I am awakening to many realisations lately, many of them painful. I never seem to have ‘escaped’ my family system and re reading John Bradshaw’s book on the healing the inner child, Homecoming I am moved to tears often. He speaks of the grief of unmet dependency needs and other needs and emotions which don’t get allowed expression in dysfunctional families or families of multi generational trauma or addiction.
In one chapter he writes :
Getting these (developmental dependency) needs met at the proper time and in the proper way is nature’s way.
But god knows so many families are not natural and there is a long history of emotions and experiences we get born into in this world with no choice at all in them.
Bradshaw sees recovery work comprising grieving the absence or loss of what needs we didn’t get met or addressed and finding ways to rechampion the parts of us that needed expression (which involves coming to understand the essential part our necessary emotions play), for sure there are certain injuries or wounds we cannot always fully heal but we can embrace and understand them with inner work and do our best to become more aware of when we have been acting out of them.
Lately the pain over being scammed and the disowned by one of my older sister’s sons is running around deep inside of me much of the time. I think of the longing I had for deep connection and emotional support the extreme lack of which became painfully obvious following my mother’s death two years ago on the back of my older sister’s death and second sisters multiple hospitalisations and woundings from her own family who remained oblivious of the causative factors which reach back into our history.
When we are not met or ‘held’ emotionally in childhood by a stronger more self aware adult that leaves a wound, for many of us who were punished or hurt for our reactions it can leave a long and disempowering legacy of shame bound feelings that get frozen and involve a great deal of anxiety to unthaw. According to Bradshaw there are four critical stages of childhood development that we are required to move through and each enable us to develop one of four powers : the power of being, the power of doing, the power of identity and the power of having basic survival skills. I would list one of the most basic of survival skills that has such a power to negatively impact our life and health in later years, the ability to set and practice good boundaries.
For myself I see the boundary struggles I encounter, lately I recognise the level of fear I feel if I need to set a boundary with someone whose connection I rely upon and how I also struggle with my own inner boundaries around reasoning of what is right and wrong for me on an emotional level or in other words, functional or dysfunctional. I see how desperate the need for love and positive attention was and for the missing support, especially after Mum died and my other sister was so ill, while my brother was emotionally absent and disconnected and how that set me up to be scammed. So when one inner part of me want to shame me and agree with my oldest nephew that I am a complete ‘fuck up and waste of space’, another part of me cannot allow this. I did my best with what I struggled with and he has a partner to support him and I did not and she also cut contact when I was struggling to help my other sister. My nephew did not struggle with an abusive mother and a sister as a surrogate mother who was an untreated alcoholic, as well as another sister who was emotionally abusive due to her own abuse. That was, for me, such a painful and confusing situation to grow up in.
And the truth is that all of this mixed up feeling and boundary confusion cannot just be sorted out on a purely head or intellectual level, it is a deep feeling process, most especially if critical wounding to attachment and bonding leading to emotional neglect and invalidation or lack of parental ‘holding’ went back to preverbal stages. John Bradshaw writes :
One way adult children avoid their suffering is by staying in their heads This involves obsessing about, analysing, discussing, reading and spending lots of energy trying to figure things out. There is a story about a room with two doors. Each door has a sign on it. One says HEAVEN, the second LECTURE ON HEAVEN. All codependent adult children are lined up in front of the door which says LECTURE ON HEAVEN.
This occurs because we had unpredictable (often out of control or hyper controlling) parents, the result was confusion. Staying in one’s head is also an ego defence, because when you obsess you don’t actually have to feel anything. Healing comes from feeling the pain you felt then, along with the frozen feelings in order to make sense of your past. It involves being in your body with your inner child as he or she goes through re-experiences and memories IN YOUR BODY AND NOT JUST YOUR HEAD. It involves listening to the anger, confusion, sadness and guilt or shame so you can release these and tap into the joy and freedom of your true self that always lay inside of you.
All of this said, difficult as the past week of time spent with my sister has been its also been liberating because I have been able to feel in my body how it was to be the youngest one in a family of far larger adults who were so often unavailable and often intruded on my boundaries in all kinds of ways. I have felt how I had to struggle and really begun to listen deeply to how confusing and painful it was for my inner child. I have also come to realise how, as the fourth child I took on the painful task of trying to heal and reunite my fractured family while being the loving available parent for not only my mother but my two sisters and several of my nephews and one niece (at one stage) too. That was a massive task and led to my cancer in 2016. It was not my job and I have been shat on for not doing it well enough by one of them. That pain is not mine, it is his and my mothers and my sister’s, much as I love them I must also take care of me. Its just that as a child, I never learned to do that while being literally emotionally starving, longing for any emotional scrap of attention, love or approval. An extreme set up for unhealthy co-dependency and emotional enmeshment.
Still I long to support my family, but today as I woke to see that I had been dumped with all the last of my Mum’s possessions, just as I was left to sort our my sister’s things in the care home 5 and a half years ago, it did bite me. And yet a part of me also in some way feels okay with it. That said I would love a place now just for my life, to not be as surrounded or weighted down by the painful memories of loss and confusion of everyone’s past and yet I also feel lately my joyful inner child coming back to life as I become more alive and real. And I even see my older sister’s inner child finally coming out to play. At dinner last night she owned that Mum could be ‘a real bitch at times’. Wow that was huge. At one point Mum pushed her into a cupboard after slapping her over the face with a slipper. I had a brush broken on my backside one time as Mum hit me with bristles face down. That was a boundary violation. It was WRONG AND NOT OUR FAULT. So why use meds and diagnose someone bi polar to cover the real truth over keeping it locked in the body? IT JUST ISNT RIGHT!!!
Bradshaw writes :
The wounded inner child is filled with unresolved energy resulting from the sadness of childhood trauma. One of the reasons we have sadness of childhood trauma. One of the reasons we have sadness is to complete painful events of the past, so that our energy can be available for the present. When we are not allowed to grieve, the energy is frozen.
One of the rules of dysfunctional families is the no feel rule. This rule prohibited your inner child from even knowing what she as feelings. Another dysfunctional family rule is the no talk rule, which states that expression of emotions is prohibited. In some cases it may have meant that you may only express certain emotions. Different families have variations on their no talk rules.
In my family all emotions except guilt were prohibited. Emotions were considered weak. I was old over and over again, “Don’t be so emotional.” My family was no different from the millions of other families that carry the by product of three hundred years of “rationalism.” Rationalism is the belief that reason is supreme. Being reasonable is what constitutes being human, while being emotional is less than human. Repression and shaming of emotions has been the rule…people also stop their emotions by fantasising. For example, I spent a great deal of my early life with an almost phobic fear of anger. My fantasy around expressing anger was one of catastrophic rejection and/or punishment. This fantasy mobilised muscle tension and shallow breathing.”
Bradshaw is not alone in this fear. I just listened to a programme on repression of anger. In our culture if we are angry it is often not seen as acceptable and we may be exiled for expressing anger. But without anger we have no self and boundaries rely upon us knowing what harms and hurts us and feeling free enough to express that desire in a way that acts for our needs in terms of allowing us self assertion rather than aggression……aggression often results when anger is not properly validated.
Hold the hand of the child that lives in your soul. For this child, nothing is impossible.
Paulo Coelho
Unfortunately, we live in a society that forces us to repress our inner child and “grow up.” But the truth is that while most adults physically “grown up,” they never quite reach emotional or psychological adulthood. In other words, most “grown-ups” aren’t really adults at all. This leaves most people in a state of puerile fears, angers and traumas that fester away in the unconscious mind for decades.
Loner Wolf
Emerging From The Dark Night 