you bring to silence

That determines whether it is blessing or a curse

A hiding

Or a finding place

Where you are finally free

To open your being and feel your soul speak to you

Truths you always needed to know

That so often others

Could not accept

Or fully understand

Hidden deep in your body

Under a heavy blanket of silence

Trauma and silence

The following is partly verbatim extract from the video of Diane Langberg’s talk on trauma I reblogged earlier, and partly some of my own thoughts interspersed.  We so badly need to speak about our trauma and be understood, heard and validated.  The paradox is that so much of trauma is hard to articulate at first, our body carries a hidden burden that often is so difficult to give form and substance to, but it is so important that we try.

Trauma silences human beings partly because there are no words to really describe what that was a like.  It brings emotional darkness, isolation because you feel like nobody cares or even if they did they wouldn’t understand,  it makes time stand still because we get so lost in what happened we cannot see ahead we have lost hope

Trauma heals through : talking :  tears:  time.

When somebody does not talk when all of that is shut down they are broken emotionally (and deeply wounded in a wordless space).  People often will not talk because the pain is so great they cannot find the words. Or they talk over and over again not touching the real deep place.  To remain silent is to fail to honour the event, the memory.  (It is so hard to find the words…. words are often so inadequate when it comes to trauma. After a major trauma in the beginning often there are no words.  (Can we ever really explain what trauma is as it goes into the body?  The body knows!)   Dance it! Draw it!

To recover from trauma we must find a way to live in the truth and not pretend.  Minimising trauma, saying it didn’t hurt, should not hurt or leave lasting effects is wrong.  That is silencing.

Talking says I am here I am alive and for people with trauma that is a huge step.  Most of all letting someone talk or being there for them shows you have ‘care for their broken heart’.

Most especially sometimes what really helps is to sit in silence with the person.  Join with them in the darkness.  Let them know by your presence they are not alone in it.

Most important is gaining power over trauma by learning to tell the story. At first trauma will come out in fragments that slowly have to be pieced together.  Telling and being listened to restores the interpersonal bridge broken in and through trauma.  It CONNNECTS us to others and to our trauma.  When we are believed our trauma is validated.

Thank you so much Broken Blue Sky for sharing Diane’s video with me.  She speaks of things I did with my sister who died and never got free of her deepest traumas, but how could she.  I often just sat with her and held her hand.  How often I have wished someone was there to do that with me.  🙂

 

Alone in the pain

I just reblogged a post on the impact of the silent treatment in abuse.  I was on the receiving end of the silent treatment a lot in my past relationship.  When something triggered my ex partner’s pain or nastiness or when he felt the need to disempower me or control my valid responses and needs he would just walk out and refuse to speak to me for days.  At the same time I would be slammed with judgement about how wrong, or bad I was, simply for expressing my self and being me.

At the time I met that person I was isolated and alone in a very out of the way place.  I was suffering from the impact of a head injury and a nasty fall.   When this person offered me titbits of attention I became quickly ‘hooked’, I was like a starving animal being fed scraps after a time in solitary confinement, admittedly one I chose myself due to the other abuses that had gone before.

As I look back I don’t know how I didn’t take my own life at that stage.  The only thing that saved me was writing and writing everyday in my journal on the computer and going to weekly Al Anon meetings.  Even there though I was sidelined a lot because I was a ‘dual member’, someone who participated in both AA and Al Anon and those affected by other’s alcoholism did not take well to knowing I was in recovery for addiction myself at times and I was told I needed to stay silent about that too.   I was not in therapy at that times and I was all alone with, (by that time) over 40 years of pain locked up inside me.

I look back now with the benefit of hindsight and many years of researching and reading about narcissistic abuse behind me.  When I read the post shared by Pascale’s Healing Journey and the poem it broke my heart.  It made me realise how important empathy is and how profoundly damaging it is to abuse a child with deed or words and then leave them all alone to stew in their own juices in silence with no comfort or validation or understanding.  If we are very young when this happens our little bodies cannot really cope with all of those powerful feelings of hurt and hatred at unjustified abuse, we literally have nowhere to go with them, so they stay locked or trapped inside and in later life when they are triggered and we have no rational way to articulate or release them in a healthier way, others may judge us as ‘crazy’ or ‘mad’.  Welcome to the genesis of so called ‘borderline personality disorder!’

If we later find no way to solve the dilemma we were left with, we get attracted to the same ‘type’,  narcissists tend to be attracted to the highly emotionally charged or intensely sensitive ‘borderline’ like moths to a flame!  But in some strange way such a painful outcome may hold the genesis of our healing too.  For the pain being retriggered  in the present may show us where old wounds and injuries lay.  However, that said, if we can’t find the right help to understand how such things as the silent treatment work to evoke and block access to our deeper feelings and reactions we may struggle for years.  When my ex used to cut me off at those times, I would frantically try to re-engage with him to prove how he was so wrong, but later I was advised that a narcissist would have had to trigger me and then paint me black due to the dynamic.  As one friend who knew us both said to me a few years after my ex and I separated.  “He used you like a bar of soap to wipe his dirty hands on!”

If you are on the receiving end of this kind of abuse, please do all you can to get some help.  No one deserves the silent treatment as punishment.   Being left all alone with unbearable feelings which prevent and stymie our capacity to self soothe is dangerous on so many levels, physically, emotionally and spiritually.  No one deserves this abuse and if you have suffered in this way it is so important you have someone there who can help you to understand, contain, unpack and work through your feelings which are too much to cope with alone.

 

 

Silence

A heart rending post on how silence can hurt us.