If we were abandoned…

 

If we were abandoned…if abandonment is an issue for us…the way to start healing is to stop abandoning ourselves. We need to unlearn that. We do that by, in baby steps, learning to trust ourselves. We do it by paying attention to our feelings and never ignoring what we know is right for ourselves. This is a practice since we’ve forgotten or never known how to do it.

It’s been an active practice for a long while.

The thing that strikes me most about this is the idea that we must be true to ourselves and in that we must be willing to feel. If we are not willing to feel all the ways we’ve been hurt and to acknowledge to ourselves that pain we cannot heal. It is an abandonment of self to not feel. It made me think of this article which I’ve always loved and in fact the title has become a mantra of sorts for when I am facing any difficulty…physical, emotional or spiritual, actually. For me it’s worked for all of those things:

• You can’t heal what you don’t feel

And you see what a perfect mantra it is too. It’s got a nice little ring to it. “I can’t heal what I don’t feel.” Thus giving me permission to feel whatever it is I’ve been resisting. Thus validating that little child who had no one to listen to her when she first felt those things.

This is, among other ways of viewing this process, a way to reparent ourselves. We may have never learned to self-soothe, but it’s not too late.