existing

My first blog entry, Existing, fitting name. I guess this website is now in its existing-phase. Being born. It’s been a landscape in my mind for a long time, and now its crystalizing like this. Pink and takes a while to load due to all the moving images, kind of like my mind. But this entry is gonna be about existing. And pain. But also healing.

I went to Switzerland this past weekend. I went for a workshop. I wasn’t too hopeful as I’ve been in a Stockholm syndrome relationship with the floor for the past weeks, but it turned out really well. Kind of life altering really. I met really lovely people all working on emotional healing, and we shared very special days together. One of the things we did together was to talk to parts within ourselves that have been suppressed and pushed away, because we don’t know how to deal with them. These parts are very hurt. Imagine being rejected by the being that you are a part of, it is a very painful existence. And there is nowhere to go. You can’t not be a part of that being anymore, you share the same consciousness. All you can do is hide somewhere in the back. In the subconscious.

I met this lovely woman there, she had the same name as me ironically, and her part that we worked on healing was in acute pain. It was desperate. It felt like it didn’t belong, like it had nowhere to go. Like it was wrong. It wanted to hurt itself, disappear, die.
Seeing this part and hearing it talk to me, looking at it I realised I have that exact same part. She was mirroring me. She was mirroring that pain within me, the pain that I shove away because I don’t know how to handle it. It feels too strong, existential, like it would take over my whole life. And I was faced with this confusion and inadequacy when I was expected to hear, see, feel, validate and understand this aspect within her. It was the aspect I didn’t know how to do that for in myself even. It can be hard to understand something and meet its needs, I assume that this is what parents feel like sometimes when they can’t comfort their child. You feel inadequate, powerless, disoriented. We had to take a break because all of us were stumped, how do you make a part feel better when it is in this much pain and it just wants to die? I felt the powerlessness wash over me, but when we came back to the session something started to shift in me. I started to understand where this part came from, how it really felt.
You see when we are children and we experience life primarily through feeling, before we even develop a thinking mind, if a certain aspect of our being or personality is rejected by our parents, we in turn reject that part to stay safe. Our parents provide us all of our needs and so to survive we have to gain their approval. This causes our consciousness to split off into separate parts, and what we deem unacceptable (because our parents do) we suppress into our subconscious. We want to cut that part of us out but we can’t fully. What we can do is split ourselves off from it and deny it, although it doesn’t go far, it stays in our subconscious mind. The thing about the subconscious is of course that we aren’t aware of it, even though it is what governs the majority of our life and our perception of life. Naturally, this causes confusion.
But let’s say, that this woman when little, maybe only an infant, is approached with the attitude of being “wrong”. Maybe she is too much work or her parents are not capable of taking care of a child. Since she has not developed a thinking mind yet she perceives life only through feeling. She can’t conceptualise that her parents may be tired, or in pain, or whatever they might be, she just feels that they disapprove of her. And since she is completely dependent on them, she is panicked. The only way for her to survive is to be on their good side, and if she isn’t, she could die. Naturally this pain is too grand to handle, so she splits off from this aspect of her that feels completely helpless and wrong. But it is still there, she’s just not aware of it. In her adult life she feels pangs of this pain, she might feel suicidal at times or just this feeling of shame or wrongness. But the thing about these parts is too, that they remain in the state you left them. So if we split off from them when we are 1 year old, they, until you come back for them, remain this age in awareness.

That’s when it started clicking for me. This part in this woman, and this part in me, is an infant. It can’t comprehend anything besides the immense dread and desperation of somehow being wrong, even though it is only existing. It is a baby and it can only yet exist. If existing is made to be wrong, what do you do? It is now so understandable that this part feels as if it wants to die, hurt itself, be gone, stop existing. If your parents approach you like you are wrong, as an infant, your existence becomes a nightmare. You are in a prison of a baby’s body and all you do is feel this pain. You can’t escape it, but you desperately want to so you cut yourself off from it. You are now half alive, disassociating, floating in space with no anchor in this world, but neither are you gone. It is an in between space. You can’t even kill yourself if you wanted to because you can’t even move your body yet. It is utter hell and it is inescapable. There is nowhere to go because you can’t not exist.

Meeting this woman and meeting this part both within her and me, made me realise so much about my own emotions. This is a part I could never make sense of, I always just felt it. But now I truly understand it. This pain is no mystery. It is not weird that I have a part like this and it is not weird that it feels this way. And if you have a similar part within you, I hope that you look to the origins of this part and see that anyone or anything, would feel the exact same way had they been in your shoes. They would also feel the pain inherent in being alive, if aliveness itself was made out to be bad. They would also feel the pain of existing.