Making sense of my feelings and reactions

Making sense of my feelings and reactions is taking a lot of time.. I had a good therapy session with Kat today, a lot was shared about my insecure attachment, why I have had trouble trusting my nephew has positive intentions and how some of the urge to save my sister comes out of young magical thinking.

I do understand a lot of what my sister is going through, to lose access to your true self and be medicated or shocked is not helpful to my mind, if we cannot make sense of what happened to us in terms of identity and self value what use is medication alone? The following quote on narcissism and identity made a lot of sense to me when I found it written in one of my old journals today (sorry I do not know the source to cite it!)

When we know what we want, and see that our desires authentically reflect who and what we are, our self esteem improves, and we find ourselves enjoying truly human interactions.

When we are not centered in our selves we lose a sense of being and security and a heavy darkness descends.

I do not deny medication will help in tandem with other approaches : some of us may need it.. For my own case I had a big fear of medication seeing how badly it affected both my sister who died and this living sister.

I am grateful my nephew was able to be angry with me on Saturday and to express his frustration over what is happening to his Mum.. As Kat said to me today it is very hard to have a parent who is depressed and incapable of reaching out as an adult to give love and to be put in the role of parent when he does not really know all that he can do to help. This is something I did not see clearly before.. I also have not been able to be the best aunt due to my own combination of insecure/avoidant attachment in the past.. for example when Ryan married I did not go to the wedding as Jonathan and I had separated the year before and it was too confronting for me at that stage, I was full of grief and also scared and depressed..

I will continue to pray and to hold out hope we can both come together in a new and more supportive and loving way, I get scared trying to connect with he and his family due to past rejections and harsh treatment at the hands of my Dad, brother and past male partners but usually his family welcome me in to their home and try their best.. even if most of the time I have had to initiate contact.

Being swept up and inundated by emotions is more likely to happen for the Highly Sensitive among us due to a serious lack of attunement and positive mirroring experiences making it possible for us to make sense of all we see, intuit and feel.. it has been encouraging to read past posts from the Highly Sensitive refuge that speak of how when we as HSPs attune more deeply, we may have trouble sharing those insights and perceptions.. That we also tend to feel thing more deeply. Last week on another blog someone with Autism was saying there is research that shows autistic people tend to remember negative experiences more powerfully than positive ones.. that would dovetail with high sensitivity.

Thank God we now live in a society where more is becoming known and understood about how we are wired, even if multigenerational trauma expert Mark Wolynn really says that subject of ‘wiring’ is down to what we carry epigenetically in terms of past trauma that has rewired the nervous system for a higher predisposition to anxiety, depression or hyperactivity..

I will continue to blog, do my inner work and research reading all that i can… I will continue to investigate the roots of any of my own paranoia (while continuing to connect deeply to the anxious part from the past that got hurt to find why I may feel confused or unclear about my feelings and fears), for as Kat said to me today we all have a version of it and we can and do often project negative intentions when the degree of past hurt we have suffered at the hands of our fellow humans has been significant.