What I can and cannot take in

Some truths are hard to digest.. that young ones are not loved or protected, that adults don’t see the child or acknowledge how they feel or respond to their unique individual identity.. that a parent is so caught up in themselves the child may as well not exist… that the child has to run away in search of another mother…that children end up alone, or later in life they struggle with abuse or hurt and have no one to help them with painful memories, or worse are told certain things that just make the pain worse.. such things hurt my heart to hear.

Possibly it is that they trigger my own wound or hurt in some way, that said I did have parents that stayed around.. I was not totally abandoned and in later years Mum tried her best and actually started to even open up to me about her own abandonment feelings, but then at other she times she only wanted to shut me down or herself down or even put up barricades with grandchildren…at times her behaviour was confusing, however coming to understand more about her own childhood did help me to make sense of certain things.

I have never been a mother myself (except to my dog, Jasper) and so I could never fully understand the full ins and outs of parenting, however I do know how it is to be a child and long for the parent and that longing when unfulfilled translates into something else much later in life, it may be a feeling of incompleteness, or a well of emptiness, or a craving for touch, comfort or soothing we try to address with substances or a pain of a body that is crying out but cannot find words for the feelings or longings and so translates them into other forms.

Alexander Lowen in his body dynamic process of bioenergetics shows the impact of supressed longing and crying on the musculature of a child… in his therapy he gets the patient to try to open up to longings.. Many of us may have had to shut down our most primal instincts, longings or needs to please our parents, siblings or peers. Some of us collapse in the face of threat, some of us rebel, some of us go silent, some of us placate all in the effort to win love and such strategies in later life can cause us problems.. Some of us turn off our longing for attachment if that longing is disappointed or frustrated too much, some of us turn away and may even pretend for a long time we do not long for what we long for. Perhaps for many of us the price of being real and true and vulnerable was to be shamed by someone in our family…

The key movement in therapy actually happens when we can finally allow this sense of vulnerability, most especially if we were an annihilated child. If the price of fighting for what we need or to be who we truly were leads us to be seen as a threat it can feel like the risk of death is upon us if we try to fight for what we want or be ourselves.. Some of us may have had parents who made us feel like we were hurting or damaging them in some way if we just wanted to assert ourselves….that fight may seem to go against vulnerability impulses but perhaps at time both can co exist.

I know for myself how often I can collapse and second guess myself.. I know how often I can doubt my own perception, but lately its just feeling too painful when I do….at times I have felt like I had absolutely no power.. it scared me today to see how many times I gave away my power, or, in failing to assert a strong boundary allowed abuse or invalidation to continue…I always tried to stay connected, even if it meant changing who I was… getting to know who that is is taking some time and there is more strength in me than I, at times, realise. I guess in the end it is really only over time that we can allow a process of trial and error to show us what is most true for us and what leads to us feeling better and stronger… At times taking on board the suffering of others does no favours but that does not necessarily mean we need to shut down our empathic feeling responses.. sometimes those of us who have been through it just have to be there for others, sometimes because no one else is and the person in question is not yet strongly enough grounded in their own power.. we all need others in this life but we also must come to know ourselves well if we are ever to find true happiness. In thee nd I guess that involves learning how much we can take in and how to express outwardly in a grounded way.