GS - that longing, I know well. It all feels so sad. I've been "with" that feeling for a long time. But little girls - even inner children - can and do mature and grow up. They find ways to manage disappointments, realities of life - with good parenting. Yeah - the apportioning of motivation, emotion, and thoughts to conscious, subconscious and unconscious gets VERY confusing. It's almost easier to think of the little girl - growing with your care & guidance - a relationship between the two of you, even communication.
"Twiggy" has grown up a lot. Inner children are relevant to self-sabotage, too. That's where the original wound(s) still live on. They have healing to do, too. And their healing is vital to getting to the root cause... the original motivation to self-sabotage.
I think I got to my root cause, today. Almost by accident... but I can trace the steps, the thought processes, the re-evaluating and re-framing... and all of that finally converged into what I think is the motivation - the need and payoff - for self-sabotage. Again - I have to let this sit... because my ability to "think" things has led me down blind alleys before, not wanting to face something.
Basically, my emotional attachment to smoking - this last form of self-sabotage I am puzzling through - is because of life/death NEED to PROVE to my SELF, that the story Twiggy told me over the course of months of therapy.... is TRUE. At one point, I referred to smoking as a "smoke signal"... like an SOS... a cry for help.
The way this fits, is that:
a.) I was told that what I remembered happening - didn't happen. I was
told I was imagining things, hallucinating, and making up ways to intentionally hurt my mom, because I was angry about the divorce. Hell - I wasn't THAT angry to finally have a whole night's sleep without breaking glass, yelling & fighting... you know? I did see the benefits.
What I was really angry about, was not being believed. And then, being forced to question my own sanity... because I remembered things that my mom said "didn't happen". SHE WASN'T THERE. How the hell would she know? And when she finally had to face the fact of my pregnancy.... denial and coverup; gaslighting.
b.) The other thing is that I had huge anger and abnormally intense fear; a normal "aftermath" set of feelings to rape. There was no logical explanation for those feelings EXCEPT what I remembered happening. I wasn't allowed to be angry; angry was "bad"... since I couldn't control or explain those feelings to my mother's satisfaction - she convinced someone to hypnotize me (I think)... and I was left with the suggestion that I could choose to "not remember" my memories... or have to deal with those feelings... by putting Twiggy in the "box": push it all to the unconscious.
Well - Twiggy never did anything against her will without a fight; trying to get the last word in. Since she'd been smoking anyway... I think she latched on this... the smoke signal... to get my attention, to prove to me that she and those memories were REAL. Part of this was also a harsh self-judgement: after everything that happened I was now "sure", convinced, that I was one of "those" kids - from a broken home... they all smoked... that there really WAS something wrong with me. Otherwise, WHY would my mother not let me believe what I believed to be true?
In therapy, I spent a long time dealing with whether people believed me. My husband, my T. Who would believe such an ego-damaging betrayal as making me question my own sanity - perpetrated by my own mother? I even had a hard time believing it. I excused it in a thousand ways. So.... the smoke signal.... Twiggy's/my SOS.... the breadcrumb trail of clues back to those memories... the NEED for PROOF. Proof = physical evidence.
I was a model student. I was ambitious, picked up skills quickly, responsible, social, funny............ and I smoked. It didn't "fit" with anything else in my personality. (Yeah, I tried the 70's crap; paranoia and paralyzing fear didn't make all that stuff overly attractive). Smoking became the "physical evidence" I needed all these years later - that those really awful bad things really DID happen to me. Evidence that there "was something wrong" with me... the hope and waiting for someone with "eyes to see" that would finally "get" my message and rescue me. Vindicate me; validate me; PROVE that all this really happened to me... to my mother; to me.
Prove my mother WRONG.I know that I'll never be able to prove this to my mother; when I told her I was remembering things about that time, she said "you won't be able to remember them 'right' ". Yeah. Right. And Iams dog food is "bad" because it has too much protein in it. Where does she come up with this crap??
Proving my mother wrong was the "revenge" I wanted/needed. I'm OK with being denied that. The key, was proving to myself, that all this was real... it really happened... and I finished all that up a year ago, in therapy. But, I'd lived with that doubt for so long - it simply took time for it to be replaced with trust in Twiggy.... in Twiggy I trust!
Now, maybe she'll let go and let ME deal with the addiction.
