Craving attention from those who cannot give it : today’s reflections

Quality time spent with those we love and connecting from our heart may be a strong love language for many of us, but we may have grown up in homes where it was not happening. Today my guidance was led to a reading on this, it was about a woman from an alcoholic home with emotionally unavailable parents who went on craving their attention until her time in Al Anon revealed to go on craving the impossible was doomed to fail and became a character defect when it motivated her behavior with them. In time she learned to give them attention and seek her own meaning and connection elsewhere.

Lately I find being my own best friend is making life easier.. I am even able to reach out to members of my family now who I know wont meet me on that level but my recent chats with someone made me realize its a big world out there full of potential people to connect to and that when I get out and live I can and do find those people..

Its sad to me to see how confined and restricted my life became from 2001 onwards, it was a very dark time, being sober and in therapy but with none of my emotions processed or unpacked and such a huge charge of energy around my home town.. It took me until 2011 to come back and about nine years in the wilderness to begin to even process so much. Therapy has been essential for this to remove the self blame over considering myself a failure when in fact I had gone through so much that I had not been able to explore or unpack.

A video I posted recently from The School of Life spoke about what Hindus call a Sunyassin period in life when one goes to a beach or mountain to be alone and get in touch with the soul and nature, hearing that made sense to me of when I broke my mooring with the world and my marriage ended and I found myself living alone in what felt like a huge deep void at the coast house my Dad built about 7 years before he died. But how appropriate that I ended up there and how powerful were some of the dreams I had at the time.. Looking back I see them as soul dreams that spoke of the work I was about to embark upon with the family unconscious and also showing it would remove me from the family in a daily present day way .

Lately I can even be a little less upset and more rational about the way my Mum and sister treated me in the few months and years after Jonathan left me, my sister was trying to pull me out of whatever I was diving into that time and actually ended up saying some nasty things that hurt but looking back I can take the sting out of those now, after all they came from her own world view and her level of trauma was not like mine. There was just so so much I had to process both personal and collective.

Another reading I read today in my reader Hope For Today spoke of how a sign of maturity is an ability to be open to the opinions of others. When we lack a strong and healthy sense of self holding onto our opinions or points of view can become a defensive thing, we fear being challenged, but the truth is everyone has different life experiences and levels of trauma as well as differing attachment styles and reading another book on emotions earlier also made me realize that not all people intellectualize as much as I do and may, in fact, be more deeply in touch with their emotions in a more intelligent way.. For me the world of emotions has at times felt so super intense, confusing, over whelming and chaotic. And at times as a highly sensitive and emotionally expressive person as well as someone with very porous ego boundaries (a past therapist called this ‘living very close to the border of the collective unconscious) it can be overwhelming both for myself and for others too when that intensity erupts.. I guess because in attachment trauma the fund of emotions we have had to suppress, when they start to emerge, may be huge and feel very very scary and overwhelming and if they are not just ours that makes them even more confusing to understand as well, but epigentic research bears out the truth we do carry deep inside our cells unresolved emotions or carried grief, depression and anxiety from our forebearers.

This a point trauma therapist Tian Dayton makes about the intensity and overwhelming power of emotions left unintegrated from childhood, many of our parents also carried these and may not have related to them at all but as a child we may have picked up on them.

With my living sister now I see she found it hard to feel her feelings after Mum died and even before so she sought the medication pathway then shock treatment. She was also the one bearing a lot of the pressure in a family where two other sister’s nearly died and she also lost Dad at 30 years of age in the thick of her own child rearing years.. The grief has surely impacted her sons too. .. I do not believe she has ever been able to process or unpack any of this as she often tells me I am lucky to be able to cry now.. she claims the meds she is on just numb her to say nothing of the shock treatment.. My sister was put into hospital again on the day we attended my older sister’s funeral on 24th April 2014.. lots of 2s and 4s in that date which speak to me of relationship.

I texted my sis last night as the singing competition show The Voice is on tele at the moment in Australia and when I would call her all the time a year or so ago or visit her after Mum died she would often speak about seeing it, I know she loves music and has a soft spot for Keith Urban who appears as one of the judges.. Last night was moving as a woman who lost her Dad only recently sung his favorite song by Florence and the Machine on the show and towards the end of singing it she broke down and the judges asked her what the song meant to her and she shared that and cried, Keith left his seat at that point saying how sorry he was and went over to give her a big warm hug. The other judges were all visibly moved and Jasper also seemed to be watching this part of the show intently drawing very close to me in the moments before it aired almost as if he sensed something..

I cried too. My Dad was more into classical music and Shirley Bassey which he used to play on his 8 track cassettes in his car before he died of cancer in January 1985. than modern music, but I can still see him dancing around a little drunk to The Blue Danube which was one of his favorites.

Watching this just highlighted again how unalone I am in the experience of losing my Dad in my early 20s.. Many lose parents well before then, grief is all different and affects everyone in different ways, for me grief was complicated and buried under so much of the ways I reacted. Coming across some photos earlier of my time with my husband Jonathan in the UK in 1998 – 2001 when my reversion and ‘breakdown/breakthrough’ began made me a bit sad last night. I looked so young and fresh in the photos but I saw the deepening start to happen to. And of course when the grief hit no one, least of all me knew how to manage it but to retreat and that must have been painful for them too.

I am no longer that young woman, I have grown and I could even bear with more feelings of sadness or self blame that arose this morning.. The truth is like everyone I am a work in progress and I also know as long as I live I am learning..

I do not have to worry so much anymore about looking for connection from those who cannot give it, the pain over doing it and coming up short has made me grow in awareness and while there are many who will not understand us or even want to connect to us, there are also those who do, will and can, those who like Keith Urban are not afraid of their feelings or too proud or emotionally disconnected to embrace another human being in theirs.

So for me at least, a little more lately, the world has not felt such a scary and unsafe place as it used to feel.