I have started to become more and more aware lately how I repress my own lively life energy. How a huge part of what has been wrong with me over my life has been in not being really true to my honest insides. It has taken some years of therapy to show how I began to turn against my true self in an environment that was out to squelch self expression and was just too bloody goddam serious!!!
So here I am at age 54 feeling about four years of age with all this life energy simmering below the surface of awareness. I look in the mirror and see lots of lines on a face that is ageing and feel so sad (and yes, angry too. Yesterday I was really angry) about the life and years stolen from me by a false self that put a large part of who I really truly was to death.
Before my marriage ended my ex husband accused me of blocking his spirit. His family didn’t appreciate the fact I was in early sobriety and that meant that I could not party in that old way and things got very serious for a time for I had to look at self destructive habits and change them as well as deal with my past. I now see that I was headed down a very dark road around the time that our marriage began to splinter and much as I have blamed myself at times, I now see that for both of us the journey parted ways. My ex met and married a woman who could give him a child (which I failed to do). I could not bring to birth an outer child until I dealt with and reclaimed my own inner child. I see that fully now. We both did the best we could.
In the next relationship my sadness and concern with a very traumatised older sister who was disabled as well as my connection to a family dogged by trauma didn’t go down well with my new partner who had come from a severely dysfunctional alcoholic childhood where his mother abandoned him at 4. I could not make up for all of those deficits and that is a very, very deep source of pain and sadness for me as in this relationship I felt more fully alive at time than I had in my marriage. For example, my ex husband did not like me to kiss him as he said I overwhelmed him. It was so hard to be in a relationship which was more like a sibling relationship really, but in this last relationship there was so much passion but also two people with unresolved trauma histories rubbing up against each other’s wounds.
That relationship fell apart five years ago, in a way which replayed so many key aspects of my father’s death all those years before and left me alone in the deepest way but also on some level returned home to my deepest wound, a wound that has needed to be grieved in these past few years.
However what has emerged out of these wounds is this vital little child in me, a part of me that was so true and open to life and living and loving and to joy, a part of me that got put to death in my addiction and most especially after the accident when my way to a true life path got negated when I was not permitted to return to my teaching degree by my father at age 19 in the year after my older sister’s haemorraghe.
I do believe the child in us holds the key to life and to healing. She or he knows all about out wounding and its impact. She or he needs our inner adult’s support to be and live and unfold and grow in all the ways this essential process was blocked or barred by those around us who claimed to love us, but could often not even truly see us. Often many of our parents were more invested in imposing their own distorted image upon us and fucking us over than in really seeing and supporting the true us.
I feel this little one in me lately trying so very hard to have her voice heard. It is almost as if now I must champion her and allow her the space to be and live and grow in the way she needs to, not the ways she was told that she should or needed to by others. I am sick to bloody death of listening to the voices of others who tell me who or what I must be. The voices I internalised that tell me I am nothing and have no future. I feel myself standing on the brink of something and I see how the wounded child in me who never got enough love still clings onto those wounds and re-enacts them in a way that is not healthy for her, does not really allow her to grow.
I am beginning to see also how many times I have denied the truth of what hurt to those who hurt me, and how I have twisted myself back out of shape to be loved by them and blown apart my own chances by holding onto the vain and fruitless hope that someday things will change or the past will be rewritten. I now see, finally, it can’t and it won’t and if I truly want an happy future it is up to me to create it and that means letting go of so many old hopes that should be put to death now.
I want to live, I want to love, I want to sing, I want to dance, I want to be free and most of all I want to be me. It has just been such a long journey to find out who that me really is apart from what others have told I me I should or must be.
Emerging From The Dark Night 