Distance from my family

I had a pretty powerful dream last night.  In it my sister and I had a massive confrontation.  I was trying to get her to understand how she had been abused emotionally by her family but she was still siding with the abuse and then she turned a hose on me. I was lucky to be able to share with Scott about it as he had texted me a few moments before I woke up.  The dream got me thinking of how I always stayed close to family no matter how little they gave me at times and how emotionally shut down they were.  I even gave up relationships to stay close.

At the moment as soon as my Mum’s place is finally sorted out I will be able to have more distance but the problem is I still have love in my heart for my family.  That said I am never really going to be deeply seen by them.   As the youngest I was on the outer a lot and lately I am accepting it would be better if I didn’t struggle with this quite so much. It would have been a lot better for me if I made the decision to break away but it was not really possible to be all alone, or at least I thought it was not and I have had lessons to learn by staying close and working over these past years to achieve psychological separation.

Now I know I am never truly alone if the adult self in me shows up for the inner child who still longs for what she never got.  There will always be a sadness for what I lived through and how darkly the consequences manifested for me and a deep grief for the support to develop emotionally into a secure adult.  Due to a lack of self esteem in the past I now see how I attracted partners who treated me as badly as I treated myself with my inner critic.

I was just listening to a programme on self compassion and it reminded me how important a caring loving soothing inner voice is to recovery for those of us raised with lack of empathy and emotional intelligence.  How can we internalise something we never had?  We have to learn it and my own struggle with a destructive inner ‘killer’ or critic has been ongoing even 24 years into addiction recovery.  I am grateful I am at least making some headway.

I was reflecting this morning after so many loving conversations with Scott over the past two days how he is actually the manifestation of a loving inner masculine figure for me and I must have attracted him because I am growing in this way myself.    I never had a close relationship with my Dad.  He never protected me from my mother’s rages or abuse and he never stood up for me face to face.  Due to lack of nurturing and losing his own father at 12 and then escaping Holland for his life just prior to Nazi occupation he just carried all that unspoken trauma history.  He kept a great distance from his own family over there.  We only met his mother when I was one year old, as she died shortly after but my older sister and brother were in Holland with my Mum for 13 months after Gary got sick in Indonesia where my Dad was stationed during and after the war.

My Dad was reserved emotionally and very serious but he wasn’t a violent man.  He kicked out at me once when I was a teenager and threatened me with a strap when he should have been asking why I did something I did out of a lack of self esteem.   But he didn’t protect us from Mum’s lashings out with the wooden spoon either.   I guess he did his best but it was by no way good enough.

Anyway its hard to write about this without my body starting to feel a bit tight and sore.  I go through so much spasming and contorting with my body anyway and I know its due to past stress carried and stored.  I was wondering this week if Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are more prevalent amongst those abused in childhood. I imagine what a flood of stress chemicals does to the brain of a child when faced with a threat or instrument of torture with no way to escape it and no right to protest. They then become a collapsed or introverted person and loose the will to protect and the fighting off energy becomes internalised as an inner fight between the True Self and an inner persecutor (introjected from unloving unempathic parents).

I see this in my sister who tried to take her life 5 years ago.  The family just set upon her and had her committed back in 2011 when she was running a bit amok.  I tried to advise her to get therapy but she would not listen and only said it was in the hands of her doctor and psychiatrist who gave her rounds of shock therapy.  I wanted to take a fucking gun to the psyche’s head as she later retired leaving my sister alone after having over medicated her for years.  So many in the psychiatric profession don’t have a clue and I believe many of them re enact their own ignorance and abuse or emotional shut down on their patients.  Not all are  corrosive, some are helpful and do assist their patients but many also abuse them not understanding the true roots of psychic injuries.

Anyway I can now have as limited contact with my family as possible.  I want to keep my distance as much as I can.  I feel better when I don’t have a lot of contact.  I still love them and I know their wounds are there, I may feel differently with time but at the moment I am finally feeling the full impact of my history.    I know its useless to seek any validation from those who have not chosen to do such healing work.  Its not realistic and it can end up making me feel like the bad one when they get upset with me trying to express truths and feelings they would rather deny or hide from.  In time things may change this is just where I am finding myself right now.