Caring for me, even if it means being alone

I have pretty much accepted that from now on I am making no attempts to reach out to family in care.  I dont receive much back from them at all.  I haven`t ever in my life to be honest, not at a deep emotional level.  I have showed a lot of compassion as I know how hard it is to be alone and hurting without a lot of friends in the world but a lot of the time my compassion trips me up, as I see it recently.  And I think for many years I have been naive and lived in denial and got emptied out.  .

I now know that as an adult I have to care for me.  Its my responsibility.  Fact is I didn’t get the care I needed growing up to develop in a healthy way and I married before I knew myself fully, looking for the love I never received.  In that marriage I wasn`t accepted as a soul.  I was told towards the end when my healing began that I could only be loved if I was the fake happy person.  On one level I get it, as a child before I was emotionally abandoned I was happy and full of life.  I am finding that childlike part of myself recently.   I love her.  I don’t want to betray her ever again.   But when I was married and after I got married and sober I had a lot of work to do to face my wreckage of my broken hearted child who had endured a lot of abandonment and trauma.  I could only do it alone in the end (though not alone as therapy has been for me the essential place to address my brokenness and find the wholeness that lies underneath deep inside).

Anyway sometimes it’s not the best idea to forgive those who emotionally abandoned us too soon, at least not until we learn and experience the pain their obliviousness or ignorance caused.  I am just listening to a book on CD about two brothers one who denies his abandonment and forgives and the other who is stuck in anger and resentment.  In a way the feelings of the later brother are more genuine, in the story it is becoming apparent now that the father who abandoned them both in childhood carried deep wounds.  He didn’t have the ability to give the sons what he never got.  There is a phrase used by the author : ‘punishing indifference.’

At times it is not only what was done to us in childhood that hurts but the absence of care.   That neglect (as a form of invisible abuse) can be harder to come to terms with, it was a deep emotional absence, especially if we were provided for in other ways.  We need to come out of denial to reclaim the true self.  It means facing a lot of powerful emotions.  There is no easy way through this.

At the end some of us are able to forgive as we see the abuser acted out of pain or ignorance, we forgive for us, to get free, but it isn`t essential to do so if we lose true self and feelings  along the way.  In the end we need our own self care and self protection and to take our damaged child by the hand and build a new life for him or her outside the wreckage or obliviousness of a shut down past.