I feel better today for having stepped up yesterday to walk and go visit my sister.. I engaged in the world even as I felt so sad and anxious and today I could unpack recent hurts in therapy with Kat.. While there i thought of how vulnerable emotional neglect makes us.. It sets up a soul starvation, a hunger for love, it can drop us into a seemingly unfathomable void and that is where addictions and narcissistic relationships can happen.
I know that territory really well by now.. Alone at the end of my marriage I was vulnerable and I let someone in and kept denying or glossing over the red flags.. I let him invalidate, shame and blame me because in many ways as I still blamed myself for past trauma as well as so many things going badly I did as reactions to the difficulties in my family. I was saying to Kat today that there came a time when I felt so alone and in the cold in response to the way he treated me that I had the insight that if I was going to get well I had to learn how to light my own fire, and that was a metaphorical thing but true as well as living with him in a small cottage I learned how to light fires as that was our only source of heating in winter.
I thought today of the tale of the Little Match Girl. I don’t know if you know of the fairy tale but it is a profound metaphor for what happens to us when we have been emotionally invalidated, undervalued or neglected. I had a very powerful vision of the Little Match Girl in therapy today while also thinking of the song A Candle In the Wind as I remembered how vulnerable I was in relationships and also very anxious to please while carrying a profound underbelly of rage (possibly multi-generational) over all I had been powerless over in my traumatic family and life.
Growing my own sense of inner nutrition is very important for me now, as it is for all of us who have been traumatised or neglected. It is the soul in me that is hungry for that which feeds me on a positive level now (not only, but including physical food). And I am realising that inner nutrition comes from the choices I make and also from the boundaries I feel more capable of setting in my life now.
I am remembering too while I write this of how many times I actually physically collapsed in that last difficult relationship. In fact on the first night Phil and I slept together I felt my energy spin, it was a feeling of being almost drunk and then I actually fell and hit my head on the bedside table. At this time I had only one year out of traumatic head injury of 2005 and, of course, this was still affecting me. I remember Phil saying to me he would never let me drop again and keep me safe, but the continual boundary skirmishes we had made me fall another two times when pressure was being put on me for something or he was savaging me with so much criticism.
Getting close to others is challenging for many of us with difficult attachment histories, our unresolved hunger if not understood or addressed may lead us to ‘act out’, when we place unfair pressure on a partner they feel it and will rebel. It’s just part of what a relationship means, in a healthy relationship you can inter-depend, but you are not co-dependent.. If the other person takes distance you can still support yourself, you do not need to ‘cling’ but clinging may ark up when a partner moves away if we have a past history of being dropped as children. You also don’t have to push a person away if they need support as long as they are taking care of their own inner ‘stuff’, emotions, past trauma, unresolved wounds and hurts from abuse, invalidation or neglect. Being able to express what is going on for us at such times may help to bring a partner closer though, if they say they are feeling vulnerable instead of lashing out and blaming us we will feel more drawn to be close to them and able to show compassion, at least if we are not in denial of our own need to inter-depend due to past woundings of being dropped, neglected, pushed away or hurt too.
Anyway I am feeling better today after such a dark weekend. I had the courage to front up and ask family for time to be connected and they gave it instead of whinging behind their backs about their emotional distance which came from the fact as a young family they are so very busy. I felt happier seeing my sister and showing compassion for why she is so reluctant to leave the psyche care facility after 5 months at a vulnerable time of year. When we talk of the past she has even fewer memories accessible or, if they are there, she does not address them. I know this time of year affects all of us. When my sister is alone at home in her unit its harder for her to connect and I also thought yesterday that when she doesn’t reach out and is in hospital, she learns who really cares for her by who gets in touch and visits. I am not the hero in the family for getting sober and doing therapy but at times it feel like an heroic task for me to reach out. As Kat said today I was so often rejected or sidelined in the family and my neglect pain unnoticed that getting accepted and asked to come to a family member’s house means a lot to me. Kat also said she feels that the stronger I become the more I will be able to open myself up because my fears of past rejection will not always come to pass.
I am also learning that getting into my body and around others helps me just as much as I need my times of quiet soul communion where I can hear in the silence the growing voice of my intuitive inner self as well as the breath of God.. In this space too, I attune with the ancestors.. At times I feel the vibrational imprints or ‘charge’ of things they endured, such as the three month migrational sea crossing.. This morning after I woke with spins and coils and snaps and locks going on in my body in more of a slow dance than yesterday I tottered around the room on what Kat calls my ‘sea legs’, it felt as though I was back on that boat with them… even though it is not yet the time of year they left, but they would have been getting ready..
What a massive undertaking to pack up you family and tiny kids to move half a world away from everything you knew and held dear. I have undergone so much dramatic isolation then maybe there is a reason and it lies further back.
Today in therapy after sharing with Kat how sad I felt leaving the family behind on Saturday afternoon I thought of how Mum told me she would sit on the back stair of the home she lived in with Nana watching the neighboring children play while crying and longing for siblings. We discussed too, how lonely my two other siblings are in many ways, just like me. So its no stigma to at time feel such pain, so despairing and alone.. So so many people endure these feelings and I thank those who reached out to me over the past 24 hours to say so. I want you to know I hear your pain too and am so grateful you felt you could open up.. That makes my heart sing.. It brings a spark of light to the darkness.
The truth is that we are not all alone with what we undergo as part of a very human journey and my own feelings of soul loneliness come and go.. When I am present for my deeper soul and hidden emotions and am able to give them a ‘home’ then some of the separation ends. But the sweetest time is when others reach out too, and we connect. For are we not all, just aching to know we are loved and belong? Belonging to ourselves is vital.
Perhaps by sharing about it we can all light our little candles in the darkness as we seek also the ways to bring our soul home out of the silence, and darkness to a place of softness where we can feel nurtured, understood, recognised, seen, appreciated, valued and loved.
Emerging From The Dark Night 