Enmeshment in Relationships, and Seeing Myself

              I was reading my old journal the other day and so many feelings came up. It was from 3 years ago and on, and I discovered how much I really did grow since. It was when I was stuck with my relationship with this person who was not serving me, yet I was so clueless to how I held my own key to fixing my self esteem. I was looking to them to suddenly make Everything better, like a magic wand. I remember reading about codependency in those days, from a christian website, and seeing how it was a sin to be so dependent on your friend because it is actually a form of worship, which is the opposite of what God wants and only brings you pain because you deny yourself the rights to be happy with who you are alone. I was so shocked and scared by this, it made a lot of sense to me. But I could not physically detach from the relationship, and it felt like doing the impossible. That was why I am so proud that I did it, and I never looked back when I gained my self-worth.

          I also used to feel traumatized by the idea of being different, because to me that meant abandonment. Teal Swan says in her video about belonging that people who were traumatized by feeling not belonging to their families often subconsciously live with the belief of being different, no matter how much they want to fit in, and will monitor their surroundings for differences, as if expecting the rejection from it. I used to be more like this, seeing myself as crazy and scared of being seen as different, so I conformed more. Now I don't care AS much, and accept myself more, even though I am different sometimes. I know that others can be different than me but am trying to see our similarities instead so I can relate to them. I do that with my bio sister, because I want to connect with her. The beginning of relationships are always in infatuation stage, where we SEE the same traits we have with one another, and then it gradually turns to reality, and it is there where people start to notice the differences and either get annoyed or scared and leave, or they keep trying to make it work and find commonalities.

          But what about all those people who do cling to another thinking they will make all their problems go away? It is so sad for me to think about it. I know what it was like, the utter anguish of losing the person who you feel holds your very essence and heart, and knowing they hate you and can break you in a million pieces by their rejection of you. Mark Smith of Family Tree Counseling talks about this in Romantic 'Love' is a Magnifying Glass For Childhood Wounds, and he says that the ones we pick in our relationships show us our wounds in enlargement, and it hurts like hell. The ones we fall in 'love' with remind us most of our parent relationships we had growing up. How we felt wounded by them. He says although it hurts soo bad, it has the ability to heal us because we face it. So this is what happened with me in my relationships, I felt all the pain of rejection on my very being, and it turned me inside out to face my shattered soul. 

             Now, I have a relationship that is better to me, but I still feel hurt a lot by the way he seems to ignore my feelings. That is because of his wounds and not feeling worthy of a full partner intimacy, and so he ignores my emotions because he is used to ignoring his. He has opened up a bit in the past few days, and tried to talk about feelings and annoyances, but is still living in survival mode so does not focus on them much. We talk about living from the trauma vortex and not being able to face big feelings because we need to have more assurance that we'll be okay inside. It really sucks and I want to just live fully and give back to the world of my talent with happiness, but I feel stuck through not seeing my full self. I catch glimpses of myself, and am able to be joyful a lot at those times, but frustration with challenges creep up. Such as seeing my daughter loves me, and myself as worthy of life.