oh PR, you are the shaper of my thoughts, the wordsmith of my feelings. I read your posts and check word after word to make certain it is you who authored the piece rather than me. Again this bizarre out-of-body experience occurred when I read these words of yours:
Yes, people still try to tone down my intensity and encourage me through my awkwardness as I try out this ability - since I've not had a lot of practice! But no one's denying me the right to be emotional or making fun of me... or saying I'm "crazy" for being so intense about things. I'm still sorting out why other people were allowed to feel things; be emotional... but I wasn't. It just makes absolutely no sense... I can't find the context for this... unless it was simply that other people's feelings in my FOO mattered more than mine.. or they felt one thing, while I felt something else - and they imagined that this was challenging them or being bad... or crazy. I guess I wasn't allowed to have emotional needs... they were just magically going to be met by the universe... or I was just letting my imagination run away with me, to expect safety, protection, love, happiness, encouragement and validation from my parents. It certainly wasn't on their agenda.
But then, too - I was told what to feel; any deviance from that was disobediance or worse - a character flaw, insanity. That "party line" was paranoid, clinically depressed, powerless and full of learned helplessness. When I felt something else - hope, excitement, happiness, anticipation, and the ability to achieve a goal... don't ya know, that was just crazy? And I had to "stop it" and not be so egotistical, getting a "big head" - because it "hurt" my mother... because, I guess, she couldn't feel those things and that meant that they weren't "real".
I have spent most of my last 8 years trying desparately to mitigate the intensity of my emotions, certain that that is the very core culprit of my solitude, rejection, isolation. It is painful to prod back into my memories and look at those experiences when joy and happiness were jerked out of my being, replaced with demanded fear and respect or my now omni-present anxiety. These memories are revisited almost daily when my son's own joy and silliness flare up PTSD type memories of moments of glee being descimated with the hammer like fall of my father's reprimand.
But rather than dwell there, I want to explore something else your post and many recent posts have been trying to tickle out of me. It is about staying with something in me - that something that I am trying to cover up when I retreat for hours on end into my computer and online life. It is an addiction of sorts because it is my way in which to self-soothe. If it were not for my retreat into this computer I would have to face up to the disorder around me - physical, psychological, financial, social disorder that is pressing in on me. And yet I flee - day after day after day.
But your own work calls me to task because in truth the way out for me now is two fold and one of those aspects is to stay with that pain, take it into a mediation and allow it to unfold and release. I must not continue to flee from it but to allow it to operate right here on a level of consciousness. I need it though fear it. I fear it because for all of my life until very recent years it wreaked a tyranny over me sending me into such dispair and hopelessness. But I have seen my way out of that. I am no longer hopeless nor in despair and yet the old neural paths have not relinquished their age worn responses. And it is the fear and anticipation which continue to lock me into the old patterns.
But you and your writings are holding a mirror up to my face and allowing me to see that those old reactions are based on patterns established by that N family life which no longer has a death grip on me. I must keep looking in that mirror, trusting what I can now see, consciously telling myself that my false perceptions are attributable to them and not to my own reality.
Keep writing - it gives me hope and gives me life.
