No child can be good enough to evoke love from a highly self-involved parent. Nevertheless, these children come to believe that the price of making a connection is to put other people first and treat them as more important. They think they can keep relationships by being the giver. Children who try to be good enough to win their parents’ love have no way of knowing that unconditional love cannot be bought with conditional behaviour.
Lindsay C. Gibson, `Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents´
When a child is enmeshed with their parent, they become one with them – they’re not allowed to separate or individuate. It’s essentially extreme dependency on both sides but created by the toxic parent, who makes themself central to the child’s existence, not allowing them to operate without first considering their parent’s needs. Enmeshment suppresses the child’s identity…
Helen Villiers & Katie McKenna, `You’re not the Problem´
I guess the depth of our grief is a reminder of the depth of our love…. Grief can make one feel hopeless.
Jane Goodall, The Book of Hope
I turned to `The Book of Hope´ this week in an effort to restore balance, fearing for my sanity. The other book I had been reading up to then, – `You’re not the Problem; The Impact of Narcissism and Emotional Abuse and How to Heal´, – had taken me to some dark recesses of my childhood with all the pain this involves. My firm belief that the childhood wounds had already been sufficiently acknowledged and addressed proved erroneous. A house of cards began tumbling down.
Desperation, anger, and hopelessness tinted the horizon. It took all my energy, my mental fitness practice, and supportive conversations with friends to keep me on the straight and narrow. The great river, along which I cycle, walk, or run every day, also played its part, inviting me to cast my burdens into it as I befriended the pain. Just as the ocean refuses no river, the river refuses no burdens.
The Book of Hope proved to be an inspired choice. So now I continue to read both books in parallel, turning to Jane Goodall’s story whenever revisiting the topic of childhood emotional abuse threatens to throw me off kilter, or the clouds of despondency begin to gather again.
No parents are perfect. As a parent myself, I can attest to wishing to have done better in countless situations, in the knowledge of having done much harm. Some parents, however, are incapacitated when it comes to providing the basic affection, safety, and support necessary for the emotional well-being and development of their young child.
The ultimate cause of this dilemma would appear to lie in their own upbringing and the stresses of parenting and other matters they encounter in adult lives. These explanations provide no solace to the effected child, however, – the child exposed to the emotional abuse. Whenever the parent instrumentalizes the child to fulfil her or his own needs, seeds of disaster are sown. Such a parent loves a child only as an extension of herself at first, and then as a loyal subject. She will tend to the needs of the child only when it makes her feel good.
Fast forward into adulthood and imagine going to the local bakery every morning in the hope of purchasing fresh fruit and vegetables. The shopkeeper gives us the same reply each time, that there are no fruit and vegetables for sale, and offers bread and pastries instead. Each day, we leave the bakery frustrated, hurt, hungry, and confused, yet fortified in our determination that, if we only try hard enough, our exertions will some day pay off. We keep repeating the exact same pattern, day in, day out.
In adult life, the child of a parent who was unable to provide the emotional support she needed will continue to be drawn to similarly incapacitated individuals, to have their emotional needs met. This is a pattern driven by denial and false hope. The denial is that of the severity of the childhood emotional abuse endured. It is compounded by the false hope that some ideal relationship later in life will have the power to eradicate the suffering, – undoing the experience, removing the wounds, and making everything good.
This false hope is a product of magic thinking. It is the reason many of us spend so much time and energy later in life trying to fit square pegs into round holes. The magical aspect of the thinking makes it very difficult for us to recognize the impossibility of what we trying to achieve, which is the avoidance of re-feeling the pain of the original situation as we attempt to heal and grow.
Not only does the bakery not sell fruit and vegetables, but even if we found a fruit & veg shop, we would soon discover that the food available there would not nourish us in the way we need. We would be as hungry as ever after consuming it.
Instead, with recovery over time, we come to the realization that nobody, no relationship, no success, no shining toy, is coming to rescue us and heal what’s broken on the inside. In this new-found clarity it dawns on us that we already have our very own garden which contains everything we have been seeking and all we need.
That garden has always been waiting for us. An inside job beckons. The price of entry to this little fertile patch is often what prevents us from going in there. We may even overlook it, as we keep our eyes fixed on the distant horizon for `the solution out there´ instead.
Stepping foot in our enchanted garden, – this source of spiritual, emotional, and physical nourishment, – requires that the pain of our original childhood plight be fully re-experienced, embraced, and befriended. Our incapacity or refusal to empathize with all involved in the generation of this pain, and to forgive, is what generally holds us back. Instead, we return to the bakery each day in the doomed hope that something may have inexplicably changed, and that we will find there what we need.
Jane Goodall became world famous as the woman who, by earning the trust of her research subjects, the chimpanzees of Gombe, was able to establish a bond of love. It was her willingness to enter into their world which yielded important new information about both the chimp species and ours, – revealing common characteristics and shared heritage. The story is one of curiosity, courage, open-mindedness, patience, and discovery. It is heart-warming.
The incapacitated parent cannot approach her children, – her `subjects´ – in this fashion. Instead, like the rancher who has rounded up wild horses on the prairie, removing them from their natural habitat, she begins the relationship by `breaking them in´. This violent process is designed to grind them into submission by breaking the natural spirit of these majestic creatures, so that they will subsequently do the bidding of their new master. It is a process of domination, of brute force, though the perpetrators would argue it is necessary, justified, and even kind, done in the `best interests´ of the child.
In last week’s Reflections, I wrote about working with the Inner Child to heal old wounds. Resolving emotional abuse is a case in hand. It is the Inner Child who, still suffering, is terrified of re-visiting the original pain. My adult self may also have conjured up many rational reasons why this is not a good idea.
In the first half of my life, the cries from my Inner Child were tuned out, or worse, discounted, – even ridiculed, – just as had been the case at the hands of my adult caregivers in my earliest years. The more I internalized this pattern and abused my own Inner Child, the less he trusted me.
In a practice which has emerged over the last two decades, the adult me now tunes into the voice of the Inner Child, and can decipher what needs, desires, and feelings are at play. It is the adult me, living in recovery, who, while pointing out that the past cannot be changed, determines to protect the child from any further emotional abuse. By making this solemn promise, I have now stepped up to that responsibility, something my adult carers couldn’t do, when initially required.
Without the power of the third entity of the Trinity, – the Spark of the Divine, as the Sikhs call it,- (Sage, Love, God, Great Spirit, Gaya, Allah, – whatever name you wish to use), we will not dare to return to the original scene of the crime, to begin the process of identifying, naming, befriending, and dressing the old wounds. It is into this power that the adult me now leans into when tending to the Inner Child.
Had I not resuscitated my relationship with the Great Spirit, healing would have remained impossible. It was only by cultivating gratitude for all that has been given me despite or even in the face of the hurt endured, that it became clear that some form of higher power had been guiding, protecting, and caring for me all along.
In my years of drinking and self-medication, driven to numb pain at all costs, I had blacked out hundreds of times. How is it that I am still alive? Who took care of me as I stumbled through this valley of darkness? A less dramatic way of connecting with this power is to ask, each morning: Who keeps our hearts beating throughout the night as we sleep?
This Trinity now in place, it is possible to listen to what the Inner Child has to share, to allow memories, feelings, and emotions to bubble to the surface without the need to suppress, discount, or manipulate them in any way, and to lean into the energies of the Great Spirit while I simply sit with them. No longer fearing that the feelings will annihilate me, and now confident that they will surely pass, as they always do, I trust the healing process as it unfolds.
This is the key to the success of Inner Child work. We cease falling into the trap of trying to control the storm, -past, present, or future, – and begin to learn to surf the waves, as they emerge in the ocean of life.
One final point is worth mentioning. A few years ago, I broke two vertebrae in an accident. The damage was serious, and, thanks to the wonderful loving support and professional treatment I received, I have miraculously regained full physical health. In a touching final encounter with the orthopedic surgeon, when I sought him out to say thank you, he exclaimed with a warm smile: Of course it healed, after all it is all bone!
It has occurred to me that I never had a problem accepting the fact that my back was broken. My reaction to the breaking of my spirit has been a very different proposition, however. All my life I have had great difficulty in accepting the reality of this experience, preferring denial.
The root cause is to be found in the great lie of shame. The shame that was inculcated during the emotional abuse. The shame that says that I was the problem; that continues to try to assert that as I am, I am not OK.
Today, as the three-way inner dialogue fuels the rewilding of my spirit, that shame can be put to rest. I hear a voice declare: Of course it is healing, after all, it is all spirit!
