Finding healing through telling my story

I would explain the journey to consciousness and self awareness as a process of getting all the "gunk" out. As adults, all of ones childhood traumas and emotional baggage that we carry seems to come to the fore at some stage in our lives, so that we can work through it and let it go. Some of us go through it in our twenties or thirties and others later on and this is what people call the "Mid Life Crisis''. Where we begin to question everything about life and who we are.

This ''gunk'' as I would like to call it comes in batches. Sometimes it’s not so big, sometimes it’s enormous and other times, it feels life threatening and you are left wondering if you will ever be able to move past it. We are then faced with two options, we can explore it or put it on the shelf. The second option works, for a while, but unfortunately the issue just comes back.

We all have our story but we often to ashamed to talk about our pasts or we think that because it's in the past then its best left there. But this is similar to keeping a secret , it can eat us up even if we are not aware of it. So I have decided to share something about myself, about my past because I have carried the shame for far too long now and it is time to acknowledge it and hopefully finally move on from it. 

One of the most painful processes and difficult issues in my life is that I have always felt that I have to give of myself in order to receive. Even when I feel that I have nothing left to give I will find it somewhere within me for the other. I do this so that I feel deserving enough for others to give to me. And even then I don't feel deserving.

Growing up was just like this. My parents were not givers of the emotional or supportive kind. They gave me an education yes, and good sound advice, yes, but a child does not feel love and support from a good education or advice of any kind.

So I learnt quickly that to get the emotional support I needed, I needed to be supportive, Psychology refers to this as 'Parentified Children'. I took it upon myself to be there for my parents so that maybe then they would be there for me. I was like a 7 year old therapist. The only problem was that as a child I had nothing to give but somehow still managed to give all of me. It then became apparent that the need to feel support and love from my parents was selfish of me, because if they were not giving it to me, then it must be my fault for wanting it because it’s unnatural to want something that felt so natural to want, to need. So that's when I became the rescuer, the giver, the person my parents could depend on.

I don't ever remember feeling happy as a child. I felt burdened constantly from the responsibility I felt towards my parents. I always felt different from the children at school. They always looked so happy and care free but I was carrying around a secret.

I was trying to save my Father from his drug addiction and trying to be there for my Mother who was slowly falling apart. I used to watch her flush his pills down the toilet in desperation. But because my parents were both Doctors,  he literally had pills on tap. My parents got divorced eventually because after 4 rehab clinics my Father didn't get better, he just got worse. He moved 2 hours away from my sister's and I and we would only see him during the school holidays and that is if he remembered to pick us up.

There are things that will always haunt us, memories that become in grained. For me, and possibly the most terrifying thing I ever saw as a child was waking up one morning to find drops of blood on the carpet in our passage, I remember thinking it looked like someone had spilt paint. The night before my Father in desperation had broken into my mother’s medicine cupboard and injected himself with whatever he could find. I remember wondering why he needed to do that, wasn’t I enough. Wasn’t I enough to make him happy?

Or the day that he collected us to take us back to his house and he had to keep stopping the car so he could vomit. I knew the cause was that he had taken too many pills again. There was a mixture of fear for my life and the responsibility I felt towards my sisters. They needed protection and I had to be the one to protect them, but I just didn't know how, because I also needed protecting.

His behaviour just got worse each time we went to visit him, to the point where he would buy my 5 year old sister at the time, a six pack of ciders, or he would let me drive at the age of 12. I thought he was the best Father, the cool parent but at the same time I was terribly worried. Worried about him, and worried about my sisters.  Each and every time I would leave to go back to my Mom’s, he would tell me that he is going to be so lonely again and that used to send me off the rails. I would cry for days after the visit because I felt so guilty for leaving because he was going to be lonely and I had to save him. I would beg my Mother to go and live with him. My Mother always said she dreaded the day I would return home from visiting him because it would take me weeks to recover. I would literally go into a depression. I missed him so badly and I yearned for him every day but above all, I wanted to be there for him, I was his knight in shining armour. I was the one that was going save him from himself. Living with my Mother was no better. I felt that I had to be her confidant. I would listen to her vent about her financial worries and her marriage to my step father that was going down the tubes. I wondered why I wasn’t good enough for my parents to ask me how I am once in a while or check on me.

 The rescuer and people pleasing role I fell into began to filter into my friendships, and I attracted friends who needed fixing, just like my Father. But I was ok with it and when I felt like I helped them, the void inside me would be filled for a certain period of time, like a temporary high. I began to live for those moments and now I look back and wonder how I had the energy to do it. I had nothing to give but still gave everything I had. When you have nothing to give and you are not really giving or helping anyone. A shell of a person cannot give to others.

 I was never able to fix my Father and that has always been extremely painful for me. He eventually died, which made my mission to fix all the people in the world even more important. But it didn’t work and I am left feeling chronically fatigued in every sense of the word. And the question I have been asking myself lately is “who am I if I have nothing to give and who will love me now?”  This dysfunctional pattern in my life has led to on going health issues and various Doctor's diagnosis. This seems to have had the same impact on physically as it has emotionally.

 The painful reality that I had to come to terms with was that rescuing my parents didn’t make them love me more; it just made them more dependent on me when I should have been the one depending on them.

 Not a day goes by where I don’t yearn for the parents I always longed for, for the love and support I desperately needed. I often wish I could start again, go back to being a child but this time my parents would be different and that void I wake up every day with would be filled.

Getting rid of the heart ache and the baggage is helping me to see that it's ok to start being myself. From a young age I could see things and understand things about people that I never shared with anyone else. I knew things about someone just by looking at them. Back then I was perceived as quiet and shy and it was because I was listening to what I heard in my head. I spent forever wondering why I knew these things and how I knew that things would happen ,before they did. I knew that I was different, different from everyone else around me. Psychic? Maybe. Ill just call it intuitive. But I completely shut this side of me off because I so badly wanted to fit in and be “normal”.

 Perhaps it’s time to be myself and not feel ashamed of it, to give, myself permission to live my life for me and no one else. But also it's time to move beyond the story because who I am is not what happened to me.

Through this journey I have realised that having a baby would have been a perfect distraction to all of this. I would have been able to once again focus on something else, or rather someone else and not myself. But it did not happen that way... So now its almost like I am have to put myself back together and be the parent that I never had, to myself. To take a leap, move beyond fear and be fully who I am without shame or guilt.

 Just another step towards the beginning of this new path my life is moving towards.