Don’t be so scared : a garland necklace

What my inner child needs to hear today (from witness self).

Don’t be scared little one.  I am here.  You are not alone.   As a child you were alone And later lots of really painful traumatic things happened to those you loved.  It was painful, frightening and scary and you didn’t know how to cope, so you reached to substances. There was no way could you have known about the hunger in your soul then When you needed help it wasn’t there And so often you were pushed away or told you knew how to cope or should when you didn’t.

This anxiety that you so often feel also isn’t all bad or dysfunctional.  Its about trapped life energy, the soul of you, the true self that never got to fully live and express in the world due to fear and being told you were ‘too much’.  The reality wasn’t that you were too much, the reality was that it was too much for a mother who was wanting not to be a parent any more but rather to find a way to express in the world.  While you can resent that you can also see why she desired that so much when so often her own mother tried to put her to death.  If you go on resenting that you may not find your own path into the world for you will see individuating or self assertion as a kind of attack rather than a strong life urge that you learned to both hate and fear and see as a kind of wounding.

Little one, despite the fact Dad didn’t communicate you know there was love there, he didn’t know how to express it in hugs or love, as a youngster maybe he felt the impending threat in Holland and so he escaped, he was always a bit prophetic your Dad, you are a lot like him.   You felt the longing for what he left behind, all that he didn’t talk of. After he died and you finally found your way to Holland you felt like you had come home when you shed those tears after the visit to Aunty Leis’s place.  The dark affair with Dutch Mirko on Ios in Greece was all about unresolved grief.  You carried the unresolved longing and grief over your Dad throughout all those ‘lost’ years and into each affair.  There was the termination you had on the first anniversary of his death.  There was the sad call from your Mum asking you to come home, you only answered with a drug fuelled resentment and anger.  There was the precious gift of that relationship on the second anniversary of it all, in which you acted out all the unresolved grief and pain and longing.  Simon abandoned you as you knew he would.   He could not see what lay beneath the wounds.  It wasn’t really his job, was it?  He came looking for you all those years later but by then it was too late.

Dear Debs don’t feel ashamed for those lost years that followed in Sydney.  By then you had lost your way but it wasn’t really your fault.  You tried hard to find a way.  This waking up to deeper truth is something that happens much later for some.  Remember always that it is recognizing your lostness that you are found and who you truly are in the deepest part of you can never be lost.  You have been brave, you have been strong, even when you were weak, for there is so much strength in owning your weakness.  All alone you were trying to heal a wound so much deeper than you that needed to be understood.  You know it didn’t begin with you but you also know that you want it to end here, at least the dysfunctional unconscious replaying of it out, over and over and over again.  You don’t want to be a helpless victim any more.  There is great strength to be found in owning ones wounds and taking action for self care.

Deep amongst the pile of wreckage are jewels and pearls so precious, wisdom, empathy, compassion, mercy, forebearance and love. Take these and fashion them into a necklace, a garland of beauty that will dazzle you and provide a doorway into deeper mysteries than you could ever fully know.