A very sad reality

There is a very sad reality that I am realising lately. It is this. That there are so many beautiful souls out there who just do not know how beautiful and divine they are. It is such a shame that in my Catholic school one of the most powerful indoctrinations was that every one is born with mortal sin and that we are not complete and perfect just as we are. What we are often taught instead is that our loveability rests on what others say about us, how well we can ‘prove’ ourselves or how ‘good’ we can be. (And I know this my just be my perspective coming out of that perfectionistic Catholic conditioning.)

Instead so many of us are inculcated in SHAME or feelings of being flawed or needing to live up to superimposed arbitrary standards imposed by others or society at large. We are taught so often to look outside and yes, as humans we are wired to connect and imprint with others for our very survival which is why so much of our inner damage stems from painful early relationships that do not allow us to relate fully to all of our emotions which are present from day one in the form of body sensations, (yes, even inside the womb.)

In a powerful interview with a Scottish journalist, Gabor Mate was speaking of how as a baby born during 1944 he along with a whole lot of other babies naturally cried as Hungary was occupied by the Nazis. He was talking of the exquisite sensitivity and finely tuned radar of the little baby which is already in touch on so many levels. And so many of our parents were like this and they often had many raw forces impinging upon them. Both my parents knew parental abandonment and loss in their early lives and those wounds were passed down. I remember going to a seminar on the Moon given by psychological astrologer Liz Greene and my birth chart was one of the one she used and she asked me, “What death or experiences of loss surrounded you and your family in the first year of your life? Because looking at your chart I feel you were a kind of radar or sponge for some deep grief that was going on.” Well she was spot on about that my beloved Poppa Lester who entered Mum and Nana’s life in 1938 was dying from cancer in that first year. It was he who saved them both from a very very lonely single parent life and was much beloved by all of my far older siblings. Of course I never go to know him Maybe my fear of being left or abandoned by men actually stems this far back. According to family stories I was taken to hospital and put on Poppa’s bed in my basinet and he loved me smiling at him.

Lots of tears writing this as I think of how 23 years later Dad would be taken from us after 6 years of trauma beginning with my near death smash up very close to the 55th birthday of my father, John Anthony Willemsen. He would see his older daughter struck down with an embolism the next year, he would she her undergo psychosis after being left by the man she loved and returned home with a one way ticket 3 years following this from the land of our ancestors, New Zealand.

Anyway, as usual in my blog I have diverted from the original subject, but WHY THE FUCK DID THE CATHOLIC CHURCH BLAME US FOR TRAUMA.. WHERE THE FUCK DID THIS BELIEF IN THE SINFUL CHILD STEM FROM????

I remember my own powerful watershed moment when I first came upon John Bradshaw’s wonderful book Healing The Shame That Binds You back in 1994 just a year after I got sober. Luckily prior to getting sober I began to work for a company that distributed the Health Communications Publications range that published Johns’ work. In that book he sites psychotherapist Alice Miller’s idea of poisonous pedagogy that sees the child as sinful and blames it for the woundings or failures or injuries of the parents carried multi generationally. Weighted down by this sense of badness and shame we try to be better and ‘good’ we try to cover over the full humanity in us, the so called ‘bad’ self that is not strong, moral, impervious and upright, but who the hell can be like this all of the time.

In his talk on the hidden causes of cancer, palliative care Doctor Gabor Mate sites an over developed sense of duty and responsibility towards others as one of the lead causes of the cancer type personality, he says he has recognised a similar pattern in those who go on to develop other kinds of auto immune diseases, like Lou Gerhig’s disease. Where as if we are seen to be ‘selfish’ and take care of our own needs first it would be more likely that our immune health would not be compromised so badly.

I have been thinking over the past few days too of how most childhood emotional neglect survivors end up blaming themselves for the consequences and impact of living in emotionally unresponsive families and then find it hard to notice and pay attention to and seek guidance from buried feelings and needs they so long ago had to hide from or deny or project becoming caretakers for others. The idea that we are born bad and can only become good by caring as much as we can for others is also at times detrimental if it comes at the cost of our own intrinsic emotional needs and health.

That said we do also now live in a cult of so called materialistic individuality. An absence of community and truer and deeper emotional connection results as work lives become more demanding and people become time poor, unable to be there for others because they have to work so hard just to make a living, making it harder at times for them to be deeply engaged on a connected level with their families.

So it really is a profoundly double edged sword so many deal with.

Ideally we need spiritually and emotionally sustaining relationships of healthy mutual interdependence where people act and engage out of authenticity and respect both for self and other in this world. But when we have suffered for no fault of our own and are them blamed, when we blame ourselves and fail to see the beauty truth and goodness as well as our intrinsic worth as human ‘beings’ rather than human ‘doings’ then it is that things feel saddest of all, for a failure to see the beauty in ourselves also extends to a failure to see the beauty in nature and life and in others, denigration then results as well as depression and desperate sense that we have to grab at something from outside of us to complete us when the deeper truth is that we are actually born complete, entire, whole, divine and precious. Truly beloved unconditionally.