With emotional neglect and lack of attunement in childhood we come to feel our needs or feelings do not matter much, we may not be helped to know what they are or be encouraged to find ways to meet them. We may have parents who turn away from us in all kinds of ways, they may be ill, self preoccupied, or all of their energy may just be tied up in surviving and so in some ways the more sensitive among us may have fallen into the darkness and identified with what they carried hidden in the shadow.
They may have had a problematic relationship with their own parents and be carrying much that is epigenetic or multi generational in nature.. If they cannot relate to and express their own emotions well we will struggle to know how to express our own and may come to feel shame around them.. Since our emotions express depths of who we are when they are shamed we come to feel shameful. Many of us come to identify with what therapist Elaine Aron calls the wounded helpless self.. We fall into this place when we seek to bond and attach and connect and cannot, it is one of the major issues Mark Wolynn shares about in his work on multi-generational trauma and its healing.. Mark makes a big point about expansion and contraction of energy as well. Love, connecting, expanding, attuning and allowing help us to expand, being unloved, left alone, shut down, forced into isolation (at a young age when we could not contain or make sense of the feelings) leads us into to contraction.. I am being told by my guides and angels today that contraction has to do with Saturn (family karmic patterns).
We may also meet an inverted mirror, not be reflected or related to AS WE ARE, or have parts of us blocked or shamed and devalued, we may then turn against these parts as well as what therapist David Richo calls our lively life energy, then it may feel dangerous to need what we do and LIVE ARE WE REALLY ARE we may begin to attack our own self and needs from within coming to identify as bad.. I thought of this suppression of the lively self yesterday writing my post on Aron’s patient Karen who learned to become a ‘good girl’ when her Mum got sick but then found a friend who was more alive and together engaged in what society may label ‘bad’ ácts that only make sense when we know both kids were reaching for life.
This is where the inner critic or persecutor can step in and derail us, it if it doesn’t only turn against us to devalue us, it may make us turn against others and become hostile to what Aron calls ‘linking’ or connecting.. It may lead us to learn instead to ‘rank’ ourselves as higher or lower than others feared or misunderstood due to their own hidden shadow issues around emotions and sense of self. We may then using an outer critic reject those who carry qualities we had to bury into our shadow but we are drawn to them as we are in some way trying to make a relationship with them in order to grow, complete or become more whole.
As a child we cannot know that the way our parents are relating to us may have more to do with them and their past. In recovery it may help us a lot to find out how they were treated as children and make sense of the strategies they used to cope. Mark Wolynn spent a lot of his life on a spiritual search (like me) that led him to an ashram and then there he was told to go home and connect with his mother, from this simple act Mark then learned all that he did to help countless others carrying multi-generational trauma.
Depending on and bonding as a young one ensures our very survival, that is why we will turn against ourselves to gain a parents love, the more unavailable they are, the more we may struggle to make a connection. Or alternatively we may snub our noses and erect defences and then become avoidant ourselves. In fact after going on my own tangent here I am going to share below the four strategies that Mark says we adopt when the love and bonding and connecting issue becomes problematic.
- We reject, judge or blame a parent. The parent may have been difficult to cope with growing up due to issues we, as a child, could not know about. We may take that as a rejection of us and then reject them toi, in turn creating a broken connection.. Mark claims that until this is healed it will continue to affect us.. Although it may come with great pain to make the attempt to connect the gifts are there, how you were treated had nothing to do with you, but until you can understand why it may continue to plague you “If your reject your mother, it is likely that a traumatic event stands between you and her… a lost child..one given up for adoption, loss of a first love, death of her father or a brother or other sibling when she was young. Shock waves of this will affect you but it would tie up your mother’s focus and attention, no matter how great her love for you” (p 68).
- We merge with a parent. A sensitive child may sense the pain in a parent and make attempts to heal it in some way or even adopt similar ways of coping like anger or sadness in that way taking on emotions not belonging to them. They may side with one parent if there was conflict in the marriage, or fear showing love to one at the risk of angering another. We may also try to become a satellite in order to belong, find love or get needs met. “Many of us unconsciously take on our parent’s pain. As a small child, we develop our sense of self gradually. Back then, we had not learned how to be separate from our parents and be connected to them at the same time. In this innocent place, perhaps we imagined that we could alleviate their unhappiness by fixing or sharing it. If we too carried it, they would not have to carry it alone. But this is fantasized thinking, and it only lead to more unhappiness. Shared patterns of unhappiness are all around us. Sad mother.. sad daughter.. disrespected father, disrespected son… the relationship difficulties of the parents mirrored by the children. The combinations are endless.” (p. 64)
- We experience a break in the early bond with our mother. This could be due to all kinds of reasons and our mother could have experienced this with her mother or her mother with her grandmother which makes it hard to give you the necessary love.. This broken bond may play out and be carried down along the ancestral line and in time it leads to anxiety when we attempt to make partner or friendship bonds in later life. According to Wolynn due to separations often taking place at a time before the conscious brain is fully developed the pain or feelings remain embedded inside of us but not accessible by memory. “The memories are often stored as fragments of physical sensations, images and emotions, rather than as clear memories that can be pieced into a story. Without the story, the emotions and sensations can be difficult to understand.” (p. 73)
- We identified with a member of our family system other that our parents.. in this case we may bond well with a parent but carry traumas that are not ours at all. Wolynn tells of an interesting case in his book It Didn’t Start With You in which a young man Jesse at the exact age of 19 began to experience symptoms of anxiety, being frozen and sleeplessness.. When the family history was explored it turns out the mother lost a brother who died while working on a telegraph line in a very cold part of Canada.. The uncle fell down into the snow and died at the age of 19. At the exact same age Jesse began to experience all of the uncles pain until Mark worked with him to visualize connecting with the dead uncle to return it.. Alternatively we may seek to bond with a sibling or aunt or uncle or grandparent if another parent is unavailable. Much of Mark’s healing work surrounds those children who carry the memories of earlier traumas such as death by gassing concentrations camps, traumas never spoken of at all due to the pain but traumas communicated to a surviving descendant who has difficulty knowing about their origins.
It is easy to see how complex the issue is of us growing to mature to a point where not influenced by many of these issues
The four themes are relational and according to Wolynn will affect our ability to flourish and come fully alive. Understanding a theme at play may help us to question or investigate the past to find out what happened. And it is important work to understand why and how us having needs became a problem, how and why we began to indentify with a sense of not having value or of having carried a largely unconscious trauma that actually has major roots leading a long way back in our own particular ancestral history.
Emerging From The Dark Night 