I often fear losing things. I do it with my car keys. I have misplaced them or dropped them on a walk so many times that now I am as rigorous as I can be but there is still this dread of losing things that is almost anticipatory. Then there is the letting go of what is gone and lost. I was just reading a post written by someone recently left by her husband and it took me right back to the ending of my marriage and so many other losses, at times it was hard to let go and I know letting go is a process and it is different for each of us. These days when I misplace or lose something I do my very best after a good look to put my focus on other things, to take my mind off the pain. But I can see also that at times I hold on in other ways.
For instance I may hold on to an instance of being ignored or someone saying something mean or wonder why a person did not honour the thing they said before and then made me doubt they even said it, but what I am noticing lately I can make it even harder for myself if I don’t let go of the hurt and this doesn’t mean I ignore it and do nothing about it, it just means its better for me not to fixate on what was said and then hurt my own body with resentment, resending the upset thoughts back into my system. Rather I am better to look for ways to calm and self soothe and lately rather than beat myself up if something goes wrong I try to speak to myself tenderly. All of this said it has been important for me to gain insight into why anger is triggered in me by these things, since intense anger in response to something speaks of earlier pain in some way.
Yesterday I got very annoyed with Scott and as it was happening I paid attention to the cascade of symptoms in my body. I now know when I get angry it can be triggered either by a boundary violation or fear or both because when I stand up for myself I do get the fear of abandonment and its like a hot cold dread that can flood my body reminding me of times I was going through an injury or accident or other times I stood up for myself and got in trouble. That said this kind of fear is something I have to allow myself to feel so that I don’t withdraw my effort or go into a collapse just to appease the person. This is what Pete Walker talks a lot about in his book on Complex PTSD as the co-dependent response and Melodie Beattie speaks a lot about what she calls ‘afterburn’ which is the feeling of dread and excitement that overtakes us as we start to set boundaries with others, some of whom may be violators.
With my Mum I would often get in trouble for being too angry. My father would try to explain to her why I was reacting to her as I did but he didn’t explain it correctly and my needs and feelings were not taken into account, so now it can be difficult for me to hold my boundary and speak for my needs but I am learning. I will often go through an period of being beaten up too by my Inner Critic after I do set a boundary and be told I am being selfish when really what I am probably expressing is self care.
I have just started reading an excellent book by Elaine Aron author of The Highly Sensitive Person, called The Undervalued Self and in it she discussed the role not only of the Inner Critic, but of the Protector-Persecutor internalised during a neglectful childhood with turns against our True Self and tries to negate it. It can involve in self protections too to try to avoid the pain that lies underneath that came from times our True Self was erased, ignored or humiliated in childhood. She also talks of the part of our psyche which she calls ‘The Innocent’. This is the traumatised part of us that we had to hide or deny in order to survive and it is what most needs our love and care but as Aron explains some of us have had such low nurturance in childhood we really cannot develop an strong inner mother or father to support us if we never got to internalise this in childhood because we internalise a lack of attunement to this part of ourselves. For this to occur we are going to need a very very good therapist or other supporter who can validate our True Self initially to help us break the powerful hold of the Inner Critic and Pesecutor-Protector in our psyche. Learning to attune to our innocent and find out about his or her true feelings is an important part of this work for initially they are amorphous, buried, repressed or confused. We can take steps first to ask about her feelings. We then try to link present feelings to past causes. We validate if our Innocent Or Inner Child felt scared, helpless, humiliated, negated, shamed or confused. We then provide a corrective emotional experience which is the kind sensitive support or self talk we should have received from healthy parents in childhood. If our Innocent is seeing a current situation wrongly due to transposing something from the past we can gently point this out. In short we can provide this split off part of ourselves with the support she or her really needs, rather than looking for it from outside.
I have not finished Elaine’s book yet but after I do I will post some more from it. She recommends working with our dreams and also a process of Active Imagination in which we visualise these figures in our psyche and learn to talk to them and make a relationship with them. As if triggered by reading the book last night I had a very powerful dream after falling back asleep last night after over an hour and a half tussling awake with my PTSD trauma symptoms of my dead sister lying in bed with her body all contorted and she was in so much pain, so I went to her and wrapped my arms around her and said “Jude, you need to grieve, you haven’t been allowed to grieve” and with that her body just went into spasms of grief which were a lot like the spasms my own body goes through at times, huge contractions and expansions of energy especially upon awakening. I see the expansion as the repressed life or emotional energy trying to enter consciousness and the spasm or ‘snap’ as a kind of surrender or pull back from it. I have never had sufficient support underneath me to actually let myself relax and surrender to my full grief or trust my fully embodied emotional life. I feel for years I have been on the brink trying to push myself through or ‘lift above it’ something Susan Anderson addresses in her book on emotional abandonment trauma. She explains how some of us learned to lift above our feelings in families where feelings were not allowed or were seen as a threat to a parent for some reason. It now makes sense to me why I have felt I have to fight especially hard to have my own feelings and often pushed people away too when I feared my true feelings would spill out anticipating the rejection or humiliation I received in childhood for having feelings. “Don’t be such a cry baby”, “Lighten up.” “Here comes the bloody tissue queen” (because as a sensitive child who went through loss I started to cry a lot in later childhood and adolescence). Life has never felt safe for me with an anxious/avoidant and insecure attachment style (yes, I don’t just have one because my childhood was so unpredictable as was my mother’s responses to us due to the emotional neglect of her own childhood.)
Wow the struggle to become conscious is really enormous for many of us who suffered benign forms of neglect or abuse in childhood, its no wonder my head hurts at times and I feel like my body is screaming due to all the trapped feelings and my fight to have my own boundaries and separation from others.
Emerging From The Dark Night 