Dating

[WRITE]

I only have one photo of me as child and you can't imagine how sad I look in it.

Dear Anansi,

All the mother in me wants to hold that small sad child and give him so much love.

I hope I never see a sad child's face again without stopping to smile.

Now you are older you can learn to love yourself and others, and create your own photo albums.

~Write

[Anansi]

I'm grateful that you wrote back to me Write,

After I read your first affirmation, I teared.  After the second, I nodded in warrior admirmation by your initiative. After the third, I got an insight as to why I don't take photos.  I haven't owned a camera in over 15 years. 

If I can get through this valley (head nodding in 'how incredible that would be'), you all will truly have been part of a miracle.

Anansi






 

[WRITE]

I haven't owned a camera in over 15 years.

first gift to self?

Recovery comes in stages A, it takes a lot to overcome not having those special first relationships. But it happens.

I mourned the lack of mothering/ parenting in my early life for years, then having my own son gave me so much satisfaction, as I played and hugged with him it was so healing to me too, and I paid special attention to each flower in the path, each nursery rhyme, each story...each new thing fed the tiny child inside me too.

Now more years later I work with alzheimers patients. So many of them believe they are my parent and I am often awed by someone's arms around me, a whispered 'I love you' from nowhere from someone who doesn't really talk much, the touch of someone straightening my clothes or smoothing my hair. Unconditional love.

Life has this amazing way of giving us what we need even if it's in a time and place we don't expect!
So don't think if I get through this, think when.

~W

 

[pennyplant]

Life has this amazing way of giving us what we need even if it's in a time and place we don't expect!

Yes, this is so true.  The secret is to recognize it when it comes and to be willing to accept it.  The specific things that should have happened, but never will, have to be let go of on some level.  It is not going to come in the exact form we have waited for all these years.  And maybe that is a good thing.  What we have been waiting for are things we needed way back when.  We are different from that person now.  Sure, the young one is still inside.  But many layers of self have been added since then.  We have grown and changed!  In spite of ourselves.  It was inevitable.  So, when it comes to us, the things we need, they will also be different from what we expected.  We must be able to see it and accept it.

I like your examples, WRITE.

PP

[Portia]

Dear Anansi,
fully-fledged board member, welcome and valued contributor (that’s how I see you right now, how do you see you?)

Please no need for explanation about when you reply. There’s no standard to live up to I don’t think. Anytime is a good time.

Did I think of you enough to write to you, or did I sense something in your post, something that sounded like you wanted a hand – I think it was you thanking people here for their kindness, actually, that alerted me, as though you were planning to go away, somehow. You are welcome here and you can stay, you have a place, a space, to be you.

Gratitude. The thing is, I chose to write to you because of what you’d written: you had an effect on me and you therefore have an individual influence that perhaps you don’t see? Perhaps you might imagine that you’re alone and not seen, when in fact, I’d bet quite a few people see you.

I'll be saved by one woman who can see me and love me

It’s quite possible this could happen. But you might have to ‘catch her eye’! Are you looking at the women who might look back at you?

If I can get through this valley (head nodding in 'how incredible that would be'), you all will truly have been part of a miracle.

Anansi, there’s no ‘if’ as Write said. ‘If’ is not an option, it’s a non-option, if you see what I mean. ‘If’ is simply maintaining the status quo, ‘if’ doesn’t make any changes, even tiny ones (like smiling at the female who gives you the grocery bag etc). Tiny steps often yield big results, changes in attitude. I imagine you feel so alone, and so many other people feel so alone too, all around you, not seeing each other. There is a chink of light out there but it needs seeking out, I believe that!

Miracles, hey, miracles take a while, the impossible a little longer. You control your brain Anansi, and that’s an incredible and wonderful organ you have at your disposal. You can change your brain, you need to want to and not resist. ‘If’ doesn’t exist. Right ‘now’ exists!

What would help you most, right now, do you think?

Hope you keep posting, as and when you want to, no pressure, no obligations here.

[Healing&Hopeful]

((((((((((Anansi))))))))))))

I wish I could express how sorry I am for what you have been through, but somehow I don't think it will come through here because I can't find the words to express it.

After the third, I got an insight as to why I don't take photos.  I haven't owned a camera in over 15 years.

I would love for you to buy a camera.... so you can take photo's and create yourself some happy memories.  Not necessarily with people, I love photo's of hills, of nature, of pets etc.  Maybe it seems a long way off to do this at the moment, but maybe one day hey?

(((((((((Write)))))))))

This leapt out at me....
What do you think about the process when it's time to let go and you need to change a relationship or leave it?

Am I just paranoid about having another relationship like my ex?

When do you need to change a relationship or leave it?  When you're not happy, when you don't look forward to seeing your new friend (and I'm not thinking a one offs, but say each time you arrange to meet, you have a feeling that you're bored etc, or you don't enjoy their company), when you're needs aren't getting met.

Love H&H xx

[WRITE]

when you're needs aren't getting met.

That's now then! ( smile )

Thanks H & H. I guess I am finding it quite painful to separate, it's been a difficult couple of weeks, but tonight things are sorted out and looking better.

I can worry about new relationships when I've finished dealing with the emotions from the old one!

[Anansi]

Dear Write, PP, Portia, H&H,

Thank you!!  I teared while reading everything, especially when Portia noticed and said, " ... as though you were planning to go away, somehow."  This is the most love I've ever received in my life!!

I vividly acknowledge and appreciate being noticed, seen and cared for here by you.

"first gift to self?" (Write) - Thanks for this highlight, I'll let myself by open to it. 
 
Later,
Anansi

[portia guest]

(((((((Anansi)))))))

One sure way of killing a baby is to ignore it. Being ignored - feeling without worth, feeling unnacceptable - those are things nobody should endure, but I know people do, nothing is perfect.

I'm glad you're here: board / earth.

We all want acceptance and acknowledgement, it's only human, we can't happily exist without others. And I'm a partial hermit!

Gotta go.....later is fine and okay

[WRITE]

One sure way of killing a baby is to ignore it. Being ignored - feeling without worth, feeling unnacceptable - those are things nobody should endure, but I know people do, nothing is perfect.

I often wonder what it was liek for me and my siblings as babies to have our crying ignored until it stopped.

Even now I never sleep in the dark- though I'm happy to wander around outside in the dark, I just hate waking up and it's dark and there's no one there.

And it's taken me years to feel secure with relationships, to trust that when people go away they still have feelings for me and will come back to me.

***

Last page of the Judith Sills Fine Romance book:

Fight the impulse to let the anxiety built into courtship turn you into a clingy pushy wimp. That wimp lives in all of us. He or she is not the product of some neurotic outbreak in your psychological undergrowth. Give that wimp a talkign to when he shows his face. Remember who you are and what you are worth. You don't have to run away from courtship or cling to it desperately, just because it occasionally brings your wimp to the surface.
Come to understand how your own fears of intimacy typically express themselves. You can reduce your obstacles to Commitment if they are front and center in your consciousness. Learn to pay attention to your romantic patterns. You'll get better at them.
Keep in mind that love is something that you build not something you find. Courtship is the process by which you develop love while you simultaneously handle your fears of it. You need its moments of distance as much as you need the process of attachment.
You don't need to have a perfect courtship. You don't need to have a perfect partner and you certainly don't need to be perfect yourself.
You will need to:
*Take a risk, confront a fear
*Love a real person instead of a fantasy, and
*Be good to yourself in the process.
If you are able to do all three, you are guaranteed a fine romance.

[portia guest]

(((((((((((((((((write)))))))))))))))))))


so so many kids and babies were raised by being ignored. I was left to cry apparently (I have no memory of it). We learn that we are of no value, that we are worthless, we learn that lie.

(((((Anansi))))), Write....no-one can supply that exact love we need so much, no-one except ourselves, and it is possible to love ourselves, it is. However, acceptance by others and knowing we are not alone in how we feel - that we are all together in this life - i think that helps enormously and is why I love it that we meet here.

[WRITE]

do you think it was a common method of childcare where we grew up ( Portia and I are a similar age and raised in the same part of the uK )?

I remember other things which seem somewhat prescribed and unnatural now, the women refusing to nurse even briefly, trying to time feeding schedules, believing they could 'spoil' a baby with too much love or attention.
I talked to a health visitor once who had studied these things and she came to the conclusion it was the industrial requirements of the area, the women were going to work so the baby had to get into a routine and take a backseat early on.

Consequently they were rather 'hard' and unemotional.

When I had my son I found many of the nurses to be like this too. I told one of them off for being rude to me 2 days after he was born and she dissolved into fits of tears, turns out she had a 2 month old herself and had gone back to work. I was astonished, it was surreal sitting on my bed hugging a nurse who was meant to take care of me and my baby and couldn't because she was heartbroken not to be home with her own.

( she did give me excellent advice on nursing though- she was mixed feeding which anyone who hasn't done it tells you can't be done! )

[portia guest]

write, yes to an extent - the effect of reading too much Dr Spock child-rearing books.

I found this http://users.aber.ac.uk/asg/child-rearing%20of%20punjabis.htm , which while talking about some practices and ideas that i would find wrong, it does say this:

It is a well-established custom in Punjab that young infants, and even toddlers, sleep with their mothers or a mother-substitute. Indeed, very few mothers would contemplate putting a new-born baby in a separate cot in her room, let alone in a different room. As discussed earlier, babies are indulged to the point of being spoilt. A grandmother mockingly remarked: ‘ We are not like the Goras (whites)who after feeding the baby leave her in the upstairs bedroom -cry or no cry... In my family, if a baby is slightly ill the whole family is awake to comfort and support the young mother. A completely different Tarika (way of doing things).’

and this is a long one, but interesting, given the date!!

Tears before bedtime

29/11/04 by Margaret McCartney

Controlled crying aims to turn babies who are poor sleepers into good ones. But a new book suggests that the technique can be dangerous I SPENT THE first year of my first child’s life holding him. If I put him down, he cried. I was irritable and exhausted. I bought all the books and eventually, out of frustration and fatigue, I turned to controlled crying.

This, as described in Dr Christopher Green’s Babies!, aims to turn poor sleepers into good ones by leaving your crying child for increasing periods. “The aim is to let them cry for a short period of time, but not long enough to let them get upset or hysterical,” Green writes.

But I simply couldn’t do it. My boy seemed to be instantly upset when I left the room, and letting him cry when I could easily have comforted him seemed cruel. He cried, I cried. It felt deeply wrong to have my baby wailing for me yet not respond to him. Yet when all the “Gina” babies I knew were sleeping through for eight hours at a time, I was convinced that, as a mother, I was failing.

So I secretly took my baby back into my own bed, accepted that this was how things were, and planned my life around that instead. And, almost imperceptibly, things slowly got better.

As a GP I see lots of women who are having a hard time getting their babies to sleep and have resorted, as I did, to the controlled-crying technique. It has become apparent to me that for every controlled-crying success story, there are also lots of parents who admit that they have found it too distressing and given up. And maybe we were right to feel uncomfortable. The Definitive Child Rearing Book, by Margot Sunderland, is based on more than 700 scientific papers, and claims that the technique of controlled crying can be danger- ous. If you persistently leave a child uncomforted, ignoring their distress, Sunderland writes, it can result in brain changes that end up creating a neurotic or emotionally disordered adult.

Sunderland has been working with children and their families as a child psychotherapist for 20 years and is now director of training at the Centre for Child Mental Health in London. She feels strongly that we should be working with our parenting instincts more.

“For many years we have assumed that the child’s brain is robust. It isn’t,” she says. “Key chemical systems are not yet established after birth — and continued stress can damage, even shrink, part of the brain, the corpus callosum. Magnetic Resonance Scans show a direct relationship between early stress and these brain changes. We don’t yet know how much this will impact on a child in terms of emotional difficulties, but we do know that persistent, uncomforted emotional stress — including smacking — can make these structural brain changes.”

The scope of damage that Sunderland believes can be caused by this level of uncomforted distress is marked. She writes that “one in five UK children has or will have a mental health problem; 40,000 children and young people are taking antidepressants; 170,000 people a year, mainly teenagers, harm themselves in despair”. She feels that persistent distress as a child is a major cause.

“The key is cell death,” Sunderland says. “Persistent child distress can lead to enduring changes in the autonomic nervous system and alters the responsiveness of the child to stress in the future. Using controlled-crying techniques might seem to work, but we know that around the age of one, children start to be able to ‘bottle up’ their distress. I’m not saying don’t use these techniques, but I am saying that parents need to be aware of the cost. And there is a cost.”

While it isn’t possible to extrapolate some of the research that she cites — for example, the effects of stress on Romanian orphans, or studies of maternal separation in infant rats — to the controlled crying of well-cared-for children, it does raise questions about the technique.

Sunderland thinks that we should be more responsive and instinctive to our children: “Other mammals don’t want to separate from their children as we do. There are huge benefits from physical touch, which releases our natural opioids and oxytocin. These are key response systems.”

But what if the parents are exhausted and controlled crying is the only thing that seems to give them a break? Is this so wrong — can the “damage” become irreparable? “It is only persistent uncomforted distress that seems to be hazardous for brain development. However, there is biochemical repair if you pick up a child and soothe them.”

It is normal for babies to cry, says Asha Phillips, a child psychotherapist, lecturer at the Tavistock Clinic and author of Saying No — Why it’s Important for You and Your Child. “They need to cry from time to time,” she says. “But don’t let a baby cry for hours. The problem with controlled crying is that it is not always responsive to what the baby can manage. It is externally imposed by an ‘expert’ and not tailored to your baby. For some it works, for others it distresses them too much.”

Phillips doesn’t believe that babies cry because they are “trying it on” or because they are spoilt. “They are expressing the way they feel. It is crucial to listen to what the baby is saying. Crying is one of the ways he communicates. There is no single answer to the different cries. I believe that in certain circumstances it is OK to let a baby express himself by crying. Sometimes it can be his way of dealing with overstimulation, especially at the end of the day, the colicky time. His nervous system is raw and can be overloaded. Crying may be how he lets it all go, almost in a cathartic way. It can be his way of settling himself and self-comforting. At those times, parents trying to rock him or speak to him may increase his difficulties by overstimulating him and interfering with his attempts to recover. A crying baby is not a terrible thing, but an unresponsive parent can be damaging.”

Gina Ford goes further: “Babies should really cry only seldom or not at all. That is the whole point of my book — using a routine means that babies do not get into the situation where eating and feeding habits have gone so far wrong that you have to use controlled crying. Even then, I would advise controlled crying only as a last resort and where medical professionals have advised it. I don’t think that parents should be panicked by this research. If controlled crying works for you, that’s fine — it doesn’t make you bad parents.” There are lifelong positive effects on emotional development from children reared with tender loving care, says Professor Jaak Panksepp, a psychobiologist at the Falk Centre for Molecular Therapeutics at Northwestern University and author of Affective Neuroscience (Oxford University Press). However, he does not think the latest research means that parents who have used some controlled crying should panic.

“A few good cries within a loving environment seems unlikely to harm or permanently modify the develop- ing brain,” he says, “and perhaps it might even facilitate emotional intelligence, as long as the child is comforted soon after real distress begins with a brief period of holding, understanding and loving words, as opposed to ‘stiff-upper-lip-type’ advice.”

I know what it is like to endure motherhood as an exhausted, paranoid hell, and I would hate to think that this latest book was going to add to the stress of parenting. The key is to get in touch with our instincts. My children are now 4 and 2 and, it has to be said, join me under the duvet every night by midnight. But it feels instinctively right for me.

One of the best lessons I was taught at medical school was simple: if a mother is worried about her child, you should be, too. Doctors are taught that for a reason. The maternal instinct is potent and protective and we should use it, not ignore it.

The Definitive Child Rearing Book, by Margot Sunderland, will be published in the new year.

From: http://www.mentalhealthjobs.co.uk/news.html about half way down

[WRITE]

Fascinating, thanks for that Portia.

I have seen parents driven to distraction by this ( and other 'catch-all' parenting ideas ) whilst being told by well-meaning advisors 'if you just persevere it will stop'. My s-i-l had a very difficult birth and didn't bond well with her baby at first and controlled crying just made the child worse, but they persevered for months; eventually she slept in their bed and things improved. They received a lot of criticism though.

 However, he does not think the latest research means that parents who have used some controlled crying should panic.

“A few good cries within a loving environment seems unlikely to harm or permanently modify the develop- ing brain,” he says, “and perhaps it might even facilitate emotional intelligence, as long as the child is comforted soon after real distress begins with a brief period of holding, understanding and loving words, as opposed to ‘stiff-upper-lip-type’ advice.”

yes, I think I was lucky, my son and I were very bonded even before birth and I always had a strong sense of when he needed me and when he needed to be left alone. There were times I put him down awake and he went to sleep and times he slept with me in my bed.

When his father and I separated he took to sleeping in my room again, dragged his little bed to the foot of mine, and after a year and a half I knew it was the time to send him to his own room which is where he sleeps now.

I think if you don't allow the baby to cry sometimes they become fearful, but ignoring a cry which is a need for you is a way to send the message that they are in some way abandoned. The best thing is for the mother to be supported and learn to build trust in her instinct regarding her child.

[portia guest]

Write

They received a lot of criticism though. Isn't that the worst thing? When you've been through all the problem, you've doubted yourself, you've asked for help and then - you find the solution and believe in it, and it works! - and what happens: folks can't wait (it seems) to criticise. Why is that? I don't know. Yes I do. They want to believe that they're right and you're wrong instead of thinking: it works for you, great. Same old ...stuff! Fear.

When his father and I separated he took to sleeping in my room again, dragged his little bed to the foot of mine, and after a year and a half I knew it was the time to send him to his own room which is where he sleeps now.
Maybe too personal Write, I'm thinking, why did he do that? Because he felt too worried to sleep alone, because maybe he thought you felt bad and was taking care of you? hey I don't even know how old he was. I feel so far removed from 'normal' sometimes that I can't imagine a little boy doing that; well, I don't have much experience of children, other than being one once, so I guess I'm constantly curious. On which note, I wanted to ask about being impatient (re Hops agnostic thread), just for feedback reasons. I just didn't notice the date there but generally, do you think I'm impatient? I've been pondering this and can't decide. I sometimes think I'm intolerant, but impatient, not particularly. Or maybe I'm impatient and actually not intolerant? ha! Too much pondering i think.

Child rearing. Some people still think it's okay to beat (and I mean beat) their kids here because they were beaten. Some people think it's okay to treat their kids as pets or objects and so on. But those fashionable ideas and too much book-reading.....my stepdad apparently told my mother to leave me crying so that I'd learn to stop (but that's what she says and I can't believe her) so...honestly, i think they were both quite mentally odd and somewhat lacking in education and the ability to know where to find new information and how to think about knowledge, like many from that area of the UK. They were different times when they grew up. i think if it's true what he said, he learn that from the way he was 'raised'?