Sometimes change comes upon you, and all you can do is remind yourself that you're inside a process, and that this too shall pass. On my journey, I've been in grief many times. As the attachment to abusive parental figures loosens, I grow, breaking through layers of denial and delusion, reaching through my pain, to rise and stand tall - a little wiser, a little more serene. I've often found the time before the grief the hardest, inside the process without knowing what exactly it is about. I'll be in an emotional repetition that has yet to reveal its symbolism, which helps me link it back to specific traumatic incidents from the past. Being in the state of un-knowing is uncomfortable. Clarity brings relief.
Since 2004, when I realized I had to go much deeper if I wanted to be a real mother to my daughter, I've had the sense that an elongated repetition has been taking place, of being taken through my childhood again (I'd already been in therapy for decades). This process would necessarily end at the beginning of my abuse - with my mother.
Denial and its illusions of comfort have the very specific purpose of keeping reality, along with the pain, at bay. In dropping one false belief from what the authority figures of my childhood were like, false beliefs about the world are also dropped, to reveal a reality as difficult to come by as personal liberation.
Some weeks back, slivers of minimization and denial about my mother began to give way for the fullness of her betrayal. She found release which she called happiness only in seeing me suffer. Her denial was so strong that everyone had to believe she was the best mother ever. It took me half a century to go from the belief of having the best mother, to the reality.
Three years ago I met a woman in a professional context. I was aware that I had some mother issues with her, because she presented very strongly as a mother figure, being older, and nurturing. However, in our first attempt at working together, she tried to undermine me. In trying to speak to her after the first incident, she found fault with me, and suggested I was selfish. This really put me into mother territory - my mother would often mention how selfish I was. Because this woman was not able to look at her shadow, and I was too willing to look at mine, the relationship deteriorated from there. She would find blame, and when I crumbled under her accusations, she would grandly "forgive" me. After a day or so, once I'd found my center, I'd realize I had been taking on what was hers to carry, and that I never did anything to harm her in the first place.
Through her behavior, I started to get a look into her unresolved trauma story, and also got the distinct sense that she would never be able to face it. Such a person unconsciously gets themselves in a victim role, repeatedly, without the ability to see what they do to create their situation. I distanced myself from this woman when her hypocrisy became untenable - when her former support had turned into sure and unrelenting criticism - yet she still called me her friend, and she was sincerely convinced that her intentions were pure, and her comments for my benefit. With that mindset, my distancing would be perceived as me hurting her, put her back in the victim-state, which has kept me from reconnecting.
Just a few weeks ago, a piece of extremely specific information that only this woman had known and addressed with me popped up in a damaging context of online slander through email and comments on social media. A specific piece of information was twisted to question my integrity, and the woman had been the only person with whom I had shared it, so I suspected her and felt betrayed.
I got in touch with tremendous anger, at this woman, and then my mother. The anger reversed the responsibility for the entire trip my mother put on me, that turned me into every shade of evil.
And after all that was done, instead of the relief and renewed energy I usually feel, I started to feel this enormous weight. There have been tears, sometimes just streaming down without a prefacing thought. But mostly there were no tears, just a dull headache, and emptiness. While the state resembled depression, I had no negative thoughts, and no trouble reminding myself of the certainty that this, too, would pass, and that the freedom and transformation on the other side would match the severity of the pain.
The relief from the present heaviness came in the most unexpected way. In meditation, I received a prompt to look at an email that had arrived some weeks earlier from a man who had briefly taught for our organization three years ago. In reading the message, I was stunned. While the message was kind and inviting, he used the same obscure words as were used in the online smear campaign, launched the very day after I had received his email - after he didn't receive a reply. There was relief in this, because I had always known that this man was not well, that he might be capable of this. There wasn't the same shock and betrayal as with the woman. How he found out this specific piece of information which he plied to use against me, remains a mystery.
I noticed that my fear had been greater when I believed a woman to be behind the libel and threats. My mother was truly scary, and the destructive power she wielded over me was absolute. To overcome this fear, I had to go father and deeper in the spiritual work than I had in a long time, placing this man I had worked with in an ethereal light and send forgiveness, again and again.
Finally, the dark cloud was lifted from my consciousness. I had to return to the fear from being around insane people who had no boundaries in their destructiveness through this process before the present could shift, and I could find the clarity that brings lightness and freedom.