Spending time around my sister who struggles with mental illness has been a real challenge this week. I am having to see the self hatred and the killing off that she has allowed within herself, and also allowed to happen to her at the hands of the psychiatric profession. She revealed to me this weekend that when she tried to refuse Electro Convulsive Therapy her son and his family arranged to have an order placed on her that forced her to undergo it. This made me so so angry. I see it as a force of co-ersive narcissistic control and because they felt helpless they resorted to something I see damaging her.
Carl Jung said hatred is not the opposite of love, the will to power is. When we try to impose our will upon another person without their consent (and especially if they are vulnerable) we really are committing a form of psychological terrorism or what writer Thomas Szasz forcing them into Psychiatric Slavery. Sadly, I know how terrorized and frozen and driven we younger ones felt in our family growing up and how terrified and alone my mother also felt as did her grandmother as a child of an abusive alcoholic parent subject to rages.
My sister shared with me yesterday her fear that if she broke down with her son she would be put back into full time psychiatric care.. The rigid defences of narcissism sets up all kind of elaborate road blocks against the natural and raw expression of primal or chaotic emotions, as a child these need parental mediation and attunement, not punishment or rejection. Our emotions issue g from the authentic being and essence of us, they speak to us about all kinds of things. Struggling to come alive after abuse or neglect, to differentiate as a separate individual out of an ‘at times’ rigid, numbing or shut down system can at times be made impossible by those who only add further to our fragmenting and confusion.
Lately through seeing how my sister has been affected and working more deeply with my own feelings of helplessness, vulnerability, grief, anger and rage, I am seeing quite clearly exactly how and why emotional neglect, gaslighting or avoidant and anxious parental misattunement both forces us into the dark while erasing our identity, it truly does put us to death at a soul level. The lack of full love and unconditional acceptance shown to us is then deeply internalized and a dark witch like energy exists within as both protector and limiter. This is something therapist Donald Kalsched shares about in depth in his book on trauma.
The rejecting witch like energy acts in several ways :
One – it stops us both caring for and loving our true self, the vibrant alive and fundamentally life giving solar or Sun like essence of our divine nature. This yang energy will turn yin in the face of repeated humiliations or defeats, being scorned, raged at or put down for any attempts we make as young ones to be separate, naturally self expressive or ‘shine’. In a recent talk on Echo Narcissism Richard Grannon spoke of how the scapegoated child is effectively sent into the dark by parents or sibling that cannot cope with its authenticity. Often it is only they who get to live in the light, they may then co-opting siblings into different roles. Parents and siblings may gang up on the family scapegoat, this happened to me and I’ve seen it happen to two sisters as my older brother was the chosen one and still wields power over us at times due to his fear of emotions.
Two – the killing force inside also acts to stop us making linkages or loving connections with others.. As the authors of the book Becoming Attached on differing attachment styles point out, those who become avoidant in later life due to problems bonding as young ones often learn to become excessively critical of potential partners, they tend to look ‘for the worm in the apple’ in others then magnify the judgement using it as a license to distance, shame, devalue or avoid. That person, (the one they attract) may express many attributes of the avoidant person’s shadow.
Those with anxious attachment go on carrying the deep fear of being fully themselves into each subsequent relationship, or may actively seek those to bond or connect with that have similar wounding to a parent or similar ways of dismissing, devaluing or shutting down the full expression of that person.
In recent videos and talks Gabor Mate speaks of how the two most vital things we need as human beings to fully thrive are nurturing healthy attachments as well as the ability to be authentic in relationships. Much as I adore aspects of Buddhism in the sense of how it talks of our true nature often being hidden or obscured the Buddha lost his mother when very young, and so he knew very early in life the loneliness and suffering of broken attachments. Experiencing that emotional void or hunger, he also questioned how the rich could allow the poor to undergo the deprivation and suffering that they did, he began to identify with those who had not and went out into the world to discover more and in so doing made many inner discoveries. Some teachings of Buddhism put a lot of emphasis on detaching from attachments. But becoming attached is fraught with issues of vulnerability, suffering is a result of loving, because anyone we bond with and develop an authentic or meaningful attachment with, we will eventually lose That said such loss or suffering also opens us up to the very real fact of this life’s basic flux of both change and impermanence. If we hold back from fully opening out hearts due to past wounding, how can we truly experience many of the joys that come with bonding and connecting, as well as loving?
Positive aspects of Buddhist teachings encourage us to turn within to our soul or true self in order to hold wounded, under developed or distorted parts. Practices of inner focus and radical acceptance encourage to be honest and focus on the truth of what we feel. We learn to hold those feelings tenderly and with respect, not turning hostile to the small child that still lives inside of us and is in very real need of our approval, attention, affection, self-parenting and care. Being able to hold our anger, shame or hurt and sadness means we may not have to act them out, it gives as a strategy for facing issues of past hurt and disappointment while developing an accurate appreciation of why and how we suffered. This means we will be far less likely to turn self shaming or dismissive inwardly.
A gentle holding practice of this kind enables us to face and own and be humble about our deficits or mistakes as well as value and own our positive qualities, it affords us a grounded humility that also allows life, spontaneity and joy.. It gives as a way of understanding how absence of emotional engagement truly affected us.
Many of us with anxious or avoidant styles of atttachment did in fact suffer the absence and loss of, or the breaking apart of early love attachments, that later affect our capacity to bond and feel safe. These kind of inner holding and cherishing practices enable us to welcome into our being and hearts parts of our authentic self, ways of being that outside forces may have tried to kill off or forced us to separate from. As children we did need to be related to authentically, appreciated, given affection and noticed, and as a child our very survival depends on that. If instead as we grew up we had to sacrifice our authenticity to belong and be attended to we need later in life to grieve for the enormity of a loss that must be recognized if we are to transform old patterns and come into our own sunlight. Without a valid sense of an authentic self and positive attunement to and recognition of our feelings we can not build a peaceful, meaningful life for our adult selves.
On personal level, in my family I have seen two sisters killed off in their emotional reality various ways, as I, myself have had a long and protracted battle with my own inner killer, the introjected Super ego or negative devilish force that seeks my destruction. I first established an active imaginative dialogue with this part of my inner self after my husband left me in 2004 and I went into the dark as a response to cutting short my first attempt at depth psychotherapy in the UK that spanned the period of July 1999 to October 2001. It took me another 6 years after that as well as another killing relationship with a person with NPD to actually find my way back to some kind of therapy and a further 9 years to find my present therapist, Kat with whom I have made such great progress.
Those of us with our feet and hearts and inner focus placed firmly on the path of seeking to re-establish a loving inner connection with our true and vital or authentic selves, do need ‘refuges’ of a kind. .People, places, groups or religious and spiritual traditions, setting and practices that help us to know there does exist beyond us and yet surrounding us a vital and all encompassingly vast nurtritive and generative/regenerative force or source that through holding us also allows and affords our soul an alembic or vessel of change within which we can make all of the necessary transformations. A time of fragmenting, fracturing or breaking apart (Uranus) in order to coalece or reunify in time may be necessary for many of us coming out of long term emotional neglect or trauma.
We need as we recover to see those places of emotional safety, acceptance, validation, comfort and mirroring. The more deeply sensitive we are, the more we need this because it is a sad fact of modern times that it is often the most sensitive and vulnerable ones in the family that absorb the hugest portion of the collective or family shadow. And in a family system where both the parents and children suffer with emotional dysregulation, lack of emotional attunement and recognition, toxic shame often gets deeply internalized or is projected onto the most vulnerable one. That person then may be shame dumped, seen as an aberration or ‘strange’ sent out into a kind of psychic wilderness to fare all alone and many can and do suicide at this point.
Gabor Mate points out we need the love and support of other authentically open human beings to survive and thrive and it is often those who suffer from the deepest early attachment injuries that then go towards addictions and opoids or into high risk adrenaline settings in order to feel some kind of comfort, warm embrace, holding, numbing, soothing or sense of intense aliveness and yet such solutions are so often sought in all of the wrong directions.
Sadly in many human systems coming out of the past Kali Yuga or heroic egoic age, vulnerability and being in touch with the deep feminine has been associated with either insanity or weakness. However, vulnerability and the experience of deep, intense and often chaotic emotions often speak not only of a very long history of inner oppression or repression but also of genuine and authentic struggles we encountered in trying to come fully alive and in touch within as we grew. Neglect leads to many needs not being fulfilled, and perhaps could not be coming out of such a deeply wounded past.
Additionally not everyone who struggles is ‘bad’, ‘evil’, ‘useless’, ‘hopeless’ or ‘worthless’. We humans have value just for existing and being.. The saddest thing to hear a person badly traumatized say is that they are a burden or a waste of space when in fact THAT IS NOT THE TRUTH AT ALL. THE SENSE OF STRUGGLE THEY EXPERIENCE SPEAKS BOTH OF WOUNDS AND OF A BURIED DESIRE TO SEEK VALID FORMS OF AUTHENTIC EXPRESSION FOR THAT PARTICULAR SOUL DIFFEENTIATING OUT OF A TOXIC MATRIX.
At the moment, too, many of us are trying to deal with many years of carried trauma or high anxiety states that we absorbed within the family, and certain social systems that are actually hostile to new life.. So the kid who has trouble paying attention and is ‘off with the fairies’ may be singled out as weird, since they not fit the approved ‘norm’, but it is these very people who may be the ones open to large insights.
Collectively we are all also suffering from a wounding of the feminine and in our capacity to be mothering in positive ways.. We arrogantly believe (not all of us) that we are somehow above animals and nature forgetting that both animals and nature are perfect manifestations of the divine.. You only have to look at the patter of a flower or a pine cone or watch the growth of a plant or a tree to see that is has a pattern it adheres to and unfolds out of organically. A tree or bird or animal does not deviate from that implicit pattern, but sadly we humans too often do, in our hubris or arrogance we often try to change, adapt or shape others to an image that is not necessarily in any alignment with the wholeness of that being’s essence. This is not our right and it is our responsibility to bring ourselves to light and not remain totally subsumed by the darkness.
Emerging From The Dark Night 