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abandonment
the result of divorce or infidelity
When I was 20,
my father told me he was leaving my mother.
He had the bad judgment to announce this fact to me just before we walked down the aisle on my wedding day.
(He belongs on the self-absorbed page.)
Not long after, my father divorced my mother, he married another woman
& moved away.
This dissolution of my original biological family happened very quickly.
I was busy with my own life & career & thought there'd still be time to have a relationship with my father, if only a changed one, in the years ahead.
We always think there'll be time to sort things out, but sometimes there isn't.
I saw my father only 1 more time. It was on a day when he'd had so much
to drink that I worried for his safety in driving. Later he wrote to tell me of his deep dissatisfaction with our relationship & that I clearly wasn't accepting him & his new wife. I'd tried in every way possible to tell him
& show him just the opposite.
I wanted him in my life under any circumstances.
I heard from him just 1 more time, after my son was born. Somehow, he'd
heard he had a grandson & he sent a gift. He told me in the note not to try contacting him, but at 26, I was certain this
new correspondence meant a fresh start.
My letter to him came back marked, "Addressee unknown." And that was the end of the
story.
For years I didn't think about him
& then I thought about him all the time. I had such a deep heaviness because he deserted me.
I wanted to walk with him in the woods, arm in arm & feel his strength & wisdom as I got old. I wanted my children to know him, to laugh & cry with
him. I missed him so deeply.
As my spiritual life grew, I was able to begin to see how I'd compensated for my loss
of a father as
protector by wanting my husband to play that role, or other friends or work colleagues.
Still, I didn't know what to do with the emptiness. Just as I'd think I had it handled, the tears would again well up in my eyes & I'd feel that deep searing pain in my heart.
Our deepest pain doesn't go away, but it can be healed. We know intellectually the
circumstances or fears that kept others from responding to us in the way we needed. It's more difficult to see our own fears that hold past pain in front of our eyes, preventing us from a truly new beginning.
Simon told me that he'd been raised in an orphanage & when he finally hit the street at 18, he
got in with the wrong crowd.
He wanted to make some easy money quickly to feel that he was important & land at the top of the heap because he was smart.
One bad debt led to an even deeper debt & he found himself living a series of complicated
lies to avoid jail or worse.
This was 20 years ago & yet today he finds himself
in a similar situation, never being able to shake the poverty that follows him & remaining unable to be clear &
honest with himself about his needs & genuine intentions.
Every healing modality in the pages of today's magazines recognizes the need to do something
positive with the feelings that belittle us & slide us away from genuine belief in ourselves.
While we know that loving ourselves in different, more spiritually intimate ways is the path to healing, we still find it difficult to forgive others & ourselves.
The many new age philosophies & techniques give us hope for a while & then we find ourselves back in the same morass.
My experience, both personally & professionally as an intuitive healer & spiritual mentor, is that love takes many shapes in our lives to help us live authentically.
Love as Wisdom is necessary
for us to be able to apply it in new ways to finally find resolution to old blocks. Like climbing a rope, we must keep putting
one hand over the other, which means finding new ways to treat our pain with loving-kindness so that we may slowly learn to live in the center of a new, more
meaningful story.
But we must also wrap our feet around the rope as we climb upward, in order to keep from sliding
backwards. This grip with our foot represents the means we have to apply
wisdom as a salve to old heartaches.
I call this wisdom process finding the blessing in the challenge.
We never think to look for the jewel in the dung heap. Instead we take the remains of old painful experiences &
continue to return to them with each new violation.
I
began to use internal dialoguing, spirit-to-spirit,
to try to heal my pain & to help my clients.
With my father, I chose a time when I was alone in the house. I lit a candle & sat down with the lights dimmed. I put his picture in the chair across from me. I let the full scale
of emotions well up & spill out of my mouth.
I didn't try to curtail my what's really making you angry? or grief. I didn't tell myself my feelings weren't true or that I shouldn't feel this way. I did feel
this way & I needed to grieve this deep loss.
I let him know how angry I was, how much he had hurt me & that his leaving the Earth without ever needing to find me to set things right had left me feeling irrevocably scarred.
Then I put my hand over my heart, which gradually allowed me to move inside to a quieter & truer
space.
Slowly I felt calmer & could find a small feeling of loving for myself
from my true spirit self. From this new center, I asked my father to tell me what was in his heart.
His real self, his spirit said, I think you're beautiful & I was always so proud of you, I just never said so. I thought you knew it. I saw no one, not you, your brother, or your mother over the edge of my own pain.
Can you forgive me? Like a terrible blister bursting, I sobbed, "Yes, Yes, oh Yes!"
I'd found the blessing of self-acceptance thru his words, honoring me, letting me know that he'd loved me after all.
I've been deeply touched by the way people handle pain & loss as well as unsteadiness, fear & resistance.
We judge others actions, being unwilling to consider that our perception is what keeps us in pain, no matter the circumstances of the situation. There's no such thing as right & wrong in our memories. We all feel we're right & justified in our actions & attitudes.
Still the pain continues because we've not found the blessing that may not feel good, but does well by connecting us
to a more loving & forgiving place in our own heart. Our soul space lets us see a part of our authentic
nature that's been growing all along, even under the pain & confusion of all the years we've suffered.
Stan was a powerful example of old pain, but also an example of the inability & the fear that prevents us from finding the jewel in the old experience.
He was an extremely successful internist who lived with his wife on a magnificent farm. His wife raised
prize Golden Retrievers to show.
But he was dirt miserable. He felt his marriage was a joke; he worked insane hours because he felt some satisfaction in his work & he was afraid to find what he loved.
He knew that cutting back on the work meant less money in the short term. He wanted
the opulent lifestyle & he also hated his impotence in
being unable to take the steps necessary to find why he couldn't feel love & heal it.
He commented one afternoon how a patient's young wife, in appreciation for his saving her husband's life, had kissed him on the cheek.
He got very quiet & his voice almost disappeared from the other end of the phone as he continued,
I wanted so much to feel that love, I just couldn't. He was diagnosed with a pituitary tumor.
Our journey is to find an inner steadiness so that we can apply our new wisdom, the blessings from the challenges, to bringing love into our families, our friendships & our careers.
This steadier authentic part is our Divine Presence. We usually don't stop to reflect on this understanding, that we have something quite as grand as Divine Presence with us, in us, guiding us, as our essential self.
Yet, with time & practice we begin to inquire into the nature of God & the way our life came
into being & where we go when we leave this life. We have a deep & lasting need to find The Creator in some way.
Without a Creator-presence in our lives, something that we trust that holds the reigns of our life & those we love, we easily run away with our own importance.
We're meant to ask the questions that we feel we need to understand to feel secure & in control. But life shows us that we can manage to be happy even
without the control we think we need.
Finally thru the maze of life's sharp turns from joy into grief, from loss into happiness, we need to find what we can believe in that's ours to manage & ours to develop.
As we finally come to see that we can control the state of our happiness by our ways of looking at circumstances, we're shocked.
We assume happiness comes from outside of us & that well always be at the mercy of other
people & the randomness of actions.
I've cried as I've sat with a person whose vibrant life slowly ebbed away & I've celebrated with
a person's first important step toward self-acceptance.
But for all the memorable, life-shifting times with friends & clients, I'm continually reminded
that the ordinary day-to-day hurts are what mount up inside. Unresolved emotional pain grows into a mountain, blocking our energy.
Unresolved emotional pain is uncomfortable & a serious liability as it creates serious physical trauma. Taking the time to clean up those old sufferings does a great deal to
help us find renewed energy & self-acceptance. Empowerment
is, a spiritual choice to be happy.
To heal the traumas that bedevil you, take a quiet evening & gift yourself the ceremony
of a lifetime, Finding the Blessing in the Challenge.
You may do this experience a number of times or just one time may be enough. Be prepared to find
forgiveness, replenishment & renewal.
Here are some things you can do to prepare:
Create a setting where you'll be alone & not disturbed.
Use candles, music or incense to help create the sacred feeling that you want.
Put a picture or the belongings of the person you wish to dialogue with in front of
you. It makes no difference if the person is alive or passed on.
When your mind asks you, "How can you know if the person is really saying healing things
to you?" tell your mind to move thru this ceremony as if it were true.
Thru our intention we easily call the energy of others spirits to us. You'll be talking to the person you need to share healing with. The experience itself will convince you if you give it a chance.
a parent or a loved one that you depend upon as a child doesn't have to abandon
you physically to cause damage, they can abandon you emotionally as well....
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