A realisation over the last few days has enabled me to understand even more than ever that we see things as we are. What do I mean by this?
Back in 1989, I entered psychotherapy because I wanted to understand why I felt so miserable all the time. Of course, what I discovered was that both my mother’s death (when I was 12 and she was 47) and my separation from her immediately following my birth had a profound impact on me.
In this post, I want to talk about my birth and separation, because this is where a recent exploration of that time has resulted in a much clearer understanding of the core of who I really am.
When I explored this separation during psychotherapy I came to the conclusion that I must have been terrified to have been taken off to another hospital so soon after my birth. This was a conclusion I came to through thinking, rather than connecting with the time and space in which this event occurred. What also impacted this conclusion was my inner state at the time of the exploration.
In the late 80s and early 90s, I was an extremely insecure young woman, terrified of my feelings and with a massive lack of trust in anything or anyone. At that time, I was also in the process of connecting with emotions I’d been denying even existed for more than a decade since my mother’s passing. And of course, feelings I’d not allowed myself to have all of my life.
What I learned last week in my Soul Session with Gilly Godward, is that my experience as an infant all alone in that hospital was actually very different. By going through a process whereby I connected with my infant self, I could actually sense what I felt at that time. And that was this: I felt calm and had a deep inner knowing that everything would be okay.
Uncovering this got me thinking about my time in Psychotherapy and the fact that at that time, I got it so wrong. Or did I?
This week I have been relearning that we attract who we are. And that is exactly what I did when I explored my infant’s world in the 90s. At that time I was so frightened of my emotions, myself, and the world around me that the only thinking I could have had about my experience as a baby was that it was terrifying. There is no way I could have seen it any other way.
Following my time in Psychotherapy, I was able to re-emerge with a newfound level of self-belief. This is what happens when people do attachment theory work such as I did. It’s about building a secure attachment with a trusted individual, in this case, my Psychotherapist, to explore parts of ourselves.
With the work I did in the 80s and 90s, and the subsequent counseling and healing work I have done in recent years I am now in a completely different place, therefore I am able to connect with how things really are or were rather than only being able to access my thinking around how I suspect they might have been.
This I find fascinating, and of course is how we develop, grow and expand. For me, it’s been one of those ah-ha moments, so that’s why.
Life has its own way of unraveling for us all. In my experience, the more time I spend consciously connecting with myself, examining my thoughts and feelings, and the past, the clearer my story becomes as does the way forward.
With love,
