Like many, even most people, problematic childhood issues have a way of re-emerging. I like to think that gives us another crack at them which I have been trying to take rather than the time honored approach (mine in fact) of stuffing them down where the sun doesn't shine.
So this time when they made a reappearance, I took a closer look and discovered that it is when injuries are denied and papered over by the perpetrator, anxiety threatens to take over my nervous system. In that contracted state I can see no solution other than an inconceivable capitulation to a false narrative or an outsized vitriolic reaction. Either choice leads inevitably to the death of any soul matter still struggling within me to find a voice.
So, in short, if I don’t stand up and yell, the false version of events stands as truth. If I do scream my truth to the heavens, or even state it in semi-rational terms, I am held to be overreacting, I am too sensitive and must have misunderstood the situation.
That is the road to unending anxiety and even panic attacks because there is, apparently, no honorable way out alive.
Enter my friend Dorothy who knows that road intimately and, after much heartache, study, trial and painful error, has found a way to make her peace with the gaslighting shadow boxers of her world.
She asks “to be given the intention to be willing to let go.” I love this because it acknowledges where you are and does so without judgement. It takes you at face value and works the landscape accordingly.
So now this is where I turn when all roads seem to lead to self-destruction. And wonder of wonders, my heart rate slows and my breath comes easier.
“I ask for the intention to be willing to let go.”
“I ask for the intention to be willing to let go.”
And, as someone else said, “Seek and you shall find; knock, and the door shall be opened to you.”*
“I ask for the intention to be willing to let go.”
And lo and behold, I am receiving. I hope you can too.
September 6, 2022
Free Image Credit: Pixabay, kasjanf.
*Dorothy McFarland, To Live In This World: Poems (2011)
Mission Impossible: Poems (2004)
Blind Horse Press
Leverett, Massachusetts
**Matthew 7:7
All blog entries are works of the imagination and are for spiritual and entertainment purposes only.