From my own childhood, I grew up feeling emotionally invisible and disregarded. The less 'needy' I could get myself to feel, the better life seemed to go within my family-of-origin. This was my normal, my relational-emotional template, my baseline that I operated from, with its foundations unchallenged or unexamined until I entered into recovery a couple of years ago, on the other side of a downward spiral.
The downward spiral was inevitable, even though I was unaware of it at the time. I'd been surviving so long with trying to medicate my emotional needs away through pseudo intimacy and pseudo spirituality via a confining Fundamentalist Christian religion which brought me to hitting my rock bottom, just as a drug addict experiences before entering into recovery.
Feeling numb to my own emotional needs was my learned-baseline, and within a Fundamental Christian religion, it was viewed as pretty damn 'spiritual', I had it made. My drug of choice was readily available and I was enabled through the same people who were also addicted to my drug of choice, and I enabled them in return. It was quite a successful drug ring, it was all legal and respected by mainstream Christianity. My dysfunction fit very well into this religious pedagogy I rigidly adhered to, and I could feed my ego with it until God intervened through a crisis of my denial's own making. That is God's grace - saving me from my own denial in which I could not have recognized on my own.
Indifference to my unmet emotional needs and its pain felt 'safe' to me, because it was my normal...the pain was familiar. It was not a deviation from what I was programmed to accept as "just the way things are". My emotional thermostat was programed to hold steady at "0". Not needing anything emotional from my relationships. I was programmed to be OK and tolerant with not needing any emotional deposits or investments which would carry me over to above a "0". Contributions like attunement, empathy, nurturing, validation, affirmation, affection and emotional reciprocity would have overloaded me because I was programmed to sit comfortably at "0". While at the same time I did not receive overt negatives or withdrawals in the form of visible and obvious physical or sexual abuse. I didn't have regular black eyes and bruises to prove my inner pain. Neglect left me at a numb "0" - surviving proudly because I was not physically dead, but not truly alive and thriving either. That kind of stuff was for the really "needy" people. In my childhood, my baseline of "emotional safety" was programmed to alarm me only if I was to be dramatically physically (beat) or sexually abused (raped), neglect wouldn't register on my radar, because then I'd be in constant alarm and feeling my depravity on a regular basis. That is the sly nature of neglect.
Then I experienced the wake-up call. There was an earthquake through a personal and marital crises where I came to admit that my "normal" I had learned to settle for simply wasn't working anymore and that I was powerless to make it or fake that it worked for me. I could not persist in my dysfunction by subconsciously trying to fend off these emotional needs and come off as being "super spiritual", and in an attempt to do so, sabotaging myself from getting them met in healthy ways.
Currently, I have announced I will divorce my husband of almost 10 years. I find myself going through all the different stages of grief in a 24-hour period. From denial, to anger, to bargaining, to depression...and even getting glimpses of acceptance, though they are still fleeting.
Right now, I am acknowledging that I've been in and out of denial. It is so easy to fall back into being complacent through tolerating my previous "normal" emotional baseline of neglect. Why? -Because when it comes to the pain I feel through the particular nature of the abuse I am so well accustomed to, it is so easily hidden because it is not physically manifested to the unaided eye. It is emotionally and spiritually visible to the emotionally and spiritually discerning person though. The abuse I am so familiar with is covert and is emotionally/psychologically rooted in shame. It's roots are under many thick layers of concrete denial, which requires lots of taboo-ish types of digging and demolishing to get at. I've had a shovel in my hand for several years, as well as inviting others who have earned my trust to come along and shovel out the layers of denial, deception and bullshit along with me.
Until an abuser comes to the awareness of their own shame, and grieves with others, themselves and a loving God of their understanding, over the covert abuse they themselves received in their own childhood, it is impossible for them to see how they themselves inflict the same abuse onto others. The abuse from having to fear their parents if they did not comply, and being punished or humiliated when trying to get their own valid emotional needs met in their early childhood emotionally stifled and crippled them, and when that wound is unattended to - the abuse cycles through to others. Forgiveness is on the tail-end of this. How can I forgive the abuser of the abuse which I am in denial of? That's putting the cart before the horse. When forgiveness is attempted to be given in order to bypass having to experience pain and grief over what happened, then I am short-circuiting myself from healing and becoming whole. By doing so, I am unconsciously playing with kids as we play with fire. I will prevent the cycle of abuse from being broken. I will complicitly be passing this infected wound down to others I am in relationships with, especially my children and not excluding my spouse. This is how I see shame and the ensuing sins getting passed down from one generation to the next, while abusing my children in the name of "for their own good".
When I say 'abuse', I'm referring to a pattern of behavior that aims to control someone else which results in harming them. Not only the kind of overt harm that can land you in jail, but harm that injures relationships with one's self, others and God. I have to make that distinction because we've all been hurt and in turn, hurt others. Abuse isn't just the presentation of hurt, or a black eye or a bloody nose. Abuse is a pattern of behavior that usually gets denied and unacknowledged, and therefore doesn't get corrected or repaired. Sometimes abuse has only emotional wounds, but it is still abuse. It still causes harm, and if left unhealed, they will eventually manifest physically in various degrees of presentation from addictions to other compulsive behaviors regardless of how culturally accepted they are (work, religion, codependence, being ultra healthy), and/or in some form of a physical illness or chronic pain. That is my belief and understanding at this time, however it is evolving just as I am. While I don't believe every single ache and pain can be exclusively attributed to a particular unhealed abuse, either by one's self or by others, I think abuse that isn't healed and remains stored in denial, contributes way more to our physical pains and addictions that what we realize.
How did I survive the covert emotional abuse, which is also known as emotional neglect, in my own upbringing? -Through escaping the pain and trying to alleviate my suffering through compulsively entering in and exiting out of emotionally unsafe and dysfunctional dating relationships with guys who exploited me and I colluded with it because I did not know my own worth. I knew nothing different.
My family is where the nurturing my emotional health would have most safely been acknowledged and met, albeit imperfectly, if it is met more than not or promptly repaired/corrected when it caused harm, that is good enough. But this was not my experience in my family growing up, in my early childhood or adolescent years. To survive this developmental emotional needs being neglected, I had developed a compulsive dependency to be validated and affirmed by an emotionally unavailable and unsafe male who would usually sexually exploit me, while my emotional needs were being numbed out within my own family because when I tried to get them met I instead received shame for having such 'big' emotional needs in the first place. The shame often came as a result of me trying to get my own emotional needs met when I felt hurt and angry, so I practiced self-sabotaging behaviors due to the compelling driving force of both my unmet emotional needs in combination of my parents' own denied and unconscious toxic shame from their own childhoods.
My current marriage is not working for me anymore, because of this emotional baseline shift from an earthquake of a spiritual awakening. My current husband doesn't perceive and access safety like I do now, but rather perceives it the way I used to before this earthquake which has demolished my old self-image of my emotional needs being less than important. I used to perceive safety in terms of primarily physical indicators. But shame is not safe, not because of the immediate physical harm it inflicts, but because shame (which is believing I am bad) lends itself to seeking relief through sin and the shame that further ensues from sin and sin plus shame separates me further from myself and from God, and propels me further into sin and shame...until the gift that a crises can unwrap of admitting I am powerless over controlling other people, places and things in order to meet my needs and that my life has become unmanageable.
