I think the most healing gift we can give to ourselves or to anyone else emotionally speaking is to be real. I think we live in a society where we are taught to be externally focused rather than inwardly self aware and if we have painful feelings we seek to run from them, we may have been raised in homes where our fear, flight, fight response was triggered all the time by parents who had their own triggers or many of us may just have been unseen and unheld emotionally speaking. One of the key signs of emotional neglect is that we are out of touch with our feelings and we may struggle with empathy either the giving or receiving it, because we were not attuned to, we may attract more lack of attunement and we may shame others or ourself. If we truly want to heal from our trauma or at least be less activated or more conscious, we must take on board pain and know what things hurt us deeply in a society which often will mock us for that.
The empaths amongst us struggle most and adult children of alcoholics or trauma tend to develop high empathy and acute emotional sensitivity anyway. We aren’t just being ‘too sensitive’ that said if we are familiar only with pain, shame, fear and having needs dismissed denied or unmet we may grativate towards dark and injurous experiences or people in order to become more aware, which is a large reason why empaths attract those with damaging narcissism.
Condition to deny and deflect pain, narcissists are not good for us to be around, we wont get the soothing hug or the help with undoing powerfully negative self concepts we may have been conditioned into, such as that helping others is the way we have value. Or we can only have value by working extra hard to be what other want us to be rather than feel secure that we are lovable simply because we exist.
I really sat with my inner child today. I am having a lot of digestive issues at present on the back of all this stress Scott continues to be laying on me over money. I have already set a boundary with him twice this week that he keeps pushing past. The sad thing is if I don’t help him we wont be meeting for a few years. I am at the point though where my inner child really needs love from me, rather than external sources. I read once that the only person who will never leave us is actually ourselves that said we can emotionally abandon ourselves to belong. I know that feeling so so well.
Self love has been a long time coming for me and it has involved being real about painful feelings and risking being judged as crazy or overly sensitive. I now know where my trauma came from, I know why I reached for substances or other things to medicate the pain I was in. I know now the cure to self loss or abandonment is self love. The journey to find and uncover our deep emotional truth is a long one for so many of us right now in a culture that continues to put the sense of value in superficial things and encourage is to dismiss the inner world. It also leads us to disconnect from nature because in many ways the natural world is a mirror of us. As kids we naturally connect to nature and animals if we are not deconditioned out of such a connection, but sadly some of us can be pushed away from our inner true nature by so many forces out there that encourage us to be ‘unreal’. But the only cure for heartbreak is to embrace and know it for what it is, and only we can give ourselves the permission to be real and embrace the truth of what we have really lived, either dark or light. We gain nothing by minimising or glossing over painful realities that need to be integrated in order for us to be truly authentic.
Emerging From The Dark Night 