I think I am coming to understand the core damage that was done to me.
Everything that was primal was bad---selfishness, jeaoulsy, pettiness, egocentricity etc--according to my NM.*I* became the bad primal nature and she became the good non primal one. I guess this is "splitting".
When I was in nursery school, I remember my M raging that I needed too much love and was too dependent. I thought I was bad for these ( and all) primal needs and wants.
I took HER view of me .
However, there was always a part of me that knew it was not real
There was always a part of me which could see human nature .God made me naturally intuitive ,I think.
I had to throw away my self protective nature in order to survive my parents, who were an N team.
I was like a de-clawed cat in the world. I thought my primal nature was bad and I denied it in others.
I was the de-clawed cat in the world of people who could use THEIR self protective mechanisms
I am still at the place where I feel guilty for primal parts of me and I feel *I* am bad if I see them in others.
I am trying to get unstuck from this place. Ami
Ami - there is a lot here. I know all of what you are talking about. Our NM's did not mirror for us. They did not mirror us at all, they only wanted the parts of us that affirmed themselves in the way that they wanted to be affirmed. If you, as a child, needed, cried, acting exactly like a child who is full of needs and essentially is in pure need of unconditional acceptance AND love then our NM's denied us; that rejection takes on many forms, facial expressions, harsh judgements, abandonment, rules of silence. We, as child, are highly intuitive...our whole world is about getting our needs met, getting validation, attention, recognition, praise, stimulation etc. it is has you say, if those parts of ourselves are not mirrored as OK, or at least given the room to be worked out in an atmosphere of acceptance then we bury those part of ourselves.
My sister is an excellent mom, she is so tuned in to her children's emotional lives; she accepts them, their oddities, expressions, voices. She sends them a powerful message of freedom in unconditional acceptance; they feel secure in her love of them, that they can be and fully experience the world, their world without so much fear.
It is like you said yesterday perfect love casts out fear. Our Nm's were imperfect love, they could not love, they were living in constant fear and they evoked that fear in us as a way to cope with life and tell us their story. We became their parents before we ever had parents.
Over the years, in therapy, I learned that unconsciously we are trying to tell the world our story of pain, we are aching for someone to give us the space and room and time to share the story, cry the story and have our story of terror and agony as child, who were denied love and then denied ourselves, heard. Our little inner child will go to great lengths to get that story across to others even unconsciously evoking fear in others as a way to tell them about our buried fears or terrors of rejection.
We were objects in our parents eyes. They saw us as an extension of THEIR needs, if we did not mirror for them, then they rejected us. It is a tragedy or was but that part of you, that just knew better, was the part of you that buried yourself, knowing that there would come a time when all of this unfinished business would finally get expression.
The guilt that you are talking about may be about the ways that our mothers used guilt as a weapon on us. I have certainly used guilt as a weapon on people before, very effective. What your mother wanted was for you to love her in the N way. But, whenever we fail our N-parents in not giving them what they wanted they guilt us with further silence or punishment, these messages are hard to break....
Ami - tears break the old tapes for me. Just squeezing all the old pain out, crying deeply and grieving that I was just never loved when I was supposed to be loved the most. The more I cry, hurt with pure ache, the more I can feel grace and hope of healing, real freedom...perhaps one day?
