Month: January 2023

The feeling of “you’re too much, your pain is exaggerated, you’re not worth believing” is an imprint on your psyche from being treated as such. For being made to feel like you’re crazy for feeling for what you’re feeling, for knowing what you know, for seeing what you’re see. Made to doubt yourself for every little thing about you. “You’re imagining, you’re making too much of it, you’re sensitive.”

This level of abuse is insidious and isn’t imaginary, it’s real. But because there are no bruises, no concrete events – it can make you look and feel like the crazy one. And abusive people love that. Abusive families in which you are the scapegoat thrive on that. It’s their food. They love plausible deniability because it keeps them looking ‘clean’ with all of it. 

You can’t forgive, you can’t let go, you can’t move on, if you don’t know what you’re forgiving. What you’re moving on from, what you’re letting go of. It’s quite simplistic to say forgive, let go and be faced with the fact that you can’t. It’s too premature. Your system hasn’t even digested the original pain, the original hurt. And so to put a bandaid of spirituality on it and call that ‘forgiveness’ is violent, delusional. It doesn’t sink into your bones, it’s not true. It’s surface-level; moving the furniture around. And that’s not what your system is after.

Your system is digesting in its own time, you can’t rush it, you can’t purge it. Be true to where you are, where your system is, slow down to that level of digestion without trying to jump over the hurdles, fast track to getting over it. That’s true kindness, true forgiveness. Forgive yourself for not being able to forgive, allow yourself the luxury of being who and where you are without any violent ‘should’s’. Slow down enough so that you can catch up with yourself.

Let go of all the things you think you should be doing to be somewhere other than where you are. Give yourself that luxury, that kindness. The kindness to notice the insidious internal critic keeping you in check, keeping you feeling limited and boundaried in what you can or can’t feel, say or do. Keeping you in check by making you believe “you’re too much”. Your pain is too much, your voice is too much, your questions are too much, your needs are too much, your life is too much.  

Been noticing the self-sabotager in me; the one who is afraid to go beyond old patterns that I’ve inherited and made my own. The one who doesn’t want to evolve – out of fear of the unknown but mainly out of a toxic loyalty to old family patterns and a fear of family members, a loyalty to their suffering and their limitations. 

“I’m still included somehow, I’m one of you see, even if you disown me. I’ll sabotage myself to stay close, to prove my loyalty, to show you I love you, the only way I know you’ll receive. I’ll limit myself so that you don’t attack me. I’ll keep myself in check so that you don’t have to.”

 This one, the one that unconsciously inflicts self-harm; in small ways and big ways. The one that trips herself up so that she doesn’t go beyond her family’s capacity. Health, money, self-image, career, life expectations.  It would be too threatening, too hostile otherwise. 

Not wanting to admit that it doesn’t have to be this way, that there’s an easy way out and it’s not that hard. It’s quite simple actually. But something wants to make it hard, to make it so that the hamster wheel never ends and stepping off is not an option.  Something wants to make it so that happiness is an elusive and far-reaching dream. So that I can stay close to my family, stay out of the way of their menacing competitiveness, their unconscious harm infliction because I’ve stepped out of bound. 

I’m starting to see that stepping off is an option, there is choice somewhere in there. I don’t want to condemn the self-sabotager. It was trying to get love the only way it knew how. I don’t want to stop her either. I know that acknowledging her is the beginning of something new. To recognize when she’s in action. When she’s making herself small and limited to protect herself from the cruelty, competitiveness and harshness – it’s the utmost intelligence. The most loving act of desperation. 

As a kid, I was trained to feel bad for my existence, for my needs and desires, for my having, for my doing. The level of scrutiny I received as a child from all my family members – bar none – was insane. I didn’t even realize this was the case. I was in denial or unconscious of most of it. But what is being shown to me through this process of unravelling is opening my eyes to the amount of terror, fear, guilt, shame and horror that my system has imbibed through living with “my family”.

It has been a nightmare since the beginning. The youngest of 3 brothers and 1 sister. All looking down on me, judging me, criticizing me. My every move was scrutinized. I was not given the permission to discover myself. To explore my existence. I was barely there. They were most comfortable when I was invisible. In the background somewhere. Forgotten. As soon as I’d express anything, I’d be met with their eyes.

Their eyes scared the living day lights out of me. Their eyes were dark. Full of judgment. Full of condemnation. Full of shaming. Full of hate. I was this thing that showed up and I was unwelcome. I could feel it in my guts. It freaked me out. It made me shrink. I was an object from the beginning. Not a human. Not a little girl. An object. A thing in their way. A problem. It almost felt like they were doing me a favor by accommodating me living amongst them. That was the general vibe from all of them.

Parents, siblings, nephews and nieces, aunts and uncles alike. It was devastating to my system. I shrunk in shame. I feared for my life and so I tried to want nothing, to be nothing, to express nothing. When I’d get hurt, nobody was looking out for me. My pain was irrelevant. I was irrelevant. And so to want, to have, to express was not just frowned upon, it was downright hated.

My brothers despised me. They despised my femininity. My sister hated me. She projected onto me endlessly. I was this thing in her way. My mother was burdened by me. I was useful to her sometimes but other than that I was just an object, a burden, something to keep alive – that’s it. My father didn’t know what to do with me. I was this thing that was there that he kept at a safe distance.

I have been feeling bad about myself, about my life from the very beginning. A deep sorrow and despair haunted me as a child and waves of intense grief surrounded me and the connection it had with my family was undeniable. I knew it. They were a nightmare. A nightmare I was supposed to love? And who supposedly loved me? Cared for me? This was love? This was care? Life is not worth living if that’s the case.

Ever since I got married I have had this unsettling feeling in the background. I have never been able to pinpoint it or understand it. Getting married, having someone in my life who genuinely cared for me went against the family MO. They were threatened by it. And I could feel it in my bones. I was unsettled to my core in my “settling down”. I lived everyday in a way where I feared for my life, feared for my safety. They were livid. You don’t get to have this you little shit, is what their eyes screamed.

Breaking away from them has been my dream, even as a kid. But I denied it. I couldn’t admit it. I didn’t trust myself. You’re just imagining. I was gaslit my whole life out of any genuine feeling, out of any instinct. And so it makes sense, I was fucking confused. Unraveling has been mainly diffusing this confusion. Confronting me with it. With the fear and terror and shame and grief at the base of it. These people are horrid my feelings would say. And I felt crazy for even thinking it. It couldn’t be. They fed me. I had a roof over my head – I’m the problem. I must be.

But whenever I stop seeing myself as the problem, everything feels more right, I’m more in tune with myself. I feel my power and inner knowing again. Something I had denied myself my whole life, had been denied, had been trained out of. I don’t know what to do with this information. I don’t know how to break away. The fear, the terror is overwhelming. I’m scared. How the hell am I gonna disentangle from this nightmare once and for all?