Healing the Inner Child – My Wounded Self

“If you are never open to change things will remain the same, thereby driving you insane.”

Clarine Williams

I have really struggled writing this post.  I have a bin full of paper where I have started to write, gave up, and started again.  This is my most honest, painful, raw and embarrassing post to date.

For some, it will resonate deeply.  However, I realise that if I was reading the first section of this post whilst I was very stuck, it would have made me feel worse.  Therefore, I have decided to break it into sections.  This first section is the difficult one, so if you prefer, you can skip to section two , about how I healed my inner child.  This first section will concentrate on my wounded self only.

My wounded self is 14 years old.  At 14 I needed to be rescued, heard and believed by my mother which didn’t happen in the way I needed.

My entire family didn’t want to hear about it, shunned me and just put my distress down to my diagnosis of bipolar.  I was seen as the difficult one, the wayward one, the black sheep of the family.  My family was ashamed of me.  I have received a lot of criticisms from them during the years, I took it all on board and hated myself for being who I was.

Due to this, I quickly conditioned myself to also shun this part of me, to be ashamed, not listen to her distress, and even question whether I had been abused or not.  None of my family believed me, which led me to wonder whether or not I had just over-reacted.

This suited my step-father perfectly.  Rather than the finger pointing at him, the finger was pointed at me.  And the more I saw my family the more paranoid I was in their company.  I was desperate to be understood by them, believed, heard and rescued.

Each time there was a family get together, I’d tell myself to be on my best behaviour, stay calm and pleasant.  But because my step-father was always present at family do’s, I would always get triggered by the family talking to him, laughing with him whilst, at the same time, shunning me, avoiding talking to me.

When they did try to talk to me, I would be aloof, difficult to engage with, and looked at them with eyes of pure hatred.  Although I desperately needed their love, I was also pushing them away whenever they tried to show me it.  I was punishing them for not loving me in the way I needed.

I was scared of my step-father, whenever I did challenge him, he would be quick to anger but never get upset.  He would always be more powerful than me and always make me feel that I was the bad one, repetitively telling me that I was a ‘stupid little girl’.  Other family members would get upset, it was easier to punish them.  I didn’t want to, I was just projecting all my suffering onto them, it was the safer option.

They thought I hated them, and thought it was better to leave me alone, not to engage with me, felt that they were doing me a favour.  In reality I was desperate for the opposite, I needed to be loved unconditionally by them, to feel safe, to feel nurtured.  But I couldn’t communicate this, I didn’t know how to.

So family get together’s were extremely triggering for me.  Each time I got triggered, my 14 year old self would arise out of my sub-consciousness.  This would either lead me to become withdrawn or agitated.  I’d cope with this by either bursting into tears, destroying any positive happy moments within the family or I’d get ridiculously drunk leading me to be obnoxious, short-tempered and rude to them.  I was so bad that, even still today, a few family members have written me off completely, refusing to have anything to do with me.

My family just thought I was attention seeking.  In reality, I probably was but it was for a valid reason.  I wanted them to hear me, believe me and rescue me.  And the more I tried to be heard, the more they shunned me, which led me to becoming more withdrawn or more distressed, which resulted in even more younger behaviour.  Sometimes, when I disclosed to a family member, they would get angry with me, telling me I’m lying and walk away from me.

This only compounded the desperate need to be rescued by others and I was searching for anyone, people at work and acquaintances I had briefly known.  But it was difficult for me to share what happened to me, knowing what reaction I would likely to receive, shunning and disgust, so I got people’s attention by being distressed.  It never happened on a conscious level, I was deeply ashamed of myself whenever I had a public outburst, the guilt would last for weeks or months.  It was my wounded self, my child crying out, she was in pain, she needed to be picked up by someone, hugged, nurtured, to be understood and accepted.

Some people tried to support me, but it wasn’t enough.  I realise now that it was only my mother who I wanted to rescue me, it was my mother all along.  But she was emotionally unavailable, still married to my step-father.

People constantly told me that they felt as though they had to walk on eggshells with me, that I was emotionally draining, unstable, unpredictable and immature.  I couldn’t take this on, it was too painful to hear.  It always resulted in me bursting out into tears, loud uncontrollable sobs.  Each time people tried to give me advice, helped me to step outside my victim self, I saw it as bullying.  Because of my reaction, they would either avoid me or I’d avoid them, hating them for making me feel worse.

Everyone I met quickly learnt that it was no point trying to help me, trying to help me see where I was going wrong.  Rather than people understanding my distress, listening to my story and not judging me, people would walk away from me, give up on me and decide not to include me in their conversations.  I knew that a lot of people gossiped about me, at work and amongst acquaintances I knew.  They didn’t understand, so it was easier to gossip, people were fed up with me and needed to offload with each other.  I often experienced situations where I’d walk in a room and everyone would stop talking and just look at me with either a frown or wide eyes probably scared of the next outburst of tears.  I didn’t have any friends, I’d have them for a short while, and then they would get fed up of me eventually, they couldn’t cope with me, found me too emotionally draining.

I was never an angry person, and I always found it difficult to stand up for myself.  Whenever people were negative with me, I’d just cry loudly to make them stop.  I cried like a baby.  This happened on a weekly, if not daily occurrence throughout my twenties.

Other peers my age had done their degrees, settled down, a child on the way, good careers, whereas I was still mentally in my teenage years.  I saw the world through the eyes of a young teenager.  Everyone I met knew this, but I didn’t.  I refused to admit to it, it was far too painful to be honest with myself.

I hated that part of me, that wounded self.  I blamed her for getting abused, I blamed her for not stopping it sooner, blamed her for telling the family about it, blamed her for not being assertive enough with my family, blamed her for the family not loving her, blamed her for not having the strength to shut them out.  Everyone that I had met conditioned me to hate that part of me, conditioned me to not listen to her distress, not believe her, and disown her.

I was well and truly stuck in the victim role.  I saw my entire self as someone who had been abused.  The people that did stick around were people that took advantage of my vulnerabilities.  For seven years I was stuck in a very damaging relationship, he was emotionally abusive all the time and frequently violent.

There was a part of me that wanted him to be violent with me.  This was my second chance of getting rescued by my mother.  I didn’t realise this at the time.  I didn’t realise that I had sub-consciously got involved with another abuser in order to repeat history, but this time it would be a happy ending.  I thought the happy ending was about getting to change him into a loving person, but it was actually about my mum rescuing me.  This time my mother believed me, she asked questions, she saw the bruises, she eventually helped me to get out of that situation.

Being rescued by my mother only gave a temporary relief.  By that time I thought it was a good idea to forget I’d been abused by my step-father.  It only caused me grief to speak up about it, but those feelings of anger, pure rage at my step-father would always resurface.  The more I tried to suppress my emotions, the more they would come out when I really didn’t want them to.  I had no emotional resilience, I had no outlet, I had no-one to talk to.  Each time I had an emotional outburst, I hated myself even more.  I used to look in the mirror and just scream ‘I hate you’ to myself.

As I ended up being so delicate and vulnerable, I was an easy target for people to take their bad moods out on me.  I never stood up for myself, instead I’d resort to bursting into tears, loudly and uncontrollably.  People would often look horrified, just look at me with a blank wide-eyed stare as if I had come from a horror movie or say ‘I’m sick of this’ and walk off.  I realise now, people either pitied me, or people thought I was being manipulative.  To be honest I was being manipulative, but it was because I needed anyone, simply anyone to hear me, listen to my story, accept me and rescue me.

I avoided counselling because I was scared that I’d find too much ugliness within me.  I was scared to address this difficult behaviour, scared that it might tip me over the edge.  So I struggled by myself, continued to hate myself and continued to suffer deep guilt every time I had an outburst.  I’d feel guilty about it for weeks, and each time my mind went to a previous memory of an outburst, I’d cringe and feel physically sick.

From mid 2010 until the end of 2012, things were going from bad to worse.  Due to not being able to control my emotions, my distress, I got thrown off my social work degree, I quit a well-paid job and undertook very low paid jobs in which I always started off well, and then I’d have another uncontrollable meltdown and quit, just not turn up due to sheer embarrassment.  I got sectioned in 2012 for a month, and completely withdrew from everyone I knew apart from my mum.  I spent most of 2012 just lying on the carpet, not getting dressed, not going out of the house.  I told myself I was a loser and that my life was over.

2012 was coming to an end and I was set to experience yet another horrendous year.  I felt there was nothing left to do than kill myself.  I tried to, I spent an entire week purchasing any tablets I could get over the pharmacist counters.  By the end of the week I had over 300 tablets.  I started taking them but I was petrified.  I didn’t realise at the time that there was a glimmer of hope in me.

This hope drove me to google successful people who publicly share their recovery stories.  I stumbled across Ron Coleman and his website www.workingtorecovery.co.uk.   I quickly realised that he had a recovery farm in the Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, Scotland, but I didn’t hope for much.  I’d decided by that point that good things don’t happen to someone like me.

I made the call anyway and got through to Ron’s wife, Karen Taylor.  She asked me what do I want to work on, I said my victim self.  Shortly after, I received an email telling me to come up straight away.  I did just that in January 2013.

My wounded self wanted everyone to hear her distress, like a child crying and needing to be picked up.  It’s okay for a child to do this, to be distressed, adults naturally feel compassion for them.  But if an adult is distressed, people think that you are mad, crazy, insane, and want nothing to do with you.  It bugs me that in Western society we cannot make the link between a child in distress and an adult in distress and realise compassion and understanding is the cure for both.

Deep Listening – Part Two

When you love someone, the best thing you can offer is your presence.  How can you love if you are not there?

Offering someone your presence, in Thich Nhat Hanh’s view, is to deeply listen to someone, to be aware of their presence, to understand another’s needs, not just your own.  There have been plenty of times when I have been in the presence of someone where my mind has drifted into thinking about a TV program, work concerns, boyfriend problems, whatever, and when they have spoken to me, I have pretended to listen, and perhaps on the surface I have, but I haven’t listened to them in my heart.  Offering someone your presence is about offering people your time, to listen to them, to step into their world, and to bring that person into your heart.  It isn’t necessarily about jumping in quickly and giving them lots of solutions to their problems and trying to change wrong perceptions, rather the focus is on just listening and acknowledging their thoughts and feelings.  Rather than listening to make that person feel better, the idea is to listen to understand that person.

For instance, for years I felt responsible for the abuse I suffered, many people would say I’m not to blame, and I feel very grateful for that, however, I continued to feel guilty about it.  I understood on an intellectual level that I wasn’t guilty, but on an emotional level I felt an enormous amount of guilt.  After meeting Ron Coleman (author of Recovery: An Alien Concept?), he recognised, as soon as he met me, that my whole persona was that of a guilty person.  But rather than softly say I wasn’t to blame, he asked me why I felt guilty which I reflected on and soon realised that I couldn’t give him a valid reason why.  It was at that point I began to realise that I wasn’t to blame on an emotional level and began to realise that I had been groomed in a way to believe I was.  Ron wasn’t quick to reassure me, rather he explored why I felt guilty, empowered me to discover myself that I wasn’t guilty which was very powerful for me.  This, in itself, created a sense of well-being within me and helped me to step outside of seeing myself as a victim.

Thich Nhat Hanh believes that deep listening, compassionate listening, can heal us and nourish us.  So compassionate listening must be based on understanding rather than offering solutions.  To love someone is to understand them.  To forgive someone is to understand them.  And loving yourself, forgiving yourself are two of the biggest challenges we all face, regardless if we have been abused or not.

I’ll mention Thich Nhat Hanh a lot on this blog, because he breaks down everything into steps which, for me, helps me to remember.  And yet again, he has broken down into small steps, of how we can deeply listen to someone.  The same rules apply when we want to listen to ourselves.

First of all, in order to help us have the capacity to be there for someone else, to deeply listen to someone, then we must first recognise our own suffering.  As this helps to understand ourselves on a deeper level, we are more likely to understand someone else on a deeper level.  This is the reason why Peer Support Work is gaining in popularity in mental health.  If we begin to know how to be there for ourselves, then we can become better at being there for someone else.

The second step is to be present when you are listening to someone’s distress.  Being present in the here and now means not thinking about your stuff, not thinking about what you have just done or said, and not worrying about what you are going to do afterwards, rather, just being present in the moment, so that your full attention is on that person.  The same was true for myself today when I was meditating.  I was focusing on what I was going to type next in this blog rather than being present.  Once I realised this, I chose to just focus on my in and out breath and shortly after, I found the space within me to listen to my wounded self.

There is an old zen phrase ’empty your cup’.  This means, whilst listening to someone, whether it’s someone in distress or someone who is sharing knowledge with you, you must keep your mind empty in order to give you space to hear the other person.

For me this is really difficult.  To help me focus, just focusing on my in and out breath, not paying attention to where my mind is drifting, helps me to keep my mind free of offering solutions and having my own perceptions.

The second part to deep listening is to create stability within yourself.  For instance, someone I worked with had self-harmed.  Instead of panicking and reacting out of fear, I told myself to stay and calm and listen to him.  This helped him to calm down and open up to me.  The self harm wasn’t a gaping wound, but by not panicking, I found out that he was in a extreme level of distress and he had thoughts of cutting his throat.  If I reacted initially out of fear, he might not have disclosed this to me, and I wouldn’t have discovered a deeper understanding of his risks.  Instead of fear and judgement, I remained calm and listened without judgement which led him to open up to me.

When I first heard voices, I went to my mother’s to help me feel safe, but out of fear my mum looked at me with sheer panic.  This created more fear in me, so I decided to walk the streets whilst responding to voices and spoke to strangers instead.  It was actually a homeless person that calmed me down, because he wasn’t frightened, perhaps he had heard voices before, and because of his calmness, I ended up going back to my mum’s feeling less afraid.  When someone is calm, then it creates calmness in the other person.

The same is true when I was meditating today.  When I chose to listen to my wounded myself, I kept myself calm by sitting down and focusing on my breathing.  This helped me to access both my wounded self and my parent loving self at the same time so that I did not become overwhelmed.

Your presence should be pleasant, it should be calm, and you should be there for him or her. That is a lot already. When children like to come and sit close to you, it’s not because you have a lot of cookies to give, but because sitting close to you is nice, it’s refreshing. So sit next to the person who is suffering and try your best to be your best—pleasant, attentive, fresh.

Emptying your cup and remaining calm helps us with the third step and that is being mindful of our perceptions and feelings.  There has been many times I have sought out counselling for myself, and I have managed no longer than two sessions.  One counsellor advised me to shut the door on my whole family as, at that point, they weren’t supporting me in the way I wanted.  If I took this advice on, I’d never have got to the point of having deep and honest discussions with them like I do now, perhaps I would have never seen it from their perspective.  Understanding them and their reactions has helped me in my recovery journey.  For me forgiveness, not only for myself, but for other people involved, was and still is very healing for me.  This isn’t for everyone, but for some people it is important.  We might hold our own views on family members when we are working with someone, and perhaps that person at that moment feels very angry with them, however, sometimes anger is down to misunderstandings, and sometimes it is more helpful for someone to explore their anger rather than advise them on what they should feel about their family members.  For me, encouraging me to feel more angry about my family members, also compounded my feelings of despair which has often driven suicidal thoughts within myself.

When I have been distressed, I have let my critical self bully me into feeling worse about my distress, saying things like, ‘your pathetic’ and even telling my wounded self ‘I hate you.’  This didn’t help me to calm myself down, rather it made the distress get out of control and has led to despair.  When we want to listen deeply to ourselves with compassion, then if these judgements arise in us, then it is better to view them as an observer, asking myself why I am thinking this, who does this critical self remind me of?  Usually my critical self is my step father talking.  Once I realise this, the critical self dies down and I can go back to accessing the loving parent again.

Thich Nhat Hanh also has a mantra for helping us to be there for someone we love, however, I often use this mantra to help me access my wounded self.

When you love someone, you have to be truly present for him or for her. A ten-year-old boy I know was asked by his father what he wanted for his birthday, and he didn’t know how to answer. His father is quite wealthy and could afford to buy almost anything he might want. But the young man only said, “Daddy, I want you!” His father is too busy – he has no time for his wife or his children. To demonstrate true love, we have to make ourselves available. If that father learns to breathe in and out consciously and be present for his son, he can say, “My son, I am really here for you.”

The first part of the manta is saying to your wounded self or your beloved “I am here for you”.  When you love someone, you want to be there for them, to give them your full attention.  When I was struggling, to be told by people who cared “I’m here for you” made me feel safe and gave me hope.  It gave me the motivation to keep afloat.

The second part of the mantra is saying “I know you are there, and I am very happy”.  By saying this, you are recognising the importance of the other person.  When I have felt suicidal, I believed that everyone else would be better off without me.  When someone made me feel special and important, it helped me to gain a more realistic perspective and made me recognise that family members would have been distraught if I killed myself.

The third part of the manta is saying “I know that you suffer”.  This helps the person feel that their suffering has been acknowledged by you, that you are aware of their pain and want to help to relieve that pain.  When I was younger, people didn’t recognise I was distressed, this only led to more distress which resulted in a hospital admission and a diagnosis of bipolar.

The fourth part is the hardest and that is admitting that you also suffer.  This is used when the person you love, the person you are trying to support, has let their suffering spill over onto you and you feel some resentment towards them, that you feel that this person is the reason why you suffer now and perhaps this has led to arguments between you.  The mantra is simply “I suffer, I’m trying my best, please help me”.

When I have been at my most distressed, I have let my suffering spill over onto others, especially those who I have loved the most.  This has only created more arguments and more distress for not only me, but for the people who were trying to help me.  The last mantra would help me recognise that the people around me aren’t against me, that they are trying to help, but I also have to recognise that I am making them stressed.  This would help me to step outside of my own pain, and be able to communicate with them in a calmer, more loving way, in order for me to get the support that I desperately craved.

Whenever there is a fight between parents and children, both sides lose. Children who have been sexually abused by adults often feel helpless. They feel that violence will eventually destroy them. It is very important to learn the art of transforming the energy of violence in you into something more positive, like understanding or compassion. If you have suffered because of violence, you may tend to use that violence against yourself. That is why it is so important to practice looking deeply to take good care of the violence that is within you. Looking deeply, you will be able to see what could have caused the other person to act so violently towards you. You see the person who sexually abused you as someone who is sick and needs to be helped. Children who have been victims of that kind of sickness also need to be helped. If you are aware of their suffering, you will be able to generate the energy of compassion and bring about healing. In the past, you may have been animated by the energies of hatred, violence, and blaming, but through the practice of looking deeply, those energies can be gradually transformed into understanding and compassion. Compassion helps us understand others, even those who have caused our suffering. With compassion and loving kindness in us, we suffer much less.

Quotes by Thich Nhat Hanh (of course, who else?)

Deep Listening – Part One

When I suffered from distress as a young child such as, nightmarish dreams, physical illness, scrapes and cuts from falling over, missing mum when she was away, adults (family members and school teachers) knew immediately what was wrong with me and was attentive to my needs, I didn’t need to explain much to let them know how to support me.  But when my step father came along, bullied me, groomed me then sexually abused me, I experienced distress on a much deeper level, yet no-one knew how to respond to it and appeared as if they were unaware of my distress which made me feel that no-one cared which increased my distress levels.  On a conscious level, I believe that they were actually unaware as opposed to not caring, and just mistook my rebellious behaviour, my angry outbursts, as part of being a teenager, thought it was something I would grow out of.  On a subconscious level, I believe they knew, but it was too traumatic for them to acknowledge what might be happening and in order to protect themselves from the ugly truth, the focus was on my unruly behaviour instead of my distress.  But this meant no-one had the capacity to hear me, to listen to my pain, to listen to my story.

It has taken twenty years for my family members to finally hear me.  It isn’t there fault, this is very common for victims of abuse, especially sexual. It is an unspoken abuse, it is a type of abuse where the victim is often groomed to take full responsibility for it, and we are often groomed into keeping silent.  My perpetrator threatened a children’s care home, saying that all of my family members will take his side, that I won’t get believed, that I will lose everything.  And I believed him.  But my subconscious self expressed my pain in my behaviours such as teenage tantrums, early age drinking, smoking cigarettes, smoking pot, running away from home, starving myself, outbursts of anger, sleepless nights, the list goes on.  At school I hung out with the naughty crowd, truanted, refused to do any homework, smoking in the playground, etc.  I went from the quiet shy girl to the outspoken and mischievous girl.  Although my conscious self was too scared to speak of the abuse, my subconsciousness was speaking for me by acting out.  What I needed and wanted was for others to look beyond my behaviour and recognise something was wrong, but instead people could only see a teenager acting out.  Adults were quick to point out what was wrong with me instead of asking questions and listening to me.

In my twenties, although I calmed down and went into the world of work, whenever I spoke of the abuse, people would turn away or try to quickly change the subject.  I also saw this as a sign of people not caring, but now I realise that it must have been too traumatic for people to hear about.  It creates too many strong emotions such as anger, fear and disgust.  It’s better not to think about it, it only happens to other people.  Thinking like this helps people to avoid it and not confront it, helps people to protect themselves from the ugly reality that sexual abuse is a lot more common than we’d like to think.  It feels better to have some distance from it, it feels safer, more comfortable for us.  But how does that leave the victim?  For me it meant having to cope with overwhelming feelings of distress on my own.  I also hated that part of me that got abused, blamed her for it, wanted nothing to do with her.  I looked at her in the same way as I did my abuser, with the same level of hatred and anger towards her.  But I had no outlet, no-one to talk to, I tried counselling but instead of listening to the full story, as soon as I told them that I had been abused, they quickly asked ‘why didn’t you stop it?’ which led me to not go to the next session due to experiencing extreme feelings of self-blame and self-hatred.  I realise now of course I did stop it, otherwise it would have continued, but I was so caught up in blaming myself that I couldn’t see that at the time, nor could everyone else including the people that were trained and paid to support me.  If the counsellor had just kept silent and let me talk about the full story, I don’t believe they would have asked me that question.

So I stopped trying to tell people about it, through fear of getting harshly judged.  I learnt this lesson quite quickly in my early twenties.  However, this led me to suppress my suffering, disown it, and pretend to others that I was fine, that I wasn’t a victim.  But I’d always go over the top.  I’d either be very withdrawn around people, stutter and shake when I spoke or I’d be really loud, centre of the attention, act really silly and be the clown.  The more anxious I was around others, the more louder I became, trying to cover up what was really going on underneath.  On my own I was depressed, withdrawn, struggling with extreme feelings of self hatred and despair.  So it’s no surprise that I ended up with a diagnosis of bipolar.  I didn’t want to access the part of me that suffered, it was too overwhelming for me.  Whenever that part of me arose, I looked at her with self-hatred, anger and despair.  I was embarrassed of her and was unable to reflect on myself, unable to change, unable to control her constantly arising and taking over my behaviour which was leading people to walk away from me.  I was unstable, no-one could trust me to stay calm, I couldn’t trust myself, she was always just bubbling away under the surface needing attention, needing to be rescued.  People felt that they had to walk on eggshells around me, I felt I was on eggshells around myself constantly.  Being alone, being in silence was too difficult to bare, so I’d always keep myself busy and became a chain smoker.  I constantly needed noise around me, the TV was always on or the radio, watching and listening to nothing of importance, just so that I didn’t have to hear that part of me that wanted to be heard.

In my late twenties, I crashed.  Although I no longer spoke about the abuse to others, because I felt that they would either walk away or be disgusted with me, my subconsciousness forced me to open up about it and get the support I needed.  It came in the form of voices.  One of the voices represented my abuser.  But the other voices led me to have delusional beliefs which was enough for others to become concerned about me which led to a hospital admission.  I guess my voices were wanting me to get support.  The support I received from the NHS wasn’t what I needed.  Although I was given a high amount of medication, the voices became louder and the beliefs more wilder.  Fortunately I changed hospital where my consultant just wanted to listen to me.  After the first session the voices became quieter, I became calmer, my doctor reduced the meds and two weeks later I got discharged.  The voices disappeared completely without the use of medication.  I continued to see my psychiatrist for a while after and each time she spent the whole hour just listening to me with compassion.  I realise now, that the majority of my suffering wasn’t because I got abused, rather it was because no-one wanted to hear me, didn’t want to believe that could happen.

But even still, I still struggled to listen to myself.  I was conditioned by family members, work colleagues, friends, acquaintances, the NHS (apart from my consultant) and the rest of society, not to listen to myself, not to open that can of worms.

Later, I worked in the NHS as a support worker.  I felt I had to prove that I was resilient, so I refused to recognise any of my own suffering, almost dissociated from it, but yet I could listen to other’s pain.  However, I wasn’t a brilliant listener, I realise this now, and the reason was because I didn’t learn how to listen to myself.  I continued to work in mental health but within the voluntary sector in organisations, such as Mind, where listening was key.  I began to become a deeper listener, but even now it is still work in progress, but I’m gradually becoming a better listener.  There is a lot of room for growth.

I was meditating this afternoon, and even then I still struggle with listening to myself.  To begin with, my thoughts were about this blog, wondering what I should write about next.  Then my thoughts noticed a peculiar shaped cloud and spent the next 10 minutes trying to spot more funny looking clouds which led to me getting frustrated with just normal, everyday, looking clouds.  When I finally realised that I was yet again avoiding my wounded self, avoiding listening to her, I decided to close my eyes and just focus on my in and out breath.  And that’s when I finally was able to hear her.  I had the space inside of me to listen to her, and finally to help her feel safe.  Afterwards, instead of feeling bereft because I dared to open that can of worms, I felt calmer, a feeling of peace within myself, because I spent some time in the day to be a loving parent to myself.

Part two will be more about deep listening, listening to others when they are distressed.  I believe if we have the capacity to deeply listen to others, then we have the capacity to listen to ourselves.