Why not me?

I’ve been thinking a lot this morning about the legacy of hurt, pain and resentment being a child of narcissistic, wounded or emotionally neglectful parents can leave you with, at least in the case where you are not turning all the blame back in upon yourself as you may have been led to do by being conditioned to believe ‘it was all your fault’.  It is one of the most difficult symptoms of being a child of emotional neglect where some love was shown but not enough affirmation, support and assistance with navigating emotional realities that we do blame ourselves and end up developing a voracious inner critic or persecutor.

A few weeks ago I wrote some posts on the persecutor-protector archetype or energy that forms in the psyche of children of abuse, neglect and trauma.  The protector may actually be a benevolent figure such as a Guardian Angel or a Goddess figure, it may be an Animal Spirit.   For example at a very dark point in my life I turned towards shamanism and a found a shamanic healer who recommended I get some sculptures of dragons and use them in an imaginative way to call on my own inner power that had been thwarted or stolen through years of neglect and addiction.  

In the case where the abuse is very overt and a lot of damage has been done, feeling our anger is an essential part of the healing process, we need to know that we never deserved what happened, we need to know it was not our fault, we need to know that it is the parent who carried the damage and passed it on to us.  Hating what happened to us is an essential part of the journey, but to my mind true healing eventually involves some kind of alchemising or transforming of all of that pain, hurt, anguish and resentment into a deeper more profound understanding of causative factors, an acceptance that on some level it was for our growth and that we can in the find love and forgiveness even for our abusers.  I know many on this path would not agree and there is no one right way through the exceedingly difficult terrain, but ultimately healing does demand we find a way back to love.  That is why over the course of my own healing I have always tried to look back further than one generation to understand the causes where by a parent becomes split off, damaging and cruel.  And what terrible fear or pain or wound or separation from the past must have caused such monstrous splits to occur.

Being the target of a parents hidden or overt rage and fury or obvious displeasure towards our softer side is very difficult.   It can leave a terrible scar.  We are left to nurse ourselves through our own profound sensitivities and many of  us turn to other sources to find solace, for example to our inner world, to fantasies, to stories, to pets, to poetry, towards music and nature.  I do not think this is purely pathological, for there is something about the deep soul that wants to be known and recognises its natural kinship with these sources of healing and sustenance.

However one of the thorniest issues of having power used over us to repress our deeper being, soul or emotions is that our own will to power or use of assertive energy can become depotentised, we may lose the power of agency, we may lose the belief in our value, in our effectiveness, in our ability to assert and advocate for ourselves against those who in teaching us to turn against vital aspects of our own nature in fact also end up turn us against our own drives and instincts which are so necessary for us to develop along our own unique path in life.   And we need the power of our emotions in order to be able to know what it is that wounds and heals us, when we are not helped to develop emotional intelligence and emotional effectiveness in life, we truly do suffer so profoundly.

The dismantling and disabling of assertive instincts is something Jungian analyst Sylvia Bretton Perrera investigates in her powerful book The Scapegoat Complex : Towards a Mythology of Shadow and Guilt.  Particular narcissistic or emotionally neglectful families will often chose one child to receive shadow projections.  That child will not be allowed to express their true self, they may be shamed, they may be led to believe getting upset at the abuse means “they are being ‘too sensitive!'”, they may be taught that it is ‘bad’ to strike back, to want, to feel, to ache, and to react to the multitude of injuries subjected to them even in surreptitious ways.  Part of healing for this person may involve a descent into addiction where all the pain and rage is internalised and acted out in self destruction, and healing for this person involves turning ‘in-rage to outrage” but also the eventually discipling of that at times grown monstrous anger, rage and resentment.

I remember the antidote to this in AA parlance was that we were to recognise the damaged abusive parents or people in our lives as spiritually damaged, we were to pray for them.  And I do think there is some wisdom in this, as one of my most helpful therapists once said to me “Deborah its almost as if when you are abused like this you are like Jesus on the cross, recognising “forgive them father for they know not what they do”.  This does bring up some thorny conundrums within the abuse/persecutor/scapegoat dilemma…..Does the narcissistic or hurtful person really know they are abusing?  Don’t they think that, in the words of Alice Miller, they are just “doing it for our own good”, even if that good ends up in so much damage?  Aren’t they just psychologically blinded by the repression of their own psychic damage?

The truth is abusers will often not own their own damage, they will try to turn it all around, they will gaslight us, tell us we have things wrong, are just being ‘too sensitive’ or that we need to ‘get over it’.   And we should not have to forgive all of this for our true healing means we need to ultimately find our own individually fully grounded standpoint after having the legs cut out from us, metaphorically speaking for all the years of our neglect/abuse, we need to find our rebel yell, or inner dragon’s breath or lion’s roar that shouts out and defines a radical ‘NO’ and stop sign not only to abuse but to the inner critic and demon persecutor inside us as well.

But we have to do so in such a way that the anger and rage does not become a destructive fury that ends up permanently lodged in our own entrails doing us damage.

Today I can actually feel sorry for those who hurt me.   I have cried so many tears over years and its a relief now to be free of the self blame and shadow legacy of unearned guilt I absorbed from a multigenerational family legacy of trauma to a large degree (not always).  We who walk this path of razors know what a profoundly difficult journey it is. But sometimes after all the rage and tears we actually wake up on a new day feeling a kind of cleansing.  The old resentments that seemed to have plagued us have been transformed, we don’t feel the sting quiet as much as we did, we may even have energy for tasks again, a new vitality, one birthed not from rejection of but rather acceptance of the pain as the necessary medicine of a most profound transformation and healing.

Today I found myself feeling willing even to make an amends to my ex narcissistically wounded partner.  I actually felt like calling him and saying I was sorry for the way I reacted at times out of my own woundedness.  I really truly felt the deepest forgiveness as I swept the leaves outside for him and I understood that all I went through in that relationship was a vital and necessary part of my healing.

For so many years my deepest cry could have been Why Me?  Why was it I that carried so much of the Scapegoat energy in my own family and peer group?  Why was I always the one sidelined?  Looked on askance?   And were other people actually judging me as harshly as I was, at times, judging myself?  Today I realised however Why Not Me????

And you know what?   I actually even felt gratitude for it all.  I actually felt forgiveness for everything and these profound feelings are actually flooding me with a kind of wave of power and energy and emotion as I sit and type this on a sunny Sunday morning finding myself engaged and symptom free, if only for moments.  And while typing the words of the Promises of the Big Book of AA came to me.

If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. (accept learn, move on, be free of unearned guilt.)  We will comprehend the word serenity, and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others.That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change.Fear of people.. will leave us.  We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.

Today I really felt all of those promises coming true deep down in my soul.  Truly nothing upon my healing journey has been ‘wrong’ or a ‘mistake’, every single experience no matter how painful or difficult has been a miraculous part of  a profound process, even my decision to walk away from  AA to pursue other healing and deeper psychotherapy in the past 10 years of my life.  However essential things I learned ‘in the rooms’ over 20 years will stay with me as I find myself moving each day a little closer to my 25th anniversary of growing emotional sobriety.