"Piffle" my friend Lioness offers from Portie-Land, and asks me to think of all the reasons why my friends do love me now, why I AM worthy.
yes yes, plenty of reasons blah blah
But when my head is reeling with noise noise noise that I just want to SHUT UP, its not so easy to hear the distant whispers of those positive words. This noise is so persistent that it is indecipherable, all encompassing and constant.
I want it to stop. I want the silence.
Pink wrote in her song "Fucking Perfect": Change the voices in your head/Make them like you instead.
Listening to this song for the first time while in hospital, I came to realise that's what they are, these incessant noises: voices.
Voices of people long gone.
Voices of people dead.
Voices of people dead-to-me.
Voices of people with their own pain, that they never acknowledged or dealt with.
Voices of people who would project their feelings about themselves onto me.
Voices of people with no love to give, even to me, who should have had it.
These voices are loud, constant, persistent, unrelenting and lifelong, starting at birth and continuing through bullying at school and then into relationships. They have had me shy away from friendships that might be positive, or worse, not nurturing them as they needed to be. Shying away from the people that wont treat me like crap. Persisting with those that do, whilst begging them to change. Rejecting those that love me to pursue those that can't love me and never will. Then I do it to my own children too, rejecting them in favour of things that have no value in my life.
I feel like whale shit at the bottom of the ocean because this is not what I want to do, this is not the mother I want to be.
And the panic, the panic that those voices can instill in me... The intense cell-level need to flee, to get away from the conflict that is coming, the negating of what I have to say, the denigration, the PROOF that my mother was right. Anything to avoid that...
My psychologist asks me during my session this week about my early childhood (no, not that, do we have to talk about that??) Who did love me, if not my parents? And I think. And I shrug my shoulders and the tears fall. Because the answer is unsayable. The answer is "no one."
Imagine that?
She explains that if a child has just one person to show them affection, to nurture them, provide care, to show love, make them feel safe and wanted, then their brain will develop to expect that relationships are positive, safe, good things. If the child doesn't have that one person, then the brain develops completely differently. Relationships are a source of danger, and are to be avoided or sabotaged.
Without that "one person" to show me love when I was no bigger than my own children are now, it is no wonder I behave the way I do, react the way I do, expect the things I expect from people. The voices, they repeat the things that hurt the most in my childhood. The way I react to them and the way I relate to people is result of my brain development.
Does that make a difference? I know now that my childhood is not something I "should just get over." I know that there is no point in beating myself up for the way I react in certain situations - its like hating on myself for breathing. I know that with self-knowledge comes the ability to change.
I know that when my heart is pounding and every cell in my body screams "danger! love approaching" that my brain is going to try to fuck things up for me.
I just don't know how I'm going to stop it.