Voicelessness and Emotional Survival > Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board
Still need to work through early trauma
Gaining Strength:
This summer my first priority is healing from the paralysis that has crippled my entire adult life.
Though I have made progress in my healing in many ways and on many levels in the past 3 decades I have not broken through this paralysis and the profound anxiety that accompanies it. But I don't want to mask the unlying wound. I don't want to funtion inspite of. I want to heal - all the way down to the core. I don't know the way out. I can only guess based on what I have read, heard and how it clicks with me, strikes my gut.
So, for now, I plan to hold that place of pain in my heart which I tend to that broken child. It may be very slow going at first but I expect, if successful, that it will blow open at some point. Why is it so nerve racking? I think it is because by using this "only way out is through" approach that I must feel that original pain and that is still so indescriabably difficult. But I am going to do it. Thanks for letting my share my struggle. It is so helpful to have a place to share..
Gaining Strength:
After my husband died, when our child was 7 months old, I needed help. I needed help sorting out the mess he had left for me, sorting out his estate. I needed help putting food on the table, keeping my house repaired and the yard kept. At that time, my parents, divorced, were in their late 60s and early 70s and each were worth a few million dollars and almost $10 M. They did little to help. My mother said she was too old to keep my baby. My father at one time made an offer and sent his man over to help with a few things in the house but demanded it be done to his liking. I declined.
Neither helped me financially. Neither helped me sort out my husband's estate which left me the house we were living in and all of his debts. Nothing else. He left his insurance to his former wife (divorced 15 years before his death) and his grown children from that marriage. It took me years after that to truly understand that my prominent, wealthy parents had abandoned me years before. They liked to pretend we were family and my mother had been dependent on my since my father had left her a few years before.
But that abandonment had happened more likely when I was born. But because they used the language of love and because they led a life that look like a life of envy from the outside even I was fooled by it all. What do I mean be being abandoned. Well I mean that they simply were not there for me. they did not advice me nor train me nor provide for me other than what I received by virtue of being their daughter. For example - at 10 I went away to camp for 8 weeks. I had been begging to go for two years. Even at that age 8 weeks seemed far too short to me. At camp that first year some of the girls had begun shaving their legs and taught the rest of us. When I went home in August I asked my mother if I could shave my legs. Her test response was, "It looks like you already have." That was the most she would offer me about any aspect of the physical or emotional changes of growing from a child to a woman. When I married at 23 I asked her to give me some advice and again she told me I didn't need any. And when I divorced I received less help or advice. By the time I married again I didn't bother.
It would take me years to understand that neither my mother nor my father had ever been there for me. Unlike the other people I had grown up with whose parents were my parents friends. The guided and provided for their children. I was left all alone. But the most destructive was being expected to do certain things without the resources to complete the tasks and then being belittled and humiliated for my failures. But not just at the time but for years to come. I feel certain that those experiences continue to plague me and are a large part of what underlies my paralysis. the Pain is indescribable.
I am determined to move forward and figure out how to stand in front of the pain and move through it. It is so easy to sit and avoid but that leads to its own pain and loss. God give me strength, courage and healing.
Gaining Strength:
I think that shame has an energy level that connect with what I thought was love as a child. This is so complicated and convoluted. But I think the only connection I got with them was when I was being shamed and as a child that was better than nothing and that was necessary for survival.
I seem to get stuck in shame. Peter Levine describes how a child able to fight is less likely to suffer PTSD. I did not fight as a child. I was unaware that anything was wrong other than me and I did try to change me - over and over and over again. But Levine writes that we can go back to that child and fight for her.I get that.
Hopalong:
GS,
How is your beautiful, amazing son?
I so hope he is thriving and doing well in school,
feeling hopeful and positive for his own life.
Hops
Gaining Strength:
Thanks for asking Hops. He is doing well - glad to be out of school and so excited about the summer.
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