Lately I am really beginning to feel the benefits of all my emotional recovery work and years of therapy..I am coming to really love and respect the true me and see how much I shut down my inner child in response to parents who were just completely emotionally unavailable.. I have a lot of compassion for both of my parents coming out of this. Kat and I spent about half of yesterday’s therapy session talking over my mother’s barren childhood life..
My dear Mum to try to keep herself warm in bitterly cold Canberra winters had to use a large stone put into the fire place and then covered with a blanket on those lonely nights when her Mum was working.. Speaking to her about this and different aspects of how Nana was unloving it always brings to mind the story of warming the stone child Jungian therapist and storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes tells about a pattern of emotional coldness and neglect. Mum’s father died of war injuries and alcoholism when she was only 7 and my Nana struggled a lot in the aftermath with no financial support of any kind in terms of a pension even though my grandfather served over 3 years in the First World War.
I had a day where the savage inner critic was back again this week saying how much it wanted the young me dead, Kat my therapist seems to feel that on some level my Nana didn’t want Mum around and she did put my Mum into domestic service and then railed at her when Mum got herself out of that situation and found another job as a tailor’s apprentice.. I have to hand it to my Mum she had a lot of fight and worked so very hard to make a life when she was young and after she met and married my father, but she most certainly covered over a geat deal of insecurity within. In fact she once told me after I got sober in 1993 that each of her children had been given some aspect of her personality, when i asked her what she had given me she said to me “you have all of my insecurity”. That deep and hidden sense of no solid foundation within or without and the sense of not having any place to turn, did plague me well into adulthood and is something that i heard once again being shared a lot in online AA meetings this week. In the absence of this we often turn to substances to gain power or courage but in the end it is a false courage.
If we are not attuned to and held and mirrored adequately and filled with a sense of self love and care as well as skills of nurture and agency in childhood it can leave us with enormous inner deficits. Being hit hurt, isolated and punished for behavior and reactions we need help with just makes the damage worse and leads to higher instances of depression and anxiety as current research shows.
At this time of year I find myself in the build up to the period that led to me getting sober in AA 29 years ago. My husband and I were married on the 16th of October that year (1993). We went away for about 2 weeks and when I came home I lost my job and it was apparent to me that now I was in a stable relationship for the first time ever it was not going to last if I kept up the drinking. I was getting up in the middle of the night and taking myself out to clubs and bars and in a moment of clarity I just saw myself as if from the outside at the same time as my husband expressed such distress. I got to my first AA meeting in the first week of December in that year thanks be to God and got sober immediately but that was just the beginning of a very long and painful journey. I a still not out of the woods and still struggle with fronting up in daily life due to myriad fears and anxiety.
The answers to my inner child healing have taken me such a very long time and a lot of therapy and inner struggle. I hit the wall at 10 years of sobriety as I needed to, at that point I had to face everything I had buried from my young and adolescent life rising up and a therapist with a lot of experience with adult children of alcoholics informed me in the earlier days I would not find many boxes of tissues in AA meetings and that I needed to seek adult child meetings. However, it took until my marriage ended and I was in complete breakdown for me to find Al Anon and then a lot of years to find a good therapist. The upflowing of my feelings as I have shared here before was too much for my husband who chose to leave me after 11 years, and I take some responsibility too as I myself was still stuck deep inside a self negating fawn/ isolation/freeze pattern. My experience is that as soon as we hit the fund of buried multigenerational childhood issues at our Uranus opposition with that hit comes a lot of confusion and fear most especially as after that transit we experience both Neptune squares to our natal Neptune and the Chiron return at 50 years of age. With the Chiron return those of us with deep attachment trauma start to re-enact many of our wounded child trauma trance dances so we can grow in awareness of inner patterns..
Looking back now I see how much I struggled with self blame in an emotionally neglectful family as it appeared from the outside our family had everything externally. It really wasnt until I finally read therapist Jonice Webb’s book on emotional neglect that i put together the missing pieces of why I ended up struggling with suicidal depression even 11 years into my active sobriety.. Prior to this a very good therapist I started to see after returning home at the age of 50 called my kind of trauma benign neglect.. I was not sure what that meant until I read Jonice’s book in around 2016 or 20017. Healing those mistaken ideas about myself has taken so much committed therapy with a therapist strongly attuned to and respectful of abandonment trauma. Reading the work of Complex PTSD therapist Pete Walker has also helped me a lot especially in terms of his work with outlining the concepts of emotional flashbacks, emotional melange and inner and outer critic work. I honestly do not know where I would be today in the absence of all of this help. Lisa Romano is also another person whose videos and books helped me to understand the loss of true self we raised by emotionally neglectful or emotionally shut down or immature parents learn.
What I am seeing with blinding clarity lately though is how a witch like defensive structure grows to isolate us in a tower of disconnection and intellectual confusion when we are coming of out of neglect and narcissistic trauma… Trauma therapist Donald Kalsched draws heavily in his work in the mythic fairytale of Rapunzle to show how our wounding and negative self care systems coming out of attachment trauma function to keep us trapped in our heads and hostile to our bodies and often too, deep and essential aspects of our inner being. And yet as therapist Dr Ramani explains in some of her interviews on healing from narcissistic backgrounds we need to be in solitude for a long time when we first begin to do the healing work on our traumatized and dissociated inner child or True Self.
The tale of the woman in the tower guarded by an evil witch is also used very clearly to explain many aspects of narcissistic trauma and invalidation abuse that occur and end up with us losing contact with and in many ways turning both hostile to and critical of our inner child who really connects us to our divine self. John Bradshaw in his work on healing shame and inner child issues talks much about the soul child who contains our most vital and lively essence and must be found if we are really to do the inner reclamation work of feeling, healing and releasing our shame.. For many of us us inculcated to become empathic caretakers we may suffer from many feeling of F.OG., fear, obligation and guilt if we cannot help or save those who are mirrors for some of the dysfunctional wounding in our parents, siblings or our selves.
Lately I see how I turned against by inner child but also how wounded child keeps me in patterns that originate in a lot of grief, shame and guilt. Sometimes I act out that punishing of my lively and real self with my dog who always stays connected to his authentic self as this quote by Jeffrey Masson about dogs points out that comes from this excellent book Why Dogs Never Lie About Love
Dogs are not worried about how they will be perceived by other dogs. They do not have to hide their joie de vivre for fear of being naïve (oh how I relate to that one!!), and they do not need to feign boredom when they are in fact interested for fear of appearing unsophisticated. Dogs never stand around at parties wondering what to do or say, or why they came, or how pitiful they might seem to more elegant or more amusing or more important guests. They do not struggle to be witty, getting right to the point… Yet they manage to come away with a greater and more accurate fund of information than human do at their parties. For the dog sex may or may not be present, in deed or thought, but information, knowledge is critical: What kind of dog am I dealing with? Who stands before me? Where have you been and what did you do there? But even more basic.: Who are you really? Questers of the truth, that’s who dogs are seekers after the invisible scent of another being’s authentic core.
We humans sadly get thrown off the scent of what it means to trust our deepest instincts the more we are shamed in childhood for natural tendencies that need understanding, affirmation and support to grow.. Lacking these we become enemies to ourselves and even others by proxy. For myself coming to trust how I feel, think and react and to learn more effective ways of dealing with all three is taking a lot of time and many mistakes made along the way, which when viewed from another perspective are only even related to soul learning.
Emerging From The Dark Night 