How hurt affects us as empaths and if emotionally neglected.

As empaths we cannot fathom people not caring and being so selfish. When the world is harsh to us we often internalise that. When the world hurts us we really struggle to understand, after all, isn’t this life about caring for another’s heart and welfare and if they are vulnerable and you are the older one why wouldn’t you want to help that person, protect that person, be kind to that person, support that person?

These are questions going over and over in my mind tonight. When the hurt is deep I only pray at times to die and sometimes I must confess the frustration makes me throw my body around or hurt my own body, this is due to the enormity of what I feel as someone being so easily overwhelmed and lacking strong self soothing skills..

I am just listening to an interview with write Liz Gilbert on handling difficult emotions.. She says the worst thing we can do in feeling anxiety or difficult emotions is to shame ourselves, and the word or judgement ‘should’ always comes with shame, with the implied judgement that if we were better versions of ourselves we would not struggle so. But the truth for empaths is, we STRUGGE DOUBLY WITH THE FEELINGS OTHERS WILL NOT ALLOW. The last thing we need to do in this situation is to shame and blame ourselves. The best thing we can do is show ourselves compassion, mercy and tenderness. This may be judged by some as having ‘a pity party’. But that again can be a subtle negating of the enormity of what it is we struggle with.

It is natural to feel deep hurt at times from others carelessness, it is natural to want others to be kind and care, we may not be able to expect it, human nature being what it is with others often so fallible and shut down. The last thing we should be doing is hurting ourselves or blaming ourselves for our vulnerabilities.. Learning to self soothe does not come at all naturally for those of us with emotional neglect histories, after all our parents punished us for being real and vulnerable, they did not help us. This treatment creates an even deeper wound and the re-engagement with it, (as opposed to suppressoin and denial) bloody well hurts. It may cause our death as the facts now show that those of us who suffer ACEs or adverse childhood experiences are more likely than others to develop a host of diseases if such experiences are not worked through.

The body hold the charge of cuts and wounds made to us and those things hurt us so deeply and we carry the ‘implicit memory’ even if we do not consciously remember it, our body does and it will say so in symptoms. What hurts most is also the knowing that caring attentive parents would have protected us more, rather than making us carry the can for their own omissions, as benign and unintentional as they. Those omissions do cause us extreme damage and often make the likelihood we will turn the pain back in upon ourselves and suffer self harm or self injury many times more likely. Learning to turn the loaded pistol around and point it outwards (this image was shown to me in a dream once) takes time. We need too MOST OF ALL TO GET IT OUT OF THE BODY. This may involve hitting a soft object until the charge builds and releases. It is a fine line of not letting it become so entrenched either as resentment, although lately its seeming only natural to me we would do that if there is no way to get the feelings back out there, out of the body. Releasing pain and tending to the remaining wound with care seems to be a very difficult process. I am still very much trying to get a handle on how that is done.

The following talk really explains what is to hold our anxious self in love.