Trusting my own self : Trusting my own instincts

I seem to have a hard time acting on my intuitive instincts at times. I may get an impulse or instinct and then I will argue myself out of it and I know at times we can be led astray but what I am talking of is when you get that gut knowing to do something but logic argues with you. I am currently listening again to the talk on shame I posted a link to yesterday and shame too can dissuade us from acting and trusting our true self expression will be good enough or acceptable to the world, and if our parents fostered a sense of shame or carried this burden and hid it we can carry on that hot potato!

Early in sobriety when reading Clarissa Pinkola Estes book Women Who Run With the Wolves one psychological concept that really rang bells with me was of the instinct injured woman or girl. Estes said Janis Joplin was just such a woman, driven away from her more instinctive primal side by the Baptist faith never the less it burned within her the instinctual desire but got subverted into alcohol and drugs and association with the wrong types of people and things. And it occurs to me that we are most vulnerable through our dependent side which longs or rather hungers for the ‘promise’ of a connection often denied (even if in the end it proves not to be a true connection.) And how do we know if we have never known truly reliable dependable figure in our lives? Or learned to develop strong instincts and boundaries and not over ride them?

Sooner or later though life forces us back onto our True Self and its instincts and there are those who will try their darndest to argue us out of them. In my case I had a Mum who tried to tell me not to be a certain way, and so I learned to turn against parts of myself that are actually okay, I guess that is how the shadow within us is formed, that grey hidden aspect of us that contains traits not encouraged by parents. For myself I would have loved to have pursued an acting career or a career in the arts but how I was conditioned made me feel both aspects of being were not practical enough for me to make a living out of. And on some level I felt ashamed of wanting what I wanted or came to believe no matter how hard I wanted it forces would conspire against me so that I did not get it.

Also teaching was also ‘beneath’ me (according to my father who forced me to go to business college instead.) As I have said before from that time on when I was forced down that pathway my shadow grew, I really started drinking and drugging and frequenting quirky dark dance clubs in my home down. One I used to frequent a lot was called Tricks and it played all those dark etheric banks like The Cure, Echo and Bunnymen, The Church, The Birthday Party (Nick Cave’s first band) and others. And then I got involved with a guy who worked in disability and smoke a lot of marijuana and it was he I fell pregnant to twice when I was 23.

He is the one who after my Dad died in 1985 told me not to meet him overseas as he no longer cared for me (truly I don’t think he ever did but was on the rebound from the woman who he really loved and broke his heart a few years before – her family would not accept him not thinking he was ‘good enough’ for their daughter.) I met up with him after this abandonment and he betrayed me with another woman.

Anyway I got progressively more lost in those years of active addiction 1985 – 1993 when I first met my husband, married and got sober all within 6 months of each other. I am grateful to the stability that my husband, Jonathan gave to me over the next 11 years. He was the one who said if the drinking did not stop he was leaving. I saw myself breaking his heart if it continued so I went to my first AA meeting six weeks after we got married and I am so grateful I was one of the lucky ones who got sobriety from her first meeting.

By then I had done a lot of emotional damage but I was so numbed out and disconnected from it. I had had 5 terminations of pregnancy to four different partners. My final one occurred in the first 6 months of my sobriety. Its not easy to share this here but I promised myself on this blog I am going to be honest. There is no point in hiding. I had to do the work with each termination to forgive myself for them. I did this in the first five years of sobriety. But understanding the roots of so called ‘child murder’ showed that psychologically I was also murdered on some psychic level. I actually came across this term in an article that a valued follower Mawr Gorshin shared on one of this blog, it happens when a parent unknowingly erased the true being of the child by thwarting aspects of the true self. Those then go into shadow and there is a deep grief that hangs over the person until we retrieve them.

I missed out on so much due to my arrested development and trauma. I will never be just a normal person due to the experiences I have gone through. I am happy now I don’t have to hide anything or pretend, in AA we choose rigorous honesty and we do the work of cleaning house as best we can by bringing secrets and so called shame up to the light of day, we share them with others, admit them to ourselves and hand them over to a power greater than ourselves. For me healing comes with the recognition of pain that defects of character due to unmet needs left me with. Its been taking a long time to be okay with that expression. I know these are not my fault and the best I can do is become conscious of them. At times I do look for an easier softer way. I believe in fairy tales and fantasies at times too, but nothing takes the place of honest introspection and a surrender to being transformed through honest to goodness soul searching and awareness and sometimes too, because our heads lie to us with thoughts implanted there by parents and conditioning we need another person’s help to see ourselves more clearly.

I learned in adult child meetings of Al Anon that we cannot accept what we are not aware of and without that acceptance we cannot take the action to change. And if we deflect through insecurity or shame how can we become more aware?

I will always be a person who lost touch with some of her instincts but I am trying as hard as I can lately to get more in touch with my intuition and gut truth. Its not always easy. People can lie to us at times and I have been a victim of scammers most especially when I was at my most vulnerable. But at all times I am working as hard as I can to be honest. The critic may give me a hammering some days telling me all the ways I fall short, but I must keep a balanced perspective because there is a lot that is good inside me. Carl Jung did say that for many of us all our gold is hidden in the shadow, our low self esteem may have less to do with who really are and more with what was projected upon us by those who could not see and know all of us and for some of us the hard work of mid and later life involves excavating those golden gifts and attributes that remain undeveloped and doing our level best to express them in the world.

I am trying not to throw everything the critic says out either as I need healthy discrimination to change the things I can, accept the things I cant and move on from them taking the lessons learned and not carrying the big stick onwards.