No I haven’t disappeared into oblivion. It’s classic isn’t it? Life gets in the way, or should I say, you let life get in the way, and the healing goes on hold.
I feel thoroughly ashamed. I feel like I’ve let myself down (and anyone reading this – sorry); I haven’t written for about 3 months and I promised myself I’d write every day – well, if not every day but at least a few times per week to chronicle my inner child healing journey, catalysed by an unceremonious cutting off/dumping by JKR, literally overnight, a friend who I loved like a sister, leaving me feeling suddenly bereft, aghast, heart-broken and dumbfounded, which coincided with my splitting up with my narc. Talk about kicking someone when they’re down.
Let me explain my absence as boring as it might be (yes there’s an excuse). Excuses are like arseholes – everyone’s got one and they all stink.
Here’s the stinky excuse: since I came back from a short holiday in August where I took myself away, (solace is golden post) all by myself (the best thing I’ve done in a very long time) which proves that I have the ability to thrive (and not just survive on my nerves), I decided that I want to change my life and get away from the city to the countryside. Something that is LONG overdue. I don’t like where I live and haven’t liked it for some time, Rather than thinking about it, you have to DO something about it. All the ‘signs’ were pointing to letting my house out rather than sell it. Pay attention to signs people!! So, I’ve been literally consumed with with that idea since early August, whilst trying to get enough money together to find somewhere else to live (which hasn’t happened yet as there’s still things to do to get my house rent-ready), and as a result living my life on Ebay and Gumtree.
On top of that, I’ve been consumed with legal issues and neighbourly issues which are also legal issues of kind (which are way too complicated to go into so I’m not going to). Not a discussion for this blog but it certainly pays to understand the legal system as a ‘lay’ person (I effing hate that derogatory term). So, being glued to my computer with these ‘pen-sword fights’ as I like to call them, which drains the hell out of you, the last thing I wanted to do was open the laptop and write a post (and all I wanted to do was veg out in front of the TV – and no I’m not a couch potato!)The fact is, I couldn’t find the feeling place as I’d stuffed the trauma away and pushed it down whilst wielding my pen sword. Plus, when you keep yourself distracted (like most people), it’s a great excuse that you “just don’t have time” or inclination to devote to your healing. In fact, when you’re too busy, you don’t even know that you have healing to do! It’s the way this fucked up society is intentionally structured – to keep you eternally busy on the hamster wheel of earning-to-pay-bills-and-to-buy-things so that you never get any time to heal inner emotional wounds, which, may I add, is the cause of illness and disease. I do believe that.
Anyway, I had a rude awakening a few days ago. I met up with a couple of acquaintances for dinner. One of them, let’s call her Little Pi, I haven’t seen for at least two years. So naturally there was a lot of to catching up to do. I told Little Pi about my prison-sentence of a relationship with the narc (there was an “I could have told you” waiting for me) and regaled her with some tales of unexpected narcissistic abuse. It’s strange how I’ve managed to fully let him go though. There’s no bad vibe towards him and he’s been forgiven of his sins.
But then I felt the niggling need to tell her about JKR even though she wasn’t really part of the story. I started to tell Little Pi how JKR dumped our friendship overnight without any warning after I’d asked her partner for some support with telling the the narc to back off (who was giving me a dose of post-break up narcy harassment). Suddenly, I felt the emotion about how she cut me off rise within me; like a tidal wave, there was no way of stopping this flood of emotion which took me by surprise. My words turned into incoherence and I couldn’t speak as the tears welled up in my eyes and rolled down my face one by one. The feeling of that overnight abandonment and cutting off was raw, like it happened yesterday. And I realised that my healing needs attention. It came knocking on the door with a very loud bang. I felt embarrassed and kept apologising for the tears – why do we apologise when we’re hurting and we cry in front of others? It’s nothing to apologise about. Little Pi was compassionate and empathised with my pain; Hard Heart (the other acquaintance) tried to change the subject nonchalantly, in a less than compassionate ‘just get on with it’ style (I could tell by the tone of her voice and the look on her face that I was being frivolous).
I know this stems from my childhood trauma as the cutting off/abandonment is an exact mirror of what happened when I was 12 (and I’m 48 at the time of writing). I read in a book about trauma that re-enactment of past trauma in adulthood is very typical: similar situations will continue to occur until the trauma is healed or should I say, until the trapped emotion is released. I have been reading “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel Van Der Kolk. Not an easy read but there are some gems in it. The re-enactment is from when I was 12 years old: following a few years of acrimonious family feuding between my mum and her sisters (my aunts), instigated by narcissistic hubris and gossip, my mum and I were abandoned surreptitiously and overnight by my aunts, my mum’s sister’s, whom we lived with, leaving in its wake an emotionally bereft, broken hearted and betrayed 12 year old and her mother. More seriously, we were fed to the wolves and left to perish at the mercy of the racist families who had victimised us since we moved there (which, may I add, did continue). Back then, it was okay to ‘paki bash’. We were subject to a campaign of systematic racial terror and abuse which had been going on since my mum was housed there, at the hands of families who lived just a few doors away.
I’m not going to go into the build up to the childhood trauma right now. There’s too much to say and you’ll be reading this post like an extended essay for a few days I’m sure lol! So it’s best if I dedicate a post (or two) about the wounded child, from my point of view, and the wounded adult who never got closure from the perpetrators 25 years later. It’s my truth you’ll get, the unreliable truth as some people call it…
If baring my soul to you (and the world) has moved or touched a part of you in any way, then your support would be very welcome. To help me on this healing journey, perhaps you’d like to buy me a coffee (although mines a tea) via the link below:
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