With gratitude at such a painful time

I was so infinitely touched by everyone who sent me such loving wishes over the past few days.  I was actually shocked that my poem on the wind and Persephone falling made a connection with others.   I tried to write a prose poem yesterday saying how I am always expecting that my darkness and sadness will be rejected by others as that is what happened so many times in past relationships.  When loving souls on WordPress who I KNOW suffer so very deeply themselves reach out to embrace me and say such a poem was beautiful I am truly shocked.  I just expect people to judge it as too black.

I honestly considered over the past few days giving up my blog.  I was scared that writing about trauma would be triggering the trauma again and you can tell by my last post I was at the absolute limit of what trauma has taken from me and how it impacted my body.  Having the breast cancer surgery and radiotherapy last year truly felt like it was the final wound that I would NEVER be over striking me hard as it did in the most feminine part of my anatomy.   And the truth is I found it hard to love my body coming out of it.  My family were absent and so I had to push myself out to of the house to get things too soon last year, promised support from social services just never came and I see I was running, running, running though not consciously when really I needed to sit still and feel my own broken heart and body in order to stop defending against the grief and pain.

When the flu hit me last week I also fought.  Its what I do.  Its okay to fight but there is also a time to surrender to pain. Sometimes fighting it or railing against it makes it worst.  I know radical acceptance isn’t popular but the truth I have come to over the past few days is that I have to accept all the terrible things that happened to my body and realise that I did survive them.  If I don’t wrap loving arms around the hurting self then I am retraumatising myself again.  So I have made the decision that I must love my trauma imprints even though I hate the trauma that led to them.

The truth is that way back in 2006 at the end of my marriage I could have stayed still in one place to get care but it was too hard to let anyone in and so I let that last guy into my life and he savaged me.  I’m still not over how I was treated so cruelly in that relationship, the only plus is I now see the part I played in it keeping going and not putting up a big ‘stop’ sign.  When I arrived back in my home town badly broken and bruised there were two other siblings in trauma and my Mum too and I gave them the care when I needed care myself.

The one good thing that did happen over the past week is that my Mum and sister have reached out to give me help and practical assistance.  I will never get the emotional recognition there though and I think realising that after the last painful encounter with my Mum just over 11 days ago was really what led to the flu getting its grip into me.  It was like all the pain that had been repressed just rose up to the surface and my body made me stop.

Without good boundaries of self care we are so lost, its one of the hardest things that happens to us growing up in abusive, neglectful or low nurturance families.  I look back to how absent my boundaries were, how in my addiction I let any one in.   How I failed to value myself or even feel good things for myself and how alone I really was, but the biggest aloneness by far was most certainly self abandonment.    I have self abandoned over and over and over again so much that I could literally cry with the savage pain I have caused my precious inner child self.

Anyway it isn’t too late for me to change.   It isn’t too late to tell the critic to take a hike.  It isn’t too late to love me.  It isn’t to late to learn about self care.  It isn’t too late to wrap loving protective arms around hurting me.  It isn’t too late to stop looking for love in the wrong places.

Practicing loving care and self soothing, well that is what I am about now.  I don’t want to be traumatised over and over again.   I am so very, very grateful to all who have reached out to me in love over the past days online here.   I find the strongest sense of love here on WordPress than anywhere out there in the world to be honest.   It may just be cyber love but it means the world to me.   I don’t know how I would really cope without the knowledge that those out there ‘get it’ and ‘get me’.   I really hope I do the same for you.

I will come through this latest pain.   I know I will being able to share about how much it hurts and not be silenced, well it just means the world to me.  So once again bless you, and thank you.