‘Bad’ me : some reflections

(Image source from Randi Fine’s blog : http://randigfine.com/emotional-child-abuse-poem/)

It’s interesting to find out that some of us absorb fairly early on the belief that there is something ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ inside us when really we are just children with different impulses and urges clamouring for expression.   Ideally in a facilitating environment we would be allowed to grow and emerge as who we really are inside with help from our parents and guidance as well when we seemed to be going beyond healthy limits.  Sadly not all of this receive this kind of help in childhood and voices of criticism and shame may not only come from our parent(s)  but from other family, peers and teachers.

The subject of feeling attractive came up in therapy this week and shame around my body and I was sharing with Kat that I was often called names by the boys from the public school, I was a tall gangly kid with long limbs (due to my Dutch ancestry) and they used to shout out ‘Federal’ which I only found out later was a brand of matches and they thought my legs were like match sticks.  This may have rolled off the back of a less sensitive child who was getting some emotional nurturing at home but sadly I didn’t feel I could talk to my parents.  I can laugh about it now but at the time is just added to the many ways I felt different and as though I didnt match up.  I was trying to share in a post last week that never made it out of drafts how at 17 I lost my first boyfriend to a friend who was more sexually confident, that too put a huge dint in my self esteem which is sad.  I didnt carry a sense of positivity and trust and high self esteem into my later relationships at any point and often lost partners due to insecurity or feelings I could not match up to other woman or girls.

Anyway I had my heart broken at least 5 major times by partners leaving.   I was always loyal to a fault due to this sense of being flawed in some way, when I met the boy who was really ‘right’ for me, the one I connected to emotionally and intellectually I could not break it off with the guy I was dating due to fear of hurting his feelings.  In the end he broke it off with me and I lost both chances and it was only a few months later I ended up in hospital after a major motor vehicle crash for the last 3 months in school.  My sisters cerebral haemorrhage followed less than 6 months later and then a chain of events where i was prevented from pursuing study for the career I wanted by my Dad but forced to secretarial college.  All of these  things contributed to the idea I didn’t have much power in the world and i increasingly turned to drugs and alcohol and promiscuity to find that missing sense of power or confidence, but it was an unreal power and confidence which shattered in shame further down the track.

I married a very gentle guy just shortly before I got sober in 1993 and we lasted for 11 years.  I look back on those early years when I was first sober as happy, even if unconscious years.  It took me over 6 years in sobriety for the grief, confusion, shame and pain I had been burying to even begin to emerge and by that time we were overseas and move was in mamy ways a repeat of me being so far away after I lost my father.  When my older sister was finally in crisis and Mum needed the support we came back  home to Australia but I could not live in my home town and part of me still craved her emotionally independent life back in the UK but neither impulse could fully live at that stage and so I ended up at the end all alone at the coast house my father built a few years before his death divorced in 2006 after suffering yet another major injury overseas shortly after the first annivesary of my husband leaving me.

As I look back now I see that is really when my journey to become conscious fully began. I started to hear all the inner voices, most especially of the inner accuser who Kat and I call Mr A.   Kat used the word annihilation for that psychic force inside me that wont fully let me live, that criticises and shames me and sees me as the source of all the bad things that happen in my life and the lives of others I am associated with.  When I came across the book The Scapegoat Complex by Jungian analyst Sylvia Bretton Perrera she talks at length about how that kind of inner accuser forms in a familly where the shadow is passed off onto one child, or even several in the family at different times, its also a theme Andrea Mathews addresses in her book I quoted from at length last week Letting Go of Good .  

This morning I woke again to the shock realisation of how my nephews visit in early December triggered my Mum’s death only 8 days later.   I had images in my mind of various things that happened on the visit and saw how lately I have blamed myself but what I understood this morning was that no one person or event led to what happened to my Mum, there were myriad factors contributing to the fall she had on 6th December.  Why then was I blaming myself?  Was it a kind of (what Tian Datyon calls) dark narcissism where we feel ourselves to be the worst in the world just because we were not perfectly able to somehow miraculously see and know everything?  I tried to write another post on this on Friday which is still in drafts.  About how perfectionism and the mixed up idea that we should be perfect and good and get it right all the time is so unrealistic and comes out of untruths we learn to swallow wholesale due to conditioning or an emotionally neglectful environment.

The deeper truth around my Mum’s death is that no one person caused it.  It was just the working out of very complex events in my family that were years in the making.  And that was a cause this morning for me to feel sad and to grieve, but as I did I realised one thing, there is no grief in blame, or at least blame is often a kind of defence against the full messy onslaught of fully expressed sadness, regret or grief which can have so many other emotions and desires tied up within it.

I see also that over years I came to believe in my badness and so I have tried so often to be as good as I could, always doing the right thing, worrying over others pain and sadness, thinking it was somehow my responsibility to fix, If I could only read enough, study enough, know enough about psychology and love and pain I could in some way put my broken family back together again,  but reading Andrea Mathews book has made me realise a lot of those behaviours are a defence against feeling my own grief and the places I can be powerless and they can fix my gaze away from the places I can and do have a sense of power, over taking the steps to make my own life as full of joy and happiness as I can even in the midst of very deep sorrow and sadness.

The truth is that none of us are totally good or totally bad, we just have a mix of qualities and traits that others can and often do consider ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and which we are so often led to judge in positive or negative ways.  The truth also is that somethings are helpful and growth enhancing to our lives and others are not but the things that hurt can sometimes be turned into the places where we learn.  This ss a point she makes very well in the chapter on Forgiveness in her book that I would love to write a post on later.  She speaks of this forgiveness issue as a process that comes out of not being able to forgive what truly was bad and hurtful to us over years, including being scapegoated in an emotionally bereft family.   Its more than I want to address this morning as breakfast is calling me.

I am just so grateful that in feeling my sadness this morning I was able to see deeper and more fully beyond the black and white thinking that so often can dominate my consciousness and paint me as ‘bad’.  I certainly had lessons to learn from my Mum’s death and nephew’s visit, and being able to live with such paradoxical understanding is, I guess, one of the deeper fruits of becoming more conscious and aware.  Hopefully it also means I can beat myself up a little less and make other essential discriminations that are less dominated by a tendency towards black and white thinking.