TRAUMA BONDING
I’ve continued to notice over these past few weeks that my mood continues to be very low.
At times, I wonder to myself whether life has damaged me so much, that I will never know what it is like to be simply happy and content. Unless I am doing the work that I love, I feel in a state of emotional turmoil and excessively vulnerable. There’s a void that no matter what I do to become the best version of myself in creating a life of purpose, the vast emptiness always seems to be lurking in the background. I cannot shake it. Time and time again, I keep revisiting this ‘life lesson’ and even in my previous post, Light of Truth, I was guided to acknowledge that just because my senses cannot hear, see or feel something, that it doesn’t mean that the positive stuff is not divinely unfolding for me. For any of us!
Nonetheless, I have found myself frustratingly stuck again and as always spent time sitting in the mountains talking to my Holy Father; this relationship has evolved a lot in the last few years. It started from a place of thinking that faith was about having to plead for things, pitching life ideas in the hope that wishes would be somehow granted. It’s now one of love and friendship; one that recognises that there is no judgement or punishment by Him. That when bad things happen, it’s about growth and understanding, and seeking a pathway to knowing the Self. So, I put it to Him that I was struggling and that I needed more help to not only see what I was not seeing, but to feel; to know why the void within me felt so huge and painful.
I woke one night with a message telling me to do some research on the subject of trauma bonding. Naturally, I would always suggest it is not always advisable to search for ‘ailments of conditions’ on line; to seek professional advice as a priority. But I felt safe following the guidance and admittedly, I am a little surprised, considering the nature of my journey to this point, that I have not really noted this terminology before. No doubt the explanation was always there but I was not ready to understand it. Yet, in doing so now, I can see that it will bring more Light and clarity to understanding my Self, and the truth beneath the void I feel. When the truth resonates there is no other feeling like it, it is when the inner chaos simply stops.
Thus void I speak of, is the product of trauma bonding. It is worth me understanding it, because it explains a lot about why I feel stuck in the same emotional patterns that leaves me wondering how on earth I cannot feel happiness when I am creating the life that I want. My trauma bonding clearly started in my childhood years and explaining it as simply as possible, it is the development of the need to have constant validation and the misuse of that need. I can only speak about my own experience of trauma bonding, but my childhood was extremely volatile. I already accepted that in my younger years I had developed people pleasing, empathetic and intuitive skills as a survival mechanism. But the part that I did not see was that in a childhood that was spent assessing my own safety, it built an internal need, to be constantly assured that everything is okay.
The longterm downside of this need, is that it potentially made me a prime target for narcissistic abuse. It allowed my need for regular validation to be exploited. Even though I have now removed myself from the harmful situation, it continues to impact me greatly on a daily basis in how I interact with others and even toward my own emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual well-being. As a result, the void I feel is the emptiness at not being enable to engage in seeking validation, regardless of whether in reality, what was being received previously was truthful or helpful. Therefore, living alone and remotely, I am cut off from being able to observe, hear, interact with those who I have any form of relationship with now, which creates unease. Hence, if I am not getting a daily dose of validation that allows me to feel that my world is safe, that I am loved or even thought about, then the emptiness is my sense of feeling unsafe, unloved and unwanted.
Because I’ve been conditioned to believe that I have to earn love, affection and even safety, I’ve relied on being able to use my instincts to assess situations to know whether these are available to me. It’s how I gauge whether I fit in and whether I have worth. Likewise, because love and affection, was only ever given or withdrawn, using a bizarre and warped reward system, it explains why I can have the most amazing time with a special friend, but shortly after, can find myself in emotional meltdown when we have each gone our separate ways. If I cannot be with someone, to see, hear, sense, feel and experience them directly, then I begin to doubt the strength of that bond.
This has had a huge impact on my life in how I interact with people in general. I realise now, that historically, without validation, I’ve lived my life questioning my Self-worth: am I good enough in my job, as a wife, as a mother, as a friend etc. Am I creative, can I write? Am I really any good at my therapies? Does God really exist or does He have to give me visible validation too?
Knowing this is truly freeing. That’s not to say that these thoughts can be banished overnight… but I have begun to question the void and the doubt and insecurities, and recognising that it’s validation that I need when I have these thoughts.
Interestingly, I did some decluttering today to clear my mind.
I love books and I read a lot, but also buy a lot of books that also never get read.
One such book, I decided it was time to give it a go.
I found these interesting words by J. Khrisnamurti (taken from The Book of Life).
“You are not listening to me; you are not making an effort to pay attention, you are just listening, and if there is truth in what you hear, you will find a remarkable change taking place in you - change that is not premeditated or wished for, a transformation, a complete revolution in which the truth alone is master and not the creations of your mind.
And if I may suggest it, you should listen in that way to everything - not only to what I am saying, but also to what other people are saying, to the birds, to the whistle of a locomotive, to the noise of the bus going by. You will find that the more you listen to everything, the greater is the silence, and that silence is then not broken by noise.
It is only when you are resisting something, when you are putting up a barrier, between yourself and that to which you do not want to listen - it is only then that there is a struggle.”
With love & gratitude always,
Sally Jayne
xxx