Keeping the heart open : how cutting off the flow of love can damage our capacity to be empathic and stay connected and intimate

Reading different books on how the flow of love gets blocked is very interesting to me. I am mid way through The Untethered Soul at the moment and the early chapters concentrated on how skandas get set up within our hearts. Skandas are like knots or places where our life energy gets stuck or bound up or twisted by hurtful things that happen to our heart when young and then they get triggered in the present. We all know the kind of thing. One of the examples he uses is of a man who has lost his girlfriend’s love, seeing a couple embracing in the front of a Ford Mustang, immediately the grief is triggered as the thoughts awaken and feelings try to flow.

While reading, I was also thinking of the concept of a facilitating or allowing atmosphere in childhood where the child’s feelings and needs do not become what John Bradshaw calls ‘shame bound’. This is partly an outgrowth too of the Neptune in Leo generation who survived the depression and Two World Wars as well as the poisonous pedagogy that both Alice Miller and John Bradshaw speak of which shuts down our emotional truth, feelings, responses and life energy. When such feelings become shame bound we learn to believe it is WE who are defective or ‘bad’ and some parents will perpetrate this if a child tries to protest unfair treatment. For these kind of ‘children’ then to be mis attuned to and given meds later in life when suffering to me seems like down right abuse even if it comes out of ignorance.

I was also thinking of how Mark Wolynn multigenerational trauma specialist talks of how the outward flow of love energy can be blocked in the heart of a parent due to earlier traumas unreconciled along the multi-generational line leading to ‘acting out’ with addictions which then traumatise the descendants due to epigenetics. Separations or cut offs may ensue in some families especially addictive or religiously addicted families who prohibit the expression of certain feelings. They also cause what Wolynn calls the carrying of ‘core sentences’ or life scripts which become embodied beliefs such as ‘I will always be left” ‘I am fated to live alone’, “Something terrible is going to happen’.

Often when the history is explored in the family we see that someone was indeed left or had to live alone. I know in my own family it was my maternal great great grandfather that got cut off by part of the family. His daughter got as far away as she could leaving New Zealand just as her father had left Cornwall in the 1870s. My grandmother then left Victoria and her own mother with her husband who died when my mother was 7 they came to a small town called Canberra in the 1920s and it was there my mother met my father in 1940 when he was stationed here with the Dutch East Indies while on a rec mission to pick up fighter planes.

I think of how my older sister who died in 2014 was cut off by sister in law who lost her own mother when young and had a very problematic relationship with mother in law to be, who violated her boundaries really badly shortly before she married my brother. I think of how my niece ended up in a mental institution at the exact same age my older sister her mother forbade her to see had her aneurysm. Funny that – how family ‘secrets’ have a way of repeating. And it is sad to me to see how the blockage of love between my mother and my sister in law played out in the final years. She did not come to my mother’s funeral and my brother told my niece not to bother coming home for it.

I thought today of the quality too that therapist Les Carter speaks of being central to psychologically healthy people, that of ‘openness’. In A A one of the central ‘slogans’ of recovery is ‘Keep an open mind”. Sadly my Mum could not keep an open mind about how vulnerable my sister in law was even though she hid it all behind distancing and ‘bravado’ type behaviour. Sadly my sister in law could not ‘Keep An Open Mind” to a mother who in later years felt bad for her snooping and wanted to repair things. I think too of how often, refusal to be open hides a wound and I think of how formal and restrictive certain members of my family are and of the ones who find it hardest to cope with emotions of any kind. I think of my sister who died who was full of life and of the love most of her kids express openly and how one of them called my brother’s sons eldest children ‘the corn children’ at my mother’s wake as they stood their in all their finery not really knowing how to mingle and engage with anyone. Sarcasm can be a sign of anger, judgement, fear and damage too, I believe

I think too of my own struggles to trust in relationships and of the sense of shame and insecurity I carried from childhood on that made me reach for substances to ‘fit in’ and to feel less anxious in social settings. Now that I am over 26 years sober I can chat to anyone anywhere pretty much about anything but that would not have been possible for me even in the early years of recovery from age 31 onwards as I still held deep inside me so many feelings of silent shame and not quite belonging.

Opening our hearts or keeping them open is not easy. I think of a lecture by astrologer Melanie Reinhardt I attended in early 2000 which spoke of the practice of ‘keeping our heart open in hell”. How many of us manage to do this in a society that so often shames us for grief or minimises it? How many of our parents could do it coming from backgrounds the encouraged stoicism and survival at all costs?

I now see the enormous burden both of my parents carried in their life. I thing of how silent my Dad was but how soft but then how hard he could become towards me at times. I think of my mother’s OCD whirlwinds that often terrorised the family. I think of the stories from my relatives about how my great great grandfather terrorised the family coming home drunk and pulling the tablecloth off the table as everything flew about the room. I think of how his daughter took flight, and how I did too. I think of all of this and see more and more deeply into the genesis of things and as I do I start to feel more and more comfortable in my skin and less vulnerable to my inner critics ongoing litany of tirades about all the ways in which I am a failure at 57 years of age. And most of all I feel gratitude that despite all of the pain I am still alive and my heart is relatively open, if not all of the time, at least some of the time and increasingly more on any day.