Self-Compassion is not as easy as it sounds. I find whenever I return the focus away from self degradation to self-compassion, painful memories rise up from my childhood and much of my past adulthood as well. Self degradation is learned very early on. When I was a child I naturally believed that the significant adults in my life were right and all knowing. Therefore what they taught me had to be true. I carried those memories and teachings with me into my adult relationships and transferred them to husbands, friends, the workplace, and even my belief system - my spirituality. Cultivating self-compassion means realizing a different truth for my here and now. So many of the myths that were taught about me - that were instilled in me as truths now make no sense. Not only that. I experience hurt and anger that I ever believed such nonsense about me! This is painful indeed.
For example, one of the myths about me is that I am a "femme fatale." One of the definitions I found describes a femme fatale thus: an attractive and seductive woman, especially one who is likely to cause distress or disaster to a man who becomes involved with her. I first realized that my family thought of me in this way one night sometime in my late twenties - 50 years ago. A younger family member had come to stay with me for a couple of nights with her significant other. I was a single mother at the time, and was happy they came to stay. I felt warmly supportive of her and gave them my bedroom so that they could have the larger bed. That night I went out to take a class on bioenergetics and returned home around 11:30 or so. I was tired and put on the kettle to make myself some tea before going to bed. My family member's partner came out of the bedroom to greet me. I took it that he was being polite and friendly. He sat with me at the kitchen table drinking a cup of tea and checking in with me about how my day had gone. Suddenly my family member ran into the kitchen, eyes wide and flew into a rage. She blurted out, "They all said you are a femme fatale! Now I see it with my own eyes." I was shocked and hurt. At some level I knew she was not angry with me, but that something about her relationship must be causing her to be anxious. However, I realized, for the first time, that she must have learned this expression from my family - probably my mother as she loved to label others and gossip about us one to the other - causing fear, division, and mistrust. Recently, I was amazed to hear once again a family member describing me as a "femme fatale," in quite a different context.
In both instances neither understood that I have had an excruciatingly difficult time with relationships for years. I did not marry many times because I was seductive and destructive. Instead, I tried over and over again to prove myself worthwhile and lovable, while each time choosing partners who did not really want me from the outset. I was reinforcing the life script I had learned from my mother's relationship with me as a child. In fact, she did not want me. I was in the way of her forming a new life with a man she was passionately in love with after a few years of being with my father, whom she hated, and with whom she compared me daily - over and over again. Indeed, I spent my childhood and much of my adulthood trying, in vain, to prove to her that I was worthwhile and lovable. This script I would transfer to all my relationships with friends, lovers, and husbands. There was nothing seductive or fun. Rather, it has been exhausting and painful.
I think about Natalie Goldberg writing in her book, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within:
This particular myth or learned fictional reality about me has been the bane of my life - one that I have pushed aside and tried not to face until quite recently. Maybe it has been the many hours of solitude during the pandemic and a forced retirement that has helped me confront this area of my life. Maybe now in my seventies it is natural for me to reflect on my past to understand myself more clearly. Or, perhaps it is the many years of therapy strengthening me and giving me the confidence to feel this pain viscerally and see that I don't actually die from it.
Writing about it splits open some of the wounds of my childhood, and forces me to face how I hungered, yearned, and constantly searched for love in so many wrong places. How I constantly sold myself short and chose partners or friends, who did not appreciate or deserve me, and yet with whom I tried over and over again, in vain, to prove that I could be lovable, if only I tried harder. I started to write about this - to hesitantly look at it - four years ago in April, 2017 right after my mother died.
Lately I feel that I am developing the courage to face the tough stuff now:
Now in my seventies. Now, as I realize I have much to contribute, that I have love to give to those who want to receive it. Now as a retired early childhood professor, who still works relentlessly to advocate for young children's emotional development. By writing books, articles, opinion pieces, this blog, presenting or facilitating professional development workshops.
And, perhaps, now as I continue to pass on my message that all children need relationship and unconditional love, I might find more and more that I am redeemed, that I can start to give me some of that love that I yearned for so desperately for so long. And, this way, I won't need to search for it externally any longer, as I continue to cultivate, and develop self-compassion.
At the conclusion of my book: Everyone Needs Attention: Helping Young Children Thrive, I write:
When stormy emotional rivers have thrashed around me, I have hung on for dear life to compassion and gratitude. They have always steered me through to the other side—to calmer waters of acceptance and love. As teachers, children give us work, passion, and inspiration. They will love us with all their might if we pay attention to them with an open heart. If we watch them closely, we can learn about emotions, spontaneity, joy for life, curiosity, and ourselves—for we relive our own childhoods over and over again, each time redeeming our own selves through their first-time discoveries and expressions of amazement.
Be grateful for them.
Forgive them.
Love them with all your might.
While I wrote those words for all adults who care for and educate young children, I feel sure that I also wrote it for and about me - the little Tamarika, the nickname that my father would fondly call me many, many years ago.
A year ago at Mining Nuggets: Taken Hostage
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