When we have been parentified, emotionally or energetically from a very young age, caring and attuning and being of service can come to feel like our super power. Good girl, they praise us and we know what is being asked. It becomes entwined with our self-perception, entangled in our identity in ways that we may never fully understand or disentangle. The self has only ever known how to accomodate and perpetuate cycles of co-dependence and sacrifice. Sometimes before our sense of seperate self has had a chance to emerge from the enmeshed dyadic union of infancy, we are entrained to hold space, to surrogate, to carry for other. Some of us are still trying to engender a sense of self-as-seperate-to-other well into the fullness of our adult lives.
Then the time may come when we must grapple with the shadows of this archetypal compulsion to care, that has entangled in its roots our very quest to survive, our imperative to adapt in order to receive the life giving thread that would hold us to life, that would allow our soul to have a centre through which to live, a purpose in which to coalesce. The way we have learnt to care has been formed in the urgent imperative of survival, as understood by a very helpless and immature psyche and at it’s heart this impulse is a self protective force. In a sense our care becomes the shield with which we defend ourselves against unbearable rupture, our care becomes the weapon with which we assure our life-or-death dependence on relationship.
I am coming to understand that this way of contractual giving, this captive way of loving, can have a weaponisation encoded in it’s heart. As we grow and form adult intimate relationships, this adaptive way of relating is not always received by others as love, as care. It might in truth be more about control. Relationships may die in it’s wake, or perpetuate in stagnation. It can be a life long pattern of relating that holds us entrapped within the isolating defences of our original abandonment. Self perpetuating cycles of rejection and betrayal, because in spite of all our attending, we are unable to foster the true intimacy we long for. All our caring and centring of other does not equate to the reciprocal exchange of energy which we deeply hunger for. All our sacrifice does not bring us closer to the unconditional acceptance that we crave from other. Rather it pushes love further away and leaves us perpetually triggered, by the original trauma of unmet need and insecure attachment.
We may have a deep instinct for love, yet the time of such selfless care has missed its generative activation, it’s origin most fittingly placed in that oxytocin drenched, immersive field of the newly born mother and babe, intoxicating love pouring through in a one directional imperative to care and attend at the alter of this heaven lit dyad, with the otherworldly visitor at the breast. When this primal alter of motherhood is supported and held as the sacred threshold that it is, we learn unequivocally what it is to be loved and to have our needs met unapologetically by other, the nascent narcissism of our own helplessness instilling a deep intuitive knowing of safety and connection and merging, as well as eventually, boundary and cohesive selfhood, healthy separateness.
When this paradisiacal coalescence of love is absent however, or hindered, or made conditional, at any stage along the journey from infancy to maturity, we must make something happen in it’s place, we intelligently find or craft or create something that feels near enough, close enough to love. A subversion of the natural order, in the absence of loving capacity, we take complicit responsibility for the default, in ways subtle or overt, we become carer to the care-giver. We form belief systems about how safe a thing love is, how surrendered we should be in the receiving of it or how deeply we must protect ourselves from it. We form beliefs around what it means about us, about who we are, our value and worth, when love is showered in abundance, or when it is weaponised, absent or made dependant upon particular ways of relating and behaving. We grow our personality, our identity, our careers, our family structures around the ways we either heartfully received or desperately protected ourselves from this primary experience of love or it’s absence, depending on its capacity or lack as it moved towards us, depending on its purity or toxicity, it’s availability or it’s entanglement in the ancestral weave of inter-generational trauma. We raise our children from inside these beliefs, from within these adaptive survival strategies, these self protective shields from the unbearable affects of our own infancies, as we in turn were raised.
This subconscious imperative to habitually attend to the need of others is often seeded in the excruciating paralysis of a chronic freeze response or the ingratiating tyranny of a fawn response, the reactivity of a chronically over-burdened and under nourished nervous system. However beneath the placid facade of this placatory, pleasing, accomodating, self-sacrificing conditioning, there may often lurk profound abyss’s of grief and despair, torrential uprisings of rage, hatred, disgust. Whilst these are a natural and understandable response to the reality of one’s less than ideal circumstance of the bereft absence, the terrifying transgression.These feelings, we learnt early were not acceptable, and we may also cultivate substrata’s of shame and humiliation, that may thrive in the underworld of our experience, when we are not relationally titrated and co-regulated by a kind and loving enough other. When this rage and grief is split off from our conscious awareness, it becomes the toxic undercurrent of our loving, the shadow of our relating to other and self, often sabotaging our equilibrium with it’s volatile surfacing, when the pressure becomes too great, damaging our relationships and compromising our own sense of integrity and cohesive self awareness.
And so the day may come when we realise that what we thought was our super power, our gift to the world, the thing we were groomed for, trained in, indoctrinated to perpetuate; our deep capacity to relate and attune and to connect and to serve, has all along been perpetuating the primal injury of our own incapacity to receive, a way of protecting ourselves from true intimacy and connection, love and unity, because at the time when we were born into the field of love, raised in the innate expectation of care, we came to understand it as a dangerous thing, subtly or overt. A dangerous thing because of what was there that was not love, that may have been violent or cruel, the inflicting of pain, the transgressions, the crimes of commission. Or perhaps a dangerous thing because of what was supposed to come towards us that did not come, the absence, the lack, the invisibility, the diminishment, the crimes of omission.
In order to survive, one may have been asked to deny themselves a full spectrum of emotional expression. The dark emotions are relegated to the shadow lands of the inexpressible, our bodies may become uninhabitable, the imaginal and dissociative realms a tender respite, addictive behaviours a blessed relief from the fraught tension of holding the forbidden libidinal and enlivening energies at bay. Forever abiding the unconscious imperative of suppression of one’s own true self- emergence. Denying the internal impulse to awaken, we abide the entrained loyalty to the oppressor of our actualisation, the internalised abuser. The poignant longings for our own fruitful becoming, perpetually sabotaged and submerged by the overarching necessitation of our own subjugation.
When we come to understand that our isolation and disconnection is a result of our own instinctive and intrinsic defence against connection, even when our entire identity has been shaped by the imperative to attend to other, there is a deep reckoning that must be contended with. A retraction of the propensity to blame the Others in our lives for the long and repeating tales of lack and abandonment and disappointment and betrayal. Until we can come to bear the full weight of our part in this story, we will never receive what we most deeply long for. The grief of knowing that after a life of caring in order to be cared for, the debt will never be repaid, the gifting never returned, the care will never be reciprocated, in those relationships with which we have grappled in the shadows, not in the way that we would have wanted it, from that terrified child’s adaptive perception of what love might look like, this perception often forged in its absence. That the other that you love will never be able to be nourished by that version of care, that desperate, extractive seeking of safety and relational security, the daemonic imperative to survive by bonding with those who hold our lives in their ill-equipped hands. The only people who will ever be drawn to this way of loving are those with their own unrealised attachment wounds, their own perversely compatible defensive behaviours and attachment complexes.
It feels that there is a fundamental self responsibility that must be realised,
that while our primal wounding was beyond our control, that it was an abuse of power, or an expression of lack, undoubtedly honed by layer upon layer of inter- generational trauma, there is something about our psychic necessity to control the consequences of that wounding, that have perpetuated its constellation within our lives. Perhaps we have allowed ourselves to orbit too long around the imperative to not feel the seemingly unbearable affects that might truly have annihilated us as infants or small children, but which we now have the opportunity to forebear and transmute in our fierce capacity to experience and atone and embody the dissonances of our energetic, emotional, physical, psychological, somatic inheritances, of all that came to pass that was anything other than the intended birthright of attuned care and secure attachment.
It is one thing to realise the double-binded catch 22, the bewildering impossibility of this dynamic within the psyche, to awaken to the loss of life that has been left in its wake, and it is another to reeducate the heart, to retrain the brain, to regulate the nervous system to understand what true reciprocal relating might look like. This is the journey that I want to take, once the cold knot of my grief grows roots that sink deep enough through the bedrock to the earth’s ecstatic core and are nourished by the eternal fire that dwells there. Once the tongues of my rage have unfurled out as far as the furthest galaxies and been cooled there by the star light of a cosmic belonging and the remembering of a unity more eternal than blood. When I have turned towards my own self in the darkest of nights and in the deepest of pain and said yes, yes to love and risk and trust, yes to all of me, with the fierce heart of a mother’s claiming. Then I will begin to know what it is to root myself in the unequivocal force of my own worthiness of love, my own unconditional entitlement to care, that I might find, finally, an acceptance of my own body, an embracing of my own existence, a receptivity to support and prosperity, an actualisation of my own gentle power and co-creative capacity, an availability to love and connection that is founded in safety, in tender co-regulation and the reciprocity of deep and natural and self-actualised care.
Words and image Copyright Lucy Pierce 2022
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