October 2023.
“What happened when you were three years old?” asked Carol.
Wow, I thought. She’s good.
This had been on my mind for a while. I had pondered how that moment and the subsequent alteration of my entire universe had led me down a path that brought me to that place. Carol and I had exchanged a few introductory pleasantries at the start of our Messenger call. Carol is Dave’s mum. Dave is the man who rescued Jonnie in Egypt and brought her home to France.
Dave is the man who rescued Jonnie and I when he realized I had no idea what I had been coerced into taking on with my derelict farmhouse in France and that we were ‘going to die’ if we stayed for winter. He advised me to sell immediately and not look back.
Of course, after twenty years in France, he knew what he was talking about. I was congratulating myself on surviving this far on my own – and it was surviving – and so I figured, Jonnie and I would be fine. I was naïve. I didn’t know. But I sure do now!
Dave returned in November to help me and Jonnie survive the winter and that is another story. (See @seeking_quietwaters for the full renovation highs and horrors)
I immediately started weeping. When I cry, tears just leak, uncontrollably out of my eyes. They keep going until I am regulated. This was not one of those heaving, hacking snot inducing releases. Just acceptance and relief.
I needed to say it out loud. It wasn’t stupid. It had created carnage in my past and my present and I was damned if I was going to let some kind of misplaced loyalty or undeserved shame stop me from getting this out.
Carol is a Clairvoyant and a Reiki Grandmaster.
I had not wanted or needed a dog. Getting a dog was pure insanity. And yet, I seemed to have no control whatsoever over my actions. A higher power moment? It definitely wasn’t my best thinking. Dave gave me no time to reason it out cognitively. He arrived fourteen hours after I sent the message, expressing interest. When he arrived told me about his mother. I think he was very quickly and instinctively seeing beyond what was obvious. He has a certain power, too.
When I was three years old, I realized beyond any shadow of a doubt that my mother did not love me. In fact, she hated me. I don’t know what it was that I did or said. Maybe nothing. I was sitting on the floor and I remember being confused and shocked. She might have been drinking. They did every evening. I think my dad made some half-hearted protest. A future pattern of pathetic and futile interventions.
She bared her teeth at me, spitting out the words like a chimpanzee about to devour its young. She was very clear. I saw it, I heard it and I felt it. My entire being would never forget that moment even though my mind buried it. It was relived every day in many ways, until this year.
Females of their species devour their young when they are weak or sick. I was neither. Whatever clicked in her brain in that moment, I remember nothing of any prior kindnesses. I remember only the ensuing decades of cruelty. Cruelty that I accepted as punishment for some imagined crime. I was the problem and I deserved what I got.
Carol described the moment precisely. I didn’t need to give her any context. She understood what had happened and how it had affected me. I already knew that I did not deserve to end up in an abusive relationship, cruelly and callously abandoned and discarded, in the same way I did not deserve the treatment I suffered at the hands of my abusive and neglectful parents. One parent blatantly abusive, the other showing affection in secret making for a confusing relationship with what emotions are and are not safe to express.
Of course I didn’t believe I deserved love. Paradoxically, at times, I believed I was worthy of great love! There is a saying in Fellowship circles – I thought I was the biggest piece of shit that the world needed to revolve around – I had some kind of identification with that push and pull.
Love had always been conditional. (Much more on this in my upcoming novel – The Patterns & Chaos of UNTREATED Minds) As I never knew what I did or didn’t do to have love withdrawn, (if, indeed it was ever really there in the first place) it also made sense that I would persist in trying strategies to find that lost love in emotionally unavailable and unsafe people. I would find myself in transactional situations around relationships and work and as I couldn't beat them, I guess I joined them.
As acts of service are my love language and honesty is my number 1 values in action strength, these causes and conditions often meant I found myself in the wrong room. I had to find where the right room was!
It felt good to know that my wounded inner child had a valid point. She wasn’t making a fuss over nothing. She wasn’t lying, exaggerating or attention seeking. She had been deeply hurt, scared, sad and had never felt truly safe from that moment forward. The functioning adult’s circumstances were proof positive that the wounded child needed to be heard, acknowledged and cared for in the way she deserved.
“Weren’t you hugged enough as a child?” “Didn’t your Mummy and Daddy love you enough?” Common taunts for those struggling with emotional challenges. Listen to some Gabor Mate to understand that everyone of us resilient children had some fucked-up childhood experience.
I asked her how I would know that I had cleared this stuff out. That I was no longer being held back by this belief. She said, simply, “You will feel better.”
Why is any of this life threatening? What does that belief have to do with self-sabotage?
I walked into the trap willingly. The ultimate act of self-sabotage. To be so blinkered to my truth that I could see, hear and feel them, yet still ignore all the red flags.
I am an alcoholic in recovery. I have not had a drink for nearly six years, one day at a time. For my kind of alcoholism, to drink again is to die. If I start again, I don’t know when or where I might stop. Within two weeks of arriving in France, I was overwhelmed with thoughts of drinking again. It didn’t make sense until I realized someone was toying with my sanity. Systematically and strategically trying to reduce me to their level. Goading me towards a way of being that they were used to and not how I wanted to show up in my life.
I saw it. I knew it. I saved myself. But I stayed. Weeks later, shut in a bedroom the thought occurred to me that killing myself was preferable to living the way I was being forced to live.
BOOM! I knew I had to leave. A slippery slope to relapse, depression and death was not going to be in my future. Nor was living as a codependent in a toxic relationship. Just like my parents. And other parents who show up in the story.
Fortunately, I had some control over my thinking. I had not been reprogrammed yet and I was seeing things more and more clearly. But coercive control and narcissistic abuse is like alcohol. Cunning, baffling and powerful. I had a lifetime of swimming with sharks. So many examples of these behaviours and manipulations that it had become my comfort zone. Despite wanting the exact opposite, here I was. In hell.
I don’t want to spoil the novel so I have given examples of my personal power over my choices to live or die but in my novel, the main character has several brushes with death at the hands of her tormentor. Did they really try to cause me harm? Did I get it wrong?
Were the bike breaks a genuine mistake? If so, why lie about it? Were the electrics in the house left live and unprotected to harm me or to kill me? So many ways in which I could have suffered injury or death both directly and indirectly by the deliberate actions of a person with malintent.
The Shaman I had a session with after Carol told me that the light in me was almost out. She said that there was just a tiny spark left. She didn’t see anyone around me and that I was alone. This made me feel sad. I was already sad, so I wasn’t really surprised.
She told me I was funny and that I had really made her laugh while she had been day tripping around my subconscious despair. That gave me hope. I like making people laugh.
I just needed the weight of the belief and everyone else’s stuff to be off me. My mother had passed away and I started creating and maintaining fierce boundaries.
‘Just put it down,’ I hear you say…..Like anything emotionally challenging - it’s a process. It was a few more months and a bitterly cold winter before the energy began to shift. The Great Escape to the South of France in the dead of winter, another leap into the unknown with no parachute or person to catch us.
Its hard to say when and how the belief left me. Maybe it was with the inner child work with Jonnie or perhaps with the completion of the novel. It could have been blocking toxic family forever and meaning it this time. Or finding our way back to the South of France, to a proper home, surrounded by warmth, friendship and kindness.
It could be deciding and understanding that I will no longer compromise what and who I am to make other people feel comfortable in their own insanity. I have left the cult. I no longer drink the Cool Aid.
Kerry Douglas, a celebrity medium popped into my life in January 2024. A connection of a character in the novel.
She brought my Mum with her. She told me she was crying and that she didn't really mean it. Crocodile tears. She highlighted the complexity of my mothers mental health and the reasons for them.
"Fuckin' hell, Babe," she exclaimed in a friendly, familiar Essex accent. "Your home was fuckin' INSANE! It's like a cult - there's no other way to describe it!" Again, no context offered from me. This is what she proffered.
I had never put it together like that but the secrets within families that keep people sick, aren't any different to the creation of a cult. The only difference is blood.
To get sober, I had to accept that a great deal of my problems were created by me. What if I am the problem - was a mega-breakthrough - to getting sober. As time has gone on, with eyes and heart open, I think of the Sick Man’s Prayer.
I am done with the heavy lifting. I now know with certainty, what is mine and what is not.
Anything that threatens our life’s satisfaction, meaning and purpose is life threatening.
We don’t all need to be driven quietly crazy by our choices. We can change our minds and our circumstances any time we are ready. We might need a little help and that’s OK too.
I hope you have enjoyed this series. It has been quite tough to write. My way of shining the light on the issues is not a typical solution. But I got there anyway. Somehow, I knew what I needed. Or my Higher Power did.
Next Blog - A short client story. A simple Money Mindset goal uncovers a client's truth that halts a chain of life altering events, potentially knocking her off course with no way to return!
Peace & Love,
Elizabeth & Jonnie
My old Farmhouse, Gigny-sur-Saone. January 2023. When you see the writing is on the wall - believe it!
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