Starting Big

When you don’t know where to start … or when … sometimes you just have to dive right in. So that’s what I am doing. I am holding space for myself, it is a gentle and loving space where I am open, safe and protected. Because I am the adult in charge now. I’ve got this.

In my mind, self-care is intricately linked to self-love. And I haven’t always been connected to self-love. Sure, I have ‘loved’ my Spiritual self from within. But sometimes I wonder if this was how I managed to navigate through my life as ‘self-love’ was something that was missing for me. It was a band-aid for the lack of self-love that I did not develop for myself as a child.

I want to welcome you to this first blog post – I don’t know that I will ever get used to that term – ‘blog’. Because for me, for the first time in my 55+ years I have opened my heart and mind to myself and I’ve started writing. Really writing. Not the ‘journal writing’ that I have done my entire life – but really being extraordinarily truthful and vulnerable with myself. “Going there” for the first time if you like. I like to think of myself these days as ‘an intrepid explorer’.

I have allowed myself to travel within to secret places, hidden underneath other secret places. And perhaps I could never have ‘got here’ without my passion for scuba diving. Because the joy I feel when scuba diving is the same joy I feel when I find ‘pearls’ from within.

I have given myself full self expression. For the first time in my life. Without the fear of what ‘others might say’ or what ‘others might think’ or if others ‘think I’m crazy’. I have disentangled myself from the bondage of fear that has kept me locked in a prison of my own making.

A prison that I created as a way to keep myself safe as a child. Impenetrable walls that only I knew about. A fortress of hidden thoughts, feelings and repressed emotions. As a child, it was very rare that I would express my ‘true’ thoughts and feelings, as I never understood them myself and I was often misunderstood. And these misundertandings would be traumatic.

So I learned to be quiet and to go within. I created a rich inner world. Not a fantasy world, in fact fantasy life (other than an imaginary English Sheepdog named “boofa” that I kept under my bed) and going to sleep each night with a glow in the dark of the Disney ‘castle’ poster on my wall. Escapism into anything was something I found difficult. Except reading. I read early and I read a lot of books. They saved me in many ways. I loved learning and going to school but I was so desperately lonely and felt so alone and disconnected.

My inner world and my outer world were often at great odds. I tried to make sense of things that were actually non-sense. But I didn’t know that then. I had no idea of what I didn’t know. My response to childhood trauma was to personalise everything. It was always, in all ways, my fault.

My mother never wanted children. But of course, I didn’t know what those words actually meant when I was a child. I only knew how it felt to be the child of a mother who didn’t want children. And I believed her lie when she left me. She had to leave me and my brother because she was scared for her life.

So I developed a petrifying fear of my father. Because if he could make my own mother leave me, he might want to kill me too. That’s when I shut the gate. That’s when I ‘decided’ I wouldn’t let myself be hurt anymore. But that didn’t work out terribly well for me.

For over 42 years I believed that I was the problem. Because me, being the problem, maybe I could ‘control’ that. I would develop complex PTSD due to childhood trauma and go through life not knowing what I was missing out on. Because I had a ‘filter’ that I created to manage in my ‘child’ realm, and that filter, well it had the voice and emotional intelligence of a child.

So as I grew and developed, I learned new words, new ways of doing things, new skills and likes and dislikes. But I always considered everything through a very complex filter. What may be clear to some looked like a kaleidoscope of confusion to me. I didn’t know it then, but my biology had set off its own neurological reaction to trauma, and this, in addition to my thoughts, feelings and the voices that I would use to ‘talk to myself’, started a pattern within me that I was not able to really uncover until very recently. Even after 40 years of therapy!

PTSD does that to a woman. I had many ‘voices’ that I had split off within myself in order to handle my ‘life’ as I grew up. I stored things in parts of my body. Further trauma would just confirm my worst fears about myself. Certain self-belief’s were strengthened and they were faulty. And wrong, but I had no one telling me that. All I had was my inner voice on repeat telling me that “I’m wrong”.

I do remember being told when I was 6 by an adult that I had very low self esteem. I never knew what it meant, but I played that on repeat to myself until I was about 19. (When I was 19 I trained to be a LifeLine Counsellor) and that was when I realised that I didn’t actually have low self-esteem, I just had a really damaged way of looking at myself. And it would take me another 30 years to be able to truly face that.

So this is where I have chosen to start. You will see many blog posts (ugh, blog) where I say ‘this is where I am starting’. Because the second guessing, “the this, no not this, that, or, maybe this, or I don’t know, perhaps it’s all crazy and I truly am nuts” … this voice “the undecider / I must be crazy” voice is still very dominant when my PTSD is triggered. But I am the intrepid explorer now and I am discovering exactly what triggers my PTSD and why, and am investigating where things ‘come from’. It has been enlightening and illuminating, but most of all, incredibly healing.

I lived over 40 years looking at myself from the outside in. Trying to see me how other people saw me. An impossible task. I wanted people to like me, I wanted my mother to love me, to want me, to want to care for me. I was desperate for it. I remember seeing psychologists and them suggesting that perhaps my mother needed to come to therapy and I’d look at them as if they were crazy. She would hate that, she would never do that, don’t ask her to do that, I’ll never see her again. I protected her at all costs. At my own expense. This was my first experience of being in a relationship with a narcissist. As a child, I believed that if I could perhaps just ‘be different’ and adjust my behaviour then I could ‘make them’ love me, like me, understand me, want me, care for me, want to be with me. Unfortunately I lived this way for many years.

It was only yesterday when I added up the number of years I have spent ‘living with’ as in cohabitating with someone I have been ‘in a relationship’ with. In total, and this includes two engagements and a marriage, I have co-habitated with someone for a total of 5 years of all of my 55 years. In total. I developed a saying (as an adult) that perhaps I “am just not fit for ‘human consumption”. And because of my childhood feeling completely and totally alone, I never got to understand ‘lonely’ as I never truly established any real connection. I never learned how. As a teenager I thought I did, I had a best friend whom I adored and she and her family saved my life more than once. But my inner belief about myself never let me truly feel loved.

Some things were set in train for me, even before I was born.

I had no idea what I was coming into. None of us do. But I would come to see what I was ‘missing’. As I grew up I developed a fascination for other people’s families, because the way they ‘operated’ was so different to mine. They had so much fun and there was so much love and connection. It was all about being happy and harmonious. I was fascinated by that. I was blessed to go on ‘family’ holidays with my best friend’s family. It was like nothing I had ever experienced. But I wasn’t actually their family, and a family tragedy for them, would highlight this, for me and I would lose my relationship with them.

For over 40 years I would be angry that “I didn’t get that” family connection again. And I believed it was my fault that I didn’t get that. There was something intrinsically and inexplicably ‘wrong with me’.

I don’t write this for sympathy, I write this for background. Because from a psychological point of view, in Erik Erikson’s lifestages of development, when I go back and sit with ‘my child’ I see clearly how my environment informed my psychology, which influenced how I acted within my environment. My distorted view of the world held me hostage to fear, shame and silence. Making me an easy target for more abuse.

But I didn’t know that then. I have only come to know this now. And I am unpacking it through a lens of psycho dynamic social theory, psychology, biology and neuroscience. And in doing so, I have made sense of my world, using my adult language and words, my education, understanding and ‘grown up feelings’ and I have been able to heal my child, as ‘my adult’.

Don’t get me wrong, I still have PTSD, but how it shows up for me when I am triggered and how I handle it is brand new. It no longer runs my life. I run my life. I live with ‘overcoming PTSD’ rather than overwhelming PTSD. I have days where I feel I am finally FREE to be myself!

It’s this freedom you are reading.

I hope you enjoy this journey with me. It is very personal. It may provoke you. It may illicit mother urges in you and make you angry on behalf of the ‘little girl’ that can’t express herself. I get triggered writing about some of it sometimes as you will see.

And that’s part of my process of the Integrated Healing Method that I have devised for myself. I aim to write a book about this method that I am developing. I don’t say ‘developed’ as it seems to be absolutely dynamic.

Expressing myself with vulnerability and full expression, even when I get the words ‘wrong’, is important to me. I don’t go back and edit what I have written. In fact, I rarely read what I have written before. I am focusing on what is present to me, sitting here in the here and now, at my computer. Sometimes I find myself writing via notes on my phone, for what feels like hours.

I go on deep dives below the surface of my thoughts, feelings and emotions, as they arise. I call them ‘threads’ (those of you who have seen my art on Mystic Mermaid’s Facebook page will know that), I then come back up from my ‘dives’ with pearls attached to those threads. I’m diving for pearls.

Pearls of wisdom. And it is these that inform me of who I really am. This is where and how I have discovered my Self. Now. And it is this process that has me absolutely knowing with complete certainty that no matter ‘what happens’, I am now living my best life, right now, here. And I feel grateful and blessed.

So please know that when you feel moved to comment about something that has arisen in you from something I have written about myself or about my past, that it may actually be a reflection of your own experience. Our own ‘lived experience’ is the only ‘true’ measure we have to ‘test’ everything against. It is how we relate to other people. But please be mindful, you may also be triggered. I have joked quite openly that ‘my life’ needs to come with a ‘trigger warning’ these days.

But you can never really ‘know me’ from my inside, out. You can only know me from your inside. Just as I can never truly know another person from ‘their inside’. You can feel empathy and connection, love and joy with me and in unison with me, but we cannot ‘know’ it for each other.

I’m highly sensitive and this is highly personal. I only ask you that you be respectful because I am still that little girl inside ready to shut myself down at the first sign of fear. My flight response is to go within. I have suffered intense anxiety my entire life because of this ‘mechanism’. Yet in my writing I work very hard to overcome this, you will see me struggle with it sometimes.

I write until I feel free.

I am feeling it now.

Starting big.