by Charity
Today we stayed in bed much longer than we should have. In fact, we've done this every day this week. At times like this I feel disappointment with myself and even shame; I keep filling my mind with shoulds, and I feel like I can never live up to The Way I'm Supposed To Be.
I can see our T challenging my thought process right now. :-/ I'm very resistant. I don't feel safe; I'm often a jumble of the adult me and a traumatized child me, and I haven't found a way to....manage my psycho-emotional well-being effectively.
Today would have been just another marathon of Mary spending hours patiently trying to guide me to a point where I could act from strength, and me resisting her efforts with all my age-jumbled being. But I realized something that ended up helping me.
Over the past several months I've realized that I have emotional memories that date back to infancy. In fact, I'll even go as far as to say I have emotional memories from the womb. And it doesn't matter if anyone else doesn't believe that this is valid. To the trolls and haters, I say: You're not living my life.
A lot of my resistance to healing revolves around what I perceive as my comfort zone or my "safe" zone. Ever since I've been thinking about this womb scenario, I've always believed that I felt safe there. After all, what followed was nightmarish: I'm yanked out of a warm hiding place, smacked on the bottom, and made to cry. And it never got any better than this.
So the womb had to be my safe place, the only place I ever want to be. Nothing else except death could make me feel safer. But during today's marathon I realized that I didn't really feel safe in the womb, at least not as safe as I thought. I've already realized that I have emotional memories of being present when our grandmother intimidated our mother, which was any time the two of them were together. I absorbed this dynamic from infancy and was helpless to do anything about it, and this emotional memory has stayed with me ever since.
Well, if I could absorb our mother's fear of my grandmother, wouldn't it be possible that I absorbed the fear and anxiety that our mother had during her pregnancy? I believe that I could and did. Even if our mother wasn't aware of how afraid and anxious she was, I knew. I knew because I felt it.
This realization was what gave me the strength to get out of bed this afternoon. I've had my fearful moments between then and now, but I know that it also gives me strength to write about all of this. It's something to acknowledge and hold onto, even if it doesn't seem like much. It is much, and I can build upon it.
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