Who knows why things happen as they do.. Who knows how things will unfold when we take action. Maybe it is better to focus on the process rather than the result, the journey rather than the destination.
The truth is we may find the way to love through experiencing the depths of all that is most loveless in this world. We may find courage by facing the depth of our fear, or at least, we may find compassion for the part of us that could not, at that time, face up. Or for the part that felt the compulsion to act due to unbearable anxiety.
The more I experience of life, the more I see how illogical it can be.. And that it is far better to approach everything with an attitude of playfulness. This is something that occurred to me after reading that post on perfectionism. It made me see how self centered fear so often operates to make our life so tough, and how the defended ego makes everything into a huge deal.
In fact this morning reading a book on gaslighting that I ordered a few weeks ago it was saying the more we seek to change someone’s opinion of us (and the more we buy into it), the more hot water we land in. Gaslighters or bullies operate by trying to undermine our sense of self value or they may imply we need them for something. Deep down we may even have a sense we are okay on our own.. And if we believed in ourselves we could be playful about them negating us or even them implying we are lucky to have them in their lives.. Their opinion would not count as much and we could possibly just laugh it off.. Also in not longing to merge we may find it easier to hold our own safe space.
I thought while reading this of how deathly hard it often was for me when others told me who I was while I knew that not to be the case. I got heavy doses of gaslighting all throughout my childhood. The reality was I was a bit too lively for a far older mother and father, they did not have the energy or time for me.. In the face of all this I absorbed the message there was something wrong with me, that I was too much of this or that.. My older sister never did this to me, but when she left home I got heavy doses of it from my other sister.. In fact my therapist Kat was saying the other day that it seems as though my second oldest sister saw me as a kind of interloper, someone who was a bit of a damned inconvenience, perhaps this underlay the reason she tried to cut me down so often and so often lacked empathy for me. And this all contributed to the head injury I ended up sustaining after this sister asked my mother to choose between her and I and Mum categorically chose my older sister because she was not ‘sad all the time’.. yes.. those are the direct words my mother used.
I probably would have been happier had I never sought to come back and bond with them, but then that is how being not loved for yourself can affect some of us.. We just keep trying harder and harder to be approved of and accepted in all of the wrong places by all of the wrong people. and yet we have one weapon against all of this should we chose the path back to self acceptance and self love.. It is to believe in ourselves, know WHO WE TRULY ARE and live as this even when others tell us this is a sign of what is not right with us..
We cannot expect that life and other people who do not deeply know us and all we have endured will get us. We cannot expect for them to be logical when it comes to us.. The fact is that a lot of what others tell us about ourselves may not even be true and their capacity to know the truth of us is, in fact, limited by their own conditioning.. And we should also trust ourselves enough to trust what Carl Jung calls our ‘madness’ for our madness may actually contain all that is best of us in a society so often geared to turning us inside out, or into something more ‘logical’, ‘ordered’, ‘understandable’ or ‘palatable.’
Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life…If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature…Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim.
Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.
Emerging From The Dark Night 