I have learned a lot about why I so often feel like I am walking a tight-rope between sanity and insanity. I recently watched "The Wisdom of Trauma" and Dr. Gabor Mate says in the documentary that many of us have a tendency to react to the present as if we were experiencing the past. Everything we see, we see through the lens of our past pain and this means we constantly struggle to be present. Along with the book, The Soul of Prosperity, written by Rev. Jim Webb, I have also been reading Never Broken by the Alaskan singer-song writer, Jewel and Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder, by Gabor Mate. Today, I'll just briefly talk about Never Broken.
In Jewel's book she says that at some point on her journey she realized she had to re-parent or re-nurture herself... There's a whole lot of truth to that, but I have currently been parenting myself as reluctantly, and in some ways as savagely, as my own biological parents tried to raise us. By the time we left our biological parents we had already begun to carry our own bullies in our heads. We didn't need anyone else to berate us for not being good enough or for being overly emotional. My siblings and I have carried with us, to this day, an internal monologue that mirrors what our biological parents said to us...even though we can't remember their words, the emotional impact of our own words have been just as wounding as theirs.
So not only did I become my own worst enemy, but once my life was good, I didn't want to grow up. So here I am now, the reluctant parent. In many ways I feel like I'm looking at life through the lens of my 8 year old self. I didn't want to grow up and now I'm experiencing all the reasons why. The responsibility of finding a place to live and searching for a new job that you pray you won't hate... I never wanted any part of the grown-up world, let alone re-parenting myself. In order to re-parent myself well, I need to learn to love myself unconditionally, which feels like a tall order.
