My life is a journey of love and healing.
I'm going through a lot right now, most of which no one person (except for me, and God, of course) really knows the full brunt of it. I don't need the world to know every detail of my life, but there are those moments when the behind the scenes process "leaks out" from behind the public persona, and I become all too human in ways that make me cringe and laugh at myself at the same time.
Abandonment issues are but only one of my Achilles heels.
Recent events in my world have caused a disturbance in the force. Someone who was in charge of something very important to me departed hastily, leaving the rest of us scrambling to figure out what we were going to do in response to being leaderless and potentially divided. And the night before last I read that he was forming a new group (rather than just taking an indefinite leave of absence publicly stated), which felt like a mule had kicked me in the stomach, leaving me nauseous and filled with uncertainty.
So I spent the day locked in the land of anxious thoughts, obsessed and fixated on the question, Why did he leave?
Well, last night, as I was tossing and turning in my normal routine of sleepless wall-gazing, I tried to find the source of my obsessive anxiety. And that's when it hit me: the roots to my obsessive anxiety about why he left go all the way back to when I was five years old and my Daddy walked out of my world. At five years old, my Dad was everything in my world, and when he walk away, it left a huge gaping hole in my heart that never found the answer to the burning question, Why did he leave?
And not only just, Why did he leave? But the deeper and more painful question, Why did he leave me?
To some, my need to understand the roots of my obsessive anxiety has no meaning for them. They think I am fixated on "the past" and should just "move on." The problem (for me) is that I grew up in a family system where there was no place for me to process what was happening in my life. So when my Dad walked away, there was no one there to help me process and make sense of that experience, because my job was to help my mom to stay emotionally grounded well enough to take care of us. So I had to tuck away all of those feelings so that I could focus on helping my mom, which has then left all of the feelings locked up inside of me. . .until now.
Yes, I have abandonment issues. . . lol. . . but I didn't get them all on my own.
What I find interesting is how this early childhood program is so perfectly timed in my life progression. Back when I was starting my master's grad school program, the family therapy program was all about family dynamics and family systems. That's where I started to process the drama of my very dysfunctional early life, but the focus then was on the family as a system, and not really the individual players. It was a good place for me to start, as I needed to sort through all of that drama first, to break the pieces down into "bite sized" chunks of emotional experience.
But now I am in the early childhood program where the focus is solely on the child. So what's happening now is that I am able to reflect on my own personal experiences as a young child as projected through the readings and class projects. Not everyone will process through this program the way that I do, but it is my way. I am using this program as a vehicle to search through my own childhood so that I can grow and develop my whole self, and not just the adult me who is engaged in this program.
I love the psychology of human growth and development, and I live my life as an in-progress work of art.
I think it's a wonderful sign that I am able to start accessing my feelings--MY feelings--from when I was a young child, instead of viewing my world as a character in the drama of my family. To feel the pain last night of the five year old me feeling lost and confused about why her daddy had left her is just such a gift, because now I can finally process through that very confusing and emotionally intense experience that's been locked up inside of my heart for nearly 45 years.
So my five year old self may have lost the love of her daddy all of those many years ago, but we are reminded each day of the love that surrounds us every time I find one of these endearing heart shapes along my path, the symbols of love found along the way. And I may still be "flying solo" on this most auspicious day of love, but I remain hopeful that someone will one day be able to love me for who I am, to love all of me, even the parts that still react to the dark stories that I carry within my heart and soul.
But in the mean time, I will continue to learn how to love myself in spite of my many limitations and liabilities. So Happy Valentine's Day to my little broken-hearted five year old self. . . .you are well loved and never alone <3