With all Change comes Loss!

Please check out my video's on my Youtube channel or like my Facebook Page for parenting support and information XX 

Loss is a part of Change

Something that has been very prominent for me in my own healing journey has been the amount of loss I have experienced whilst making the necessary changes I have been making in my life. I have been reflecting on how change occurs in our lives and how painful this part of life can be. Most people know all about change and how it can turn your life upside down and make you feel unsure of yourself. What most people don’t bank on, however, is the grief that accompanies even the smallest change.

Grief and Change:

In order for new experiences to enter into your life, you need to make some space for them. The very nature of change means that the old ways you have grown accustomed to, are found to be no longer applicable to you anymore. Unfortunately, this can happen with people too. Similarly with decision making, in order to invite in something new or make a decision to change, you have to sever, let go or abandon something old. A quick example would be that you may decide to change your breakfast cereal to toast. In order to have toast in the morning instead, you must STOP having cereal.

This ‘letting go’ can bring about feelings of loss and grief, especially if the changes you have made have included people or places that have significant meaning in your life. You will need to go through a process, a grieving process, in order to accept these changes and make them a part of your current life. For some people, this can take time. The changes do not always have to be difficult changes, in fact they can be very exciting and joyful. So many people get caught in this trap, the ‘I should be feeling happy…’ trap. What isn’t taken into account, however, is how difficult the process of change is, regardless of how good or exciting the change is by nature.

With every new beginning comes an ending:

We are built to mourn the endings we face in order for us to process the changes in our lives, in how we see ourselves, our environment and the world in general. We feel loss at all the feelings of what could have been and the regrets we may hold. We feel loss at the ending of any future plans we may have held. We feel loss at the changes within us and how we used to think, used to feel or even how we used to react. We may not have liked the way we reacted or behaved but it was familiar. It was a part of us and for us to move forward, we need to create closures and endings and find a way to let certain things go.

Sadness and Loss:

The core emotion of loss is sadness. Sadness is a heavy emotion and can often make us feel as if we want to withdraw and wallow. It is a very low energy emotion and I look at it as if it deliberately slows you down in order to allow you to take time away from your everyday life and process what has happened. We may feel longing and sorrow, which can lead to feelings of remorse and regret. We may feel untrusting of ourselves and the decisions we have made. We may feel alone and unsure of ourselves. We may feel angry and frustrated. We may even feel anxious and panicked. Mostly we feel as if we are all over the place when we are going through change. It can all feel a bit ‘unknown’ and that can be very frightening for many people.

Sadness requires gentle self-soothing:

When working with sadness as an emotion you are experiencing (or your child may be experiencing), you want to aim for soothing and comforting forms of attending to yourself or loved one. Think of a child who is crying and sad, what would you want to do for that child? If you were emotionally regulating a child with their sadness, you would want to start by helping the child to understand what they are going through. You would want to help them feel ok with their feelings of sadness (validation) and help them to understand that everyone feels sad sometimes (normalising). You would do this by acknowledging how much they have gone through and how normal it is to feel sad when people go through something like this. You would use your voice to show the child you are there for them and a calm and comforting presence for them. You would use physical affection such as hugging or holding them, holding their hand, stroking hair, rubbing shoulders, sitting next to them etc. You would also allow them to cry and support them while they do. You would NOT call them names like ‘you are being an idiot’ or ‘what the hell is wrong with you!’ You would also try to resist cheering the child up and would allow your child to feel sadness and work through it with your help.

This is what your own inner child needs too. When you are going through a big change and find yourself struggling and feeling a bit down or overwhelmed with it all, think about the loss and grief that accompanies change. Think about how loss has a core emotion of sadness and attend to your inner child who may need some help with these feelings of sadness. Nurture yourself and question your feelings in a non-judgemental way. Comfort yourself, be gentle with yourself and stop placing unrealistic expectations on yourself. Change is tough!

The light at the end of the tunnel:

The dust will settle! Often we rebuild ourselves in bigger and better ways when we take the leap of faith and make changes in our lives. Sometimes the changes are imposed on us and we feel we have no choice. That does not mean we will not rebuild in better ways, it just means that we will likely experience more loss and difficulty as we may not have felt ready for the change.

Either way, loss is a part of change and change is a part of life. We are designed to cope with loss and grief for this very reason. What makes both change and loss hard and tricky is our aversion to painful experiences and emotions. We have it in our head that anything difficult is NOT meant to be happening to us. This is a false perception as there is not one person in this world who has an ‘easy’ life. We are aiming for the impossible if we are aiming for easy.

The freedom comes when we find acceptance. When we accept that we have everything we need inside us to get through anything that gets thrown our way. We may lose people along the way and people may decide that your changes are not suited to them and their lives. It can be tempting to live your life the way other people expect you too in order to avoid losing the people you love (I get that). The truth is though, you are the most important person in your life. You have to be. This is how you will find happiness and this is how you will find out who you really are. People may just surprise you or you may find that the people you lose have made way for people who will love you through your changes to enter your life. As long as you are following your heart and doing what is best for you, it will all start to fall into place!

All the best with those new beginnings

XX Paula

My Evolving Relationship with 'Fear'

Please check out my video's on my Youtube channel or like my Facebook Page for parenting support and information XX 

I have felt a need to share some of my own experiences with the emotion 'Fear' today. It has been something that I have been actively processing, working on and making sense of for a number of months now. There are many experiences and variations of this emotion in my own life and in the lives of those closest to me and it is certainly not an easy emotion to get my head around. That said, which ones are!

We struggle to admit to our deep set fears:

One common theme I am starting to see more of is a fear of fear itself. Anyone who has read some of my earlier writing will know that I have lived with Anxiety for most of my life. I am pleased to say that I have healed from this in so many ways and I am at a point in my life where I am able to use my own experiences to conceptualise how I would like to work as a psychotherapist and practitioner but also in my personal life. 

Anxiety is a fear based disorder. I have unpacked so many of my deep set fears and this has been a gradual and difficult process. Fear comes out in the form of instability, insecurity and worry amongst other things. We do not live in a world that accepts these traits, let alone help you with them. Many of you, like me, will have shame attached to your fear. This is because we were shamed for feeling fear as children. We were either dismissed, ignored, left to soothe ourselves or our emotions were unintentionally unattended to.

We may have had parents that tried to change how we were feeling and would say things like 'you have nothing to be afraid of' or would distract us from our emotional experience. The very act of our fear being stomped out and not processed often creates shame. The way the world seems to repress emotions shows me that unless something changes, we will continue down this path without realising it. This is shown to me time and time again. Unfortunately we seldom get our needs met by other people when we are feeling scared, insecure or unstable. We often don't meet other people's needs when they feel that way too. The shame associated with our fear means that we often feel like fear is a weakness or embarrassing. We feel that we are going to be seen in a negative light for admitting to our vulnerability and insecurity. The truth is though, this often is the case! So many of us have an unhealthy and avoidant relationship with fear. This stems from childhood.

My personal discovery:

Throughout my healing journey I have been piecing things together. I have been trying to make sense of my patterns, behaviours, feelings, reactions, memories and triggers. I have been exploring and re-experiencing my emotions predominantly through inner child work processes. I have had to admit that I, like most people, have fallen prey to childhood emotional neglect. This is something that has run through many generations in my family. Emotional regulation continues to be a rather foreign concept and was certainly not known in my childhood growing up in South Africa. My mother had much of her own emotional trauma, so did my grandparents. No one taught any of us how to cope with difficult emotions such as fear. Strength and courage were applauded traits in my family, which is not a bad thing in the slightest. The problem comes in when the interpretation of strength comes to mean an 'absence' of fear. This is a false belief and one many people hold. This belief, in my opinion, is one of the most destructive forms of thinking we have. It creates an unhealthy relationship with this emotion and people develop a deep set shame because fear is unavoidable. It is one of our core emotions, we all experience it!

Fear builds up and is experienced in many different ways!

Well intentioned deception: 

I personally had a mother who liked to tell me that everything was OK and I had nothing to worry about. Looking back, I knew full well that this was not the case. I have been remembering many occasions where I have picked up on the stress and hardship in the home. I knew we had financial struggles. I knew my mother found it difficult to cope. I knew that my mother felt bad about herself. I knew that my uncle had gone missing on a sailing trip to Portugal and that my mother was staying up all hours of the night calling the Red Cross in various parts of the world. I could hear my mother and grandmother cry. I knew something was horribly wrong. I knew so much more then my mother could possibly have imagined. If I tried to express my worry, I was 'reassured' that everything was OK and there was nothing to worry about. This seemed to be a trend.

This continued throughout my childhood and into my teenage years. My mother continued to deteriorate under a pressure she refused to acknowledge to me. Our financial situation was dire and it was extremely obvious. There is nothing like no petrol in the car to drive this point home (excuse the pun). My mother was unemployed and shutting herself off from the world. Instead of attending to my fears and providing reassurance, validation and inclusion, she hid from the world. She taught me how to do the same in so many ways. This was her shame. She was frightened and was too embarrassed to ask for help, especially from my grandparents.  My grandmother refused acknowledge how bad things were for us and tried to motivate my mother by being critical. Thus my mothers' fears were punished due to my grandmothers fears. No one had any control, least of all me. It was no wonder I developed an Anxiety disorder that manifested in the form of needing to control my environment and struggling to trust other people. My environment was riddled in a survival based fear from the get go. I was never taught how to process my fear, I carried it inside me and it started to grow and permeate all aspects of my being as the years went on.

I learnt that the only person I could rely on was myself:

I developed a severe and unconscious problem with trust. I over compensated for this in ways that made me out to be overly trusting. This was such a good deception I even had myself fooled. It was a coping mechanism for my shame as we seem to do everything in our power to hide the truth when coming from a place of not feeling worthy or as if we are different from everyone else. The truth was though, I was let down again and again, particularly in my personal relationships. The love I experienced always felt extremely conditional. In many ways it was but this was partly due to the fact that I was not being true to myself. The self love I had was almost non existent. What love I did feel towards myself was the most conditional of all.

I let people down too. I valued honesty on the surface but deep down my inner child laughed at this concept. The world is unsafe she said to me. People will abandon you, they will dismiss you, you need to act a certain way in order to keep people in your life and on your side. Due to this childhood trauma around my fear, I developed the belief that people only liked me for what I could do for them in their lives. I had no money or nice things. I did, however, have a real knack for helping people with their personal problems. I was an excellent shoulder to cry on and ear to listen. I became the resident Agony Aunt. Good thing I love this role, in fact I chose to make this my profession. The problem was though, I never felt as if people liked me for me. In certain friendships and many romantic relationships, this was certainly the case. This was one of the hardest realisations I have had to face up to. The more I learn about myself,the more I realise that people couldn't have liked me for me because the real me was very lost. I didn't even know who I was outside of my practical identity (student, daughter, female, loves cats, has a sense of humour etc). The fear was so ingrained and I was so conditioned to act a certain way or I feared I would be ostracised or lose my sense of belonging in the world. It felt like the only person I could truly rely on in the world was myself. I struggled to trust anyone and still do if I am to be honest. I find it very hard to let people truly help me, especially emotionally. 

Fear is not and has never been the enemy:

I have called this blog 'My Evolving Relationship with Fear' because my understanding of my fear is continuously evolving and transforming. If I had to go into all my childhood issues we would be here for a year. From fear of the dark to fear of snakes to fear of being alone...I had many. We all do. Children are experiencing the world for the first time and fear is a natural part of this. Fear is not a bad emotion at all. Our reactions and resistances to fear are what cause us hardship and struggle. It is our experience in the world that determines what we find threatening and frightening. The less we are attended to emotionally, the more we will struggle to feel safe in the world. The more our emotional needs are not met, the less skills we will have to cope with life's challenges and the less self esteem and self trust we will have.

One thing I have recently thought about is my fear around very real danger. Living in South Africa with an extremely high crime rate means that safety is a very physical reality to this day. My house was not very safe and we didn't have much security in place. My mother had a responsibility to keep me physically safe and in this area she was unable to, predominantly for financial reasons. I lived with a high level of genuine and relevant Anxiety on a daily basis and in the end, my worst fear came true and my mother was murdered in our home. One could argue that the fact that my mother dismissed my fears and ignored her own had tragic consequences. Fear is often there to alert us to harm and danger. That is how it has been designed. As a child we are powerless to gain control in terms of our living environment. This feeling of powerlessness is where the link to shame comes in.

Emotions are here to benefit us, not make us suffer!

We become so cut off from our difficult emotions that we lose touch with the benefits of them. We turn off our internal guidance system that is really the basis of our authenticity. We cannot be our true selves without having a relationship with our emotions. We can't pick and choose what emotions we feel, this creates a mask that will end up making us sick and impacting our relationships. Most importantly though, we cannot have a positive relationship with ourselves and who we genuinely are without having a relationship with our emotions.

Most of the time we are really fearing the shadows from our past!

Lots of love

XX Paula