I just read a post on the inner void and how nothing external to us can ever truly fill us up from within. Those of us who have suffered the deep wound of abandonment depression know how utterly hopeless it feels to be totally empty inside and then attacked and besieged by all kinds of punishing inner voices.. For me the healing of my wound began with recognising it and also allowing that voice to speak and externalise, otherwise how was I to know it? For me this wound was silenced by addictions and seeking outside of myself for other false sources of love. During the process of coming to know and heal my inner self I had to start fronting up and being honest about my insides, all of my fears, anxieties, mistakes, inner struggles thoughts and feelings as much as possible and learn to stop covering them over (even to myself) and begin facing them.
I just read a lovely meditation I will share at the bottom of this blog that speaks of how intimacy cannot be achieved by withholding our painful difficult feelings from interpersonal relationships. Some of us find it hard and fear the conflict or heat of being real, we may have been shut down by various forces in life and society that persuaded us appearances and doing the right thing externally speaking was more important than being real, true to our hearts, authentic and genuine. In the reading Tian Dayton speaks of relationships needing to be vessels of holding for honesty and truth to emerge in order that we can come to know true intimacy and this also relates to the relationship with our inner selves. Until we can hear the voices of hatred or harm and self rejection inside us how can we begin to undo the false beliefs they represent which we absorbed from somewhere that lead to us hating ourselves, after all we were not born hating ourselves, others and life.
Luckily there is another source and force growing slowly within my own heart and being lately and that is a voice of love.. This voice has to work hard to be heard beneath the negating voice which often tends to scream very loud. I am sure many of us have heard the term “the still quiet voice” this to me is the voice of the soul, it knows what we need to be whole, it knows how we feel deep, think or need to act to be in alignment with our real self, as opposed to how others have told us we ‘should’ feel or think or act. My experience is that I grow in a grounded sense of wholeness and power the more closely I listen to this voice. The more I act on what it tells me and honor the way it tells me I genuinely feel, the better I feel.
Sadly in this world so many people believe they have to hide their painful inner truth from others, it is something Benny K speaks of in his post that I read earlier.. The relief for me came almost immediately on entering AA back in 1993 and hearing others struggled as I did and harboured similar insecurities, it was there that I realised that people from all walks of life can struggle, even those who seem to ‘have it all’ on the outside.. These people too can struggle with feeling empty and hopeless as well as with deep feelings of unworthiness.
In my experience the more I have been able to open up to the truth of what I feel inside, no matter how dark and embrace it the more connected I have felt. Accepting those painful feelings has taken longer and seeing the false beliefs even longer. I see more and more lately how I struggled and how much I tried to fit myself into places I just did not fit… I thought there may be something wrong with me for feeling so on the ‘outside’ at times but lately I am a recognising that that experience was also a very necessary part of the journey ‘home’.. to coming to love, accept and understand the inner forces that drove me. I now see how much my mother and other shaming voices in my education tried to convince me there was something wrong with me that needed correcting, with Mum this involved aspects of my physical being and appearance…even the way I sat and talked at times…. today I realise how deeply these messages interpenetrated by being… I will not say all the forces in my education were negative though, in my year we were blessed to have a number of good teachers who encouraged and inspired us to follow a genuine path in life.
Today I know I don’t have to fit around or cowtow to people who do not see the real me, to people who judge me not knowing the truth. Over past years I have found a voice to say in an assertive way how it feels to be negated, that said some people just erase you, they are the ones who believe they have the authoritative take on life.. they are the ones who will look down on you for vulnerabilities they would never find the honesty, insight, openness or courage to embrace in themselves.. When faced with these people now I don’t have to cry as much, and I understand that not having experienced the depth of trauma, pain or loss I have, they could never really fully understand what it may mean to walk that path.
Today it feels good to no longer feel that yawning inner void or emptiness, although at times when I see and feel loved ones struggling there the void does feel very close to me as the pain of those past feelings can still resonate.
Today I know also that even the difficult parts of me can be embraced in love and transformed through love, rather than rejection. I agree with Henri Nouwen who knew a lot of inner self rejection that in the end this is really the major force that leads to depression and a deeper condition of soul loss. Today it feels so good to know where my source lies and where the power of healing lies…in having a caring and loving attitude not only to myself but to others too who as humans suffer all these similar wounds and feelings of emptiness but sadly so often feel the need to hide that. By having boundaries to keep what is not true or damaging from others from lodging so deeply inside me I feel better. I can also see how these things come from their own perspective of reality or perception that so often does not take into account inner realities that may be hidden from view for those who lack insight, sensitivity and empathy.
The reading from Tian Dayton follows :
Pretending that painful or negative feelings do not exist doesn’t keep relationships intimate. It can even create inner distance when I act as if the intimate relationship is not strong enough to hold pain, anger or hate. Powerful feelings can be frightening, but denying their presence keeps me from deeper layers of self. When my intimate relationships are able to hold the powerful, paradoxical feelings of love and hate, anger and forgiveness, something deep within me can relax and let go. If they are not able to do this, I need to withdraw from the relationship in order to be myself.
In this era of self understanding and conscious efforts at parenting, we learn we should come down to our children’s level. That is, we should not be as hateful to toward them as they are to us. Yet, if we seal ourselves off they are cheated and burdened by the illusion that our anger and hatred are personally inappropriate. Therapists are like parents. When the therapist comes down to their level, both grow from it when the generation gap is re-established. David V Keith
Many of us may have had parents and therapists who were not able to act as containers of such powerful feelings, and that then made it impossible for us to integrate what, from within us, was real from the past and in being carried over to the present had a message for us.. Learning to contain and hold our most painful feelings rather turn against ourselves for having them helps us to find the way to a inner reality, it also allows a forgiveness and understanding of the forces within us that make us most vulnerable and able to connect and show empathy to each other as human beings sharing a common experience.
Emerging From The Dark Night 