Sorry to barge in. Have to just debrief a bit for myself. Had two therapy sessions within 5 days last week, both 2 and a half hour ones, and some really deep stuff is moving and coming to the surface. I am going back to the place that people have talked on here about before - the place where as a child you feel that to not have your parents' love will lead to your annihilation. Well, you don't feel it as a child, because you have to coat it in denial, but it is there - this primal terror.
I am "making contact" with the child I was who was so, so, so, so desperate for mummy's love, who felt that her life depended on mummy loving her. Genuinely. And I think that's really true, in a physical and emotional sense. I could not be sure of my survival if my mother didn't care for me. And on a fundamental level - emotionally - she didn't care about me. So my life was lived in terror. A visceral, primal fear of death, that was heightened by the fact I grew up knowing I'd had a sister who had died - so it was literally possible to be a child in our family and not to survive, physically - and also I grew up having asthma, which is a life-threatening condition. What can be more frightening than not being able to breathe? Literally not being able to draw breath into your lungs? How long can you survive without breathing? A few minutes at most. So every time I went through an attack I must have felt that I was potentially only minutes away from death, for all the endless hours those attacks went on for.
And the fear was always there even on the other days when I didn't have an attack. I had to take my inhaler every day, and I could never leave the house without it, not even to go out to play for 10 mins. The possibility of the attack that could possibly kill me was ALWAYS there, every waking moment - and when I slept too, really. And this was something in my own body. Not an external thing, but something deep in me, something tied to me forever, it seemed like, so there was no escape from it, no refuge. No place of safety at all.
Like I said, as a child I couldn't actually feel this fear, because of course the very lack of safety made it impossible for these feelings to be allowed to surface - I would have gone completely crazy if I'd been aware at that age of the extent of my feeling of unsafety, with no hope of any rescue or remedy; and the fact that there was not one single person in the family or outside it who was in any sense an ally or on my side made it even more unsafe and impossible to feel it. But now as an adult, with a life that is finally coming together, I have the safety. I have two adults in my life who care for me very very deeply and who see and know the real me and love that person - DH and my therapist. After two decades of my adult life spent living on the margins of society, I now have a "normal" life - marriage and motherhood, a stable home, a degree of financial security, friends; I have a place in the world finally. And, strangely, I have a very deep belief in myself - which somehow they never completely eradicated - I wouldn't be here today without that.
So I am finally starting to feel safe and I can now connect on a deeper level with the child whose feelings were buried for all that time, and I can finally feel what she felt but couldn't feel. I actually find this very exciting. I feel like I am owning a part of myeslf that was divorced from me; I am honouring the person I was who was so badly mistreated and misrepresented and left to suffer like a dog in a ditch; I am acting as my own champion, and I am allowing the truth to be told. You know, when I write this stuff, I still have a voice mocking me - that internalised parent/big brother who laughs at everything I do and sets out to crush any act of independence - but it's not as strong as the voice of my self belief so I'm sodding well writing it anyway.
None of this stuff is brand new for me, it's the old "layers of the onion" thing - a new, deeper level of the same old issues; a heightened awareness of things I was sort of aware of already. To those of you who haven't been doing therapy and so on for so long and who are dreading the journey ahead I just want to say - if I can without sounding pompous - that there is or there can be a great happiness in committing to the work as an ongoing thing. The more work I do, the better my life gets, and the greater my self respect grows, and the more I feel "on my own side". Why would I want to stop that process? But maybe I am a little unusual like that - my therapist has said that most of her clients stop going to her once the main thing they wanted to "fix" is fixed and that I am unusual in wanting to keep on going even now I've achieved what I originally wanted out of therapy - ie to have a normal life, to be a wife and mum.
But it's also about wanting to be the best mum I can be, and since having DS I've had even more demons come out to bite me; I don't want him to bear the brunt of that, and he will (and already has done) if I don't work at resolving things, so to me it seems clear cut: I keep working at this stuff. For my own happiness too, of course. It's hard and it takes a lot of energy but the rewards are incontesable, and the really hard stuff, to my mind, is living with the abuse and the effects of the abuse - and living with the big fat lie about it never having really happened. "but it wasn't that bad", "but we didn't mean to hurt you", "but I do love you" are all things I couldn't stand to hear my mother saying any more. Yes, it was that bad - actually it was worse - and the truth is you didn't actually care enough to stop it being that bad, and you still don't; and your "love" is entirely conditional and lacking in any protective force, and therefore meaningless. You are all still in stonkingly big denial about what really happened, who you are and who I am, and I need space from you to sort my own head out without your crazy-making lies getting in the way all the time. That's what I would say to them if there was any chance whatsover they'd listen to me; naturally they wouldn't.
BA, I loved what you wrote about your DH having instuctions to shred correspondence from your mother without even reading it or telling you. Brilliant! Can't do that myself (yet) but good to know someone can. After I sent my mother's last letter and cheque back to her, ripped up, I thought it might silence her, but no, yesterday her xmas card arrived to me and DH. So I did some work on the feelings it brought up and got all that stuff about the fear of dying if she didn't love me. It's still sitting unopened on the table. Anyway, it's good to realise that that's why part of me clings to the (unreal) possibility that she will write a real "I get it" letter one day; it's the child that needs to believe in her love or stare death in the face. Quite a potent force.
Pinky, just a word to you, because I don't think you have any idea how you come across. well, to me anyway - you seem just so sweet and caring and lovable. And the only reason you wouldn't know that or feel that about yourself is because your family did some truly horrible things to you. I often feel very protective of you when I read what you write; maybe you bring up similar stuff for me as in the child always afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing and upsetting other people, and the dread of the consequences of that.
And as usual I can relate to loads of other stuff on here too. Thanks as always for sharing, everybody. Big hugs to all you great gals on here. xx