Something has to make you run

I am seeing lately that I cope often by avoiding reality or the pain or the challenge or whatever it is.  I don’t do it every single time but I do it more than not and it is my own responsibility to feel the fear, see the truth and change the pattern.

I often think of the following words from the song by Norah Jones in relation to myself and some of my reactions.

Something has to make you run

I don’t know why I didn’t come

I left you standing by the house of fun

Don’t know why I didn’t come

Don’t know why I didn’t come

When I saw the break of day

Wished that I could fly away

Stead of kneeling in the sand

Catching teardrops in my hands.

As I write this I am aware that it wasn’t me who started this pattern and that is formed out of a small child’s feelings of abandonment or confusion at an important leaving.  My first imprint of loss, severing, disconnection was at age 3 when my oldest sister surrogate Mum left me.  I looked and longed for her everyday, hovering by the post box when the mailman came.  All around me was the huge void formed by my parents emotional neglect and absence and in this void I had to try to soothe myself but did not know how so I turned to substances.  There must have been angry thoughts or a feeling of guilt or even a feeling as a child I did something and so the inner critic formed to protect the lonely child.

This week my copy of Freedom From Your Inner Critic arrived and its is helping me so much to see why I am plagued by the Inner Critic so much.  It explains the various forms the critic can take and how it steps in to protect the inner child and the scared child who is struggling with huge emotions due to what the parents or caregivers have done or haven’t done.  The critical attack can turn against ourselves but the critic can also keeps us from other and may attack them, if we feel under treat.  I think then we form these thoughts to keep us safe, we are told by an inner protector that we will be safe if we eschew all forms of relationships where we feel under treat.  The heat and energy and hope of connecting just  becomes too intense and so we damp it down with what we tell ourselves so as not to want, be, feel, need so much.

There are some people we WILL need to set boundaries with but there are also others who will not abandon or hurt us.  This week I noticed before connecting with an old friend from years ago the fear I had of her and not being able to have a real relationship based on emotional honesty.  In the end she was capable of it and the fear I had before meeting could have made me run or urged me to keep up a barrier or distance.  Things ended really well.

I see in the past how I have run. The ways in which running and protecting and keeping up a defence kept the longed for love at bay.  I see how the thwarted longing of my inner and abandoned child often turns others into monsters, rather than just seeing them as flawed humans, sometimes being capable, and sometimes not being capable of meeting my buried needs, grown huge from atrophy.  Seeing all of this must be a watershed moment for me. The pain and sharp edge of reality that drives the message home that what is increasingly being called for from me now is faith, trust, hope and risk rather than fear, mistrust, doomed and dooming negative thinking and playing it safe within my cocoon of self protection.