Making you into a mistake : today's reflections

I just read a thoroughly heartrending post of a person who was sent to psychiatric care as a child and of the abuse that was done there, in terms of making her believe she was a ‘problem’.. the object of the entire exercise was to make her into someone else… Another friend from WordPress asked me to like a page recently called We Will Not Be Silenced.. on it there was a share being recited by actress Cynthia Nixon of all the things a ‘lady’ should not be or do….. Okay we may need some boundaries but for the world not to accept us and try to turn is into something more acceptable or pleasing is about the erasing of a person’s identity when it all comes down to it… No one wants to go around hurting others but to imply you are hurting someone just by being yourself is a mind fuck…

That said we are all similar in some ways, if we get cut we bleed, but I also do believe that some may have the sensitivity to suffer more from this kind of treatment which, over time, leads to an erosion or negation of ‘Self’ or self esteem and self value….

From another angle there was also the push some of our parents suffered in terms of having to survive in the harshest and hardest of circumstances coming out of the Great Depression and two world wars.. I know the impact on my own father and mother’s life and was discussing this with my nephew last night… I see how hard Dad had to push to improve his life and how hard he had to work, and the other day I came across a letter one of my male flat mates had written to me back in 1983 pleading with me to give up some of the nights I was working a second job waitressing while also working full time 9 to 5 in my secretarial job.. I certainly was pushing the envelope at that stage too and my own sense of self and self esteem was not very strong…

I can still push myself too hard and I can still undermine my own reality and value.. This issue of a sense of worth, or value is coming up strongly for me at the moment as I consider the powerful impact of both my father and mother’s need to survive and the ways they came to feel they had to find value through externals, we learned by example too, not to take care of and value our bodies….

This week I have been recalling dreams where my father came to me shortly before I got sober telling me he needed help because he was impoverished and he wanted me to leave behind the addictive lifestyle I had of pushing myself too hard, after a time I did get sober and had the support of my husband, something I am grateful for now, but I did not really know how to lean in totally with him and his own feelings of grief were blocked and when I started to explore my own he found that too problematic, he thought I was malingering when my then current therapist advised me to take time off work when my grief started emerging in therapy and screamed at me to get out of bed one day… I get it grief needs movement to move but at that stage I needed his support, not the undermining of my own therapy.

I keep thinking of my Dad’s struggles and of his illness a fair bit lately.. I feel sad for the impact all of this striving and working just too damn hard while abusing our bodies had on my older sister who had a cerebral bleed at 34 years of age, that was during the 1980’s when the materialism push was massive and my sister was just doing too much….

I am now in a position where someone needs my help and I cannot but see the ancestral side of it….I am happier these days to know there was not much wrong with who I am as a person, I just didn’t fit into a family that was geared towards business, looking good and primarily economic values…and yet I didn’t get to develop that true self and it got buried, something I was crying about in therapy yesterday as a result of a week in which I have been able to actually laugh at difficult things too.

In the shower today as I laughed about something the thought came to me that integrated trauma or awareness of the myriad effects of emotional abuse just possibly reaches a critical stage of healing when you can both cry and laugh about your past, or at least release some of the heavy shame and self blame abuse and neglect survivors so often internalise…. I feel I am at that point now..

Today I had another angry outburst at some recent frustrations… I just let myself have these feelings and reactions without shaming myself too much… there is a lot going on at present and everyone is being subjected to all kinds of stresses, yet I am grateful to find the quiet time too, time just to relax and kick back in nature.. its not easy for me to do… I noticed a bit of negativity in me today bursting out at the dog park. There was a lady there with two very overfed dogs and one of them came up to me wanting to have a bit of a pet and as I looked at the lady who seemed grossly overwait I felt sad for the dog to be put in this position of having to carry so much weight around..but that’s just the way my mind works, maybe coming out of a background in which I was taught to criticise or see the flaws and even as I type this I am not even sure if my observations didn’t come out of a grounded realism either…. I just notice so much over consumption around me in our country at present, so many people carrying so much weight and eating portions of food that seem over the top…

Today is a good day though.. I am glad I am aware that for most of my life I felt I had to hide and was not acceptable as I was, had to work to kill parts of myself off…I am trying my hardest to love myself where I am at now, warts and all, angry moods and all… After all I am only human in the end, no way near perfect..maybe in time my self perceptions will become more grounded, realistic and balanced, for now I will just be grateful that I don’t have to erase myself any more and grateful too that others on this journey are realising they don’t have to either.