A mother’s love – Part 3

Hello again fellow journeyer.

As I start my writing today, I find myself wondering how you are, as you meet me on this page and how my words may land with you today.

I am currently sat in my back garden, having constructed a cobbled together laptop shade from my laundry basket, so I can sit outside and enjoy the sunshine, the bountiful green, and the birdsong as I put fingers to keyboard to tell this next part of my story.

I feel, as I am reaching the end of my forty-sixth year on this amazing earth, that although my life is far from being uncomplicated and stress free, I have a much better understanding of myself these days and am able to direct for myself a life that I feel is worth living; well, as much as any of us can.  And me taking time to set up a temporary garden office is a version of me recognising and meeting my own needs.  I am always much calmer and able to think more clearly when I am held by the earth and the sky.   I’m not perfect, but neither do I strive to be.  I have grown to like and really appreciate some messiness in life, it keeps things interesting and keeps me from stagnating, but I try where I can to offer myself something different to what I was accustomed to in my earlier life.

I haven’t always understood myself well. I used to feel very much like life happened to me and that my job was really just to react to my circumstances, rather than being able to have an influence on how they unfolded in the first place.  I didn’t know that some of my beliefs about the world and the way that it works were helping to keep me stuck in this perpetual fire-fighting experience and neither did I realise that some of my behaviour was totally at odds with attaining the experiences I wanted to have.

I don’t want to go back to those days, but I will say that they have equipped me to be highly resilient, hugely creative and bloody brilliant in a crisis, so I am not bemoaning my past. I’m more giving a gentle nod to the me of old and sending her a little gratitude for helping me to get where I am today and also acknowledging that she still lives within me, and at times she can make things painfully awkward for me when she steps in to manage things.

When I talk about this stuff with people, sharing honestly the details of how I used to be in the world, many people can’t quite believe it.  They don’t understand how the person who stands before them today could be the teenager and young adult that was referred to at times as feral, hostile, aggressive and explosive.  I am often asked “How did you move from being the person you wouldn’t want to meet down a dark alley (it’s depressing how many times this was said about me), to being a loving, considerate, generous and responsible middle aged woman?”  And my answer is always that I think I was always all of the things I am today, I was just too scared and defended to actually show that to people fully.

Looking back from my current vantage point, I can see that gaining new insight has always been at the spearhead of any change which I have purposefully brought about in my world.  Without insight, I would have been totally blind and set to repeat the same old patterns again and again, add infinitum.

When I think about my own story, and that of many other people who I work with, this new insight can often arrive in front of you much later than you would think is normal.

For me, new insight started with recognising that my family setup maybe wasn’t quite what I thought it was, and that maybe my experiences in childhood weren’t quite as usual as I had once believed.  I was thirty-three!

Knowing what I know now, I look back and think, how is it that I couldn’t see what was happening around me?  But that would be like asking a goldfish who has spent it’s whole life swimming around and around the same fishbowl “How is the water?”  I suspect the answer would be, “What water?”  When you’re in it, it can be really hard to see it, which is why experiences which hold up a mirror to us and purposefully seeking support to reflect with someone can be so beneficial.

So this is how I found myself having a revelation about the way the world is in my mid-thirties, which at the time felt rather late in life.  When I say I was thirty-three, what I mean is that, at this age, I had a stand out experience which really made me look at my history through a different lens.  In this case, the lens was the eyes of around twenty observers.  I think before that, I was aware that something was off, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

I was in Lancaster for a weekend of shamanic training.  It was an assessment weekend and I had agreed to be someone’s client for a live piece of observed therapy work that was to form part of their assessment.

In order to prep the practitioner, I was required to create a document that detailed what I wanted to work on and a brief life-history which listed any significant events (good and bad) that I believed had had an impact on shaping my life to date.

In this, I documented that other than my slightly traumatic first few weeks of existence, my life up until the age of fourteen was relatively normal and uneventful and that my childhood had been pretty run of the mill, but that I thought severe bullying in school at age fourteen, grooming and sexual assault at age fifteen, and being in a relationship with an alcoholic, violent man, eight years my senior from age sixteen (including having a baby with him at age seventeen) were probably the most significant influences in shaping the struggles I was having today.

It was a bit of a surprise then, that when we launched into the therapy session, the practitioner really wanted to focus on my life pre-thirteen.  She wanted to hear about my relationship with my parents, so I told her that things with my mum had always been strained, but that was because she found it difficult to bond with me as a baby, figuring this might help her make sense of things.

This appeared to not be enough.

“How’s your relationship with dad?” she wanted to know.

“Yeah great!” I said, “Me and my Dad get on much better. I mean he’s understandably a little disappointed in me, but we have a fab relationship none the less.”

“How do you know he’s disappointed with you?” she probed.

“Well, at their recent fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration, my Dad wanted to introduce me to a couple of my parent’s friends who I had never met, and he said “This is my youngest daughter Rachel, this is the one that disappointed us.”

The practitioner, my friend Sue, was doing such a brilliant job of our session and had made me feel so comfortable and welcome, that to this point I had pretty much forgotten that there was a room full of people watching all of this unfold because it was her assessment.

I got a wakeup call when an audible gasp rippled around the room.

This was long before my mother’s drunken confessions of having never wanted me around, so lord knows what the impact would have been on the audience had I chosen to lead with that little nugget, but this seemed to be having a massive impact on people and I couldn’t understand why.

I was the fish in the fishbowl.  Because I had spent my whole life believing that I was the one who was wrong, flawed in my very make-up, it never occurred to me that what my dad had said about me to his friends was actually really f*cking hurtful.  I couldn’t understand why people were shocked.

However, the seal on the lid of Pandora’s box now having been firmly cracked and the top set askew, we delved further, shining a light onto the web that I grew up in and gently unpicking the threads so we could examine them one by one.

I will be forever grateful to Sue for this session. She gently and compassionately lent me her eyes as an observer of my upbringing and allowed me to see things from a whole new perspective. This pivotal experience was the foundation for everything that has come since.

In some senses, I was right when I said that my childhood was relatively good and uneventful, at least if the benchmark for a bad childhood is extreme poverty, or some of the horrific cases of abuse that you read about in the media these days.  I wasn’t a battered child within the context of growing up in the 1980’s (although with the knowledge I have now, there were some decidedly dodgy things which went on that would be considered a different type of abuse), I was fed, I was clothed, I was educated and I was given access to some positive life shaping experiences, all facilitated by my parents. But when it came to attending to any of my emotional needs, my childhood was seriously lacking.  I grew up with a mother who didn’t hide the fact that she didn’t like me, and a Dad whose solution to this issue was to tell me “You’ll just not have to mind your Mam”.

They were then surprised that my experience of living in a pretty hostile environment, where the rules changed on a whim depending on my mother’s mood, and I was virtually always in the wrong, led me to act out in certain ways, because I was scared and defensive.

They had no sense that their treatment of me might have led me to put myself in certain situations that were less than ideal, because they felt so familiar to me.  And my Dad certainly wasn’t considering that he might have had any role to play (no matter how small) in me doing the things that led to his disappointment.

No, I was a bad seed and all that had transpired was my responsibility, in my parent’s eyes anyway. But this exploration with Sue helped me to start loosening the grip of this narrative on me and see things more clearly.  It helped me realise that really I had been looking for some kind of magic pill to change who I was, when in actual fact what I needed was a clearer view of the damage I had endured in order to start healing. You can’t fix something if you have zero awareness of what needs fixing after all.  New insight brought with it an opportunity to develop some compassion for myself and this in turn opened a door that has led to the ability to even like who I am too, as well as making different life choices that make me wonder why I ever considered myself to be a f*ck-up.

Abuse isn’t always obvious to the outside world, or the person who is in receipt of the abuse.  I see this time and time again in the work I do with people.

Layer on top of that the fact that emotional neglect (not having your emotional needs attended to adequately as a child) has a similar impact on the sufferer as abuse does, but is even trickier to see clearly, and there’s no wonder that at least half, if not three quarter’s of the people who seek my support as a therapist find themselves in a similar position as I was back then, just believing that they are a bit of a f*ck up and not knowing how to change it.

I’m not in the business of blaming parents for all that goes awry in their children’s lives because as adults at least, we all have some agency and need to take some responsibility for our choices and actions.  And let’s face it, finger wagging about things that have happened in the past and cannot be changed now, is very unlikely to be helpful in creating change.

However, in cases like my own and many (but not all) of the people who I work with, too much responsibility has been put at the feet of a child, which has led to the creation of an adult who also thinks everything is their fault, so it can be really helpful to redress that balance and work out the shared responsibility.  That way, you can put down the things which are not yours and can have no influence on, and that liberates you to make change where it is possible.

On this note fellow journeyer, I shall leave you for this time.

If you feel so compelled, please do reach out to me and let me know how you have been impacted by my words. And if I have held your interest, or you have even enjoyed this experience, I shall be back again next month with another instalment.

If you find yourself resonating with any of this and would like some help to explore your web of influence in order to discover with new eyes your version of new insight, get in touch.  Email me at rachel@ramblingpsychotherapist.co.uk to book in a discovery call.