Questioning my own reality and value

I am reflecting a lot lately on my relationships and my version of events as to how things have played out in my life.  I know that one of the traits of being raised without much emotional validation or a big empty hole where attention and concern needed to be placed is that we can and do question our reality.

Lately I am feeling that although my parents let me down badly in crucial ways, there was a lot of love there.  Reading Jonice Webb’s book on emotional neglect Running on Empty which is full of examples from her own practice of others who have struggled she often points out that they came from what seemed like loving families.

One story which really resonated and broke my heart was of a woman who went home and tried to commit suicide after spending time at a party with friends.  She put on such a good show of enjoying herself that none of her friends could make any sense of why she felt the need to end her life, they had absolutely no clue of how deeply she was suffering.  When Jonice starts to outline her childhood, though she paints a picture of a sensitivity young girl who had powerful and deep feelings that were just not allowed expression in her family.  The family script was that everyone  should be upbeat and positive at all times and difficult and painful emotions such as anger and sadness were not well tolerated in the family.  Its no surprise that this particular woman hid her true feelings from others and felt deeply ashamed.  When she compared her insides with others apparently happy  and carefree outsides she found herself seriously deficient and deeply depressed.

I am wondering how much this painful story is a reflection too of our modern society where there is such emphasis being placed on being happy at the cost of deeper emotions.

At the same time as considering all this I am also considering why I chose not to turn to my mother and father when I was struggling in my adolescence.  I learned to fear that they would not understand as there were times I was hurt deeply by their lack of emotional awareness and empathy.

I was having a conversation with my mother the other day abut how painful and difficult for me the year following my oldest sister’s cerebral haemorraghe was.  Just a few months before she fell to the floor and ended up in a coma I had been really badly smashed up in a serious motor vehicle crash which came very close to ending my life.  I was taken out of the final 3 months of school,  pined to hospital bed in skeletal traction which is where they put a pin through the top of the bones in the lower leg and attach a bracket and sandbangs.  I missed my school formal and was in hospital for 101 days.

I was thinking last night in some ways there were positive aspects to being in hospital.  I had a series of room mates who also had accidents and daily contact with visitors and the nurses, but it was a heavy trauma for a 17 year old to undergo and shortly after this I had to make a decision about my future career.  I had wanted to do social work but that course was not available in my home town, and I didn’t feel well enough or secure enough after the crash to move away, so I opted to do primary school teaching.

At college I did really well, I had a great group of friends but in that first month the accident happened to my sister and my parents were pulled away to the hospital every night to be with her and try to anchor her to the earth plane.  She was in a coma for a long time. It was from this time I started to use alcohol to check out more and more.  We were drinking fairly heavily in college anyway and starting to use light drugs, which I now see played havoc with my sensitive constitution.

Anyway to cut a long story short the following year a friend was moving north to Brisbane to do her teaching degree and I decided to swap to Social Work and move with her.  We had quite a wild year.  I was trying to combine my degree with honours in political science and then I got involved with someone who was fairly heavily into drugs, I also feel he had suffered some kind of abuse.  It was a very traumatic and unstable situation and when I decided to end the relationship due to the drugs involved which were scaring me (to be honest) he threatened to take his life.

Completely in overwhelm but showing it to no one, at the end of that year I went home south for the holidays and decided not to return.  I didn’t tell my father why, but he came down on me like a ton of bricks when I pleaded to return to my teaching degree and friends.  He told me I had stuffed around too much and in truth he didn’t have much confidence in degrees, I was too intelligent to be a teacher and he was sending me to Metropolitan Business College to do a secretarial degree.  I chart my depression as intensifying from that time.  I started to use drugs and alcohol more and more to cope with the boredom and frustration at being confined to typing pool for half a day having to type in triplicate with carbon copies.  We were not allowed more that two mistakes per page.  (This was in the days before computers and even electric typewriters.)  For the second part of the day we were stuck learning shorthand.

I really started to act out and rebel and live a double life during these years, going to alternative punk clubs, drinking, using drugs, having random sex before I got involved with my first real boyfriend (another addict who was still in love with his ex).  I had two pregnancies and terminations in this relationship at the ages of 21 and 22 which I hid from all but one close friend.  The following year my father was diagnosed with stomach cancer in early November,  by the 8th of January he was dead.  Within a few months I was urged to continue my plan to travel overseas after my boyfriend (who had gone on ahead and I was supposed to meet) called me in the middle of the night and told me not to bother coming to meet him.  He did not really love me and had met someone else.

Trauma, upon trauma, upon trauma.  There was much more to come which followed over the next 8 years until I finally got sober in December 1993 after having met and married my husband.

I carried all of this trauma silently.  I acted it out in my addiction.  When my addiction was arrested I had a huge amount to unpack and that process has gone on for over 15 years.  However today I find myself questioning many of the decisions I made in subsequent years as a reaction to trauma. I have been considering the times I did turn away from certain help and family members thinking they could not understand and probably most often they did not.  They were impatient with my inner journey, did not know why I didn’t just buckle under and get a job (truth was I worked for all of my life until about 14 years ago when massive trauma made working difficult. I now see that perhaps I could have worked while doing the inner work, but I came from a family who actually worked far too hard and got next to no time left after all the trauma to actually enjoy life.

I have been questioning lately, did I make my life harder by walking out on my marriage, by deciding to pursue my own therapy and by choosing the inner life of excavation?  Perhaps but writing this today I am beginning to see that my inner beating up of myself, my constant second guessing and invalidation of myself is actually just a reflection of what I met in life.  These days people do often validate me and I am getting far more understanding as my ability to express my traumatic past grows.  They say how amazing they think it is that I have been able to stay sober for over 22 years.  My therapist tells me all the time that I am far too hard on myself and that I have so much to offer the world.

Speaking about some of the very, very dark years of my later addiction (and yes my acting out got more painful and dark over the years after I returned from overseas in 1987 and moved to Sydney following my mother’s remarriage until I got sober in 1993) yesterday.  I was telling her how I cry lately when I listen to Ed Sheeren’s song One and how deeply this part resonates for me:

Stumbling half drunk

Getting myself lost

I am so gone

So tell me the way home

I listen to sad songs

Singing about love

And where its gone wrong

I see myself stumbling drunk in the streets of London, 24 years old with so much painful history behind me, my next partner having left me for a Finnish girl he met while we were travelling in Finland, putting me on a ferry in Helsinki alone.  I was so, so, so, so, so, so, so alone.  I had gone through so much, a young lost, hungry, confused girl/woman who in my therapist Katina’s words had absolutely no idea of her value as a person.

And I cry for her, I cry for me. I want to reach back over time, pick her up, take her away from all of that pain,  tell her she is enough and that she is worth loving.  But at the same time I know that now although I went through that and on some level I am the same person I am also not. I am growing, I am birthing, tender seeds and shoots of self value, self compassion.  It is just a long road on which I doubt every day my own interpretation of events and my right to feel the feelings that I do as well as my right to be valued and understood in my deep soul as a recovering alcoholic, by a society that often judges, does not understand, tells us to put it all behind us.  For what we lived, that is our journey, one which led into such dark places but one, that in time, hopefully does lead us back out into the light to live a life full of self respect, self value and self love.

Post script.  I hope this does not read as a victim story.  I am just trying to say this is what happened but my past does not need to dictate my present nor my future which is ultimately now within my own hands.  Inner critic had a lot to say to me just after posting this!!!!

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