I have feared death my whole life. When I was a little girl I would beg my parents not
to die when they tucked me into bed at night. I have this memory from as young
as 4 years old.
I found my mothers dead body when I was 23 years old. She was not sick, not in
the traditional sense anyway…she was diagnosed with depression, chronic pain
and probably some other things. It is suspected by many that she took her own
life. I do not believe so…not intentionally anyway.
The last thing I said to my mother was “it can’t be all about you mom”. I was
moving to Lethbridge and she was heartbroken.
In the last decade I have been unable or unwilling to watch any movie with
death or dying….note the time line….long after my mothers death I stopped
watching death, I stopped watching grief, I stopped watching anything that
would evoke any feeling other than joy or happiness.
In my 20’s I would plan my monthly cry, I would grab a stack of movies
guaranteed to offer a great release and “let it all go”…
In my 30’s all of my pent up trauma seemed to bottle neck and made a mad dash
to come out all at once…or at least that’s how it felt for a chunk of years.
My therapist told me that my trauma was not centered around a specific event
she said it sounded more like the way that I processed my life, my experience
of my life was traumatic….WTF how do you process that?!? Step by step. One day
at a time. One feeling at a time….or sometimes a schmaggle of all the feels. My
therapists analysis resonates with me for so many reasons: I am an empath, a
psychic, a healer, a ….. my point is my childhood was spent feeling all the
feels of all those humans around me. I didn’t understand who’s feeling was
who’s. I just knew that my tummy hurt, or I felt worried, or unhappy or scared.
My father was in the military, he went away a LOT for 6 months at a time.
That’s a LOT of feelings to feel for a family or four. (Not to mention all the
other humans standing around saying goodbye to their parents) ((I had no
concept, no language and no way to process any of that))… I was consistently
met with “don’t worry about it”, “don’t think about it”, “think about something
else”, “there’s nothing you can do about that right now”. I exhausted all of
the humans around me with all of my feelings. It seemed that nobody had any
feelings of their own and no time to invest in holding space for me to process
what I could feel moving through my body mind.
I have literally spent the last 4 years relearning, unlearning, the habitual
response patterns of my body mind. There were moments when I felt FUCKING
CRAZY. Moments when I told myself a wild story about how I was becoming
“mentally ill” just like my mother. That if people knew all of the feelings
inside of me they would “lock me up”, “take away my kids”, “medicate me”….all
of the things. Moments when I questioned whether my mother actually had a
“mental illness” at all or whether she was just processing all of her traumatic
events, questioning her habitual response patterns and reprogramming her
brain?!?
