My therapist talks to me all the time about how as a youngster I just fell out of my parent’s minds. They were so often busy and working even as I was a baby, and I bonded most with my older sister who some of you know left to get married when I was 3. I felt a deep dark void emotionally that only started to make sense to me when I got into addiction recovery at 31 years of age and heard about ‘the hole in the soul’ many suffered. Many said it was a God shaped hole but I would see it more as a spiritual void that does not get filled up with a loving parental presence. My aim here is not to blame parents either, because both my parents were children of the depression years and Dad had to leave home at 18 before Nazi Occupation. My mother was unfathered from 7 years of age onward and even then my grandfather was an SP Bookie and I think he may have liked the booze too. Mum didn’t have a lot of memories about her father at all and we often spoke about this in her later years of life.
I often feel a very very large sense of deep insecurity and shame lately. I was peaceful this morning and I got out in the wild wind with Jasper by the lake beach to throw the ball around after coming home to make lunch but my anxiety symptoms then started up. I logged on to my blog to find Ivor had left the most beautiful song on a recent poetry blog of mine and I must say it moved me so deeply to tears as the song speaks of the joy of the child we so often lose the way too. That made me think of how neither of my parents got to be children they had to grow up so fast and I was looking at photo of my father today and crying. It was taken in Indonesia a few years before cancer struck him down and he is so skinny and he has this goofy smile on his face, when I saw it I thought of Louise Hay’s meditation that says to visualise both your parents as children and take them into your heart. I realised on some levels Dad was a child too who had to be a man and he did things that really squashed me so much. I am not as angry any more about it but I know it was down to a lack of attunement and that is what I think addiction is about, we don’t get attuned to or able to bond with people so we turn to substances and we falter with all the things locked up inside of us, feelings we don’t really know how to manage alone. We may learn too, to go silent or take ourselves away and not be any more bother, or we just despair of ever connecting again.
Both my parents used to use a few Scotch Whiskeys before dinner to wind down and that was followed by wine. It was a lovely European sentiment and custom but along with the cigarettes I don’t think it helped Dad’s health. That said I know my father loved me and wished only good things for me and I often talk to him now and pray and he talks to me. I keep under my pillow his overseas drivers licence folio that I found when Sue and I cleared out Mum’s unit following her death in which he had a photo of me in pigtails at 5 year old along with a Dutch Deflt medallion of a windmill. I adore that little momento of his which made me realise he cared for me a lot even though he often could not express it.
I had a caring conversation with my sister yesterday, she is the one person I can talk to about Scott who doesn’t give an opinion and keeps an open mind. I feel more and more lately the tremendous softness in my sister that was obscured for so many years behind a harder shell and even though she never calls me I will always try to keep reaching towards her and connecting. She has so much of my father in her where as my older sister Judith and I could be a bit more volatile like our mother.
I always hold my sister in my mind but I so rarely feel held myself that is why a ‘gift’ of a video of a song from someone who took the care to share it means so much to me today (thank you again, Ivor). I wanted to share below a piece of writing from Mark Nepo on how essential holding is to us when we are in pain or going through grief or suffering. I think our society so often forgets the power of simple presence and touch which can give so much especially when we take the time to listen without words to another’s unspoken pain or suffering all those deeper feelings they cannot say. When we do this deeply with our heart and soul we are demonstrating a capacity not to IMPOSE our opinion or experience on anther but to remain open instead to them through caring witnessing and empathy. I will share the following now because it really spoke to me.
A rheumatologist at a workshop at the Cleveland Clinic spoke of a twenty one year old woman she was treating who was dying of cancer. The medical team caring for her was running out of treatment options, and the sight of the young woman withering was weighing on everyone.
On a sun filled day near the end, the young woman was curled in her bed in a foetal position, her family around her, the blinds closed, the room dark and silent. Entering the room, the doctor felt their despair. She could see her patient staring into all those years she wouldn’t have. It was heartbreaking. Moved beyond all the standard protocols, her doctor felt compelled to climb in bed and hold her. The unexpected, quietly heroic offering broke death’s hold, for a long moment, and brought everyone closer.
After a time, the woman sat up and asked for the blinds to be lifted. Light came flooding in, and her family began to speak and listen. They brought her juice. They all began to live again.
For all our skills, for all our training, and for all the miraculous advances in medicine, we caregivers are left, finally, with what we’re born with, the capacity to hold. When leading with our heart, we can mitigate the pain and despair that the sharpness of life can render, if we softly dare to get as close as we can and simply hold.
Of course, this moment of grace and connection did not prevent the young woman from dying. But it powerfully affirms the power of holding. To hold another is the oldest form of heart to heart resuscitation. It can change how we live before we die. Holding someone in his or her pain or despair can allow the life force to return. It can let light back into the room, and letting life back in, thought it might not cure us or keep us from dying, is at the heart of all healing.
Extract from : The One Life We’re Given : Finding the Wisdom that Waits in Your Heart by Mark Nepo
For those of us left alone so much with our own feelings and suffering perhaps we do learn in time to find ways to hold ourselves and substances often help us in some way and keep us alive and afloat for a time. I know I got the necessary holding I needed for a time sharing in 12 step meetings the truth of my experience and I get it in my twice weekly sessions with my therapist, Kat.
I would like to think that the better substitute to substances or disconnection, discounting or ignoring of our feelings by ourselves and others ,would be a recognition that we can find or provide a safe harbour within the space of our own or another’s mind and heart by being willing to be brave, stay open and listen deeply for all the things hidden the silence we may not ever be able to say, as well as all the unspoken needs our soul may be unable to find a way to give to voice to.
Emerging From The Dark Night 