Healing our lonely child and moving on from sadness.

The lonely child lives inside of us. He or she is always there. He or she lives inside of our body and I am a firm believer that as Alice Miller so often wrote the truth of that inner child will be told by our body in symptoms or in a depression which is nothing but a call of our soul and inner child for us to show it both understanding and love, a call to understand the truth and wisdom of our true inner nature of connection we buried or lost the way to, when we were young.

I am a great fan of Buddhist writer Thich Nhat Hanh and I love his teachings on holding the vulnerable parts of both ourselves and others and his wisdom about the ancestral seeds we so often carry. I am of the belief no abuser chooses to abuse but is compulsed to abuse out of not being fully conscious. Though there may be a point someone chooses a darker path. The compulsion arises out of energetically carried trauma and neglect or emotional distancing as well as the failure to integrate pain or understand carried and intercellularly downloaded issues. Much of what we carry in being wounded is actually both intuited and imported from the damaged child of not only parents but grandparents and great grandparents before. Collectively this is why I feel many of us suffer from mothering wounds and nurturing wounds and the displacement of these.

Where a wise and connected child is not shown tenderness, understanding, insight and love it moves into FEAR. We become overwhelmed and flooded and we lose our ground. If we are also shamed and humiliated we learn to turn oppositional to our true feelings and sensations which are always guides to us. Collective conditioning often also encourages us to shut down intuitive inner knowings, even the fact we may see energies. If we choose to betray our connection to those feelings and energy. then we betray ourselves. Often is not even a case of conscious choice but compulsion to survive in a hostile situation, as well as the need we have to both attach and attune, or die trying.

As John Brashaw says no 3 or 4 or 5 years old child can pack his bags and say, “I hate it here, I am leaving” we are bound to stay as children and we cannot escape our lived environments. And so as Bessel Van Der Kolk says our body keeps the score and we are repeating it with every known trigger. Collectively we are also coming out of centuries of inner child repression and the rise of addictions bears testament to this.

Watching a moving with Glenn Close and Mila Kundis last night Four Days this message was driven home to me again. In the movie a severely addicted daughter seeks help from the worn out mother who abandoned her as a child. During the course of the movie you see both parties struggling, both are wounded and neither can help the other though they are doing their level best to try, but the daughter sadly cannot put down the addiction and this is where I am a firm advocate of cold turkey. That said it is not the only way to recover, but seeking a drug to heal us from another drug, this to me is questionable when the root causes are not even touched. The movie made me feel sad for our collective ignorance.

Associated to this there is an insight I had in therapy on Thursday and that is that a child will always want to love the parent and seek the parents love, when the issue is neglect its deep roots of self abandonment may not even be realized by us which is a powerful point made in therapist Jonice Webb’s book Running On Empty. When we are neglected we do run psychologically, we run our fears, we get trapped in fight, flight, freeze or fawn and we struggle most of all with powerful inner criticisms that turned against us as the parents turned against our needier parts. And often, instead of knowing how to truly embrace our anxiety driven Four F parts we turn to something outside for a solution, a solution that can only come by us beginning to do the complex work of healing our inner state of self division.

There is a saying in AA that no human power could relieve our addiction but God could if he is sought. I do not beliebve that is the only way to go but it makes a point, to heal we must look to a more loving, embracing and all encompassing presence for holding. It is well known in recovery circles that the higher power we seek may take many forms and some may be groups or other individuals so deeply connected and present they too can act, for a time, as loving containers.

I am also a fan of the inner bonding work of therapist Margaret Paul, lately I have been re-reading sections of her wonderful book written with Erica Chopic, Healing Your Aloneness most particularly the chapters on mothering, need and holding.. The truth they share is that we cannot heal neglect or deep emotional abandonment abuse without others and we need others in relationship who will ‘hold’ us as we face and go through a process only we have the power to face. At the same time WE ALSO CANNOT EXPECT TO GET IT AS ADULTS WITHOUT BEING HONEST AND IN DOING SO WE MUST ALSO DO THE WORK. And this, to my mind, is where the issue becomes complex for those of us who had to turn against the fearful needy self as our parents did. We then enter a state of inner self division and splitting into parts that the inner critic works to either protect us against or persecute ad infinitum, and it may take the firm of breaking what therapist Elaine Aron calls linkages with others.. In this case our shame convinces us not to be real, not to be vulnerable, not to be honest, and most of all, not to reach out.

For me lately coming out of this last 10 week Mars retrograde period I have begun to realise it is my needy, messy, creative self that fell into shadow. These vibrant and alive parts of me got so rejected not only by family but even more so in my Catholic education which especially taught girls we should feel shame around both our bodies and sexuality as well as around our vibrancy. This kind of shutting down to me also gets mirrored in AA circles where we are taught we may be in danger if we get too ‘high’ or enthusiastic. that we should instead always be on an even keel. I do get that at times in being too highly activated we may tend to abuse ourselves with substances but to me is always about allowing what is repressed some form of expression in such a way we connect to what is most alive and authentic within us. And to me it is depression that results from this pressing down of our most essential self and life energy.

To truly move through trauma and out of a shaming or self negating paralysis we have to learn to act too, for and in active, lovingly assertive ways to support us in the direction of meeting the true needs and honouring the real feelings we feel, while recognizing the needs of others (and the capacity to accept) may vary. Cutting them out and splitting them off, shaming ourselves for having them does nothing good. But embracing a stronger self may feel fraught with anxiety especially for those of us who had assertiveness derailed a kids. Who came to feel both ‘bad’ and ‘shameful’ for really being us.

I also had a kind of awakening today after reading my novel Twenty which I want to share about in another post that sadly trauma, loss, abandonment and damage makes us linger far too long in sadness and on the dark side.. Sadly our trauma which breeds both feelings of being completely unsafe and unable to trust in goodness can then act not only to block of new life but to stop us opening ourselves again, even to the pain of those past experiences that the feeling into and reliving and releasing of would allow us to shed so we could move through to more life.

In that novel the lead character Meg wants to die after the loss of both her daughter and her husband. The husband leaves after the daughter Rose dies. Then Meg starts to take pills that slowly could end her life and as she acts to clear out the past in preparation to die, Meg learns how priceless life truly is even after loss. She also experiences how getting so fixated upon what is gone or has been taken can end up almost killing us off, not only from being here in the present moment but moving forward too. I really related so much to Meg, the later parts of the book in which she begins to awaken to the present moment are truly wonderful, are all about refinding the daily miracles of joy after a time of so much despair. In the final chapters these words resonated so deeply with me.

All of these years (after losing Rose), I could have been remembering hundreds of beautiful moments with Rose and Mama. And I chose to lose my heart to sadness instead I would do it differently now. For whatever time I have left, I will remember the joy not the heartache.

And yet it seems we may have to deeply experience and enter the heartbreak in order to free ourselves and to, in time awaken more fully our capacity for life and joy. We have to truly go deep down to embrace the lonely, hurting and split off parts of us and bring them back on board.. We may have a lot of work to do with also shedding the false beliefs of a highly critical part of us that in some sad strange way only sought our self protection… Maybe if we say bad things about ourselves then we never had to take the risk to try. And if we pay the price of overly adapting we also will not be fully embracing and acknowledging the differences within ourselves that make us uniquely while still a paradoxically remaining a very deeply interconnected part of humanity.