It helps me to write things down. Been playing with a core wound and exploring it with a few friends. Despite knowing this for decades, the desire to receive external love and how devastating it can feel if that love is threatened or dropped, it is still so activating to me to some degree. Now the level has dropped dramatically yet is still there.
I have spent much of the last year/ years playing with survival fears of money/ food. Yet this cuts even deeper. One friend is now in a generally blissful love relationship yet notices how traumatizing it feels when that love is threatened or withdrawn. Another is exploring deep abandonment issues when family was not around to support her through an illness.
For the two and a half years I have lived alone, I have played with loneliness and belonging and come to the certainty it can not be found externally. I know that to anchor myself externally makes me a puppet of circumstance and negates my sovereignty. I now now the answer is a gnosis that I AM Love, it is not something I seek. Yet until that is fully anchored there remains a hunger for human love. When that hunger is not met, it can wreak havoc.
I know so many relationships that have broken, might break, are unstable right now. I witness the depths even strong people will go to to keep a broken relationship and how it threatens sense of self to not have that external belonging. I have played with it literally for decades.
The most obvious way I saw it play in my life was with gifts. Feeling loved being showered with gifts on Christmas, birthday I inadvertently made the association gifts=love. I real eyes-ed this about 25 years ago and still have spent the last years moving through it. I finally saw that to make others slaves of my demands was not working. In any case, the slaves revolted. So they now longer complied with my demands. Now I can see the absurdity of demanding a gift and then calling it love yet for years I could not let it go. Even this year, having apologized for all the pressure I put on friends and relatives, I still asked my daughter if she would be willing to give me one gift. I told her I was still working on this and had not come to complete resolution so asked it as a favor. I did not demand yet was shaking knowing I needed to accept if she might choose not to met the request. As in NVC, it is either a request or demand and demands are when we don’t accept a no.
I see so many make the demand and not even question it. When my daughter refused to give me a mother’s day present BECAUSE I had spent years demanding it (she does not do well with control thank God), so many mothers were incensed and suggested I force her, she should! Can anyone not see how ridiculous that is? I force you to prove to me that you love me and I used the absurd vehicle of gifts to force it? And then does it truly feel satisfying?
Yet that desire even need is still there and I can not jump ahead and spiritual bypass where I am now. I can only feel through and know there is no ultimate answer here.
What is coming forward for me in the last days is another level of feeling abandon my “God” who left me here on this “berserk” planet where love appears to be so tainted. I have gone through other levels of blaming God for my whoas but this is a bit new.
So here is what I am discovering. This planet, this reality is whatever I say it is. Since I reversed myself on a lot of this, lo and behold “reality” shifts. The new thing is I now longer try to negate or suppress the human in her desires and needs, trying to jump ahead in the game. Ok I do but less. I allow myself the grief and keep on truckin’. Speaking of trucking, go Canada! In the playtime, I allow this awareness to continue to unfold.
