I had a long drive today - 6 & 1/2 hours with 2 cats and dog and half way through my child developed a stomach flu like problem.
After we stopped because he was nauseated, we stopped again because he had to poop. He was in tears and sweating a little. When he got back in the car he lay down and fell deeply asleep until the cats began meowing incessantly.
I found myself getting overwhelmed. As i stayed with the feeling, and tapped on it, I found that I could connect with a huge amount of fear, painful, terrifying fear from my childhood. I saw how my father (authority) would criticize, condemn, punish me for things that others might get praised for. The demands were so high that I could not attain them or if I did then the goal would suddenly shift or the attainment would be diminished because of some small exception.`
These feelings, memories, triggers escalated as cars passed me when I was going the speed limit. I was hypervigilant about being pulled over by law enforcement even though I was not speeding. It was like being punished by a teacher who turned around when you are telling someone trying to talk to you that you can't talk. It took me several hours to work through the pain/panic/fear.
It was definitely like being in that child again. I saw that I believed that my actions, my being was the cause of the criticism and rejection. I was sure that if I could get it right and be good enough that I would be loved and get the nurturing and comforting and acceptance that I so longed for. When I saw this I immediately remembered the rabbit dream and the other dream I had that same night. In the rabbit dream, I see a dream symbol of a rabbit that has significance for my grandmother. When I tell her about it my mother is there, turned away, waiting for the conversation to end. I sense in her an agitation, an irritation that she is passively threatening to verbalize if my grandmother responds to me. My grandmother is caught between the two of us. If she accepts my offering my mother will respond caustically. If she ignores me, my mother will immediately move in to connect with her and offer her that soothing result of mother-daughter connection. The dream ends there. I am keenly aware that my grandmother's choice is immaterial. The rabbit is a truth which is not dependent on whether my grandmother accepts it or not. That is the message of the dream. What is me does not depend on the reaction or acceptance of a relative. "Me" does not depend on being accepted or loved by them. Even though my being longs to be accepted and loved by these very beings.
The other dream of that night shows so clearly that my choice is between trying, longing to meet their demands, to overcome the issues that evoke their criticism, to shift out of unworthy into worthy OR letting go and moving into rational, reasonable, normal.
In that dream, I am in an apartment, my apartment. My brother (who also shifts into and out of being my father) is there for some reason. My living room does not have furniture but some kind of technological boxes. There is cat fur on them. I am trying to surrepticiously clean off the cat fur as we organize the boxes. he shifts into my father and the rules are evoked and there is no way I can meet the requirements.
Someone comes by and knocks at the door, inviting me to join her and some friends at a celebration. I can't go because I have to get the living room straightened up. I tell her no and expect her to go catch up with the group at the festival. I'm feeling left out - excluded. Then I am standing in the doorway. I have become the friend who stopped by. I say that I won't leave without her (the person, (me) who lives there. I call for the other friends to come and help get the work done so we can all go. I shift back to me. I am hit with a shot of panic. He will NEVER let me go. There will be a HUGE price to pay. I say NO. She sees immediately what is going on and lays it all out. "He is destroying you. He is not sheltering you, showing you the right way. His rules are ways to controll you not superior to everyone else's way as he has claimed.
I have a choice. Try to meet his demands. Try to connect. Try to get the love and caring that I need to survive or thought I needed to survive or that I need to survive emotionally if not physically. OR see the insanity, the impossibility of the demands that are actually set up to force me to fail and then become a rationale for deserving the abuse he must heap out on me and decide to forgo that source of love, to give up being loved and cared about by the people who gave life to me, who seemed to have it all, whom I thought I admired and whom the world claimed loved me. The had to love me didn't they, they were my parents and my siblings. But they didn't and the world was wrong.
I must give up my hope for that longed for love. I must choose the friends and friendship instead. it seems to pale in comparison but in truth it is the only hope for real connection. Seeing this truth is still indescribably painful but it is a must and making that choice is the only choice of hope. The other choice is of chronic pain and perpetual failure. It is Sysiphus pushing the rock up the mountain over and over and over into eternity.
