Why do we stay? Why do we believe we don’t deserve happiness?

Some of us who are familiar with emotional neglect (suffering it in our families) will be attracted at times to situations or relationships that consistently deny us, injure us, or don’t make us happy. Most certainly, what I am learning is that my happiness is an inside job in that I need good boundaries for self care, but also what I need to know is that (1) I don’t deserve bad treatment and (2) I do deserve to be happy and some people really do have the power to light up my life.

I share a bit in this recovery blog about how I grew up with a sense of a bad or rejected self. It kept coming to me in the past weeks that as a child I was too much for my Mum. Really I was an accidental pregnancy which occurred quite late in life for both Mum and Dad in the 1960s. Dad was 41 when I was born, Mum 36 and all she wanted to do was work, not really be a stay at home Mum at all.

In a way it was good my Mum was an independent woman, she had to fight to be recognised and to achieve because her own mother thought she was only fit for domestic service and she put my Mum in a live in position with a local family at the age of only 13. Mum got herself an apprenticeship as a tailoress much to my Nana’s ire… There were a few big clashes. Many years ago I actually found out that my Mum’s great grandmother was a seamstress to a well known politician in New Zealand.

Anyway Mum spent minimal time with us growing up. My second older sister wasn’t that happy having to look after her little sis and I got bullied a bit, I just remember a lot of dark glowering looks at times. When I was younger my older sister who really loved me, was warm and there for me contained me but when she left to get married and live overseas when I was only 3 it was a very difficult change. In the end I learned to internalise…I learned that it was just best to take care of myself as human relationships were not that warm and I could not really expect much. I also began to turn to substances.

The relationship with my next door neighbours in our second family home where were lived between the ages of 3 and 7 or 8 made life less lonely but Mum and Dad decided they needed a bigger grander house in a lonely neighbourhood surrounded by embassies and so we moved. I longed for a horse and a dog in that lonely big house I used to come home to all alone (because by then my second sister had married and left too). But I was consistently told it was too much for both me and my parents. After they finally gave in about the dog, we got a beautiful beagle Sasha but she was hit by a car and badly damaged and Dad decided it would be better if she went to live on a farm with dog lovers. I just remember it was such a dark thing and then all the traumas hit between 17 and 20 just a few years later.

I site my alcoholism from emotional repression, not feeling I could talk to or trust anyone and being forced into a career I didn’t like. I just submitted. Lately the right and need to protest is coming up in therapy and I have been reading about it again in an excellent book by therapist Robert Karan called The Forgiving Self. He says its only when we feel we are worth something that we feel we have the right to protest unfair things, and in families where those urges are shut down or not recognised (or even worse, you are humiliated, laughed at or ridiculed for them) the fury can build inside but it becomes repressed and then I believe that it can affect our auto immune system causing all kinds of diseases, including cancer. We may then learn to fly off the handle to the extreme but often it may be due to frustrated needs and desires that we cannot find a way to fulfil or express in any other way. We may just have so much hurt stored up inside and no way of knowing since our true feelings were never seen, validated, mirrored or recognised. Or we may just learn to collapse and give in and forgo the right to protest with someone.

If we attract narcissists we may be shamed for such reactions when they put their needs as priority again, telling us we are bad for having our own or reacting in the ways we do. And if we had emotionally shut down or unavailable parents we may attract this again. In the end we need to understand what we deserve and that we do have the right to protest unfair treatment and if others wont meet our needs (which we cannot force them to do) nor care about them, it may be far better to walk away.

Healthy relationships also require the processing of conflict and disagreements as well as clashes of needs. I was having a discussion with Scott last night when he said to me “it is so important to apologise in relationships when things go wrong”, I told him Dad would never apologise to Mum at all, he would simply laugh at her and walk away. He wasn’t a mean man and at times Mum could be very hot to handle but being laughed at? In later years Mum said she was ashamed that she gave him the silent treatment for days…”it wasn’t a mature way to handle it” she told me a few years ago. I just remember having to tip to around both of them and pass messages on.

Knowing our needs are important and that we have a right to fair treatment means we speak up and protest when this doesn’t happen. Therapist David Richo says that the reason some people stay in dysfunctional relationships that don’t make them happy is often because it is familiar, connection of any kind becomes more important that happiness, there is fear of leaving and having to face the grief and inner work necessary to heal and recover. We may believe we can rescue those who are hurting or cause us pain, conditioned by religious education we may have been taught that self sacrifice and endurance of pain is a test of character and necessary in any relationship (earning us brownie points in heaven!!), we may engage in wishful or deluded thinking, we may fear the death that comes from letting go.

Reading this list this morning the words ‘connection of any kind becomes more important than happiness’ really struck me. For those of us who were isolated or driven into aloneness and a sense of being ‘bad’ in neglectful families or societies or friendships, some form of connection may at least free us in some way from the emotional isolation of our condition, but if we have not yet come home to and really befriended our own deeper hearts and souls wont that just prove another kind of hurtful escape for us? I most certainly related to those words. It comes up in therapy all the time of how due to my own deep emotional abandonment experiences in the past I have often sacrificed myself purely to stay connected or not hurt others. I only see more lately the pain this has caused me. Possibly my growing awareness is now reaching an important watershed… Awareness, acceptance, then action to change. It is only with awareness that we can accept that the way we are reacting or responding is not helping, feeding or supporting us and find a way to take action to change those things that hurt us or don’t make us happy consistently.

Note : David Richo’s book is called Daring to Trust : Opening Ourselves to Real Love & Intimacy