A follower shared this quote from Cheryl Richardson with me last night.
People start to heal the moment they feel heard.
How absolutely true.. We need to be heard and also understood, at depth!
It was a case of synchronicity as I was listening to another talk by Thich Nhat Hanh on The Art of Mindful Living in which he speaks of a relationship breaking down due to the parties inability to truly hear and deeply listen to how the other person feels and acknowledge their suffering and in so doing work though being fully present and open to that information, to nurture seeds of love within them.
This idea of nurturing certain seeds really struck me with such clarity reading about it on Monday before therapy with Kat in Thich’s book Fear. In this book he advises us to be aware in our heart of when fear starts to rise up inside of us and instead of pushing that fear away meeting and acknowledging it and then allowing the small seed to drop back down..Thich mentions that those seeds of fear will rise and fall again but the point he makes is that it is the way we relate to them or water them with our thoughts and actions and reactions that can ultimately chain us or release us from the prison not only of fear but of other problematic to handle emotions like anger and sadness, frustration and disappointment. The rising seeds may have a lot of information for us too, about our past long buried traumas.
I thought about the quote too in terms of my own life and of a follower with terrible neglect who is so often not got at all.. He lives a very isolated life due to his damage in which he undergoes ongoing flashbacks and terrible body symptoms. It is a positive thing that in the absence of good therapy he tries to give these a voice in his writings and when he asks for my opinion I always just try to validate his pain, after all, thinking about it this morning, his mother (who was his primary abuser) did not show him love, she was cruel, she immobilized him to a chair, she threw things at him, she locked him away and then later when he tried to tell of it he was mocked and shamed and in the facility he was sent to. Naturally with that level of trauma and grief over it all he started throwing chairs around the room only to be put in a padded cell, all because no one could really honestly meet him in the place of his suffering. A while back someone who hooked onto his blog tried to accuse him of many things due to the fact she was obviously frightened by some of the things he was writing, but to be honest this is a person I know who loves animals and is the kindest soul inside of all of that damage.. It really even hurt me to see him being so misunderstood by that person.
My earliest therapist Brian Hunt often told me about having to meet seriously emotionally damaged and abandoned clients in that violent space, he told me of getting down to their level and really entering their reality. You see any kind of ‘madness’ or violence they were trying to express was only ever telling the untold story of their trauma, abuse, wounding and damage as well as the rage they had to contain that was dumped into them from that toxic parent.
Yesterday I picked up a book I got a while back but did not really read much before, about surviving a borderline parent.. This is a parent who is very angry and does not know how to manage their huge feelings but by wantonly acting them out (often in rage), but often will not allow their child to express any anger, sending them to their room or shaming and isolating or even mocking them or humiliating them.
And in order to mature into healthy adults with strong boundaries of self care we must know what makes us angry so that we can advocate for ourselves and takes steps to get our valid needs met, not deny them or gaslight ourselves when having them, as our parents may have done.
For those of us coming out of this kind of childhood our suffering or pain body is very very enormous and our difficulty with handling our complex emotions even more so.
There are recommendations in that book for dealing with our anger in the now because the truth is having that much rage dumped into you by a parent and then having nowhere to go to express or externalise it means the only solution you often have it to turn it against yourself and your own body in either depression, through experiencing suicidal feelings or becoming intensely self rejecting (just like the parent.).
In the case of my friend his is in constant agony and has trouble getting upright, a lot like me, he suffers from sleep problems and has ongoing violent flashbacks that seem real.. And all because it has been very hard for him to find ways to externalize that anger as well as the feelings of helplessness and grief at having such an unavailable mother (and father as he was often away on ‘missions’ and even now will not validate his son)..
In my experience not a lot of therapist can contain that kind of borderline rage either when it begins to burst out and considering the deep fund of rage that must be buried and carried by a person (especially considering that in the first place it is NOT EVEN THEIRS) is very hard to handle.
Watering seeds of understanding and compassion is so important if we really want to be present for someone who suffers. Our own anxiety about the power of their feelings emerging should not be projected onto them.. And to be honest, at times with my friend I do feel great anxiety, that seems to be lessening though as I learn how to take my own angry feeling seriously and not deny them as I had to do having a mother who raged a lot and a father who never stood up to her to protect us but just walked away laughing, effectively abandoning his two younger daughters.
I do feel so grateful to be once again led to these talks of Thich Nhat Hanh’s, he speaks of our inner self as a precious flower that needs the right soil and water and nutrients in order to thrive.. So it is for us and as Alice Miller so famously said in one of her books like a small flower a young child will twist itself into almost any shape to win a parent’s love and the hidden legacy too that remains, that of us not being able to feel our feelings and make sense of them also leaves us with lasting liabilities that must in time be dealt most effectively with through good and finely attuned therapy.. I will end this post with a quote from her book The Drama of Being a Child.
These people have all developed the art of not experiencing feelings, for a child can only experience her feelings only if there is someone there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her. If that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother’s love or the love of her substitute in order to feel, then she will repress her emotions. She cannot even experience the secretly, ‘just for herself’; she will fail to experience them at all. But they will never the less stay in her body, in her cells, stored up as information that can be triggered by a later event.
Throughout their later life, these people will have to deal with situations in which these rudimentary feelings may awaken, but without the original connection ever becoming clear. The connection can be deciphered only when the intense emotions have been experienced in therapy and successfully linked with their original situation.
(Often, as in the case of my friend, that event may the birth of a child onto whom all the feelings of pain and rage can be displaced in the absence of therapy even being sought. And we must bear in mind to the epigenetic or multi-generational content of the original trauma being unconsciously passed down, from generation to generation, until someone breaks the chain of unconscious reactions or brings attention to the pattern.)
I would also add, in closing, that sometimes the person can and does experience feelings and emotions but they come out in very mixed up or seemingly violent, intense and dramatic ways since the original feelings could not be named, identified and expressed in a skillful way as a child.
Emerging From The Dark Night 