The Writer's Corner - The Breach, Chapter - 15

Image: Patrick Fore

Please Note:

You can skip to  Chapter 15,  Book Content & Chapter Links (1-12) , Chapter 13 or Chapter 14, if you've read the post).

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 Hello, Allies In Love ~

Changes are coming, and I'm so pleased to share them with you!

The Writer's Corner was an exciting new writing space I created to share chapters of my book, 'The Breach: When Love, Relationships, And Childhood Sexual Abuse Collide.' I decided to post it on my website because I needed to continue my journey with this project and edit, work on, and re-work it for publication. 

Thus far, I have posted:

Chapters 1-14, Part One: 

'First Know Thyself: What The Hell Happened To Me?' 

With this blog entry, I will post:

Chapter 15, Part Two:

'To Know Thyself Is To Heal Thyself: The Healing.'

I hope 'The Breach' has been interesting, entertaining, and worthwhile for those who have followed it thus far.

What's coming next?

After sharing Chapter 15 here, I will publish Part One and the remaining chapters of Part Two on Substack.

I will also be sharing a new work of fiction, my novel, 'The Untimely Life Of Samantha Breedlow,' about a child who first discovers the harsh realities of her life from her parents, Renee and Jackson, while still in her mother's womb. 

In addition, I'm creating a podcast for my published book, 'The Path: A Journey Into The Light: The Journey From Fear To Love, to offer an audio version of each chapter with additional notes to support and assist those using the book to learn about their awakening and utilizing the step-by-step process of learning how to love the self.

I will be working on setting these projects up in the next couple of weeks.

Substack is an online platform that provides publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure to support subscription newsletters. It allows writers to send digital newsletters directly to subscribers. 

If you want to continue to follow my writing journey and the subjects, characters and stories I create, please subscribe to my Substack newsletter by clicking on the link below. Once you join, you will find all the details for how to engage with my content

https:/substack/melanaplains

This next leg of my writing journey involves exploring and developing new ways to grow my relationship with my writing and those who read my words.

I hope to see you there!

With Love,

Melana ~

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The Breach

When Love, Relationship & Childhood Abuse Collide

Melana Plains

© 2023 Melana Plains 

All Rights Reserved

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Part Two

To Know Thyself Is To  Love Thyself

The Healing

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  CHAPTER 15

We first encounter Fear even before birth in the womb through our mother's fears and in the world from those who impact our lives directly; it is a presence from the first moment of our existence. Our biggest challenge is recognizing the value and worth of human life, our own, and humanity through this distorted lens. The story of our lives and our experiences of ourselves and others provide us with all the clues we need to determine how we are fairing. The journey through my troubled childhood and the influence of Fear on every aspect of who I was shaped the confused and conflicted person I became in my relationships.

I make a point of naming Fear at the beginning, front, and center of our life story because it is what we experience whenever we do not experience Love. And, because Fear is the energy at the root of every harmful or destructive feeling, belief, action, or experience, it is the one we need to focus on. Fear is the opposite of Love; it is the obstacle course between us and the energy we require to live, thrive, find happiness, and love ourselves and each other.

These two energies govern the reality of our lives; although both are always present, and we can move back and forth between the two, we are only ever, or aware of being, in one or the other at any given moment. When I was a child, I felt like I was drowning in so much Fear that I never felt the Love that was present. So much so that I don't recall my parents ever saying the word Love or expressing their feelings for me and my siblings. When I was so empty of Love and felt I could not bear its absence anymore, I confronted my parents, asking them if I could go where the Love was, as I clearly could not feel or sense it from them. 

As I sit here writing this, I realize that while my parents could have used my distress about not feeling loved as an opportunity to reassure me that I was indeed loved by them, whatever their reasons were, they didn't or couldn't. It may have helped me to know that they did. If I had that first conscious connection with being loved, I might have been able to identify it within myself and know what it felt like to be loved.

Looking back to my relationship with my Boyfriend from my present seat in the arena of my life took me to places inside of myself I had not seen before. Sometimes, while writing, I would abruptly pause, get out of my seat, and pace around the room, saying, "THIS IS SO HARD!!" And, it was, at times, pure torture to have to look at me through such a stark lens of truth and the injured ways I showed up. Several times, I cried from having to face the pain I caused my Boyfriend, his brother, and their family. Though unintentional and something I certainly would never repeat, I still had to face it and feel it so much deeper than I could at the time.

Since I have done decades of work on myself with countless hours of acknowledging and letting go of the root causes of my injured behavior in Fear, I knew well that I could not indulge in judging, blaming, or shaming myself with guilt and regret. Taking responsibility, yes, since it is what empowered me to make the necessary changes to heal myself and become a more conscious, self-loving, and loving human being.

In my work with people, when someone presents an unsolvable issue that needs a more fundamental understanding of why it continues, they feel powerless to fix or change it. All attempts to do so inevitably lead back to the same outcome. I call it the gerbil will effect; you keep going around and around, always staying in the same place, never moving forward. This state always signals that the answers they seek will have their roots in their childhood. 

So, I'll ask them if anything from their childhood reminds them of what's happening now. How does it make you feel about yourself, this person, or the situation? Does your behavior or reaction in this situation or relationship feel familiar or similar to how you responded to someone or some experience when you were little? Ten times out of ten, with a bit of rooting around, we discover always the answers there––every single time.

The first step in learning to know yourself is to look back at your childhood and identify your feelings about your relationship with your parents, caregivers, and siblings if you have them. In all cases, find your place in whatever represents your family dynamic. Get a sense of how you fit or didn't fit in and what place or role you occupied in the scheme of things. Were you the sensitive and quiet one? The self-reliant, independent one? The adventurer, go-getter? The inquisitive seeker? The older, responsible one? The middle child with the lost identity? The younger one, either babied or overly determined or pushed to grow up? You could identify with one or a combination of two or more. 

The important thing is which one(s) feels most like you? And whichever one(s) it is will reflect who you are today. Like looking in a mirror, you can see the striking similarities between your adult and child self. Connecting with what you felt like as a child makes it easier to go back in time and remember what life was like for you. That's when you can ask yourself, "What happened to me?" Because, inevitably, something did. Big or small, giant-sized or minuscule, something or someone impacted you specifically and defined your sense of yourself and your life in a particular way. What you will be most conscious of or recall is not what was okay or what went well but something that felt off, wrong, painful, or scary. Something that made you feel uncertain or unsafe, unsupported or unloved.

One of the greatest gifts we get from Love and its presence–even when we are unaware that it is there and unable to feel it–is our innate ability to sense when something is not Love. We may not understand how to feel Love, define it, or explain its nature to ourselves or others, but we most certainly can tell when we are experiencing the opposite energy of Love: Fear. When we are in Fear, its negative impact, unpleasant and devasting effects, alert us to the truth that we are in an unsavory or unsafe place. The more often or longer we spend in it, the worse it becomes for us. 

Sometimes, we are fortunate when we are young to have parents or caregivers who will see our distress and intervene on our behalf by addressing our fears, supporting us in expressing what we are feeling, assisting us in finding a workable solution, and reminding us there is always a brighter side (Love) to everything if we are willing and able to see it.

 Unfortunately, our troubled state is often ignored, dismissed, or overlooked by someone who could help us. We are then left to deal with the cause and effect of the experience, interaction, or situation in which we find ourselves. As children, our standard go-to is to believe that any discordant things that happen to us or those we are close to are most likely our fault, that somehow we are the guilty party. So, besides bearing the weight of a negative experience, we also carry the guilt of having done something wrong to cause it. 

If children are adept at anything, it's knowing how to hide and bury things. In the long term, we leave these dark treasures buried during childhood only to discover and figure them out as adults. In the short term, this method of finding relief is one of the most handy abilities in our survival toolkit as a child. The one place we learn as children is our fortress–and the protector of our feelings when we need it to be–is our heart. We find out very early on that what happens in there is mostly a mystery to everyone–including adults, which means parents are pretty much clueless about how we feel about anything. So much so that to find out that information, they most often rely upon us, as children, to tell them. Since no one seems to be playing fast and loose with expressing, sharing, or explaining feelings in any family dynamic, as a child, you're pretty much left to your own devices and discretion when it comes to your own.

If we decide as children, no thank you, we'd instead not share, or we are hiding something that we feel is beyond our ability to explain, or we want to punish our parents for the toy they refused to buy us, well then, mums the word. We sit or stand silently, staring at our hands or the floor while projecting such a magnitude of discomfort even the parents begin to squirm. Some push hard, verbally, or even use physical persuasion to get it out of us. But, if there's one thing we learn as children, our feelings are the one thing they can't even beat out of us. The more they press us, the more we can double down. 

After a short or long while, depending on a parent's level of comfort with the realm of feelings, they just let it go. Again, in the short term, we're off the hook for now. Whatever it was, we insisted on holding on so we wouldn't have to face it for the time being. Long-term, negatively rooted things don't store well. After a while, they rot like an infected sore or ache like an impacted tooth. They don't just lie still forever; they will, at some point, resurface to replay whatever we failed to face when they initially occurred.

When these resurfacings happen in childhood, we develop behaviors that reflect the exacerbated state of our buried injury. We turn on ourselves or lash out at others in fits of inner anguish over our now tender, uprising feelings being poked and prodded at by classmates, teachers, friends, and family who, without prior knowledge of our resurfacing wounds, think they are either playing, teaching us a lesson, making a point in either a chiding or harmless way. 

Yes, some people can sense our vulnerabilities in that area of our weak spots and will intentionally aim at them. However, mostly, it's just people being people, and whatever they are doing or saying–in all cases–is about them and what they're feeling and has little to do with you. At this time, it would be helpful to be taught not to take what other people say or do personally. It would be great if we could all nail that down as children. What a different world we would be creating for ourselves as adults!

So, as I use my childhood experience as our roadmap, follow along with yours. We know from what I shared earlier in the book that some things happened to me when I was young. I only learned to address these behavioral patterns once I grew up, and the day came when they were impossible to ignore. Let me correct that. Although I unconsciously continued to ignore them because I didn't know what they were or how to address them, these buried experiences and the feelings they engendered, years before I became consciously aware of them, began to shape my behavior in similar types of situations and relationships where the original events occurred.