Allowing myself what I need

I am slowly getting more in touch with my heart’s desires lately, and not letting the critic stop me having what I need. I also am grieving for my emotionally enmeshed self (focal Neptune in Scorpio), sensing how hard it was and feeling too the deep sadness in my Mum following the loss of my Dad. She sent me away a month after he died, not wanting to hold me back, she encouraged me to go travelling and it was very lonely at times, but what an epic adventure, I feel blessed on another level I got to live and work in London in the mid 80s. Much as I hated secretarial having been forced to do it by my Dad in meant good money temping in London in 1985 and 6. In the final stretch of 1986 and early 1987 I worked in a pub, The White Horse in EC2 with my third boyfriend and love Simon.

We hated the pub after a while and went to Norwich but couldn’t find decent work there. After a short while we went to stay with a good friend of Simon’s who was working for a family in a small fishing village in Norfolk minding their two young kids. This was fun (despite the sadness I carried over loss that made connecting deeply with Simon problematic) and we then moved back to London but my behaviour when drinking was causing distress, Simon did not understand, I wasn’t connected to myself or my pain and emotions at all due to my carried neglect and alexithymia and we kind of broke up (while still sleeping together), but decided to go travelling in Scandinavia with another couple from where I got sent back to London by boat and rail because he met someone else. I got drunk then and was a complete mess emotionally and decided to go home.

When home I found Mum was remarrying, by Gadparents offered me support to move to Sydney and I did so and those years 1988 to 1992 saw my decent into addiction.

Last time I went back to Sydney in around 2013 with Mum and my sister I cried and cried, I no longer had the numbing of substances and they got angry with me and criticised me for ‘spoiling their good time clothes shopping and quaffing down champagne’, God that visit hurt and I developed breast cancer a few years later.

Looking back now I see how difficult beginning to feel seemed to be for everyone else and this sadness is not just ancestral, as Kat said yesterday in therapy I did not get to have any kind of adolescence due to my accident trauma, it made relationships with men so difficult from then on in, and my father’s treatment of me in ignoring and devaluing what i needed made me fear men.. I still feel anger towards my brother too, for his complete lack of attunement to me and the way continues to block and infantalize me..

I am re-reading parts of an excellent book I came across in around 2006 by Robert Karan a therapist on denied anger, protest, resentment and forgiveness. He claims that the right to be angry when denied a child derails us, and makes having healthy boundaries later in life very difficult. We can then only feel a profound and deeply lingering resentment and fury at our lack of potency that then comes out in judgements but also in an inability to voice how WE TRULY FEEL ABOUT BEING DENIED WHAT WE NEED. When we cannot own this we turn against our own needs and may get attracted to and then pissed off by those who are very driven in promoting or going after what they need. If we do not feel who we are has value then we will not fight our own corner, at the same time, like in the relationship with my brother and some men I have to realize there are those who will devalue me and not see me at all due to their own solipsism.

I came across this very helpful video on toxic people and family members yesterday associated to this that I wanted to share.

Today I can see that not being able to feel safe in my expression of anger and having a separate self I came to fear that as bad, in fact it was labelled as ‘bad’ by those who never had a clue of the emotional wounding I was carrying, like my ex boyfriend Simon. My ex husband also did not want me around when I began to explore my sad feelings but I do feel compassion for him now, after all I could not live my happy side because I had not allowed myself yet to fully know, love and accept myself. So I let him and then the next partner devalue me too.

Both eventually had to leave me, finding me ‘not good enough’. For a very long time I sadly internalized that, and lately I have attracted a couple of men who only seem to want to use something of mine to help themselves, sensing in me a kind if lacking in strong sense of self worth person who may easily be shamed or over ridden. I did a good job of standing up to that man last week who did this and I have tried to do it with Scott.

Gosh its a long journey to loving ourselves, to knowing how we feel and giving ourselves permission to live and breathe as our true selves.. We must never negate the Self which can be devalued in some mystical traditions, sure enough we do feel an expansion in surrendering this sense of separation when we find those mystical magical moments of deep connection in nature.. I feel the love of the Cosmos sometimes streaming through too.. I know I am loved as I am and that the angels weep when I let others overpower me.. As a woman I have to be strong in knowing who I am has value and that my sensitivity is a good thing, not something to be devalued, hidden, feel shame about or feared.. My sensitivity is the very thing that makes me most in tune and I am just grateful that lately I am learning to honor it. and seek those places of healing refuge in which I can feel all of the love that worldly humans I surrounded myself with, so often used to deny me.