Voicelessness and Emotional Survival > Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board
Continued healing
Gaining Strength:
Thank you Hops. Your encouragement is so comforting.
Gaining Strength:
Twoapenny, I hear you and understand those struggles all too well.
Today I am preparing my presentation to the advisors and administrators at my cons school with the hope that I can keep him in this school while we try to get his brain repaired. Of course raising a child who does not function the same way as others is agonizing and exhausting but it comes with all those other alienating issues that you list and imply. And those take an extra hidden toll on child and mother and that alienation is particularly acute for you and me whose FOO was already alienating.
My heart aches for you and your son but I also feel a special kinship and compassion for you both. I will always have hope of finding a path out for our children and others who suffer as they do.
Gaining Strength:
Thinking I have discovered at long last, "What is wrong with me?" Is giving me great comfort.
I have a path now. I feel such a layer of relief, understanding how my lambic system was so strongly reactive and the prefrontal cortex unable to activate to moderate. This explains so much of my lifelong failings and pain and struggle.
Since I last posted I have found several academic papers which further explain this brain state. One made reference to the effect of childhood trauma.
I feel such relief and such hope. I am so profoundly thankful for the work being done by Dr. Has an Asif. I may give my child and me hope for a functioning life.
I have two projects due. Both of them have me frozen, not able to do the required work. I may get some part of it done and I may fall from grace, yet again. But now I understand why. I cannot describe the sense of compassion I have for myself after all. Of these years. And the ache and hope I have for my son. There are so many suffering who could be helped. I hope to participate in that when I am healed.
sKePTiKal:
In answer to your question, I don't have a specific exercise. This is simply something I stumbled across years ago and well... maybe it's "magical thinking" or simply a visualization but it's got real lasting effects for me.
The Beatles "Let It Be" or similar music helps open connections in neural pathways. And then, simply take the leash off the longing feeling. Let it run, search, despair and wail until such time as it "finds" succor and comfort and protection and relief.
What I've experienced is often just the feeling of the relief, but occasionally the sense of a person embued with those maternal characteristics; the "Mother Mary" image... experiencing the same distress alongside me (mirroring; validation)... and staying with me, till it passes. None of this even needs to be verbalized to yourself; I'm pretty sure it's all a need based in pre-verbal centers. A successful session will feel as if a weight has been lifted, the clouds have blown away, and the sun is waking up all the little chirpy birdies.
There is a whole mystique around Mary in religious circles. I'm no scholar, but I'm sure you'll be able to find lots of things via google-fu. In Chinese and Tibetan traditions, the same energy-force is personified as Guan Yin. She's the Goddess of Compassion.
Gaining Strength:
Skeptical, thank you for your post. Your craft with the written word is powerful, the way you translate your amazing analysis of your mind into written prose is a gift.
I love the idea of receiving maternal love. I read this this morning on FB:
--- Quote ---When a mother doesn’t bond with her daughter, the daughter grows up apprehensive, worried about abandonment, expecting deceit at every turn. She grows up lacking emotional confidence and security, and must find a way to gain these for herself – not an easy task when she doesn't know why she always feels empty to begin with. ~ Dr. Karyl McBride (paraphrased from Ch. 2, p.11 of “Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers.”)
In my first book, “Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers.” http://www.willieverbegoodenough.com/about-will-i-ever-be-…/, I provide a starting point for daughters who have identified the problem and want to take steps to recover from the life-long effects of narcissistic abuse. I also provide ways to prevent your own children from undergoing what you went through.
--- End quote ---
No doubt I have a profound wound from need of maternal nurture. And yet, I am drawn to the masculine for the past several months. I find the voice and image of the caring Jon Kabat Zinn to be so soothing and comforting.
These recent days and weeks have been so up and down, in and out of depression but with sharp insight into my sense of alienation and rejection. As I have written for years, the periods of healing for me, are marked with almost tortuous, upheaval - insight and understanding twisted around depression and fear; the insights lifting and then grieving for what has been lost intermingled with shame and then fear that the state is permanent or the trek out futile and then the thread of hope and determination. Ultimately, I remember to focus on, to light up the thread of hope and dim the grief, fear, and internalized condemnation.
The process is one of hope but it is speckled with black holes of despair and stumbling.
The insights have a price - the pain and grief are so sharp and ironically trip that longing for "Mother."
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