When the schism is identified

By

For weeks now I've had a pull. I ignored it. Then I was driving out to volunteer for a local group that provides emotional support for young people who have experienced the loss of a parent. The route I travelled took me past the point that was pulling me, namely the walk from my house where I lived between the ages of 3 and 7, to the primary school I was at for the same time. I have many sketchy moments from that time, mainly painful, losses and trauma caused at the hands of my parents. 

I woke up on a rainy Saturday morning and I knew that was the day. The day to walk the path I'd not trodden for over 40 years. I've excavated and processed through 27 layers, real identification of psychological adaptations made in the young self to survive what he was exposed to growing up. 27 is a lot. I am tired, my wife is tired. We're all shattered by the taking away of life caused by exposure to unsafe life growing up. Almost tired to the point of the relationship, the last thing I cling to, being over. 

I believe I found the root on that Saturday. I took my wife. We walked. From my old house to my old school and as I did, I picked up energy, suffering, loneliness and pain, trapped inside that little boy. I was able to meet him, his experiences and take him into my heart. The schism found. The child who froze during that part of my life also froze development in the adult that grew around him. Relationships with key people in my life at that time were stopped, exactly where that young mind could place them, and the work has been to get to this destination. 

Something moved in me on the Saturday afternoon. As I grieved for that poor child, I sobbed and finally saw him and let him into my heart, my body, my mind and I saw. I saw him for the first time and all that he had to carry and the adaptations that have shaped every experience since. I am writing this the day after and I am conscious that I do so with hope. This feels different. I woke this morning with a real sense of the child starting to lead me. Stretching into my frame as the tingly energy flowed in my body. A sense of calmness is within. I also woke exhausted and remain so as I type away.  

Over the coming days I hope the child in me settles and realises he is safe. He has a home and an adult who can take care of him. I know in my heart that I had to meet myself. What I hadn't catered for was the emotions that stirred and the realisation of being frozen in time, unable to develop past the pain absorbed for over 40 years. I need this to be close to the end of my healing. My family it breaking at the britches and we all need my child to bring some joy and fun to the home.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When it finally comes

By
I thought I’d start at the end. The end of 50 years of feeling something was off, not quite right. A journey that consumed me, my energy and my lifeblood for all of my life. When it lands, it does so with the grace and power of something that can only be felt, not necessarily understood cognitively. The body took over. Looking back, I think it took control in 2020, 2 weeks into a job as a teacher. I was driving into work. There was no self. Only a realisation that I was heading towards something that was self-harm. Pure and simple. I had left a successful career in IT and had retrained to teach to keep me sane during Covid. Literally. What has followed for 6 years is dissolution at its most profound. A constant and involuntary disintegration of the self. The ego fighting every step of the way to keep me trapped in the patterns I’d built to survive in a turbulent environment from birth. Patterns that showed themselves slowly, deliberately and pulled me apart, a bit at a time until a...
Read more

Coming from nowhere

By
One of the hardest things about dissolution, the dissolving of the self is being nowhere, no-one. Nothing.  At least when you were adapted and blind, there was a you, a pattern playing out in your world that people associated with you a personality, a person, "there's no-one quite like Richard". My relationships, I have understood relied on the energy that moved through me and into my world to remain afloat. The kind one, the funny one, the crazy one, the one with no limits, the one that would bring every ounce of himself to every engagement. The remnants of this remain as the void starts to take over and the old self hangs on to provide some ballast to the floating in your own space.  This period is also the loneliest. Perhaps the quietest so far, as the need to perform abates and you feel the grief of the self that was and is no longer. The pain is deeper but less violent. It is surrender from within. It is forward motion and sometimes that's all that matters. Today...
Read more

Where does the pain live?

By
Pain lives within. Each scar you carry creates a lens that you seek to uncover in order for you to keep safe in the world (avoidance of the same pain again).  If you were made to feel small, inferior, then that is a lens you will view your world through. Looking, feeling, identifying any opportunity to attach that pain to a current experience to so you can react and control in order to protect yourself. Your response when you identify a threat to your emotional state? Well that could be anger, submission, argument, fawning. It could be any innumerable   response based on your adaptation methods, in turn based on your environment, personality and when the scar was formed.  Complex really. And simple too.  
Read more