Firstly, your pain over your past is real, it lives deep inside of your soul but it may not always be fully accessible to you in a way that makes sense.. This occurs when we only feel emptiness or depression, a sense of lowered vitality and meaninglessness that comes about to the degree we are alienated from our true self that makes itself know by feeling, not thinking. Coming to understand and gain emotional awareness into your pain and mixed up feelings from the past will take time.. To do this you need help and validation of how you react and feel in response to triggers.
Remember to be soft, compassionate, gentle, kind and patient with yourself as you begin to uncover the feelings. This will not always be easy if you are shame bound or very much unfamiliar with those feelings due to a painful past of emotional invalidation or neglect.
As a child, before a certain age we cannot handle or understand and make sense of all of our feelings, especially feelings of confusion, sadness, frustration or anger at less than loving treatment that occurs at the hands of our parents. Parents who shame us for expressing our feelings or needs, who argue with us about them, try to bully us out of them, distract us from them or outright punish us for them make it almost impossible for us to feel our true feelings and feel safe. The end result is living as an adult with a painful sense of alienation from our self and others.
This feeling of safety in experiencing your feelings will for many of us require recovery buddies, friends or therapists who can help us. It may takesome time to build a sense of safety to fully experience everything if our childhood was very unsafe..
In a recent talk on shame with Oprah Winfrey that I listened to on video Brene Brown makes the point that many of our friends or those we know may not be helpful or safe to go to with feelings or to sort out issues of shame.. We cannot expect another person who has not struggled with feelings or known our particular brand of abuse or neglect to fully understand.
If we are going to reclaim our joy we are going to have to face the many ways we were not allowed to feel and experience our life as we do.. for some of us there are deep pools and pockets of grief we have to navigate through on the path of healing. My therapist was telling me yesterday that all of us have different pockets of difficulty in our psyche, she told me we all have borderline pockets, narcissistic pockets and even autistic pockets within us.. This is not a sign of things being wrong only a sign of what happened to us when we were young and hit the wall of certain kinds of parenting.
For myself it has taken me so many years to understand the damage my parents carried and how that was passed on not only to me but to each of my siblings.. Exploring our own parent’s history is the best way of finding out how and why they reacted as they did. Louise Hay makes this point in her book The Power Is Within You in her own deep feeling recovery work when healing from breast cancer she had to, after facing her own anger at her sexual abuse, then try to put that aside to a degree to understand what happened to her father to turn him into an abuser. Forgiveness does not mean what happened was okay and we may stay angry over it for some time and doing so is certainly a very essential part of our healing. Forgiveness lets us off the hook from having to recycle that pain and rage over and over inside our own being when the time is right and enough processing of anger and grief has been done.
Grief work or grieving in some way makes the letting go of the angst happen. In my experience it is almost as if our tears act like a solvent or a cleanser of the deep pain, bitterness, disbelief, rage and anger we feel. Grieving only happens when we are able to accept THAT WHAT HAPPENED DID ACTUALLY HAPPEN, THAT AS A CHILD WE WERE POWERLESS OVER IT AND COULD DO NOTHING TO STOP IT AND THAT WHAT HAPPENED ACTUALLY HAD AND CONTINUES TO HAVE DETRIMENTAL EFFECTS. Until we reach these insights, in my experience, we may continue to blame ourselves and even punish ourselves through toxic patterns and other patterns of self sabotage.
Because we were never loved unconditionally by our parents we then find that impossible to do. The results is what Highly Sensitive Person therapist Elain Aron calls living with a very strong sense of a broken, damaged and incomplete or undervalued self, having this we get set up in so many way to continue being hurt and hurt ourselves as well as making poor choices in relationships.
Turning those deeply embedded patterns of self hatred and self rejection around will take time and as we undergo the work we need to surround ourselves with those who understand.. At least until we have developed a strong enough sense of inner feeling boundaries, self love and a positive self concept so that we no longer take on board unloving or hurtful invalidation or shaming from those around us who do not understand what we truly have lived through and are working so valiantly to heal.
Emerging From The Dark Night 