Transforming our lives

Good Morning Sunshine!

I heard this once from someone and in that moment my life changed.  Being someones sunshine felt so important and recognizable like everyone from that point on could see that in me. The biggest problem I have ever faced was not being able to see this in myself.  I have been searching for that high ever since because it was outside of myself and so was subject to being removed or disappearing all together if that person was no longer in my life.  This has always been my struggle.  

I grew up in a family that argued and fought with no emotional accountability, with one parent who had out of control explosive anger issues and the other emotionally shut down with no visible empathy. And while physical violence was never actualized I was always afraid that one day I would feel the pain of that anger. Often the big family battles did not include me, as I was the youngest, so I was ignored and paralyzed with fear sitting in the corner. There were other battles between myself and my only sibling and I had to defend myself throwing hatred and venomous words back to where they had came from. I tried to self soothe by sucking my thumb far into elementary school and was made fun of by my brother and others because it had affected my front teeth.  I felt unloved, unseen and broken.  I was often sick with respiratory illnesses and sore throats.  Life felt like one hurdle after another to traverse. Pain, confusion and fear reigned.

I began to see and feel that things just did not work out for me.  For reasons unknown to me at the time I was unable to experience understanding, love and acceptance from others. Eventually I began to figure out that I was not accepting myself on the inside and until I did I would not attract what I truly wanted and deserved.

I was very pretty when I was in my 20's.  After the braces came off and the hormones kicked in I was seen and desired physically and for a time this was how I connected with others.  I felt that my outside was the way to acquire what I so longed to receive, love and belonging.  I never felt like I belonged to the family I was born into, I felt like I was an outsider from some other nice family who loved and appreciated me. I was 'too sensitive' in my family which ironically I learned years later actually meant I was emotionally in tact and feeling all the dysfunction from my father, mother and how that affected and formed my brother's lack of emotional awareness or ability to connect.  

It may sound like my family is awful and horrible. My parents were not actually unloving, the truth is also that we had moments of joy at holidays and the two week vacations to Yosemite every summer, but all the while the yelling and the bullying and the ignoring was still present if not in those moments in the emotional memory and therefore my body.  No one knew of or understood emotional regulation or how to connect with empathy and awareness of how another may feel regardless of how they were feeling. It was a place where love was not talked about we were just supposed to know how everyone felt and yet the actions did not often match the pronounced love. 

Life has been very confusing and dangerous for me for many years.  How I felt about myself is what attracted the friends I had, the relationships as well but when I had my son my heart broke open wide and I felt something I had never felt before.  PURPOSE.  This new life needed me to be my best version and I did by best! I made many mistakes and had so many missteps and eventually felt I failed at this most important task of my life.  I was angry, heart broken and eventually I attained the very sense of belonging I had missed being in my family, a deep sense of apathy that mirrored their own emotional range. 

I am not sure what hurts more, apathy or feeling too much pain.  They are both different in their corrosion.  Apathy while it is the acceptance of something it also is the lack of hope to recover from or change it.  And feeling too much is just the familiar sense of overwhelm, sadness and a constant state of grief and feeling alone.  I will tell you neither is optimal!

So how did I create something different.  Well, I will let you know when I do!  (insert laughing emogi) I have learned actually that telling the truth is the way through our state of emotional recovery from what ever has encouraged the decision to feel apathy or too much all at once.  It takes strength to admit when you have done something wrong and hurt another. So when I learned I was culpable for some of my son's pain growing up I was devastated.  Feeling deep compassion for him was how I was able hear his words of truth of his experience.  And then it took me volumes of compassion for myself to understand why everything happened the way it did.  Eventually I circled back to my childhood and the damage from my parents generation who were not taught to connect emotionally but through day to day tasks and taking care of the basic needs of a human while leaving the rest to chance or a religious perspective which blamed the very person for their own pain.  Not the best approach but here I am alive and learning to be well!  

Looking deeply at my experience I finally grieved for the little girl inside who was so scared and also hated her very existence because of a sibling who emotionally bullied her.  I was called 'stupid Ann' for years and this was never corrected by my parents.  And so that phrase has circled my head for my entire life.  I wanted to be accepted, loved and seen by my sibling and never have been.  The narrative has never changed and if perhaps he feels differently now the words have never been spoken.  In fact I really don't have much of a relationship with him at all.  I hear other people in conversations talking about how they get together with their siblings for dinner or just talk on the phone.  I don't have this and actually have always felt like an only child.  

All of these distances within the framework of emotional connection has been hard for me and made me ill equipped to raise a child with the right parental tools.  I did my best with my skills learned through my 20's. Meditation was a cornerstone, massage school helped me to understand how emotional trauma stays in the body unless we release it.  All these things made me more equipped than my own parents but not knowing how to traverse the emotional minefield of my childhood I was always going to fall short. 

So what now you ask?  How does this story end or progress?  I feel a sense of relief from admitting these things, from seeing how it all played out and how it wasn't my fault but an unfortunate upbringing where a narrative was drilled into me about how 'normal' we were and how dysfunctional everyone else was.  This was the story my mother told us, as well as to never talk about our families issues to anyone lest they think less of us.  I never honored this horrible request and because I have talked about these things it has allowed me to air out and release the residual emotions of sadness and anger.  Life is too short to not admit what happened and to allow the truth to come out of how it affected you, to see what was wrong and to admit those things that shaped you as a person.  As we do this we also release the people who did their best with the knowledge they had and to see how limited they were in the tools they had to be emotionally regulated and connected humans. 

So now that we know how to do better, lets be vulnerable, honest, forgive ourselves for the thoughts that created pain and suffering and replace them with love and compassion and above all gratitude for making it through the muck and mire of ridicule, yelling, fear, self sabotage and self hatred.  Bringing light to all that is shadow so that the air of wisdom and the light of love can enter and transform our inner world to shine bright and new and allow new and happier experiences to thrive in our lives!!  

I hope this story of my life will allow others to be radically honest about their own and create new pathways of healing to enter.

So many blessings,
Annapurna Devi