My raw story.
Every pain has a story. A story of survival, a story of strength, hope, grappling with what at the time seemed insurmountable. Yet, here you are. Beyond our flesh, beyond our smiles and endeavours to look happy and fulfilled, we all carry a heavy stone. We secretly wish that somebody would see it and would tell us we are perfect and lovable just as we are. We secretly want to not be ashamed and feel less because of the wounds that weigh so heavy on our souls. But we are too scared, too fearful to show up WITH the parts in us that hurt so badly and so nobody gets to see them and then what this does is reinforcing the narrative in our head "The entirety of me is unlovable. I am loved only when I show what is approved of me and I am only loved for the light in me, and not for the dark as well. Only half of me is loved and only half I can safely show to the world". This narrative,this story of us being defective in some way, starts in childhood.
I will give you my childhood story briefly so that I can illustrate and make a point as to how traumas and wounds in our childhood haunt us into our adulthood. I am a recovering codependent. My family is dysfunctional as any family where a codependency type of relationship is nurtured. My father was absent mentally and emotionally from my upbringing, my mother was overinvolved. She overcompensated for my father's absence and disinterest. When I was a child, she used punishments like time out, silence treatment, she slapped me and shamed me, locked me in the pantry and blew up at me for anything that I did that was not in accordance with what she expected of me. I hated her. But i depended on her.
My father used to pass me by like I did not even exist, he didn't even say hello to me. He was self absorbed to the point where he looked like he was in a trance. I was so controlled that I never got to decide what clothes to wear, what color to like, what to believe in, what words to use or how to behave in front of people. Everything was controlled by my mother and if I dared to show any resistance, she took care of it by punishing me. She withdrew love from me and abandoned me emotionally. Both my parents abandoned me emotionally. She taught me to reject anything about myself, not trust myself, but her. And so little by little I understood that the only way to please her and get love from her was if I abandoned and betrayed myself. If I was happy, it was unsafe and alone.
It didn't matter if I suffered as long as she was happy and her needs were met. Slowly but surely, I stopped putting up resistance because the more I struggled to have my needs met, the angrier and crueler she became. My mother felt unsafe and unreliable. All she wanted was a doll, an emotionless robot that listened to her and lived on her terms. I started shutting down the more I was rejected for my authenticity. I was a child and I started dying inside. I knew I would never be happy because I wasn't allowed to be happy on my own terms. And so I gave up on myself. At least I had peace when I was miserable. She would only stop criticizing me when she broke my will and I did what and how she wanted.
Anytime I close my eyes now I see this little girl with whe head down, alone, shut down, bearing a heart rending grief. I never knew what was so bad, so wrong about my authenticity that she had to forcibly shut my true self down. I became her little extension because it was safe to be that way. I cast off anything that was authentically mine and take on what she approved of. And so my biggest wound was created by my abandonment trauma. I abandoned myself as I was being abandoned. I abandoned myself because I was made to feel inadequate, wrong and defective for who I authentcally was and as I child, in order ro survive- because our brain literally registers the loss/withdrawal of love of our caregivers as our lives being threatened because we depend on them - I had to reject and shut down into my subconsious any traits that my mom disapproved of. For instance, my need for autonomy and the courage to speak up when I had a different opinion or even to defend myself were put to "sleep".
This fragmentation happens in our consciousness and is considered highly necessary by our being in order to lead a safe life. And so, what is unwanted and considered bad in you is pushed away from the light of your consciousness and into the subconscious so nobody ever sees it. It's like storing parts of your being in the „basement”. We don't cram into the darkness of our subconscious only traits and aspects in us that are deemed as unlovable, we also store the excruciating pain of the traumas that we were put through and that we found no resolve to because we didn't have the means or the tools to process that agonizing hurt. Our consciousness, our being splits into conscious (what is desired in us, the chosen self, the ego or the personality, what is liked and approved of in us) and the unconscious (the unlovable, ugly, hurt parts in us, the shadows, the disowned self - how I call it -). This tear takes place when anything and everything that is bad and painful and not processed happens to us. We reject and deny having to consciously deal with what is stored in the "basement".
However, just because you don't feel or see those traits that you rejected it doesn't mean they are not there. Au contraire, they are governing your life from the shadows because the subconscious runs 95% of your waking life without you even knowing it.
Now lets fast forward to my adult life. In all my relationships, I merged with the other person at the expense of who I was. I liked what they liked and whenever I had an opinion that differed from theirs and they slightly did not agree with it, I panicked. I immediately envisioned them abandoning me, reinforcing my belief that I was rotten at the core. I was a match to people who emotionally neglected me just like my mom and my dad used to do. My brain was looking for the familiar as it wanted me to resolve the unresolved hurt that was crammed in my subconscious. The universe put me in situations and in relationships where it wanted me to finally see that I needed to take out the pain from the basement and bring it into the light. The universe wanted me to integrate the cast off parts in me and the painful aspects in me so that I can become whole again. But i didn't see it that way back then. Anytime I changed my partner, the same pattern was simply recycled and played in a loop. It all grew in intensity until my previous relationship that was the most abusive one I ever had. I was battered, emotionally abused, cheated on, abandoned. And I stayed. I stayed because in my childhood I learned never to speak up when it hurt and when something was unfair, to always think the other person is the one giving me the worth and the value. I used to come back to him over and over again. Subconsciously I did not think I deserve any better. I did not think I was allowed to stick up for myself. I could not dream of leaving him because that would mean being alone. And I feared aloneness more than death. Because at one point in my childhood it meant the same thing. And this over the top abusive relationship brought me to my spiritual awakening in 2018. It was when I was pushed over the edge and for the first time in my life, I had to be alone. I had to face the darkest and deepest fears in my life. When I remained alone, no relationships, no friendships, nothing that would mold my views on the world, I realised I was nothing. I was nothing, I liked nothing and everything about my being felt like an immense white desert. All my life I was trained to abandon myself and merge with anyone who showed me the least amount of affection. My mom trained me to not know myself and to go as far away as humanly possible from my core, my intuition, my self and my truth. And so I did. I had no clue who I was, what colors I liked, what clothes I truly wanted to wear in the absence of someone else telling me what is right for me. This WAS my original trauma. It mirrored perfectly into all of my relationships. It was played out over and over again before my eyes until I was ready to see it. To be honest, the process of reclaiming the disowned parts in me was so agonizingly painful. I had to face all my so called demons (which are just the hurt aspects in us) for the first time in my life. Everything that was deemed unlovable about me in my childhood and sent into the darkness of my subconscious mind I had to bring into the light of my consciousness. But it's a process, obviously, I'm still uncovering my authenticity.
To wrap it up, as I said in the beginning, we desperately want for someone to take us as we are. We want to be seen whole and accepted as whole, we want what is deemed unlovable about us to be loved. Not despite it, but with it. We want to feel safe showing our wounds and showing what has made us split our consciousness. But what we first need to do is see this about ourselves in ourselves. We need to look at ourselves and see our wholeness. We need to allow ourselves to grief the pain and the inner separation that happened during the traumatizing events that scarred us. We need to see the original trauma, the root cause of all the pain in our adult life. The universe will never fail at putting us in the right place at the right time with the right people to mirror back the pain we have denied to see a long time ago. The universe wants us whole and that is why it is doing what it is doing. Not out of the need for vengeance. It is not spiteful. It wants us to stop abandoning ourselves and look at ourselves as we are completely. Not half beings that smile when they hurt. Not beings that think they have been born to suffer and too deny what is truthful in their heart. The people in our life will never fail at showing us where our deepest and most hidden pain lies, the pain of having disowned parts in us for the sake of belonging in the society, the pain of traumas that happened to us and we had no means to explain it to ourselves why and so we just denied they ever happened. The question you need to ask yourself now is: Am I willing to be vulnerable and admit to where it hurts so that I can become whole again or am I going to continue living my life as if nothing bad ever hurt me? You choose. And it is never easy to choose your wholeness. The pain in your life right now is a match to a deeper pain you once had to - for your survival- deny and suppress. That always and without exception means looking at and embracing the parts you have once disowned. The disowned self. There is nothing unlovable about it. But that is for you to see for yourself if you decide to.
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