Wed. 12/23/20
Welcome delightful person! I hope you’re feeling at least o.k. about yourself today. After all, you are intrinsically so much more than that, you know?
Last week I wrote about having an emotional epiphany while learning to believe that my Heavenly Father really does love ME, too. Been working on making that a more consistent thought and belief. A couple days after the initial revelation the random thought, “My Father loves me!” popped up. (I was referring to my Highest Power, not earthly.) It was so funny because without thinking about it, I immediately stood taller and there was a lighter sense of being, I guess is how to describe it. Does that make sense? Never realized how not feeling valued by ‘they-who-procreated-me’ effected how I faced the world. I always figured it was the actual abuse that kinda kept me in a ‘how invisible can I make myself?’ state of mind. (What’s ironic is that putting on extra weight has helped to achieve that invisibility, but more on that later.)
One of the harder aspects to accept of emotional healing is that it’s never a straight upward trajectory. There are times when I feel as if I’m slipping backwards even after a major breakthrough like the one just mentioned. There’s an initial ‘honeymoon’ phase where I think, “YES! I AM HEALED! How wonderful it is!!” and I wallow in that sense of power, gratitude and ‘woo-hoo-ness’ for as long as possible. I eat healthier, cope with life better, keep somewhat of a set schedule, do the things on a daily basis that I love to do like practicing guitar, etc.. But then sleep starts to become more elusive, doing anything consistently doesn’t seem to be an option (something else to work on), dreams start implying there’s more to delve into, and that old uncomfortable awareness of ‘crap, there’s more to do’ starts creeping in. I try to deny and then avoid it for a while by eating, reading, ‘vegging out’ too much, and isolating.
Since the beginning of this journey I’ve heard repeatedly that recovery is like an onion. We have to keep peeling away the stinky, tear inducing layers if we want to get to the core of the pain and heal it. Have you heard that? It’s a cliche for a reason, but honestly, I’ve started telling (or whining at . . .:) ) my therapist, “This HAS to end sometime soon because I’m really not all that deep.”
There are a few reasons why an amazing breakthrough isn’t necessarily the end of an issue and I understand why this time. One of the major ones is because when believing I was nothing more than a piece of dirt, then on a conscious level I couldn’t get too upset about being abused so horribly because of feeling it’s what I deserved. But as I’m gaining a stronger sense of who I truly am, A.K.A. ‘Valuable’ (Like You) and Worthy of Being Treated with Love and Decency (Like You Are), then all the hidden anger and grief in all their forms start pushing up. I keep realizing on deeper levels that what was done was tremendously wrong and I never deserved it. So I ‘get to’ deal with the deeper senses of pain, degradation, abandonment, rejection . . . (yay?)
As I keep reiterating throughout this blog, the work isn’t easy, but Oh My God, the results are so amazing. A night or two after the “my Heavenly Father loves ME too” epiphany, I had a dream where there was perhaps a twenty acre sized freshly made and cultivated hollow in the ground with no vegetation immediately around it. While looking at it I kept thinking, ‘it’s not the Grand Canyon’ (which is exponentially deeper, larger, and with beautiful scenery, rivers, plant and animal life). It took a couple of days to understand there were several valid interpretations to this part. The most revealing one is it’s about my increasing capacity to love and care for others, allowing them to care about me, and how much beauty and vibrancy that’s adding to my life, heart and spirit. (Grand Canyon = my awareness that there is so much more depth to life and I now know I’m not there yet, but am working towards it). I learned this when I was praying for some friends and Great Guy. I never knew how little I had been previously capable of feeling for these people until I actually felt the depth and breadth of care and concern I had for them in that moment. I’ll be honest, it was kinda terrifying with the vulnerability and lack of control that implies (more on this later). There are also no guarantees they could feel the same about me, and I still struggle with doubts I can be anything more than disposable to any mortal. But a belief that is growing as I am doing this work is, I’d much rather learn to genuinely LOVE people and run the risk of it not being reciprocated than to live with the numbness and then the hollow, empty feelings I had for the previous decades of life.
I am so grateful we have what it takes to do this work, we are so worth the effort and results!
Thank you to the people who put up with (and forgive) me in spite of all the missteps I make on this awesome journey. You help me to see the beauty of humanity and to understand grace and mercy.
Looking forward to spending a little time with you on Friday!
In keeping with the season my spiritual beliefs acknowledge, here’s another Trans-Siberian Orchestra (TSO) song. This is one is their version of “O Come All Ye Faithful”.
