Standing up for the infant in me

Standing up for the infant in me
SubtleStuff said:
Day 4,

Very little driving my sister and mother around today. We seem to have settled into a routine where I drive, play calming music on the car CD player, they talk. Works for me!

I wrestled with my various approaches to healing today and was feeling somewhat desperate then relaxed into a meditative state while listening to a soothing music CD. I was reminded of some notes I took during Richard Schwartz's session in the Avaiya talks on Healing Childhood Trauma: I know that I often look for someone or some group of people who will "save" me from my pain. So far, it has never worked. I simply find I get rejected and/or the people leave and I end up feeling hurt or angry or both... again. This idea of having "me" the Self as the Redeemer is good. My therapist talked of reparenting myself (self as new mother i.e. redeemer). Richard Miller of iRest also mentions a core self being unwounded. I FEEL like an exile in so many ways. People who embrace me as I am including my need to be touched and held are very rare. I only have two: my primary therapist and an animal therapist I see occasionally. Sigh! Experimenting with iRest's welcoming of all sensations, emotions and thoughts seems to help. Now that I've given up on family as a safe place and have faced the pain of it all, I seem to be settling into a more meditative approach to healing. I hope it helps. I'm tired of suffering.

Cheers,

Garth
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Have you seen the butterfly hug on you tube I use that it helps me
We , ourselves are the redeemer we can rely upon is what I have come to realise and it's helped me as has meditation which I do daily now
I'm glad your boundaries are going well
Wishing peace in your healing
HL
 
Day 5 Last day!

This ended up being a much more challenging day. I guess I felt a false sense of safety after the success of the previous day and got into my "Nice Guy"/"Momma's Boy"/ "Sunshine Kid" routine. It seemed innocent enough. I simply got some tomatoes for my mother from my neighbour's garden (my mother loves garden fresh tomatoes) and a couple of classical Cds from the thrift store for my sister (she had commented quite enthusiastically how much she liked the music in my car) and gave it to them while driving them back from the beach. My gut got extremely tense. Digestion stopped (which triggers a survival fear in me), and my pulse rose by about 6 beats per minute. As I was trying to figure out what was going on my first impulse was a reaction to a new food. It's my standard go to reaction and rarely produces satisfactory results. I can juggle my diet forever and get nowhere. I stopped eating and focused on drinking water and resting. I did alot of self talk to my belly saying that I welcomed it's message and would love to know what it was attempting to communicate to me. I thanked it for communicating with me.

I survived getting my sister to the airport (I was worried about bowel movements at that time of day) and thanked my mother for her role in keeping my sister out of my personal health decisions once my sister was gone. Later on I did some left hand-right hand writing. I experimented with a kids' song CD I got from the library and it had a remarkably strong soothing effect on me. I realized that there was something about the playful innocence of these songs and the silly non-serious topics that lightened my mood and got me in touch with right brain thinking and out of trying to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it. My left hand/right hand writing resulted in my gut recommending that I sing along with the kids' songs and move my body to them! This pushes the shame/embarassment factor to maximum but I'm think I'll do what I can when I feel very safe and alone.

This morning I was thinking that my "Nice Guy"/Momma's Boy"/"Sunshine Kid" persona (my standard personality) was set up in very high stress situations and intense competition with my mother's emotional traumas, my brother and sister's needs, and my father. It was a competitive strategy set up in a situation where my needs weren't likely to be met if I didn't work really hard to make sure they got met. No wonder my gut finds it stressful. That's a big job for an infant. I was competing with 2 kids and 2 adult kids for a very limited source of maternal affection (survival need for an infant): an emotionally unstable woman (my mother) going through personally distressing high stress events regularly. What a mess!

So now I'm returning to focusing on nurturing myself and opening to the very few sources of effective support that I have available to me outside of myself. Family is essentially an emotional train wreck which I will stay as far away from as possible. It's been very hard to see this stuff because there was no substance abuse in our family nor physical violence (other than one instance where I was spanked by my mother for hitting her with a snowball by accident and the tricycle/broken arm incident with my sister). There was, however, a very strong connection to cultural norms that are very stressful and repressive (marriage and the isolated reproductive family (little effective contact with extended family and no "Village" of any consequence to my mother or myself)) and the psycho-emotional violence of Cold War military.

These days it's tricky for me to fully detach from my family since I'm so heavily tied to my mother for financial support. My fear of ending up completely isolated (effective local community support for me is extremely weak) compounds this challenge but I have found ways to respect my needs and confront my fear of being cut off when it arises. So far, she's stuck with her support of me.

Thanks for reading and allowing me to post here.

Cheers,

Garth
 
Hi Y'all,
SubtleStuff said:
I felt a false sense of safety after the success of the previous day and got into my "Nice Guy"/"Momma's Boy"/ "Sunshine Kid" routine.
Click to expand...
I'm wondering if this is a subtle addiction. At its root is avoiding the needs of my gut and nervous system and attempting to stay "high" on feelings this "Momma's Boy" routine can generate in its target audience. In the end, I always end up frustrated and hurt at a level of which I am usually barely aware. It fits with the Enneagram description of the 7 personality type which I fit well. Just pondering.

Cheers,

Garth
 
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