Sometimes I just know I am not seeing thing realistically, some days I still beat myself up. Sometimes my focus on body pain or other problems just reminds me of entrapment.. And I had to remind myself after writing an earlier post in the car after a morning where it took me 4 hours to get fed and bathed and out that I need to get out and move my hips and STAND UPRIGHT.. For some reason lately the fear of coming alive just seems to come subconsciously with the fear of dying and I know I did nearly die two times before but for those experiences to block life at times just feels too hard.
I was interested to read in John Bradshaw’s book Homecoming last night that therapist Eric Berne talks about the three ‘P’s that are so important to our capacity to live love, experience, try and grow but also to good therapy. They are
Potency
Permission
Protection.
If I think about these three things I see they were often absent from my earlier life.. The last one actually hurts to read it as I was left alone so much or subjected to danger that I got hurt in my body very badly.. If I look back it seems to me that the accident at 17 when I totally smashed up was just a more intensified version of these earlier injuries..having my arm pulled out of its socket by Mum, experiencing third degree burns to my foot on a caravaning holiday when she was cleaning with boiling water close to where I sat colouring,. Having one of Dad’s fishing hooks he left lying around embedded in the webbing between my big and second toe, the cut I experienced trying to break into home one day due to the ‘latch key’ not being in its usual place.. So I did not feel protected at all and some days I just feel so unsafe. Sharing all this today in therapy 3 days after writing it I just cried at all the pain of never being ‘held’ due to my parents re-enacted neglect. Kat my therapist said her body hurt as I read about all those injuries.
A sense of potency is often what seems also to have been denied or stolen from us due to trauma..The feeling that our actions and feelings and needs have some importance and are necessary or useful, being supported in the expression of them, that now, I see is still an area in which I can struggle.
Permission.. I remember reading when doing a lot of research on how to grieve that often people who go through a loss are not even given permission to express and feel all of their feelings around it.. This may also be the case of things we suffered or endured when young if we were not permitted to feel a sense of ‘out’rage we may turn it into inrage and that may also impact in later life, our capacity to feel joy, or that we have the right or permission to chose to do things that make us happy.
On this note I wanted to share from Bradshaws’ book those permissions which he sees as essential to recovery from toxic shame and neglect..
- Permission to feel. It’s okay to feel what you feel. Feelings are neither right or wrong. They just are. There is no one who can tell you what you should feel. It’s good and its necessary to talk about your feelings. That said as adults we need to guide our inner child into what is appropriate and with whom it is appropriate to share and act on feelings. Those invested in shaming or putting you down may not be the best people to express feelings of protest with. Its not wise to get angry with a policeman for stopping you for speeding.. According to Bradshaw our feelings are the psychic fuel that motivate us to get our needs met.. They signal when we are hurting or in danger. So they need to be listened to.
- Permission to want.. Its okay to want what you want. There’s nothing you should or should not want. If you’re in touch with your life energies, you will want to expand and grow. It’s okay and it’s necessary to get your needs met. Its good to ask for what you want. Some of us had parents who got angry when we expressed our wants, as a result for some of us they may become bound in shame.. This needs to change in recovery. Even if you cannot give yourself all of your wants, its still okay to know about and accept and listen to them.
- Permission to see and hear what you see and hear. Whatever you saw and heard was what you saw and heard.. If you were gaslit as a child this one is not going to be easy.. if you parents tried to deny what was going on or were out of touch with themselves they may also have resented you seeing and hearing some things.. This lies at the heart of what Gregory Bateson called the double bind theory of schizophrenia, where parents deny the child’s reality and experiences.
- Permission to have fun and play.. and to engage in sexual play.. Often fun and play are frowned upon in addictive or shame bound systems and places this may also be the case with healthy sexual expression and play.
- Permission and necessity of knowing and expressing the truth. Lying makes life harder and distorts reality. Recovery involves correcting distorted thinking and thoughts. Lying is central to addictive systems. People in dysfunctional families often also play false roles. Painful truths are often avoided or hidden or are bound to secrecy under threat. Perceptual distortions due to shame based thinking, magical thinking and absolutist thinking include : Polarized thinking seeing things in terms of black and white or in extreme ways. Wounded kids form false beliefs about themselves as a result of neglect, absence or abandonment due to the way children try to make sense of hurtful adult behavior. . Such false beliefs have to be unlearned. We need to learn that both good and bad can exist inside the same person. Catastrophizing often as kids due to the way our parents react we come to absorb ‘danger’ and ‘anxiety’ messages. these need to be corrected as we take the risk to venture out.. Universalizing.. the tendency of a wounded inner child is to reach sweeping generalizations about others or the world due to a single or a few incidents. This involves feeling defeated after just a few failures and then talking yourself down. Instead of using the terms : all, never, no-one, ever, always try using the words : often, maybe and sometimes. Words anchor our experience.. We literally hypnotize ourselves with our words. Our wounded inner child scares us with his or her words. But words used honestly and lovingly set us free. Mind reading
- It is important to know your limits and to delay gratification some of the time, doing so will reduce life’s pain. Acceptance of limits allows us to be both realistic and grounded, it will counter balance a dysfunctional need to overextend. Deprived and neglected children have the hardest time delaying gratification. Our belief in scarcity makes us overextend out of an inner fear we will miss out. This overextension may be damaging for us. This does not mean we deny ourselves our wants and needs, in order to feel happy we need to do so, but within limits..
- Permission to develop a balanced sense of responsibility. Accepting consequences for what you do and refusing to accept the consequences of what another person does.. Adult children or wounded inner kids thrive on a sense of over responsibility for the burdens of others. We may also react rather than respond in healthy ways to our own responsibilities, or we may struggle accepting consequences. We can only respond if we are in touch with our true needs, wants and feelings. Most of all we need to take responsibility for our own vulnerability. Those of us with inner child damage may try to hide this out of fear or we may put up with those who project their own vulnerabilities onto us and then try to get us to take care of those. Neither way is healthy.. Only if we feel in charge of our vulnerability are we truly capable of balanced give and take and honest intimacy in close personal relationships.
- Permission to make mistakes.. Learning that mistakes are our teachers, helping us to learn.
- The need to respect other people’s feelings, needs and wants.. Respecting them. Violating others leads to guilt and the need to make repair.
- Permission to have problems.. Maturity of insight to see that life is all about problems and challenges and the the power rests in us to resolve them. Acceptance of the necessity of and for conflict and willingness to resolve and work through it.
Emerging From The Dark Night 