Bound

You bound me up inside the straight jacket

Of your own emotional neglect

And insecurities

So tightly that I could no longer

Feel my own lifeblood and breath

Moving through me

And if the spirit of us

All that is most pure, live and real

Resides inside the power of air

That we can ingest

Then in that way you locked me up

Within an airless tower

So far from human life intelligence

Understanding, empathy and love

So now as I walk trying to take back my power

Is it any wonder I cry

Mum I was there for you

By your side every time you were suffering

Holding the hands of you and my sisters

Crying for what was done to all of us

And yet you chose to give that power away

To your oldest son

Who was never there

Always ran

Always had to deny

True passion, depth and feeling

Is it any wonder I wised to die

A short time ago

When it became clear

He would cut me down and try to deny me

Anyway he could

Human warmth

Understanding love and connection

But he is not that strong

For even as his fear locks he and his family up

In a prison

Slowly and painfully I feel the stolen air

Returning to my lungs

With this flood of returning feeling

So powerful it will not longer be denied

This is why we suicide

Or throw our souls on a funeral pire

Just as these old age women

Venerated the cutting masculine force

That severed them from feeling

While weeping all alone in silence

What can we do to make an uprising?

Mothers you were left

Empty and vacant

Even incapable of understanding

The deep wounds your returning husbands bore

Under a heavy cloak of restriction and silence

And so the damage got enacted on us

You tried to cut me to shape

To fit your ideal of what

A ‘nice’ girl could be

But I was not born to the a domesticated servant

I am a woman

With the heart of a lion

And I will not longer consent to this silence

To this hopelessness

To this grief

Even as I and my spiritual siblings weep

Over what is being done to us

In this darkest age

Of growing inner despair

And emotional blindness

A powerful tide is rising

A wild fire is burning

That will not be refused

But this the returning power of

Light and feeling

Passion and fire

Must be used skillfully

To cut our bleeding heart

Of enslaved humanity

Free

Ghosts of the person you were

Ghosts of the person you were

Will visit you sometimes

Knocking on the door of your soul

Possibly in a dream

Or calling out your name

In a voice that is only barely audible

Beneath the deeply muffled

Scream of anxiety

That comes to throw you

Off the scent of

Who you knew your self to be

Buried deep beneath the obscuring weight

Of all of that haunting

So even if you

Now

Give these ‘demons’ air

For might they not be

Angels in deep disguise

Who need your attention and care?

Do not let their anguish

So utterly destroy

Those tendrils of gold

Pain can spin

From within the experience

Of fully embodied feeling

Who you ‘were’ then

Was the mixed up result of

So many things

And this

Psychic blindness

My love

Was the painful necessary reality

Obscuring from view

The Radiant moonlight

Of your own Soul rising

Above a darkened lake

Encompassed by the solar eclipse

Of protective denial

You are not a broken thing

And your spirit

In truth

It still is

Growing it wings

As you struggle here within the cocoon

To birth

Silently coalescing

Inside the storm

Of your own recollecting

And becoming

Enduring all of

The complex twists and turns of recovering

Ghosts of your former selves

They beg to be known

Let in from the shadows

So open yourself

And let the force of that storm

Blow on through

Until suddenly when you least expect it

The Sunlight of your True Self

Finally reappears

Glistening upon that horizon

From deep within the rising mist

Surrendering the ghosts disguises

Opening you up

Deep inside

To the radiant sun rise

Of your truest

Deepest

Most authentic Self

When you left

The air left the room when you entered, the force of the charge making my breath catch in the way it only can when someone you loved and then became unable to reach through to re-enters the vicinity. There were really no words to say, no more attempts to explain or plead or appease as there were in those painful months after we separated as I felt myself falling again into a hole so so deep, so so painful and oh so familiar.

I read on relationship survival group today that the pain we feel when a relationship ends is actually the pain our inner child felt in the absence of the parent’s love.. I am not entirely sure, do not other hearts break and minds tend to go under when the object of your love decides they no longer want you? Maybe in that situation the loss is not as acute if it does not end up re-triggering a far earlier wound.

I only look back now to the desperate steps I took then (in the months after you left) which were about me not facing my feelings fully and strangely this came to mind today when reading in Clementine Ford’s book How We Love about how she struggled to face or found it so painful to face her mother’s impending death from cancer and how, in time she did surrender to the sadness she was finally comforted by her mother who held her head in her lap in the hospital chapel as Clementine cried. There would be no such comfort for me from any quarter after you left. And so I ran desperately as I had to go away in that painful month after Dad passed on 8th of January 1985.

Loss can take a lot of time to negotiate. I think of the final nights of my own mother’s life, we did get to hold hands and say a lot of things that needed to be said but there was never an admission by her that she understood the deep pain she had passed on, in fact when I read the birthday card she gave me on my 54th birthday just a few days after I was diagnosed with breast cancer it is coldly detached and seems to lack any kind of warmth. Sad now but more truthful to acknowledge this. Even as I still struggle with blaming myself for ending up at the coast house after Jonathan decided to leave me and being asked how long I intended to stay and having my sister ask my mother to choose her favorite! It is all water under the bridge now but by God it was hard to live with that lack of emotional connection and care for and about my feelings.

Funny how it took us not working out for me to finally find myself.. some times lately I take a little peek at your Facebook page to see the kinds of things you post.. I enjoy some of them but there does not seem to be any emotion there, after all my feelings to you never made sense at all. Despite this I still remember that day at the cafe when I looked over and saw the beautiful blue of your eyes become even more vibrant contrasted against the deep indigo of your jacket.. I thought it was love but was it? I still pray for you.. I do not know if you ever think of me, but its okay I am at peace now.. you were such a necessary part of my journey.. and always will remain so, your leaving me took me into the deepest of pain, but in the end facing and feeling that was the necessary work that could not be shirked on the path home to finding my self, embracing and finally learning a way to love and understand myself and my past through my inner wounding.

An anchor in the storm

Listening to music often sparks thoughts or memories or associations, this song is one I first heard a few months back, I believe it was featured in a movie. When I listen to it and the desire the singer expresses to have a guide in the storm it makes sense, for if we are left at the mercy of big inner storms, floods of feeling or shock trauma re-actions from PTSD it can be harder on our own..

I remember after my second accident which occurred late in June in 2005 how the hospital connected me with a lovely woman around my own age named Marlene, by a weird case of synchronicity Marlene was Dutch and even from my Dad’s home town. After coming to see me in the hospital after the crash I remember the day she supported me to do my grocery shopping.. Just this simple task was so overwhelming for me, I was in Cambridge lodging with a family, I had no car and I would get flooded all of the time, experiencing nausea, and profound dissociation/dislocation feelings, even getting out of bed was a major achievement.. Those days are behind me but I still get the morning post eating head rushes and I just had one after walking Jasper to the oval and kicking the ball around.. It wasn’t long after lunch but my entire system and chakras were flooded, maybe some of the cold and fresh air played a part.

Marlene and I ended up becoming good friends I still found it hard to draw as close to her as I would have liked, when I went to Glastonbury shortly after the accident due to the family finding my trauma ‘too distressing a reminder’ I think she hoped I would eventually return to Cambridge and we may live together but she did not tell me this until I had booked a return fare home that Christmas, one of the last things we did was attend a beautiful church service with classical music.. Marlene really represented a strong part of my European soul I wish I could have lived then but the pull of family was strong. due to my older sister still being in a need of a lot of support and my Mum as well.

It is easier for me to tolerate being on my own now and I can hold all of these memories close as I am mindful to remember things evolved as they needed to at the time for my soul journey.. I had to come home and go through worse things in order to grow.

To be honest over the past few years in my home town I have managed to build some genuine connections with people related to my family, some relationships have changed and since my sister has been struggling in some way this has brought me closer to some of her friends that her depression often tries to cut her off from… I actually had two calls from people yesterday wanting to know how best to handle the way she is treating them.. I know for myself depression can sometimes lie, it tells us people are not safe who may be (especially if we have anxious attachment) and if we have the huge fear of vulnerability and of feeling unmasked (which my sister seems to have even more of than me) it gets doubly hard.

Sometimes too friends do not know how to be present with someone in the depths and silence of freeze, profound introversion or withdrawal.. The person may actually be comforted by you being there even if they cannot express it if you do not invade them and can simply show them via touch or acceptance a sense of allowing them to be where they are. This is something my family could not give to me when I hit the wall in 2004 and sadly something my sister seemed to get a bit better at after Mum died, for me, if not for herself.

Places of holding and anchoring are important.. Its an interesting thing I was saying in therapy to Kat yesterday that when I visited my sister in that small room close to the nurses station close to dusk on Sunday sitting quietly with her for some time it seemed to me like a womb. She didn’t have the light on at first and she was sitting fully dressed on the bed.. the words that came to me then were ‘unborn; as if she was existing in some kind of womb. I also got the impression when she turned the small upturned light on and looked at the fixtures of the bedside table that we were in some kind of ship cabin..

The night sea journey is a profound symbolic metaphor for a journey of transformation or dissolution and reforming such as my sister seems to be going through at present.. This experience appeared in one of my pre sobriety dreams and has always seemed very significant to me in terms of the journey my soul was set to embark upon then

As I write this I can call to mind the dream I had a long while back of both my sister and I walking the length of Mollymook Beach close to the house my father built shortly before he died and coming upon a beached whale, in the dream my sister looked at me with those pleading eyes of infinite sadness and longing she sometimes turns on me lately and said the words “the whales are such sad creatures.” Jonah travelled in the belly of the whale on his transformative journey, I also think a beached whale may associate to buried feelings of the ancestral history emerging from a deeply submerged collective oceanic state..

These associations and symbols ring true to my soul, they give a sense of meaning to what seems to be transpiring in my sister’s life right now and in my own over the past 19 years of my mid life journey. I need to remember too that sometimes a lot is going on inside the depths of a person when they undergo reversions or deep repressions of feeling (depression). Jung believed we can and do experience many of this kinds of dives inwards, in order to move forward and incorporate hidden parts of our self or shadow.. He underwent many himself.

Much depends on how much meaning we can give to them and if we permit ourselves to ‘mine’ then and open us up, co-operating with egoic dissolution, rather than have them medicated or numbed by the medical model.. who knows what processes the soul is undergoing in its mysterious inner landscape over such long periods.. Depression could be a huge part of the dying out of old forms of the false self in order that a process of individuation and soul reclaiming or re-anchoring or more complete embodiment of split off parts of us can take place within the ego. In other words it often represents our Self with a capital S knocking on the door and throwing a lot up in the air that we thought we were or knew before.

True : some reflections on being true to ourselves on the path of recovery.

When I am not true to myself I lose my way. I feel it more and more lately that empowering sense of being in tune with my own soul note and of how it feels when I step away from that more primal, intuitive in touch side of myself and fall into self abandonment or self rejection.. Many of the conditioning forces of society especially for women turn us away from the more powerful authentic embodied side of us, religion for me was particularly toxic in this regard. Today in therapy Kat and I were exploring the strong forces of repression in my family that put us three girls to death on many levels , we were talking of my father’s remoteness and unwillingness to step in to protect us from Mum, too. In this way my father dying at the age of 23 was even more painful, but Dad was a young kid in flight from his family and terrifying conditions around World War Two. In many ways both of my parents were emotional orphans, young kids on the run and trying so hard to survive and build something new.

For myself, I feel so grateful to have escaped the medication pathway and even the AA pathway saying I have defects of character. If you don’t get to fully blossom as the true you and cannot rely on healthy attachments and then other linkages get torn apart you end up doing all you can to surive and stay afloat and if the original deficits arent acknowledged and some attempt at rebuilding and repair made, healing and change is not possible. Some schisms and wounds stay with us for a long time and we replay them over and over until we develop in sight. It is now recognised that even later in life our brain can make new connections and set down new neural pathways if we can find positive affirming attachments to assist us. Some of us, many of us, however, do have to go into the wilderness alone and some of us find or manage to hold onto shards of our splintered being or hidden truth there. We can also explore what got torn severed, split off, buried and involve in recollecting. Each trauma memory maybe a necessary thread that goes on to be part of the tapestry.

Rilke expresses this beautifully in the following lines of this poem shared with me some years ago by a previous therapist Rae:

She who reconciles the ill matched threads

of her life, and weaves them gratefully

into a single cloth –

it is she who drives the loudmouths from the hall

and clears it for a different celebration

where the guest is you.

In the softness of evening

it’s you she receives.

You are the partner of her loneliness,

the unspeaking center of her monologues.

With each disclosure you encompass more

and she stretches beyond what limits her

to hold you.

The stretching beyond what limits us requires us to move out of ‘safety’ in the face of what threatens us with misjudgement that is sadly often the obvious response of a world oblivious to the authentic roots of our trauma. This poem also speaks about the healing witness both inside and outside as well as how the true self waits for us to hold all of us, as we increasingly develop that capacity through telling and feeling the organic truth of our trauma trajectory..

A good therapist is invaluable and even as I type this I realise how many struggle without this which is where blogs or books or other tales of survivors in recovery can help us.. Just hearing another’s story, noticing the resonances, being able to say “Ahh .. that rings true for me too”, can help us, it certainly has helped me.

And on the healing pathway God also sends us angels at critical times.. I cannot tell you the number of times an angel of some kind has whispered in my ear or saved my bacon from a near miss or accident, it happened twice last week and it has happened in terms of me finding my way to the right literature, person, group or place AT JUST THE RIGHT TIME too many times now for me to doubt it.

The true self I do believe waits on us.. the most authentic part of us will not be forever foresaken without grave damage befalling us on some level. Jesus said it well in the Gnostic gospels.

If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

In this quote Jesus challenges the assumption that the Kingdom of Heaven lives in a far off place. These words also speak of it’s closeness to us if we undertake the path of individuation, and resurrection of the true self often attended my mockery and scorn from the unwise:

The Kingdom of God is within you and all around you.

I think a person who loves and respects his true self, must also respect the true self of others and naturally finds his way to the inner kingdom. He no longer exists in a state of inner division. That person will weep for the one who loses the way to it and will never be able to put on a false mask in the face of that.. This is not always easy.. To say to a brother or sister you see them suffering and falling short (even through no fault of their own) but it seems necessary to a vibrant authenticity.. And similarly we must be vigilant in taking out a sword to cut off from anyone who tries to deny us this truth the meaning behind the saying of Jesus that he came to bring a sword.. There is a time to be real and not be nice or ‘civilised’ if that means sugar coating an inner truth that our soul very much depends upon for its survival.

It wasn’t my fault!

Kat assured me in therapy today after reading everything out my sister’s struggles are not my fault. In 2005 I expressed anger at invalidation and ran to be in a better place but my sister blaming me later for her breakdown was not fair. It was like her saying to me ‘you always were a naughty child’ when I fought for my emotional truth. She assured me nothing I can do can fix my sister but keeping in touch is good as long as I detach from the illusion I can save anyone. Phew. She also said she thought it has been mean of my nephews not to acknowledge or include me. I cried when she said that to me.

We spoke alot about how the family victimises the alive one..they get abused and scorned or shamed and laughed at..dismantled psychologically. But they carry what the shut down dead family needs. Coming alive feels like dying cause of the fear that if we take the risk punishment or annihilation will happen so we turn against our True self too…so so sad but hard to see how this happens especially as a younger one in a family geared around narcissism.

I sat with my head in my hands at Kats earlier while the inner storm went on and said I don’t know how I’ve survived the emotional confusion. I am not ‘bad as they tried to say I am.

All of this is such a relief. Like busting out of a prison created in my own mind. There is more to share but for now I just wanted to post this as I eat my lunch awake and alive surrounded by other humans in the shopping centre..no.longer all alone in the cold dark place where a grey heavy loveless energy hovers over me threatening death.

On denial

As children, denial is often a necessary survival tool because the truth is often too unbearable for us to live with, and we don’t have the power to change our situation.

Nancy Van Dyken

According to Nancy Van Dyken truth may be painful and is why we learn to deny it especially from childhood on, in addition because we are taught in various ways that following the rules, not displeasing others or making them uncomfortable is more important than knowing and expressing who we truly are and how we really feel as well as what we need is more important, we learn to be untruthful and then we suffer pain as a result. But since denying pain does not lead us to growth the more we deny or numb the less we can release ourselves from the prison of impression management or people pleasing.

In addition because our feelings and wants are not intellectual but deeply body centred denying our truth means on some level escaping the body, pushing ourselves beyond natural limits, taking on too much to appear all together or in touch. One of the most important times of change for me in early recovery for addiction lay in taking time off when I had a period and honouring the way I felt, rather than just solidering on. There was a time too when my ex husband I were in the UK and my trauma started to emerge and my therapist recommended I take time off. I had never ever ever done this before and I remember clearly on that morning my ex husband came into the room and raged at me to ‘get the hell out of bed’.

We may be so often forced to deny the truth of what we need in a society that may teach us more about how to appear than how to be, more about how to keep pushing on regardless, rather than surrendering when necessary to let things fall apart in order to come together in a better more real or integrated way. We may through conditioning learn to deny what we observe and feel to be true about other people. We may believe, incorrectly that the truth is too painful to face. We think if we admit it we may die or go crazy, the truth is we will probably have to make changes.

According to Nancy Van Dyken an important first step in healing from the everyday narcissism pf denial is letting go of the habit of lying – first to yourself, then to others. The next lays in speaking your truth assertively in a loving and respectful way. It also lays in not letting others push you past your boundaries. A simple way of saying no to a request is this : “No, that wont work for me” it is not even necessary to give an explanation as to why if you do not want to.

We can also learn not to agree to requests or favours before checking in with your body and inner self about HOW WE REALLY FEEL ABOUT DOING IT. In this case, just ask for a time out. During this time centre in and find what truly feels right for you. Its also important to notice when we are being less than honest with ourselves and others and check in with our body about how it feels if we do find ourselves lying or agreeing to do something we do not want to do.

Bear in mind that speaking your truth will scare some people. People may try to make you feel that doing so makes you unworthy, unlikeable, unlovable, or undesireable but if so and if you accede to such put downs who will suffer in the end? You! Don’t give up. Co-dependency writer Melody Beattie talks of a phenomena of ‘afterburn’ which can happen as we first start to be true to ourselves and our own wishes and needs, especially if others try to guilt, or shame us or use other manipulative tactics to control us, for example someone telling you, you are selfish or destructive in some way when you are really just honouring your true feelings, values or needs.

Learning to come out of denial may not be easy for us, most especially if others have an investment in us continuing to deny truths, but it can be done. We may have to suffer a lot of discomfort along the way as old patterns change, if we have abandonment anxiety it may feel like a death of a kind if others cut us off for being true, honest or real. Never the less we can learn to be there for our scared self and find in time the courage to be honest, open and up front with our true self no longer succumbing to the prison of denial.

Depression is necessary when we are healing our childhood wounds.

I have been reading my way back through Pete Walker’s book on Complext PTSD over the past day and finding it really mirrors and reflects my own experience. He talks a lot about abandonment depression which is a legacy of not being ‘met’ emotionally by our parents or caregivers. This leaves a wound within us, we do not get to grow a healthy ego as a director of our feelings and helping us to manage them in response to others and negotiate for our own real needs and feeling in life which are bodily and soul based. We live with those wounds inside and they can rise up.

Walker talks a lot in his book about the 4F reactions to early trauma and I have addressed this in other posts a few years ago (see below) When we get into recovery these are present as anxiety and fear and they drive our reactions and contribute to our state of depression, especially if we have not been able to get angry or grieve for the loss of our true self in childhood. Therefore on the way out of healing from emotional or physical betrayal or abandonment we have to feel what we could not feel as a child, which is painful and something Presence Process advocate Michael Brown addresses at length in his book of the same name. But we also have defences which rise up as the four (4) F responses.

According to Walker four responses to trauma are fight, flight, freeze or fawn. You can read about them in more detail in his book which I highly recommend. He also outlines there the cycle of reactivity which involves bodily sensations, inner critic attacks, attempts at running over or away and or attacking others or deflecting and defending (which may be a healthy protest response to invalidation or further emotional abuse).

There is a very enlightening section in Walkers book which talks of a client Mario who arrives at a session with Walker in a heightened state of reactivity. Simmering below the surface of all of Mario’s reactions are the feelings of grief and shame that fuel this feelings and drive his inner critical attacks. All of us who suffer from childhood trauma carry some level of this grief, fear and shame. We continue to shame ourselves as our parents did and this causes us to feel depressed and we get lost all the time in self reinforcing loops of trauma and criticism, fear, flight, fight, fawn or freeze recycing. Until we can fight our way out of the shame not by attacking or defending but by sitting with the very real buried feelings and processing them in order to release them then we do not get far with breaking out of the reactivity cycle.

Dissociation as many of us know is a huge part of childhood trauma. In order to survive we often had to go off somewhere, we became fearful of our bodies which contained the uncomfortable cocktail of emotions buried inside that parents left us with or dumped into us when they offered us no help with managing our feelings. As Walker points out, many of our parents would not let us use our anger and tears to liberate us from the traumatic experiences or protest unfair or abusive treatment. In recovery the internalised critic will often shame or fill us with fear for getting angry or crying. But what is most needed for recovery is to contain and feel in our bodies the feelings of anger and sadness and associated shame. This is why I believe that medicating feelings and resorting to the belief that depression is a result of biochemical imbalance is not very helpful when it comes down to healing childhood trauma.

John Bradshaw often writes that grieving is the healing feeling. Depression can often be a refused call to grief for what we lost the way to. Depression is not just a pathological condition and Walker argues eloquently that it needs to be understood as essential to experience along the path of healing our traumatised inner child and getting into the present with what WE TRUELY FELT AND NEED TO FEEL IN ORDER TO HEAL AND BECOME REAL.

Depression can be healed with mindfulness, rather than reactivity. What is needed to sit in presence with our hurt from the past when it is triggered into awareness in the present making associations back. This can initially be done in therapy with a therapist who can provide us with holding and containment to release our feelings and deal with and challenge inappropriate shame. However ideally it is something adult survivors learn to do with themselves now. We give our hurting child the love needed to heal, we don’t dump it on others, we take responsibility for our pain even though we did not cause it and often did nothing to provoke it.

Deep level recovery from childhood trauma requires a normalising of depression, a renunciation of the habit of reflexively reacting to it. Central to this is the development of a self compassionate mindfulness…. the practice of staying in (our) body.. the practice of staying fully present to all of your internal experience. (as well as) noticing he psyche’s powerful penchant to distract from these uncomfortable sensations.. over time the survivor will need to rescue himself from dissociation and gently bring back his awareness into fully feeling the sensations of his fear. Although sensations of fear sometimes feel unbearable at first, persistent focusing with non reactive attention dissolves and resolves them as if awareness itself is digesting and integrating them.

Pete Walker

Be Yourself : (To Thine Own Self Be True.)

I love it when an authentic, honest writer who has made friends with his or her true self posts a post that says it like it is for them. For me there is something about words of truth that resonate deep within and for those of us brought up on a solid diet of lies, such as : be someone else, think different thoughts, don’t be so : sensitive, shy, over the top, happy, sad, its so refreshing to just be loved and accepted for being our true selves. But most truly that acceptance is an inside job.

I picked up Charles Whitfield’s workbook companion to Healing Your Inner Child yesterday and in it speaks of PTSD being a result of trauma to the true self that occurs in so called ‘normal’ families in childhood. He points out that in modern times ‘normal’ is dysfunctional as normal applies to the statistical average. He then goes on to catalogue all of the ways we can get lost and alienated in a family, or society or institutions that don’t encourage our spiritual growth : i.e. the truth growth of our spirit as we were meant to be. This loss of our True Self comes with progressive alienation from our inner or ‘divine’ child the part of us that was from a young age in touch with the miracle of life, the universe and everything or at least open and curious about it. Just think for a moment all the things you may have been ‘told’ in the course of growing up when you asked important questions. Think too of Parsifal who stumbled upon the Grail Kingdom but only watched it disappear when he failed to ask the right questions because as a child his mother told him it was impolite to do so.

This train of thought leads me to think about what Alice Miller has written about at length in several of her books concerning poisonous pedagogy and the commandment “thou shalt not be aware”. In the garden of Eden Eve dared to try and sup with the serpent and gain knowledge of the ways of life, and apparently this was a crime. For asking the question or daring to want to be curious both Adam and Eve were expelled and forced to a life of suffering. Admittedly suffering can be educative but to be denied the right to question?

Sometimes it seems easier to look to others for our truth and if we were raised without spiritual support, emotional attunement and engagement is it any wonder many of us fall into a very deep spiritual void and get lost? Parsifal was engaged upon such a quest when he stumbled across the Wounded King in the Grail Kingdom. Apparently this is some type of parable for where we now find ourselves, the earth is ailing because of our alienation from the feminine principle and demonising of natural forces and the very natural human desire to just be able be free, vitally alive and unbridled. I am not preaching wanton destruction here, just trying to say that limitations imposed upon us are so often prisons and they encourage a kind of siege or hostage mentality.

The post I just shared before this one from Benny K of The Written Addiction really resonated for me today. I remember coming out of an AA meeting one day and someone took me aside. I believe I had been sharing about my struggles with my family and probably about how I didn’t belong and they just quoted the phrase from Shakespeare “To Thine Own Self Be True.” But what happens when we learned that Self was wrong, bad or shameful in some way? What happens when we were taught the price of not agreeing was alienation? As adults it may not be so bad but as kids we are pretty vulnerable.

For me I guess I am beginning to see that recovery concerns re finding the path back to personal truth and connection with those who can truly love us for who we are. I was sharing in an AA meeting the other day that the spiritual awakening spoken of in Step 12 seems to me to be about our True Self coming alive outside of the negation of falseness, fear (especially of being alone or abandoned), repression and untruth. It appears to me then, that I had a massive amount of undoing to do along the way back home to myself when I learned over years was just not okay to be me. And it also appears to me that there will be no true peace, joy or freedom until I gain the courage to stand alone if necessary or at least find my own tribe of belonging. Not that I want to alienate anyone, but there is also a time to be real.

Happily I often find that family of common loving, attuned souls here on WordPress. It’s something that I am grateful for today. Out there in the real world I may easily become alienated but here I feel at home. And feeling alienated does not necessarily mean I did anything ‘wrong’ though very often certain others will have an investment in saying so.

On Immaturity and showing empathy to the Inner Child of self and others

I am getting more insight into when my inner child with her host of unresolved hopes and fears and pain is running the show lately.  My abandonment wound has been triggered a lot in the past few days and it was easier to give away my power or alternatively become the ‘bad’ one again who is ‘withholding’ than to recognise that due to discomfort I am scrambling again for attention and love when contact is cut due to someone being upset with me because I am justifiably struggling with something.

I just know when I act from my inner adult I feel a greater sense of strength and solidity within myself and that requires recognising the far younger more vulnerable part that lies hidden or covered by defences.  It can be painful when abandonment anxiety and depression strike as both create in my body and psyche so often a potent chemical cocktail that at times pushes me to the brink of available resources to contain.

Pete Walker addresses the issue of the ‘abandonment depression’  a lot in his own work and book on Complex PTSD.  Much as all as it can feel hard to be left ‘all alone’, I have heard it said that in adulthood we cannot be abandoned by someone, only left.  That said I do think there are times our emotions need to be empathised with and understood by friends, family and partners otherwise if we are judged for certain things and not empathised with, on one level we are abandoned on an emotional level.

It’s an issue Alain de Botton addresses in his wonderful book The Course of Love which tells the story of a mythical couple Rabih and Kirsten in which he delves into the host of insecurities and psychological defences that can plague a couple’s intimate relationships as it develops over a course of years.  In the book the tale of the relationship iw told in normal type face is interspersed with sections in italics in which de Botton highlights the underground issues affecting the couple.  I particularly enjoyed the following paragraphs.

We would ideally remain able to laugh, in the gentlest way, when we are made the special target of a sulker’s fury.  We would recognise the touching paradox.  The sulker may be six foot one and holding down adult employment, but the real message is poignantly retrogressive : ‘Deep inside, I remain an infant, and right now I need you to be my parent.  I need you to correctly guess what is ailing me, as people did (or rather failed to do) when I was a baby, when my ideas of love first formed.

We do our sulking lovers the greatest possible favour when we are able to regard their tantrums as we would those of an infant.  We are so alive to the idea that it’s patronising to be thought of as younger than we are, we forget that it is also, at times, the greatest privilege for someone to look beyond our adult self in order to engage with – and forgive – the disappointed, furious, inarticulate child within.

In a more evolved world, one a little more alive to the Greek ideal of love, we would perhaps know how to be a bit less clumsy, scared and aggressive when wanting to point something out, and rather less combative and sensitive when receiving feedback.  The concept of education within a relationship would then lose some of its unnecessarily eerie and negative connotations.  We would accept that in responsible hands, both projects, teaching and being taught (in love), calling attention to another’s faults and letting ourselves be critiqued – might after all be loyal to the true purpose of love.

There is something about love and vulnerability and hidden need that can cause us to age regress and be taken back to that painful time we stood all alone longing for the attention and love that was not available due to the absence, withdrawal or inattention of others, so much needed for us to feel hold, loved, contained and seen.   Learning to hold ourselves in this state takes some considerable time for those of us with anxious and/or avoidant attachment issues.   Its a work in progress being honest with ourselves, learning to extend ourselves in empathy into another hidden world and letting the unhealed child that so longs for attention or consideration been seen, held, accepted, nurtured and loved.