Struggling with minimum support and some thoughts on self pity and self compassion.

Not having the support of family really makes life harder.. I am feeling it lately, I feel very ripped off by one part of my family.. its hard to let the feelings go, its self centredness on their part really, nothing I can do.. I do not want any more contact with people who don’t really care, its better to face it..

I was trying to think in the car on the way home from our time at the park this morning what the difference between self compassion and self pity is. I think we trauma survivors often lack self compassion because we blame ourselves for the things we did to survive neglect.. We try harder to turn things around make nice with abusers or dismissive people not knowing the person we most need to make amends to is ourselves. We can keep giving love to empty vessels.

I look back now to all the support I tried to give my sister only to see how my emotional reality was disregarded and she was down right dismissive of all I went through in my life.. She said to me back in 2006 after the head injury.. “You’ve had a shit of a life, I pity you.” It was so lacking in care that comment.. but I set myself up by going up to visit her then when it was the worst thing to do.. I should have been putting the focus on building my own life.. I was still sticking around the ruins of our damaged family hoping for crumbs..

There was also the trip to Sydney when she and Mum and her friend treated me like dirt when all of my grief about my Sydney past came up.. They told me I was spoiling things when the grief just poured out of me on the final afternoon of a three day trip and went out to dinner and left me crying in the hotel room. I should have packed my bags then, boarded a bus and got home but I waited around only to have them walk two metres ahead of me the next day following breakfast treating me as if I had been so bad. Not at any stage did anyone try to give me a hug or comfort me…Truly agonising. so so awful. But I PUT UP WITH IT KNOWING NOTHING BETTER.

I can cry over it now but past is past and self pity would be to keep giving the pain more power instead of investing in my own life.. Self compassion helps me to truly see where I got scarred by a lack of love and care, it helps to show me where I still treat myself badly. People who only care about the surface, having good things materially, will basically walk over anyone else to get them are scum in my book.. But maybe that is what it means to be healthily self assertive and perhaps I need more of it.. I only know things need to turn around.. I wasted time with that part of the family where I felt like a duck out of water.. I am even a bit shitty with my therapist over this as she was always encouraging me to keep up connection with them…. anyway in the end I got what I settled for.. I should have broken away to my own life and after the head injury found the strength to stay away..

When I caved in 2005 and decided to come home I had the worst stomach ache on the flight home.. It was a Christmas Eve flight and I arrived home to no one at all, both my mother and sister were away.. Another part of me thinks it was necessary to come back.. that I had to go through even more tough stuff with them to truly understand the deeper roots of this multi-generational addiction/trauma/separation/neglect trajectory.. In the end as the last child I had to bear it all and make sense of it.. I am not sure if many know what a Herculean task this has been and that I ever beat myself up now seems like a kind of denial of all that hurt me or some kind of insanity to me, but maybe the wounded child’s desire to attach and be loved in a narcissistic family is only ever doomed to come to grief.

On one level I am strong and brave to have survived as I did. I told Scott today I will not stop fighting, I will not stop expressing the pain of what happened to me..I will not stop reaching for self compassion.. and I will not believe the lie that having that compassion for myself is a kind self pity when it is not… not when i take action to make sure the emotional neglect of myself stops here.