The Aftermath of Developmental Neglect or Heart Thaw

“There are two points in space,” my tenth-grade math teacher said and basically lost me. I was supposed to imagine a line connecting them.  Huh?

That’s how I feel about mindfulness now.

It makes my head hurt. I listen to the words of meditation teachers because books on the subject sound like “blah. blah. blah. breathe.”

Wasn’t I already breathing? I don’t get it.

I keep at it though because because unlike geometry, which I haven’t needed, being present is important.

But it’s hard and slow. I’m skilled at avoidance and distraction. I’m the feminist waiting to be fixed or rescued – not by men – but therapy experts. Or I was.

Now, I know the truth is much more complicated like the sign down the street in front of the Unitarian Church which reads: “Sign broken. Go inside.”

This is the good news and the bad news.

Good news because mindfulness is cheaper than therapy. Bad news because inhabiting my body, feelings and self can feel like traveling to another country without a map, car or translator. I’m as fast as a snail crawling through super glue.

A few nights ago, it was Tara Brach’s voice I was ingesting, hoping my before bed brain can retain her words. She said: “Recognizing what is happening and experiencing in our body what is happening, and being able to say yes, is the groundwork for healing all emotions.”

I see the appeal of drugs. That’s my first thought. My second thought? Where are the crackers?

“What’s happening,” she said, “is we’re discovering the heart space where all that is is welcome” and again, I can’t even get through the sentence….

Is that what’s supposed to happen in the heart space? Maybe if you’re a monk…

And I’m off….

Self-hate: How did I get so fucking old and not know how to inhabit the heart? I can barely tolerate uninvited feelings.

Blame: My father, if alive, is a homeless drunk who left me with his last name, big forehead and bad eyes. He left before I could walk. I couldn’t even chase him. Not very welcoming.

Blame again: My teenage mother kept my toddler sister in her bed by tying her to it at night so she wouldn’t rip the wallpaper off. I fell out of a moving car and off a second-story porch before I was two. The same sister was hit by a car – TWICE – by age ten.

Welcome to traffic and pavement maybe but not the body.

Pity: My mother had a drunk father and was too often “cared” for by a violent grandmother. Her mother didn’t protect her so how was she going to learn to protect us?  It’s not like she’s got some secret stash of feel good she’s hoarding. She’s had cancer and still smokes.

Realization:I am post-traumatically stressed out and I still drink coffee? I’m not exactly rocking the self-care. My mother got three kids through high school and into adulthood even with spouses who hurt her and us. Some would say, “Job well done,” and I can see that too.

I thought centering practices were going to make me calm. I look calm. From the outside, I am a woman in her bed with a journal and a meditation CD. But inside, a tornado is tipping cows, cars and homes.

Tara Brach’s voice continues: “Yet for many people, and this is especially true when there is self-hatred, when there’s deep shame, saying yes, meeting what is difficult, can feel impossible. It even feels dangerous to relax our resistance or to put down blame, to open the heart.”

She certainly seems to know me. It IS difficult.

Mindfulness is making me connect with how checked out I am. What I’m noticing is how I choose numbness and chase myself out of the now.

My thoughts are like a herd of bronchos bucking me one at a time and instead of hitting dirt I just land on another one. At some point I remember breathing is supposed to be good and I do some of that. It makes some of the bronchos sleepy.

How much resistance to my own personal experience can I have? Why can’t I stop neglecting myself?

I let the hand go back to heart and keep it there and notice breath slows my brain down a bit. And there is, a teeny, tiny miniscule shift.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still aching for carbs. If they were within reach I’d be inside the box. Still, I am allowing a micro moment of emotion. It’s a little soupy, goopy and vague but it’s not terrible and is even a bit soft. What would happen if I welcomed it all?

The needy desperate inner child considers this some sort of invitation and shows up fast. She’s at my door, unannounced, peering from the closet of my past where she was hiding. She’s nine or ten and she’s enormous. Like 5 feet 3 and 125 pounds. She looks hungry and I don’t have food in the house. She’s in stained blue sweatpants and tangled mess of hair with the lice crawling on her head. She smells like a urinal which means she wet the bed. Again.

I’m not welcoming that.

I stay still. The real me went to school that way and had Sissy Pissy as a nickname.

I don’t slam the door on memory. I’m not in agony. I’m just observing and sit with myself.

Of course it’s hard for me to be mindful and to stay still. I spent years avoiding my body, sensations, embarrassment and shame. Even without reliving abuse or violence or trauma I realize there is good reason for my trepidation and it’s amazing that I slow down at all.

Is this a compassion seed?

Did I immediately get healed or hug and hold my inner peace? It’s not that fast or easy. Even even in my imagination I don’t buy pretty soaps or new mattresses and blankets. I tolerate the existence of the inner stinky me.

It’s not full-out welcoming with flowers, keys, snacks and towels but the fear and revulsion are melting off me snow on a roof when it is sunny. The warmth causes a slow slide. Dangerous icicles turn to water droplets.

It’s not like I missed out on all the old inner child John Bradshaw stuff in the feel-it-to heal-it early days. But to be honest, I’ve recoiled at the concept and not only because I didn’t want to buy a binky.

I never pictured my inner child as perky, creative or playful. I pictured her as a wild child, a feral and wild bob cat who would, if I opened the cage, claw my eyes out and eat me for lunch.

Me ran from me. Me felt dangerous. For so long, I wanted to deny being a miserable child which felt like a failure of nature, wrong, like a dirty sun or a flower blooming thorns.

I sink lower than shame into sorrow and something else. Is it tenderness?

That little girl went to school, got good grades and made friends. She ignored her body, emotions, needs and sensations because she didn’t know there was another option. There wasn’t. She wasn’t stupid or flawed or damaged. In fact, it’s amazing she survived.

To survive I learned the opposite of mindfulness. Is that what happened to my mother? Is that what happened to one of my aunts? Did they learn to function and cope, in action, but not feeling?

I wonder how their needs, bodies and vulnerabilities were met? I know their father and grandmother were alcoholics, that addiction and violence were not strangers. Are certain coping skills more dominant than others and also hereditary? Is this what was underneath cruelty or oblivion and mixed in with dinner and in the DNA?

There are moments when I have compassion my mother, for my father, for my family and myself. We learn from our parents unless and until we choose to do things differently.

Not everyone chooses or knows their are other choices. And choosing isn’t easy.

Mindful living and breaking the cycle can be like driving in reverse. Same car. Same road. Same world. Completely disorienting. It requires tuning into new cues, clues and the body. It means an adulthood of learning new skills and unlearning just as many.

My heart was a bone I buried in the yard. In a pack of hungry canines, hiding it outside where it could not be chewed on or stolen was wise.

Dusty it off and relocating the bony heart is the recovery work when there’s been neglect and developmental trauma.

This is how the cycle is broken. Breaking the cycle can never change the past. I’m at peace with that.

But this now is the past my daughter will lean on in the future.

I want to teach my girl that her face, at my door, day or night, happy or sad, is welcome. I want her to know my words of reassurance are more than blah-blah-blah but something she feels so deeply in her being they are a knowing.

Plus, I want her to know how to be available to herself, that she can listen, respond to and nurture her own body, needs as dreams as well as care for others.

Can I keep learning too no matter what my age or how foolish and inept I feel? I must. It doesn’t matter if I fumble and bumble. So what if I am not graceful?

Will I attend to myself or berate myself instead? Will I encourage or shame myself when discouraged? Do I go all up in my head and deny my body or stay still long enough to get centered?

There are endless opportunities. I fail and succeed. But there are countless new chances and THIS is where I have the most influence and power. Here and now and with me and in my home. This is cycle-breaking and silence-breaking. It’s not dramatic but it’s monumentally huge. So bring on the before bed CD’s and hand me my journal.

I put the welcome mat out and go in. Sometimes I run right back out. Sometimes the door and heart slam shut.

But I know it will open again. So I sit and I wait. And I practice.