Caught up in my head

I have to be more and more aware when I get caught up in my head.  Waking up around 5 am all of this week, that is when all the thinking starts and last night I had a dream and in the dream a woman in  group was sharing about a termination of pregnancy and crying but she had her back to the group.  I was identifying with her pain in the dream and then it occurred to me on waking that last night a notification from Facebook came up in my email, saying my niece in law was in Prague.  I didn’t register the connection last night until I had the dream.  She was going to Prague to get help with trying to fall pregnant.  The dream was about loss and loss of babies is a theme that goes back along our maternal multigenerational line.

I then got to thinking how guilty I can feel that I had several terminations of pregnancy while my niece has been trying for years and it is such a source of sadness that she cannot fall pregnant.  I don’t think that was the only dream association though because in therapy yesterday I was saying how my nephew’s visit is sparking painful insecurities I have that my life has not really been a ‘success’, my marriage and relationships have all failed and I don’t really have a career up to this point.  As I was crying and sharing all of this with Kat, in my head a voice said “oh, and you couldn’t even have a baby or sustain a new life!”

You can see from this how harsh my own inner critic is.  That’s not to say I haven’t made a lot of difficult choices, the choice not to have a child was one I took knowing I was not sufficiently emotionally mature.  I was also scared to bring a child into the world and repeat an abandonment pattern that was becoming conscious for me in early recovery.  It was a source of sadness for my husband and after he left me and met someone new they had a child fairly quickly and when I cried about it with my new partner he got angry with me and said “You should be happy for them.’  Point was I was just sad at the loss even though I chose it and I wasn’t allowed to have those feelings at all in the next relationship, and I actually didn’t bear them or him (my ex husband) any resentment at all.

At the same time I see how my new partner wanted a happier more ‘positive’ person and that at times is a source of shame but I was me, who I was with a pile of loss behind me that I bought into the new relationships.  My ex once said to me “I am not here to be your nurse or teddy bear”.  I think the truth was I needed to work all that grief through with someone in therapy which is the painful task of midlife I am now engaged in.

Anyway I called this post ‘Caught up in my head’ to say how its better for me to write this down or get those thoughts out of my head onto the open page or share them with someone nurturing and safe.  I am a bit anxious as it is about my nephew’s visit as I have shared elsewhere for all sorts of reasons. I am also aware that others in the family have pain and have been through difficult things, just not as much physical trauma and isolation from the ‘real world’ as I have.  And yet I don’t want to devalue myself, either, for after all I have been through, now my very first priority needs to be self care.  I can’t get stuck in any ideas of what the may think about me or say behind my back (as it was with this nephew a few years ago my sister shared her belief of how jealous I was of her.  That really, really hurt!)

Yesterday I was feeling very beaten down and tired from thinking about how things in life have not, to this point, turned out the best and yet still in so many ways I need to continue to make the best of them, facing reality, yet not getting stuck in beat up which wont help me to keep moving forward.

To be honest I wish I had got up earlier and written rather that twist and turn around in bed for hours.   I have a dull headache that feels like a detox headache because so many painful images were with me between 5 and 7 am, of my sister as she lay dying a few years ago, of this nephew praying over her in a quiet a bizzare way, almost like a minister and of so many other things.   Dwelling on these things that are past is hard and I have to acknowledge them, “to look back without staring” as one of my favourite Al Anon readings says.

One thing I do know, I have learned so much through my struggles with trauma, emotional difficulties and recovery.  I need to own that and affirm just how far I have come considering all I have been through in my life.  If I compare myself to others I can always come up short, but they haven’t lived my life.  Hard as it is some days, and as much on some days I feel that if things don’t get better, at times there seems so little point to being here, when all that my head tells me is bad.