Keeping a safe distance : insights into my hidden fear of rejection.

Keeping a distance from what is painful to me is not always helpful.. I am realising lately there really isn’t always a way to keep myself or others ‘safe.’ I guess the greater learning here is that I do have the capacity to survive being ‘rejected’ for being real. I am aware of how I sometimes fail by being too intellectual, but at the same time sometimes an incisive intellect is needed to cut through illusion or crap. There is a realisation only slowly dawning on me recently of how I struggle in the schism between thought and feeling at times… and how my fear of not wanting to ‘hurt’ people can end up making me less authentic due to fear.

Just getting into my body lately reminds me how much the hurt I endured in my body make me recoil from awakened life into my mind but also of how I struggled to make sense of so much.. even all that seemed most non sensical. I had the chance for an embodied relationship with someone back at the beginning of 2019 but chose a remote person who needed help to get here to meet me and I have been locked in that relationships for nearly 3 years now.. At times it just makes me cry but then I think everything happens for a reason and due to the choice I have made and sometimes only being able to communicate by text is a form of self protection as I can withdraw at any time… which begs the question of how different remote digital relationships so often are as compared to embodied ones..

Lately as ‘wrong’ or unhelpful it seems to be to put the blame on anyone else or outside conditions I know the reality for me of the way my family was so often made it impossible for me to feel I could be close to them, be fully ‘taken into their hearts’ (this comment just came up from deep down inside as I was going through some events of the past week in therapy with Kat on Monday.) or taken into their minds as who I truly knew myself to be. And of course in a world people with humans of all different beings and types we are never going to be able to relate to everyone or be understood by everyone. At times for me lately, it has felt like a struggle to stay fully alive in the wilderness of disembodied relating and the ones I can be with in bodies are so often not appearing to be at all fully awake and alive in theirs. At this point, all I can say is.. thank God when I finally get home to my dog who has no clue of knowing how NOT TO BE HIMSELF!

Contemplating it there was always a kind of detached evaluation going on with my family, an aloof distance as well as the sense that the knife of disapproval could fall down at any time and cut me to shreds.. This has tended to make me hyper-vigilant in other relationships too.. I sense that deep down inside sometimes I am wondering just how long others will want me around before they see something in me too flawed, messy, weak, stupid or hard to cope with that they want to end things… and the sense is that this ‘ending’ will happen very suddenly and will be irrevocable. The incipent threat is always hovering there deep down under the surface, circling unspoken like a giant man eating shark.

It is actually a relief to be able to articulate this today These fear go along with my Saturn Moon placement.. interesting to note that I have a such a strong sense of being flawed in some way I see I have carried around deep down inside of me for many years, to the point i feel so joyous if I am actually wanted by someone at all, as if that was a kind of amazing thing because so unusual and so hoped for. In the past this has made me feel very ‘hungry’ and attach too easily before I allow myself to get the full measure of a person. I can then get entrapped and such impulsivity is often a symptom of being ‘instinct injured’

It is interesting to watch how often this fear comes up when we are out on a walk and Jasper off lead runs up to the closest people to us.. part of me feels embarrassed, firstly that he is being so friendly and brave, while other part of me fears he will be unwelcome.. On that note I remember my brother being a bit negative about Jasper jumping up all over him one day when he dropped by to visit me.

It touched a raw nerve today hearing in a program on art, artists and loneliness that Andy Warhol actually feared rejection and that such a fear actually made him actively seek that rejection out.. It apparently influenced the way he dressed and was in the world too. I thought just then of how my husband said in the final years of our marriage that he thought sometimes I rejected people by being critical in order to be able to keep up an emotional distance. During our marriage I found it hard to invite his family or friends around… Thinking about it that dovetails with how trauma can influence us to develop a very powerful outer critic as well as an inner one.

Getting more of a handle on my inner fears at the moment is liberating as is realising the search for outer validation is a large part of not being seen or mirrored in childhood and that the way to heal it has to come about through, over time, learning to self validate and not self reject.

It is interesting as on Monday in therapy when I told Kat about my sister and her reaction to the comment she had over her hair, Kat said “wow, she has very thin skin’, but I just said to Kat “but Kat can you imagine the intense vulnerability that underlies that?” Truth is I understand and feel compassion for my sister and I no longer keep up 6 week visits to the hairdresser and have let go of coloring my own hair, because as a teenager I was inculcated into this practice even getting a perm at the age of 16 that made me look horrible, now that I look back on old photos of myself taken at that age.

I do think when I first moved back to my home town 10 years ago at the same time as my sister did, I started getting more involved in clothing again and worrying about the appearance and cleanliness of my home. Lately I am letting myself feel more comfortable having things lying around out of order.. Today when the gardener arrived I said ‘the garden looks a bit wild’ but he just said “yes but is nice to see it all filled in with such a mass of daisies” its taken 10 years for me to get the plants that work in this soil and to make finds that suit my own love like small low growing ground cover grevillias with red flower that thrive so well even when the weather gets dry. I have have had ‘hits’ and ‘misses’ in the garden when it comes to plants and with gardeners who do and do not listen to what I say, want, like and need.

Lunch is over now.. feeling okay and better for having written a lot this morning…. I plan to go out this afternoon again and do what I love and want to do rather than what I feel I ‘should’ do ie. visit my sister… I realised yesterday its not life giving for me for us to spend lots of time together… and selfish as it may seem it is better in the long run to honor and value what I need and feel, often I get to feel a backlash of guilt and feel my Mum admonishing me from the ethers, but today I just cried and told both her and Dad in spirit its not up to me to fix what I didn’t play a part in damaging in the first place. Much as my sister has sometimes tried to tell me I have damaged her life, I do not think that is fair.. I have tried my best over the years to be loving and often ended up getting hurt.. I just don’t think its my higher powers wish for me to be hurt over and over and over again or try to cut myself into a shape that will make me fit in where I do not really feel all that comfortable being.