Within the silence
I hope you feel me close to you
Hear the whisper of words of love
Carried on the breeze
And even though the world
Seems intent upon keeping us apart
I pray that you feel this
My heart silently beating out its rhythm
Of passion longing and love
Tender blessings of care and benevolence
Falling upon you from above
And when you look to the stars
At night
Remember this
I am only a thought away
And at every moment my soul
Is calling out your name
Well I went to my therapy appointment despite the fact I felt disappointed and angry with my therapist and she was very, very pleased to see me, was actually waiting with the door open as I climbed the staircase. I was able to say how I was very hurt and disappointed at what had happened in our last session without lashing out in anger and she apologised for her part saying she didn’t deal with things very well. She then said to me that we had achieved so much working through this and not letting it tear us apart but all I could do was cry. Why was I feeling just so goddam sad??? My sense is the sadness was all around other unfair things in the past I never found my voice to speak up for or was blamed for.
Maybe I was sad too because I am realising lately that therapy is the only contact I have most weeks with anyone. I have held off visiting my sister in hospital for over a week now and haven’t called her either. I was hoping that JUST ONCE she may be able to pick the phone to me and see how I am. I think hell will freeze over first and it is with great anxiety that I resist my impulse to do anything to be connected at the moment. It was so very hot last week that all I could manage to do was walk Jasper and rest and with the heat its a huge drive to go over to see her and I am just so very very tired of it all. I told Kat in therapy today I am just letting go despite the sadness of never hearing from my one left living sister after losing both my older sister and mother in recent years.
Anyway I am thinking of what I can do to be a bit more connected. I am going to attend a registration day on volunteering in my home town in 9 days time and I am also going to look into possibly doing one day a week’s home help for others. I can’t afford just to sit around a complain about how isolation hurts without doing something constructive to address it.
Also discussing things with Kat I see how I blame myself for ‘isolating’ when really all this time I have been working to find ways to connect inwardly with my True Self and feelings and needs so when I DO go back out into the world it is in a more authentic way. I see that over time I did sacrifice myself in order to be loved. I was not really given the support I needed and in my marriage when the support was offered I found it hard to accept it at times, due to my tendency to go it alone but it was hard to be seen as my true self too. I know with my sister we can be close at times but at times it is hard to relate from a deeper level as well and there is past pain there because I didn’t felt seen a lot of the time and when I did try to reach out we didn’t connect very well. Moving into sobriety and acknowledging the multigenerational wounds of addiction in our family has not been something my sister wanted to address.
I was listening to a programme on alcoholics and recovery today and it occurred to me (as it has in the past) that my sister is really a drug addict but to legal drugs rather an illegal ones. She is always looking to something to change her mood with comes from the outside instead of looking at how connecting to her insides and understanding herself could help her. They are seeking to bring her shakes under control now but stored up emotional charge manifests in these shakes and my sister was repressed in her childhood and in her later adult life, when she tried to burst out of the box she was pathologized and slapped with a diagnosis which then required medical intervention which in some ways was a giving away of authentic power. When we lose our power and give it away to outside sources we don’t really become re empowered until we learn ways to take it back.
Anyway with regards to the recent conflict with my therapist I feel I handled it well. I didn’t need to cut off totally and I am also happy I could hold myself through the painful feelings evoked over the three days, my therapist believes it shows great signs of progress for me. Learning to trust myself and my responses and feel comfortable in my own skin is a work in progress.
My heart is still with you
Even when I am not there
To hold your hand
It has wings
And is flying toward you
Over vast oceans
In which the heart beat of eternity is heard
That links us together
In a figure of eight
With invisible strings
That bind our two souls
Together forever
Trust
At times you becomes dust
As we watch so many fires
Burn themselves out
When desires
For what was never meant to be
Burn and crash
Who knows why it is we fail
And why it is
Some themes just keep repeating
Over and over again
How can we know what is real
Unless we can feel
The way to truth
And so often there is no proof
Until we have travelled so far down that road
That turning back
Is impossible
To hope and face despair
Which brings the awakening
Of every past sorrow again
Feels as though it may be
The thing that will ultimately
Destroy us
Be too much of a cost
To pay
But when trust is gone
What else lives on
But despair
And then it seems
There truly is
No end to our suffering
Its hard to be told you shouldn’t feel sad when something really sad is happening to you. Sadness is really only a feeling and its one that can be difficult for many to acknowledge. Getting stuck in deep sadness can be paralysing though but when it comes to the deeply rooted sadness and deeper sense of powerlessness over intense past hurts (which often play a huge part in depression) where really is the cure beyond acknowledging painful truths? Being told to think differently about it? True we can have a change of perspective which may lessen the intensity a bit but that does not mean the sad or powerless underlying facts disappear? Maybe it just means we learn to self soothe and not magnify the hurt.
Denying our feelings comes at a price. I recently shared a vlog from Teal Swan on why its no use being told not to be upset or triggered by something, what Teal recommends is owning your feelings and even your sense of low self esteem which leads to hypersensitivity rather than just reacting from the place. I just posted a reblog on narcissism and high sensitivity and where it becomes damaging is when the highly sensitive person does not acknowledge the roots of their over reactions which lie in a WOUND often one they did not cause and played no part in, in childhood. Its not easy living with such an intense hair trigger response. The Jungian analyst Robert Johnson explained it in a mythical way in a talk on the myth of One Two Man, a boy abandoned by both parents and raised by a grandmother who had a hair shirt with an eye on the end of one of many fibres that came out of it. That explained in symbolic way his state of hypervigilance which is typical of a childhood where you had to be on guard against a volatile, controlling or perfectionistic parent who could cut you down with a sneer or sideways glance.
Living with such a sense of being unsafe is not easy. Learning its okay to be vulnerable is better though than over reacting, blocking and deflecting or defending all over the place against further projected injury. And sometimes we do need to be wary as others don’t always have our best interests at heart. Hypersensitivity is not easy. The sadness of such a kind of emotional abandonment can carry on for a long time in adulthood until we learn to reparent ourselves and hold that hurting child safely without acting out all over the place and making life miserable for ourselves and others.
I struggle a lot with anger when I feel I have been treated unfairly. It happened in therapy on Thursday and my default is to want to cut off contact all together. I am still struggling with this one and trying to listen to what my inner child needs. On some level I feel she wants adult me to hold me in future and no longer have to rely on my therapist to do it. I never miss sessions and I missed two before Christmas due to events out of my control and my therapist now wants me to pay for missed sessions which makes me feel really strangled. Its not the first time I have wanted to end therapy and I am adding this final paragraph now. Its a tough decision because I am so isolated that often my therapist is the only person I see all week outside people who serve me in shops or at cafes. Its making me really sad and twisted about at present.
Thanks to JR from My Journey for liking this post. I just found it on his site and think it has a lot to say about things I have sensed and worried about in myself. I hope it proves insightful to other readers.
The concept of malignant narcissism and HSP traits coexisting in the same person is a matter that has very little research behind it (I could find nothing at all on Google), so this article is based on my own opinions, gleaned through a combination of my readings and personal observations of the narcissists I have known. My opinion may come as a surprise.
In my article A Match Made in Hell: Narcissists and HSPs, I wrote about the tendency for narcissists and HSPs to form trauma-bonds with each other–that’s really just a fancy way of saying these two seemingly opposite types of people are often drawn to each other and become codependent on each other. The narcissist is both attracted to and repelled by the HSP’s vulnerability and high empathy. They both envy and loathe it; part of this…
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Sometimes all that is left is sadness
A profound and deep grief
As enormous as an ocean
Full of all the longing and devotion
I gave to things that could not return
The same to me
I grew so tired of trying
And its hard to know now
Who is telling the truth
And who is lying or just acting out of fear
And when guidance comes
And I am told to read
Meditation 116
And it speaks of the sadness we must not avoid
On the way to learning
Facing all the mistakes we make
And understanding all the times
We were abandoned
Or abandoned ourselves
I realise why it is I cry
So often now
And yet sometimes I find myself home
All alone
With no one else within this radius
And as I read the words
She lives inside herself
So much makes sense
For where else does the world push us
When it fails to see us as we are
When no witness appears
To mirror truths
We know deep inside
But back within ourselves
Back within the vast ocean
That we only pretend for so long
We have ever ever truly escaped
Though you are gone from me
Each past love
You are paradoxically also still here with me
In the memories
And with the feelings that arise
Under the cover of silence
Of the loving and the wounding
It seemed for years my heart bled
With all the pain that could not be said
Until my head nearly burst
With the new wantings
That brought to me recognition of the pain of a past
I could never change
And if youth is wasted on the young
As the wise ones say
Then in older age perhaps
We grow wisdom from the pain
And suffer as the astrologer once said
The purification of suffering through the ordeal by fire
Desire is that fire
That burned
Fuelled by so much we could not speak of
But longed for
And wept for
Birthing deeper understandings
In the aftermath
We tried
But in the end our hearts could not meet
And even though we longed
For the embrace of each other
Lately it is seeming that it is not meant to be
And all my struggle with wanting more
Is ending as I find the courage to seek the light
Of a new shore
Finding a place just to embrace it all
This past I am powerless ever to change
And maybe this is enough for me
Breath of wind on bare cheek
Soft feel of my dog’s fur
Under open hand
And memory upon memory
Of what was
And was not yet to be
Setting me free
Leaving me be
Dreaming me onward
To a present where
Finally
I find the strength
To move on
Surrendering nothing
Taking it all
Embodying the song
Acknowledging it all
As part of me
I am thinking a lot about this issue of letting go today after reading a post from someone whose marriage ended painfully through betrayal. It reminded me again of the pain I felt when my ex husband told me he was finally leaving me to go back to the UK and be with his family who never fully accepted me. It was heartbreaking and from then on I started to suffer panic attacks and I had an accident on the first anniversary where I split my head open very badly. I still don’t know if we would have survived if I had chosen not to come back for family who were suffering. (My older sister who was incapacitated died in 2014 so I had 3 more years with her after finally moving back to my home town in 2011). My husband wasn’t happy that I started to do therapy in 1999 to try and deal with the pain of my past. I wish I could have left all of my pain behind without it but that was not to be the way things turned out.
I often blame myself for the ending while knowing on some level we were only fated to travel so far down the road together. When things end I have learned it hurts less if we can let go and surrender gracefully when the writing is on the wall. I didn’t do that in the next relationship either. I also struggled to let go of the pain of my family members as an empath thinking that if only I sacrificed I could heal something. I know on an astrological level its down to the strong watery Neptunian energy in me.
But lately I am feeling I want to let go. Why hold onto something that hurts you? Why keep trying with those who appear not to want to have you in their life? Why not just surrender gracefully? Because it makes you sad and you have to feel the sadness in order to release it. If you are hedging the sadness and trying to push it away you are not paying the coin to the ferry man who needs to take you to the other side of that dark river.
Anyway, often we learn more through hindsight. I am actually also (as I shared in an earlier post) feeling like letting go of therapy. I just want to live in the present now. God knows my past has been full of mistakes and pain but I am so tired of going over it. I really want to move forward and the price of letting go is sadness and grief but that is only part of the process. I also need a growing acceptance that everything worked out as it needed to. I never found it easy to separate emotionally but now it seems that the Universe is demanding that I do. If I really want to be happy.
