Understanding emotions ; some contemplations

It struck me today on our late walk but maybe I have a touch of Aspergers. I seem to struggle to understand it when others get highly emotional and then I can be a bit dismissive, but maybe it happens more when they are in a child or regressed state that does not seem reasonable.. I wonder if I have been able to be a very good partner in the past due to this..

I had a long conversation this morning with my ex partner (not ex husband’s) brother in law and he told me how Phil told him to tell me to stop reading all the books I did on psychology. When we lived together, at one point he told me he did not want any ‘psychobabble’ near his son and by God could he be cruel to him at times. I have seen Phil in a regressed state lashing into both sons verbally and laying into my furniture with his boots at one point.. Strange thing was when my upset feelings came out in anger he could not handle it, would read the riot act and disappear for days, this was after a trip when we went to visit his father who was dying and the, as yet, unprocessed grief over my own father’s loss started to emerge.. Phil told me “I don’t want you anywhere near my Dad when you are crying its too overwhelming.” He also got into a rage when his mother showed empathy over my sister in the home.

Maybe I am more in touch with my emotions than I realise. I do know my emotions have been extreme at times due to repression, and in therapy I learned I had next to no holding in childhood or later life.. I cried in therapy yesterday reading about the scapegoat from the post I wrote back in 2014 that is one of my most read posts. I cried as I got an image of me as a child in my minds eye being sent so far away into the wilderness because I was “too much” to cope with..

This has happened a lot in my life.. I happened in the UK after the head injury in 2005 when boarding with the family there… they virtually kicked me out then regretted it.. I went to an ashram and they took me to the train station.. I think they realised they had not done the kind thing….it hurts a lot because today the issue of never being held in my pain and grief came up for me with my friend, Noel and I was telling him about R.A.D. which is reactive attachment disorder.. a friend of mine who works with troubled kids told me about it at our reunion in October last year… Children or adults with R.A.D. will lash out because they fear being close and have been so badly abandoned.. I guess borderline is similar in its reactiveness but I never liked the term nor the fact that so may ‘borderlines’ are lambasted and misjudged and never treated with enough sensitivity in therapy.

I am glad today I could feel how hard it as to have never had any holding when I needed it, for my husband and mother to sabotage and demean my therapy….I think of how maybe I was not so good at ‘holding’ how Scott felt on the weekend either when I opened my heart to someone else and he feared losing me.. I started to feel bad about it on the walk, after all he has gone through betrayal too. Who amongst us isn’t wounded and some of us more so than others…

Its a long path for me to understand my own emotions and those of others. I gained a great insight into this when I heard Robert Johnson, a Jungian therapist speak about this back in the early 90s when I first got sober… he said that we live in ‘a feeling wounded culture’.. he often says “a hippie is just an upside down Victorian”. We know now that Freud did not believe or give credence to the amount of child abuse that went on coming out of that repressive era…and the hippy culture with its ideals of free love and sex didn’t really address a lot of the deeper wounding either though it made a start… We need to work towards developing a greater emotional literacy and language if we wish to grow in our ability to empathise and be there for one another in a way that breeds a deeper compassion and ability to connect heart to heart and soul to soul.