An Unrecoverable Home

“I have a question about boundaries with blood family, primarily the matriarchal line coming from a part of organized religion that is afraid of and deeply/publicly condemns and shames the beliefs I have (and I’m coming from a green witch/earth blood/mystic/priestess path). How to hold space for this in a way that works us actually forward?

- This is an Unresolvable paradox”

I thought that I wanted to be loved by my birth family, specifically, more than anything else in the world. For a long time, I thought their love was all I ever really wanted. I tried to find family in different people but the energy dynamics, my attraction point, was always the same: I kept searching for family in people who didn’t understand me. Subconsciously thinking if I can get these people to love me it will prove that my parents were wrong about me. If I can get these people to love me, these people who remind my inner child of my parents, then it will prove that I am “good”. “Good”, to my inner child, meant “lovable”. What I was really searching for was proof that I am worthy of love. I spent decades in these kinds of scenarios, trying to get proof of my worthiness from other people.

One big lesson I’ve learned in this life is that you don’t get to choose who can and cannot love you (this ties in with the whole lack of control situation we are in here) and someone else’s inability to see you and love you has absolutely nothing to do with you. It’s a biggie lesson.

“Give me your hand. Do you know what this is? It’s my heart. And it’s broken. Can you feel that?”- Great Expectations (the movie, 1997)

Complicated, Disenfranchised Grief

“Complicated grief is grief that lasts longer and is more intense than a culture may consider typical. It may disrupt someone’s daily life, alter their sense of identity, and cause frequent, strong emotions, such as longing, anger, or loneliness.”

“Disenfranchised grief refers to a loss that’s not openly acknowledged, socially mourned or publicly supported”

Grief unacknowledged might be the most painful experience one can endure. [Enter my first thirty-five years]

Kathryn Schulz writes, in her book, “Lost & Found”:

“Edward Said’s definition of exile, as a loss so profound that it darkens all future achievements… he knew intimately the cost of assimilation, one of life’s stealthiest forms of loss, as well as the abiding yearning for an unrecoverable home.”

I am an exile of my family.

Blaming myself for why things are the way they are with my family was a way for me to feel in control.

When you’re a kid you don’t understand that your parents are just human beings projecting their own unhealed issues onto you. When they think you’re evil, when they humiliate you, when they belittle you and make you feel like you deserve nothing, it’s only because that’s how they feel inside.It’s just their wounding. As a child you can’t understand this yet and you take their hatred and disregard for you personally. It’s so exquisitely painful and you don’t know what to do with those big emotions. The unprocessed grief compacts and hardens and creates pain in your physical body, leaving you no choice but to escape until you get older and realize it was never about you. You’re not evil, you’re not embarrassing, you’re not worthless. You have nothing to be ashamed of.

“Probably the greatest of wounds- not to have been loved just as one truly was- cannot heal without the work of mourning.” — Alice Miller, The Drama of The Gifted Child

“You were unsure which pain is worse- The shock of what happened or the ache for what never will.”

My grief came not only from the trauma/abuse itself but the denial of it and how it’s affected my entire life thus far. The fact that to this day if you asked my mother or my father about me they would take no responsibility for their part in my development. As a young teenager, I was shamed for my bulimia, alcohol & drug use without any adult in my life ever thinking or saying, “Hey sweetheart, we see you’re really struggling, what’s wrong? Are you ok? How can we help? What do you need?” To this day my experience has never been acknowledged and this is what hurt me most.

It’s so hard to let go of tremendous hurt without it ever being even acknowledged by those who did the hurt. SO HARD.

Letting go of deeply wanting my parents to validate how much they hurt me was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I wanted so very deeply for them to see. But the truth is, for someone to be able to apologize for hurting you, they have to own the part of themselves who did the hurting, and it doesn’t feel good to know you’ve hurt someone, especially your child. Owning that you’ve hurt your child is not an easy thing to do.

I remember one healer I worked with told me, “You are much older than your parents on a Soul level.” I knew this was true at the time but the message didn’t fully sink in until June 11th, 2022, years later (3 days before the Full Moon in Sagittarius, where my Venus lives). Another thing I’ve learned is we are not all on the same path in life and we must allow people to be where they are in their own unique Soul Journey, even if it means you can’t have them in your life anymore. Moving out the heavy emotions surrounding this reality greatly supports the shift in perception. I believe one of the hardest things a human can experience is cutting off the people who you wanted to be in your life more than anything. It’s the Death of ‘The Impossible Dream’ as Bethany Webster calls it. For me to let go, I also had to own that I, too, was here for my very Unique Soul Journey, without fully knowing what exactly that was yet. I had to own that I was going through these excruciatingly painful experiences for a reason, that it served a purpose.

“To stop pushing against the past, to accept it, and to instead focus your energies on what you need to do right now and going forward is one of the most difficult things to do ever. Why? Because it means we have to admit to things being true that we don’t want to have be true. It means that we have to look at truths that honestly we don’t feel like we have the capacity to look at. It means we have to swallow the fact that we’ve lost something and that it is gone. Or that something specifically that you wanted for your future will never be or to recognize that some things will never be the same going forward and in ways that you would never have wanted. Doing so seems to run up against the truth that you were a creator of your life experience and that you can prevent what you don’t want and bring about what you want. But there is an empowerment to be found in accepting that what has happened has actually happened and that you can do nothing to change it and so you must reorient yourself entirely towards what to do now and what to do going forward. In the face of that powerful level of simplicity your actual empowerment is found. All you are left with is what do I do now and what do I do going forward to make things different and more like what I want them to be. All you are left with is the simplicity of: “What now?” — Teal Swan

I hope that reading this inspires you to believe that you, too, can overcome insane obstacles in your life. No one is damned. We all carry the power of transmutation, no matter how extreme the circumstances. That’s what life is all about. YOU ARE INHERENTLY LOVABLE. No matter what. I love you and thank you for reading.

“It is both a blessing and a curse to feel everything so very deeply.” - D. J.