Growing into our new skin

I had a deep sense today that when we don’t get to fully live our true self in a culture and family ill equipped to foster its birth we live inside a skin that is too tight for us or a box that can confine us. We also form ego defences that may keep us prisoner when we choose the safety of conceding to the voices that kill the true self and live in fear of emerging.

I also feel that there is something deeper going on with this at a collective level too for the feminine feeling aspect of ourselves personally and culturally was split off from, from the middle ages onwards with the birth of a set of restrictive guidelines as to how we should live and what we should expressed based on social sanctions and religious beliefs that split us off from nature and the shadow. The sanctity and divinity and preciousness of the inner child was not recognised either and many kids had a tough time growing up most especially around the time of the First World War.

I think while writing this of Charles Dickens a Sun Sign Aquarian who wrote a lot about children struggling to come out poverty and restrictions of the middle ages. I think of my own mother who fought so hard to be herself and be seen by a mother who only wanted her to be a domestic servant and not get too far above herself by seeking a trade a tailor’s apprentice. It is interesting as family history revealed a few years back that Mum’s maternal Great Grandmother was actually a seamstress who worked for a notable politician in New Zealand after she left my Great Grandfather who struggled with alcoholism due to unresolved grief and separation issues from his own mother.

I think also of myself a child always being told I was ‘too this or that’ too dramatic, too sensitive, too much in need of attention, even my current exile from my sister’s family speaks of this, I almost feel they don’t want the shadow carrier of all that feminine feeling too close to their children. According to my brother I am ‘a loose cannon’ and my anger was so distressing and destructive he threatened to walk out one day when I was trying to air some legitimate grievances with him in raised tone of voice.

My therapist often says to me when I shame myself for angry outbursts that my anger kept me alive and it helped me to survive. I listened to a programme on AA the other day with an older sober member who is writer and has been part of the fellowship since the age of 25. He said that his addiction actually kept him alive until he got sober. We admit in the fellowship we don’t have an alcohol problem as much as living problem, most notably a problem with embodying our own deep spirit and true emotions and dealing with the darker legacy of abandonments, attachment issues and other wounds that cause us to reach for relief.

Carl Jung recognised this when he said that addicts could not really be helped by therapy as much as by a spiritual experience because he believed that a disconnection from their spirit in a spiritless ages makes them (us) reach for the symbolic spirit of alcoholic spirits to heal or compensate for a spiritual problem. It is OUR TRUE SELF THAT CARRIES OUR TRUE SPIRITUAL ENERGY AND PARTICULAR LIFE PULSE/NOTE/HEARTBEAT. If we have to dumb this down or numb ourselves out what happens. Well we see it every where in the culture at large we go blind to the spirit and soul in nature and no longer live in true rhythm and harmony with it.

Today I had a deeper realisation of the grief I carried for so long around not having my True Self acknowledged or feeling free and safe in my own skin for so many years, often feeling so set apart. I was listening to some You Tube talks from psychotherapist and writer David Richo last night and he was saying how as children if we don’t get the five ‘A’s (which I have written about in another post) we get wounded in our ability to be ourselves. The five ‘A’s are as follows :

Attention, Affection, Allowing, Appreciation, Awareness

https://emergingfromthedarknight.wordpress.com/2016/12/23/giving-ourselves-the-five-as-to-deal-with-wounds-regret-and-disappointment/

https://emergingfromthedarknight.wordpress.com/2016/12/23/giving-ourselves-the-five-as-to-deal-with-wounds-regret-and-disappointment/

What we lack in childhood leaves wounds and later in life it rests upon us to recognise and heal them. But what I now see is that it was not really my parents fault they could not give these to me because such an oversight came out of a form of emotional blindness or neglect for them, a legacy of trying to survive and emerge themselves from harsh conditions. How could they given their youngest daughter (born when Mum as 36 and Dad 41) those things in a family already geared to industry and business. I stood behind the door and longed and watched and waited and then when there was no loving gaze to behold me I began to turn to substances. I failed to develop emotional literacy and insight all of these are critical tasks I have had to work to develop in these past 25 years of my sobriety.

I now know I am no different than many others. I suffer similar wounds, I struggle in similar ways and others are not always the cause of my own problems, my own blindness can be. Like everyone else I am a work in progress. I am still in the process of shedding many skins. I have lived inside a box or skin for so long that was not big enough or felt right for me. But I have faith that with this ongoing growing, shedding and learning process in time I will grow into a new one that feels just right for me. And so will all those others of us out there who are emerging. And further along the line that skin will also be shed because that is the life process. If we choose to keep growing and shedding we co-operate with the evolutionary process that our soul was designed for.