too much and never enough

We live as though the idea of ourselves in our heads are real.. that can be a real shame at times. How often does it stop us from living? If we feel shame over ‘too muchness’ or ‘not enoughness’ it can lead to depression, devitalisation, problems with living.. Add to this the vibrational charge left inside us from being treated cruelly, abandoned or unmirrored.. when this emerges in other relationships where we feel disrespected, when others cannot ‘hold’ us we get upset and angry but it is really the old charge we are feeling from the past…That is when holding our inner child or trauma self safe and gently by the witness self is important.. I have heard that in some therapies these trauma energies are called parts, my own therapist does not work in that categorising way and thank God, I always feel held by her..

I looked for a long time to my other relationships for a holding they were not capable of.. Even this situation I am now in with Scott comes down to the fact that after Mum died in 2017 I was not connected to by much family… my sister went back into hospital with depression for about the 7th time after Mum died and it took her until the end of 2019 to begin to be able to ‘function’ again.. At that time I had to put away the hurt feelings that she was not contacting me and my brother was stuck in rationality and had no patience at all for feelings of grief, though he did break down with me one day. I had Kat, my therapy and my poetry as well as very lovely followers on here who reached out and had their own grief to deal with.. I relate to those who have gone through loss as I have walked through the fire of loss since I was 3 years old and my older sister/surrogate Mum, Judith left for the land of our ancestors migration, New Zealand.

Today I can see where the child in me really struggled. I see how lost I became. I see how there was so much fixation on the past, it was nearly impossible to live in my body in the present.. Towards the end of my marriage all the pain I had numbed was rising up and it was hard to know how to cope with it.. At that stage writers like Glennon Doyle were still in their own addictions or emerging out of them..so there were not a lot of everyday models for the process of coming alive, feeling deeply and unnumbing.

I have written before about a feeling wounded culture. To those of us having to wake up to ‘darker’ feelings it can feel unsafe.. Our parents had in the most part to be stoic having been raised in a patriarchal culture… We look now at what was done to indigenous peoples in long years past and feel outrage.. The author Bruce Pascoe has, here in Australia written a book called Dark Emu which tells of how invasion history was never told and America the Native Americans were depicted in films as ‘savages’ not as the complex profoundly connected cultures in touch with earth and sea and sky that they were.. I always resonated with me when Carl Jung after spending times with Native American chiefs wrote the following quote said to him by a NA elder :

“We think the White Man is crazy always running around”, this person was talking about the severing of white Western and even Eastern imperialism.

It also strikes me that in trauma it is the profoundly alive feeling body that gets cut off from us.. In trauma we are driven out of or far from our bodies, for example hitting a child causes them pain in a body that may seem intolerable, even leaving a small child alone with intense feelings they have no tools to manage can feel intolerable which is why so many of us ran from ourselves developing multi level addictions growning up. We shut down our breath and then we lose touch with the feelings and sensitivities that make us human animals with souls and a heart.

One of the best books I read in early recovery is called Narcissim : Denial of the True Self by Alexander Lowen.. He developed the body work process of bioenergetics which helps clients with arrested musculature open up to the needs and feeling they had to repress when narcissistically shut down parents forced them not to feel. To not be held tenderly when you cry, or to have to grow up and master body processes before you could is a terrible kind of abuse that creates so much stricture. As a child I was hiding dirty underpants I soiled due to fear and shame, and I grew to be a young woman incapable of sexual intimacy due to the conditioning of shame I absorbed from being educated in the Catholic School system.

In the last relationship I began to open up but the cruelty in my partner due to his own narcissistic wounding meant as a person struggling to come alive in recovery and an empath I got dumped with his pain and lack of understanding too… I have to take responsibility for the fact I stayed but I tried my best to love and be connected to man incapable of true tenderness. When grief is denied for boys and fear as well only anger remains. Its so sad.

This has been an involved post to write… There is a lot more to say on these issues.. For today I am glad to know what while I developed the idea that who I was was ‘too much’ that is not objectively true and when I start to feel ‘not enough’ I can also recognise it is not entire truly.. those ideas can still FEEL TRUE THOUGH.. AND THAT IS WHEN I RUN, FEAR AND MISINTERPRET…. so even seeing that is a gift of grace.