This past year for me could be best described as transformative. The passage has been filled with discomfort, anxiety, severing, breaking, death and rebirth, and a whole host of other things.
It is in helping others that my own wounds became visible to myself. Having constant companions on this journey has been invaluable. Having made this my life’s work is something bordering on the miraculous. I now believe in miracles and magic.
So I wanted to run through and summarize some of my process with this. Re-claiming an identity, while simultaneously forging a new one that is integrated. Becoming whole.
How does one become whole ? In my case I broke over and over and was unable to default to self betrayal coping mechanisms, and boy did I try. I worked hard, desperately even, but without a few very important ingredients. One being vitamin L as Ross Rosenberg calls it. You can listen about this here Self love recovery.
My first tool in this recovery was the morning pages. This is a tool by Julia Cameron that consists of writing three pages of longhand upon waking each morning. I created a sacred ritual of connecting with myself. Know thyself. That is the mission here.
The closest I could get to a relationship with myself was anything someone else mirrored about me, but I was then dependent on that, without it I would fall apart. I was arrested in this childhood phase of development. Having never had a parent figure to successfully mirror kept me locked in this developmental phase. I developed coping mechanisms, but never reached the root.
Maintaining Morning Pages even with ebbs and flows as a discipline was a great beginning, but I had a lot more to go. I was able to create a secure relationship with this activity for over five years now.
The next step was healthy relationship boundaries, and the way I found the need was by realizing a very hard lesson about having none. So creating healthy boundaries is essential. People not raised in a healthy family system struggle immensely with their own right to exist without having to do something to earn it or feeling guilty for everything when there was no wrong doing.
I couldn’t sit with myself without wanting to crawl out of my skin if I wasn’t being loved or touched in some way nearly every second. So most of my energy was spent trying to obtain that source but not being able to maintain a healthy relationship and healthy relationship behaviors. Since it’s expected at my age you be able to do that much shame ensued.
The reason I love being a counselor so much and an advocate is sitting with people as they turn shame into understanding of their own experience so they can grow into who they always were and who they deserve to be. I created a career that has kept me not alone on that journey. And my gift of being able to easily connect, while probably born out of need, has served me to be able to create real and genuine relationships around me as a mooring.
Becoming an earned secure out of frightened attachment and terror has been a daunting journey. It has been one I’ve needed to manage while also needing to prioritize the care of others and achieving enough financial security to even be able to.
Battling all or nothing, battling the desperate need that comes from operating from the wound. I lived my life operating from wounds and coping mechanisms and the struggle with myself was draining me constantly.
It has been my life’s art to develop the tools to get my story straight and to excavate myself from the ruins of my childhood.
I spent the last year investing in myself, it wasn’t an option, it was necessary.
I was often called selfish by the people that I chose to invest in the most. It is in fact all about you when you’re trapped in childhood. This created more wounds and I don’t know how I ever got out. It’s still a work in progress but I’ve come so much further this year.
It is the people that see me through all of it that have saved my life. The new ones and the old. Some old have arrived on the scene anew, some new have departed in shattering ways.
This is the portrait of a life lived courageously. Not right or wrong, good or bad. Just a human story being lived.
My education was another secure relationship. Something no one could take from me, though it did not come without being criticized that I put that before my children. When we needed me to have an education for many reasons.
It’s interesting to see people who live out a more normative timeline. They have babies once they are secure to do so and that process looks so different. I was a baby who had babies, but I was determined to become a mother I did not have. It has taken me most of their lives. So I hope I get enough years left to enjoy the fruits of my labors. To be able to play and create family traditions with the ability to do so, while now not flying or freezing with terror.
Shame is an enemy I battle daily, and I am healing every day.
It’s hard to be steadfast when you are creating a self and reclaiming one. I tried to do everything all at once, because it always felt like I was running out of time. It always feels like I’m running out of time because I am awake.
Learning, determined, and awake….
My next tools have been understanding the effects of being raised by a family that has a narcissistic/co-dependence dynamic and how that lends itself to not being able to trust myself or my own reality. I would try and moor and then stumble chaotically out of port the second there was a disruption in the fabric. It’s hard not to shame myself, particularly when you can see the effects this has had on my own children. My God it is hard.
But shame never heals anything, it only wounds. Love and understanding and mercy and grace and compassion are the antidote.
I stand humbly before the world asking what service I may be of to my fellow humans, because it is there that my most profound healing exists.
I commit to living bravely and vulnerably so I may be of service to others, and so I never betray myself again.
Moving from being the storm to becoming the lighthouse has required getting my story fully in alignment with my being.
Et Lux Intenbris Lucet