I have to admit that I can be a person who runs short on patience. I think it may be that I did not ever learn to tolerate frustration well and maybe watching my Mum be on a fine hair trigger much of the time (and not as young person knowing how much abandonment grief she carried and how much she had to struggle on alone) I also did not get to learn to regulate my emotions well.
I find these days I am learning to be more patient. I used to get triggered by waiting a lot because I have shared, Mum made me wait to be born. She held me back inside while she finished bottling the last lots of plum jam. And I had to wait a lot as a youngster or just stand on the sidelines in a far older family and so that wound of wanting attention and time and waiting and waiting to be seen and responded to can run deep with me and keep me paralysed. I have to watch when its triggered and rescue myself.
I read a great post the other day by someone whose family told her all the time she was “a drama queen” or just and attention seeker. Its an accusation also hurled against people with borderline wounds that front up at emergency rooms with self harm. The bleeding wound deep in the skin may horrify others, they may not understand the deeply mute pain and trauma that may have become immobilised or trapped beneath the surface of someone who was just not really ever heard seen or got at a deeper level or had to scream for emotional attention. So for those of us who have this kind of attention deficit later on in life when attempting to heal and find better ways to address our wounded attention needing self we must find someone who understands the truth of how we are reacting and just does not want to put us down or demonise us over it.
I read on the post of BPD transformation that therapists are notorious for refusing to treat or abandoning borderline patients. Many of them can just not deal with the level of rage that needed to be directed towards an emotionally unresponsive or soul murdering parent, they may end up retraumatising the person suffering with such wounds even more or repeating them when they fail to get the reactions and responses.
Healing too after finding a person who will help us to contain said emotional overflood or overwhelm also involves us being able to be present as witnessing self for the wounded or traumatised self within who may never had somewhere to turn except to substances or other damaging containment remedies. In the end through therapy or other healing relationships in which we are LOVED UNCONDITIONALLY and got emotionally will enable us to grow an good enough loving, mirroring, containing person inside who can help us to grow and mature and not load others as much with our unresolved wounds and angst.
These past 10 days without therapy I have found I have had to show up as witness to my suffering self a fair bit. I have needed that inner witness to hold me as I cried and weathered some disappointments. I noticed last week I started to lash out a bit with someone and as I read the messages back I see it was all down to old frustration being triggered. I had a chat to my closest nephew about it as he goes through the same. He was the lost child in his own family and witness to a lot of trauma and emotional abandonment. He was the one standing behind the curtain waving to his mother as his father drove her away to board a plane for another country she would not come back from, not because she did not want to but because her husband just could not deal with the level of trauma is was in any more following her cerebral bleed and psychosis and so sent her away with a one way ticket and then lied saying she had chosen to leave.
Its hard to see when we are frustrated at times that everyone is doing the best they can with what they know and their level of emotional literacy. We should not have to suffer for it but we can and do regardless. But we can cut ourselves and others some slack, unless people are down right obnoxious and horrible to us and show little remorse for the way they are, then we can just give them a wide berth understanding they are not really capable of empathy or stepping outside of their own limited reality to embrace ours.
Emerging From The Dark Night 