Scent of Cedar *
Well-Known Member
Good Morning, Everybody
:O)
I think what has happened to us is that, already traumatized through past abandonment issues (which are more painful, less definable things than that word abandonment communicates), we have been traumatically re-traumatized by our children's pain.
Traumatically re-traumatized. That is why to us, it feels like excoriation, like Frankenstein awakening, like shocked dead.
There is abandonment ~ again, something uglier than the word itself can describe ~ echoing through the depths of us. Shame protects us from going there, or even from knowing about that place where the hurt of abandoned has been frozen ~ most often without words and without light and with no clue that so much of the life of us is trapped there. Through self-recrimination, we take some form of control: to address the abandonment and take responsibility for the shame of it and to protect ourselves from it ever happening to us again. The other side of self-recrimination is a kind of wonderment, I think. I think that is what Pema Chodron is discussing when she writes: There is nowhere to stand. (Not a direct quote. Pema implied that until we got that part, we were suffering to follow a path that led nowhere so don't follow that one.)
Surprising ourselves with the limitless feel of the generosity in it, we fell in love with our children. That is Copa's Sleeping Beauty kiss. Not that they loved us, but that we allowed ourselves to love them in ways it was never safe to love our parents or sibs.
And BOOM one day they were gone.
Victimized either by the same genetic heritages that warped our parents and extended families, or by some version of it, maybe. I don't know about that part. I think it is less important here than we have given credence to. I do know Going North's post to us about addiction from the inside was a correct way to see this. Much of the guilt and self-recrimination we beat ourselves so savagely with has nothing to do with the situation at hand. It is not helpful to our kids or to ourselves to continue figuring out why these things are our fault when they are not.
If we want to be strong and whole, if we want to change things for our children and our extended families and ourselves, we need to get clarity around these issues.
I need to let go of anything like guilt where my family of origin is concerned.
Like Pema writes, I need to acknowledge there IS nowhere to stand.
There was nothing I could do to change anything then (though I did sincerely try, like any normal person would) and there is nothing I can change about them, now.
Shunning is just what they do. They have always done it. The truth here is that I need to disengage altogether from my own emotions surrounding these issues. Detachment from the emotions surrounding family of origin issues. All we know to do now is retrace our steps to know where we went wrong and address it. The more we don't find it and the harder we look, the more responsibility we take for things we have no control over and the farther we get from where we need to be. Again, this is where Going North's information on addiction from the inside matters very much to us.
What I have learned about abandonment issues this morning is that our children will carry gentler versions of these wounds or their opposites. (Helicopter Mom, whose children feel afraid and inept or larger than life and believe nothing bad will happen to them.) And, they will carry their own: Guilt at having abandoned us; rage at our pain and confusion and inability to help them; fear, intense fear, at having been abandoned by us as, whether enabling to beat the band or in full detachment mode, we misunderstand what the issues are.
This link is a sort of general information on abandonment:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blo...ion/201006/understanding-the-pain-abandonment
***
This link traces abandonment issues and names stages of healing similar to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' stages of grief.
The stages are: Shattering, Withdrawal, Internalizing, Rage, Lifting
I am not sure what to think about rage. As often as I post not minding about how mind-blowingly, headache-inspiringly angry I am now? I do mind it, actually. I see no value in having traded numb for blindingly, flashpoint angry. According to these materials, this is a desirable phase, indicative of healing. Rage indicates we have not accused ourselves. (For once). We are instead acknowledging the immovability of the issue. Confronted with walls in the past, we have turned on ourselves.
Again, Going North's post on addiction from the inside helps us, here.
It isn't that we are so stuck on ourselves we cannot believe our children's problems have nothing to do with us. It is that when confronted with something immovable, we turn on ourselves.
***
The following information has to do with love relationships. I read it as the nature of the narcissistic wounding (Narcissism occurs on a continuum, like everything. Until we pass the center line, narcissism is called self-esteem.) occurring within the dysfunctional family system. To understand the difference between other families and our own, we would need to remember that there are people, in fact, most people maybe, who have never felt these terrible feelings.
And then, gone to school. Or to work, or out with friends. Or cooked a holiday dinner.
Abandonment issues.
That is what the hurt is.
That is the other side of this, for those of us whose families of origin were deeply dysfunctional.
http://www.abandonment.net/what-is-your-situation-2
"The severing of our love-relationship creates a heart-wound. Your body reacts as if your very life were being threatened, as if you had been actually stabbed in the heart. The threat of losing your primary attachment propels you into a state of neuro-biological emergency. Your heart pounds. Your stomach turns. You lose your appetite one minute and become ravenous the next. You oversleep or can’t sleep. You’re on edge, hyper-vigilant, and plagued with obsessive thoughts (about your lost love) and can’t concentrate on anything else. You feel mortally wounded, that your life is over, that you’ll never love again. These catastrophic thoughts, along with your urgent feelings of morbidity and doom, are evidence of surges of stress hormones coursing through your body and brain. You are in a state of constant of vulnerability.
As helpless and defeated as you may feel right now, this does not mean that your situation is hopeless, that you are weak or dependent, or that you will never love again. Feelings of hopelessness, panic, and desperation are normal to the first stage of the abandonment cycle. The five stages – Shattering, Withdrawal, Internalizing, Rage, and Lifting spell S.W.I.R.L. As you SWIRL through the overlapping stages, the intense feelings prove to be temporary, in fact NECESSARY to your personal growth and recovery."
The above paragraphs are direct quotes.
So, these woundings are in the past and cannot be undone. What we are tracing through to recognize in our pasts and to prevent from decreeing our futures has to do with the way we were taught to think about ourselves when we were abandoned in any of the ten thousand ways those repeated abandonments could have happened.
The imagery I am holding has to do with incorporating something I cannot see, but can only sense. It is pain. It is formless and dark. It is what I tiptoe past, whistling in the dark. It is what I beat myself for and get lost in. But this wordless, eyeless part is me, too.
So I am sure we can accomplish this. In a way, the interminable rage may be a kind of testing ourselves to see whether we really are strong and committed enough to ourselves to hold through it with compassion or not.
What do you think?
Cedar
:O)
I think what has happened to us is that, already traumatized through past abandonment issues (which are more painful, less definable things than that word abandonment communicates), we have been traumatically re-traumatized by our children's pain.
Traumatically re-traumatized. That is why to us, it feels like excoriation, like Frankenstein awakening, like shocked dead.
There is abandonment ~ again, something uglier than the word itself can describe ~ echoing through the depths of us. Shame protects us from going there, or even from knowing about that place where the hurt of abandoned has been frozen ~ most often without words and without light and with no clue that so much of the life of us is trapped there. Through self-recrimination, we take some form of control: to address the abandonment and take responsibility for the shame of it and to protect ourselves from it ever happening to us again. The other side of self-recrimination is a kind of wonderment, I think. I think that is what Pema Chodron is discussing when she writes: There is nowhere to stand. (Not a direct quote. Pema implied that until we got that part, we were suffering to follow a path that led nowhere so don't follow that one.)
Surprising ourselves with the limitless feel of the generosity in it, we fell in love with our children. That is Copa's Sleeping Beauty kiss. Not that they loved us, but that we allowed ourselves to love them in ways it was never safe to love our parents or sibs.
And BOOM one day they were gone.
Victimized either by the same genetic heritages that warped our parents and extended families, or by some version of it, maybe. I don't know about that part. I think it is less important here than we have given credence to. I do know Going North's post to us about addiction from the inside was a correct way to see this. Much of the guilt and self-recrimination we beat ourselves so savagely with has nothing to do with the situation at hand. It is not helpful to our kids or to ourselves to continue figuring out why these things are our fault when they are not.
If we want to be strong and whole, if we want to change things for our children and our extended families and ourselves, we need to get clarity around these issues.
I need to let go of anything like guilt where my family of origin is concerned.
Like Pema writes, I need to acknowledge there IS nowhere to stand.
There was nothing I could do to change anything then (though I did sincerely try, like any normal person would) and there is nothing I can change about them, now.
Shunning is just what they do. They have always done it. The truth here is that I need to disengage altogether from my own emotions surrounding these issues. Detachment from the emotions surrounding family of origin issues. All we know to do now is retrace our steps to know where we went wrong and address it. The more we don't find it and the harder we look, the more responsibility we take for things we have no control over and the farther we get from where we need to be. Again, this is where Going North's information on addiction from the inside matters very much to us.
What I have learned about abandonment issues this morning is that our children will carry gentler versions of these wounds or their opposites. (Helicopter Mom, whose children feel afraid and inept or larger than life and believe nothing bad will happen to them.) And, they will carry their own: Guilt at having abandoned us; rage at our pain and confusion and inability to help them; fear, intense fear, at having been abandoned by us as, whether enabling to beat the band or in full detachment mode, we misunderstand what the issues are.
This link is a sort of general information on abandonment:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blo...ion/201006/understanding-the-pain-abandonment
***
This link traces abandonment issues and names stages of healing similar to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' stages of grief.
The stages are: Shattering, Withdrawal, Internalizing, Rage, Lifting
I am not sure what to think about rage. As often as I post not minding about how mind-blowingly, headache-inspiringly angry I am now? I do mind it, actually. I see no value in having traded numb for blindingly, flashpoint angry. According to these materials, this is a desirable phase, indicative of healing. Rage indicates we have not accused ourselves. (For once). We are instead acknowledging the immovability of the issue. Confronted with walls in the past, we have turned on ourselves.
Again, Going North's post on addiction from the inside helps us, here.
It isn't that we are so stuck on ourselves we cannot believe our children's problems have nothing to do with us. It is that when confronted with something immovable, we turn on ourselves.
***
The following information has to do with love relationships. I read it as the nature of the narcissistic wounding (Narcissism occurs on a continuum, like everything. Until we pass the center line, narcissism is called self-esteem.) occurring within the dysfunctional family system. To understand the difference between other families and our own, we would need to remember that there are people, in fact, most people maybe, who have never felt these terrible feelings.
And then, gone to school. Or to work, or out with friends. Or cooked a holiday dinner.
Abandonment issues.
That is what the hurt is.
That is the other side of this, for those of us whose families of origin were deeply dysfunctional.
http://www.abandonment.net/what-is-your-situation-2
"The severing of our love-relationship creates a heart-wound. Your body reacts as if your very life were being threatened, as if you had been actually stabbed in the heart. The threat of losing your primary attachment propels you into a state of neuro-biological emergency. Your heart pounds. Your stomach turns. You lose your appetite one minute and become ravenous the next. You oversleep or can’t sleep. You’re on edge, hyper-vigilant, and plagued with obsessive thoughts (about your lost love) and can’t concentrate on anything else. You feel mortally wounded, that your life is over, that you’ll never love again. These catastrophic thoughts, along with your urgent feelings of morbidity and doom, are evidence of surges of stress hormones coursing through your body and brain. You are in a state of constant of vulnerability.
As helpless and defeated as you may feel right now, this does not mean that your situation is hopeless, that you are weak or dependent, or that you will never love again. Feelings of hopelessness, panic, and desperation are normal to the first stage of the abandonment cycle. The five stages – Shattering, Withdrawal, Internalizing, Rage, and Lifting spell S.W.I.R.L. As you SWIRL through the overlapping stages, the intense feelings prove to be temporary, in fact NECESSARY to your personal growth and recovery."
The above paragraphs are direct quotes.
So, these woundings are in the past and cannot be undone. What we are tracing through to recognize in our pasts and to prevent from decreeing our futures has to do with the way we were taught to think about ourselves when we were abandoned in any of the ten thousand ways those repeated abandonments could have happened.
The imagery I am holding has to do with incorporating something I cannot see, but can only sense. It is pain. It is formless and dark. It is what I tiptoe past, whistling in the dark. It is what I beat myself for and get lost in. But this wordless, eyeless part is me, too.
So I am sure we can accomplish this. In a way, the interminable rage may be a kind of testing ourselves to see whether we really are strong and committed enough to ourselves to hold through it with compassion or not.
What do you think?
Cedar