N damage: Itentional & Unintentional

[Gaining Strength]

That is such a good point.

I am spending some time still in the "affirmation" stage - still needing affirmation for myself about how vile and vicious it really was because there was so much and IS so much pretense to the contrary.  that has caused great internal confusion for me.  Still sorting and working it out.

[Gaining Strength]

Beginning to connect frustrations of contemporary life with the pain and wounding from the earliest days.
For years I felt this building frustration and had absolutely no idea what was the source.  Today it is connecting.  I find growing frustration over incidents that are certainly frustrating on their own merit but which should be of a level that I can easily slough them off - rather I find the frustration only increasing over time rather than abating.   The feeling itself is wretched and as it grows the wretchedness grows with it but the other side is that as the feelings increase my coping skills decrease. 

As I am beginning to connect this feeling with past abusive experiences during a period of powerlessness in which my very survival depended on receiving the abuse, tolerating it, as this connection is made I am finding a toehold on which I can begin to climb out of that abyss and create or restructure some kind of solid foundation.  But this requires that I be in touch with and acknowledge the original wounding and the associated overwhelming pain.  It is staying in that pain without succumbing to it that is so difficult but moving away into an avoidance has been where all the damage has been created across the years of my life.

The other side of this connection has been when I have connected with the original pain using the tapping of EFT.  While doing that I have experienced the connections from original woundings out to later experiences and even current experiences which are built on those original pains and through which these more recent experiences feel so overwhelmingly intolerant.

[Hopalong]

((((GS))))

My friend, the only one I know in 3-D who also has a completely Nmother...absolutely RAVED to me about Rapunzel, for the same reason. It had a very powerful effect on her, as it did you. I really must see this movie. Thanks for talking about it here.

I was excited to read what you said about the disproportionality of your reaction to contemporary frustrating events...and where that comes from. And, especially, your recognition that hooking the two together (the one--the past--showing itself as now out of scale) is a toehold.

Yes! I think this is really a hugely significant statement. And I believe it really is...and perhaps even a whole rung of the ladder.

Good going, you.

xo
Hops

[Gaining Strength]

Thanks Hops - this connection is helping understand why I have such strong reactions.  When I'm in the midst of it I am able to know that I can later find out what the original wound is that is causing such a powerful reaction.  I had such an experience today.  I hope that tonight or early tomorrow I can figure out what it is connected to.  We will see.

[Gaining Strength]

A good portion of the obstacles that I am identifying and which I must overcome have to do with a kind of brain-washing or aculturization that was both intentionally and perhaps unintentionally inflicted on me and to a lesser degree my brothers by my father.  That which was done intentionally was done in order to keep him in power.  It was not unlike that which was done by medieval kings to their subjects.

I recall learning from my mother, in my late teens, that my father had the intention of keeping my brothers and me from "growing up."  She told me this by way of relaying to me that he did not want her to tell us how young she was when she got married because he did not want us to "get any ideas."  She made the connection that he did not want us to grow up.  In other words he wanted to keep control over our thoughts.

I am putting coneections together to lsee how on some level I bought into more of this than I have recently realized.  I bought into parts of this in order to maintain a belonging.  This is very difficult to explain for many reasons.  But he used spoken and unspoken "rules" of what a person of our family would or must do.  These rules are deeply buried into my very sense of identity and are difficult to extract.  As I do extract them I am able to see that these are indeed some of those "strings that hold the elephant".  Part of what is helping me illuminate them is understanding that he did this in great part intentionally.