"...instead of struggling to erase what are referred to as negative emotions, we can learn to use them in positive ways. we could describe the principle like this: while pounding on the piano keys may produce noise, removing them doesn't exactly further the creation of music. The principles of Music and Living aren't all that difference, we think." Benjamin Hoff, from The Tao of Pooh
Art by Wassily Kandinsky

I don't believe in "negative emotions." I believe in misguided parts of ourselves. Recently I tuned into what felt like tension in my belly and I felt love! My belly was trying to give me the message "beware!" That felt like self-love, if misguided (there was no real danger). It's as if a protective entity was looking out for me. So instead of shutting out the warning, I can thank it. I can hear it and help it to harmonize with the rest of me. I can help you do that too.

I’m going to try something new. Baring my soul here; because I need to. No lovely pictures, no call to action, just venting. But I do hope that you might learn something or gain some insight about yourself….

My own healing goes hand-in-hand with the healing I try to bring to my clients. I learn how to “work with” myself by working with my clients, and I learn how to work with my clients by working with and on myself.

So, here’s what I learned recently and what may resonate with some of you.

I have spent most of my adult life untangling my relationship with my mother. I have realized that on a subconscious level, she wanted me to fix her. She thought that a girl child could unlock her heart. She soon realized, though, that that wouldn’t work. She was too fearful to connect; what was comfortable for her was to detach. Because that desire was never articulated, it took me a while to understand it. I did understand it, as a child, on a subconscious level however. Because ultimately I could not unlock her heart, because she was too fearful to connect, what my mother needed from me was for me to be silent, to disappear. So I disappeared. I’ve spent a lot of my life treating myself like my mother treated me — subliminally silencing myself, or shaming myself for having feelings and desires.

What I do with my clients and what I tried with myself recently was this; instead of shaming my own wounded child, I listened to her. Instead of treating my subconscious urgings as the enemy, I dialogued with it. What I realized was that my shaming part (the part of me that sounds like my shaming mother), is, and has been care-taking my mother! I have internaized my mother/daughter dynamic inside myself. I have an inner little sad little girl and I have an internal mother that silences that sad little girl.

I now FEEL the love and compassion I felt for my mother, that unfortunately drove me to negate myself in an attempt to comfort her. Sacrificing myself to save my mother? A Christ-complex?

What will help me going forward will be to know myself as a deeply empathetic and loving person, not as a dysfunctional, self-censoring, stuck person. To empathize with myself, know that I loved and wanted to heal my mother. I will stop blaming myself for shunning myself; I have shunned myself (subconsciously) to please my mother. How loving (but sad) is that?