The aching emptiness I carried

I just returned home from the National Gallery where I went to get some lunch and stroll through the collections but I am noticing lately that my past pain and trauma is so, so close to the surface and what was triggered today was the time immediately after my father’s death when my partner abandoned me and Mum forced me to travel overseas alone to London to push me out and away from any comfort of family. I arrived in London not knowing anyone but only knowing two of my girlfriends were there staying at the YWCA. I did not know that in Greater London there were many YWCA’s not only one.

Anyway I arrived in London at Heathrow about 6 am on a freezing cold February morning and I remember finding my way to the Tube and navigating my way toward central London. I remember most particularly the grey grey skies that loomed so low after the tube train found its way out into the light after travelling through the tunnel for some way. I eventually found a small hotel and low and behold on the reception desk was a friend who used to holiday close to us at the South Coast. So my higher power took care of me over those few daunting early hours of arriving in London. I finally found the YWCA though my friends were not staying there and I spent a lot of my time going to the movies, exploring the amazing department stores and the various galleries. There was actually a Marc Chagall exhibition on at one of the galleries and I still have a poster of his painting the Wedding in my bedroom.

It would be hard to explain the darkness and emptiness and pain I was carrying in those days. The lostness and confusion. I already had so much trauma behind me. My near death accident at the age of 17, the cerebral bleed of my older sister and her long time in a coma and then her subsequent breakdown abandonment and suicide attempt, two terminations of pregnancy to the man who eventually abandoned me again. I had been using alcohol and drugs for some years to numb my feelings. I don’t know why but today in the gallery I felt that yawning emptiness in my belly as I looked at some of the works of art which spoke to me of trauma, fracture and dissociation. I was just powerfully pulled back to that time in early 1985 and my inner child was crying from my belly telling me how abandoned she felt. I had no positive internal mother at all to care for myself and its interesting because when I just logged on to write this a short while ago Van Morrison’s song A Motherless Child was playing over and over in my imagination.

And as I think of it this mothering wound goes back at least three generations. I have mentioned by maternal great great grandfather who left home at the age of 36 to embark upon a new life in New Zealand with his then wife and four children. I have mentioned that he lost his own mother at 12 years of age and I do feel unresolved grief and separation trauma led to his later addiction and being left by his wife. My mother lost her father at 7 and my father lost his father at 12 as well which is another strange piece of ancestral synchronicity.

It was a relief today to actually allow myself to feel these feelings of grief and emptiness. I was filled with compassion for that young woman who travelled so far away carrying so much and was so abandoned emotionally. My trauma went on over the next 8 years before I finally met my ex husband in 1993. I thank God for Jonathan, meeting him helped me realise I had to achieve sobriety and he was also from the UK. I have not spoken to Jonathan in years now, we separated in 2004 when I was 42 and when I started to hit my grief he could not support my therapy. He told me “I want back the happy girl I married not this sad person that you have become.” He also told me I was “killing his spirit.” His family didn’t like me, he was no fun now he didn’t drink as much and had married a person in sobriety, what had become of him?

I can see where they were coming from. His mother just thought I was too “different” and strange. She actually told me on the first day of meeting when I asked her to come to a fitting for my wedding dress that she hoped our marriage would last, hers had been terribly unhappy she informed me. She probably saw the writing on the wall at that stage. I cannot blame her, at the stage I was 2 months off achieving sobriety anyway.

It still hurts to write all of this. Part of me still feels like the inadequate wife, the person who was ‘damaged goods’ but apparently this is what a lot of emotionally neglected women come to believe. We face emotional discard after discard, after being shame dumped or having shame projected onto us and we are sent out into the wilderness like the Handless Maiden to fend alone. I actually dreamed of myself as handless a few months after Jonathan finally left me to go back the UK and be with his ‘happy family’!!!! I still had another massive head trauma/accident to go through on our first anniversary of separation after he informed me he would give me not help at all to try and make a new life in the UK.

I know now I have to be a good mother to my inner self. I have to firmly and gently tell myself I am not ‘damaged goods’. I am not a ‘waste of space’ (as my inner critic so often tells me) in fact I am doing brilliantly to have come this far over coals of fire, I just have a lot of deficits from a neglectful childhood that I must work to soothe and improve. Getting out from under the scapegoat complex that so many of us assume who have early trauma or emotional neglect unrealised is not easy at all many of us die because internal shaming voices take us out.

This is something Donald Kalsched and Robert Firestone address in their books. Donald Kalsched’s book The Inner World Of Trauma is not an easy read but it so powerfully expresses how our own psyche can end up turning against us or keeping us prisoner by trying to protect us from any subsequent relationship or intimate connection (even in therapy). In the fairytale Briar Rose in order to save the princess the prince has to confront the forest of thorns.. this is a kind of metaphor for the inner destructive forces that can end up tearing us apart from emotional connection, intimacy, vulnerability and love.

I cried part of the way home from the gallery today. I decided that I would go to the nursery on the way home and buy some pansies to plant in my front terrace boxes and that I would also treat myself to a beautiful small enamel watering can that I saw there a few weeks ago. This was a present to my inner child. I know shopping can sometimes be a diversion but in this case it was an opportunity to give my little girl something she loves instead of denying her by saying the extra 40 dollars was too much.

I know that my grief is very close to the surface now because the tyrannical hold of the inner shaming critic is loosening. I am coming to believe I am not ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ or ‘damaged’ I have most certainly been deeply wounded and I will always carry the soul scars. Maybe I will never stop crying for what I missed out on but deep inside that acknowledgement will be testament to an authenticity that would just not be possible if I were to live in denial and keep shame dumping myself. I lingered a long lost desperately sad time looking to be seen by a family and world that so often could not see deeply into my soul. And how could they? Is it their job? I have a least found that kind of validation in later years in therapy and here and with one or two close friends. I now know that validation and empathy and compassion are essential gifts which I can and must give to myself and I am so grateful I am reaching the point in therapy where I can truly feel the reality of what I had to live over all of those lost years and no longer deny it to myself. My inner child holds the memory of everything and she needs me and my love, attention, understanding, help to grow and mature and become stronger… desperately.