Fear Is The Thief Of Connection.
How fear, anxiety and trauma steals our opportunities at connecting with others, ourselves and the world.
Dear reader,
I woke up on Saturday morning from a dream that highlighted one of my biggest subconscious(and also conscious) fears and insecurities.
I dreamed that I was in hospital and my mother came to visit me. She acted like she was genuinely concerned about me and was there to see me and make sure I was okay.
I was wearing my cremation bead necklace that contains some of my granddad’s ashes in it, a bead I had made after he passed away, as my granddad was my favourite person in the world and I wanted to have a piece of him with me always.
Anyway, in the dream, my mother hugged me before she left and then, after she was gone, I noticed that my necklace was gone.
I instantly knew that it must have been her who took it, because there is no other way it could have just disappeared like that. So, I tried calling her to ask her if she had taken it, and her phone kept going to voicemail.
I woke up feeling stressed, because the dream felt so real and I really thought that I had lost the necklace and was never going to get it back.
Then, it got me thinking of the fact that I only ever hear from or see my mother when she wants to see my daughter.
She has very rarely ever just called or texted to see how I am doing, even when she knows that I am going through a very hard time.
For example, when I was diagnosed with MS in November, I was keeping her updated on my treatment, etc. because I thought that she would want to know how everything was going, but I never really heard from her to see how I was doing or if there was any updates, unless I was the one to contact her.
She came over on boxing day, but it really seemed as though she was only there to see my daughter.
Since then, I have contacted her to update her about my first infusion treatment for my MS, and she has contacted me once through a Facebook message of a meme and what felt like her way of passive aggressively telling me that she was in London with my older sister. It was like she knew that it would bother me that she was going on another big trip with one of her daughters that wasn’t me.
Maybe I am reading too much into that, but based on past experiences, it is very difficult for me not to feel like the child that neither of my parents wants or cares much for.
Anyway, I digress.
So, other than that one Facebook message from London, and the texts I sent her to update her, I haven’t seen or heard from my mother since boxing day.
Why am I sharing all of this? What does this all have to do with fear and how it steals our sense of connection?
Well, I don’t trust my mother.
And that dream that I had only made me all the more aware of my lack of trust for her.
I don’t trust her to be honest with me, be there for me or even be a consistent presence in mine or my daughter’s life.
She occasionally pops up in our life to see my daughter, usually around times when she has an excuse to buy her love with gifts, such as birthdays, Christmas, Easter, etc.
And then she disappears again for a few months.
Even when I do see her, she doesn’t seem remote;y interested in my life or how I am doing or what it going on for me. If I didn’t tell her, she wouldn’t know anything about what is happening in my life, because she doesn’t bother to ask.
And even on the rare occasion that she has in the past, she doesn’t seem remotely interested in my answer and is usually quick to change the subject back to something about her and her life.
Or she will start talking about one of my sisters.
So, it is difficult to feel like she is someone I can trust, when she is basically giving me no reason to show me that it is safe to do so, especially given our history.
Late last year, after many months of not speaking, she got in contact with me to tell me that she had done to work with a psychologist and had come to terms with the things that had happened to me by my father as a child and that she believed me and wanted to try building our relationship back up and rebuilding the trust.
That conversation meant a lot to me, after years of having my experience denied and disregarded by her, so I was hopeful that it could be the beginning of us rebuilding.
But then she stopped seeing the psychologist, stopped making an effort to talk about things with me and, eventually, stopped making much of an effort to contact me at all, unless it was in relations to my daughter.
So, to have her say all of those things about wanting to repair our relationship, but not follow them through consistently with actions to show her commitment to doing so, only severed my trust in her even more.
And, if we can’t trust our primary caregivers, who can we trust, right?
At least that is what our brain starts to tell us when that trust that is so pivotal to our survival is broken
“If I can’t trust my parents and other close family or community, I can’t trust anyone”
Which brings me to the other most pivotal relationship in my life - my relationship with my husband.
My husband is one of the most important people in my life, and a person who has seen me through some of my most painful and traumatic stages of adulthood.
He has proven to me, time and time again, that he will be by my side through whatever life throws at me and has sacrificed more for me and our family than I would care to admit.
In fact, sometimes I even worry that he sacrifices too much for me and doesn’t leave enough for himself.
And yet, still, I find myself unable to fully trust him.
I am constantly having thoughts that follow a script something to the effect of;
“He doesn’t really care about me.”
“He doesn’t really love me.”
“He doesn’t really want to be here.”
“He is only staying out of obligation.”
“I can’t trust him.”
“He will just leave like everyone else.”
“He hates me.”
“He resents me.”
“He’s angry at me.”
“He’s unhappy being here.”
And so on…
I want nothing more than to be able to put my walls down and let him in, because having my walls so firmly up with him only causes me to lash out, push him away and keep him at arms length.
But the fear that I feel about being hurt, being rejected and being abandoned by the people that I care for the most is so all consuming that it doesn’t allow me the awareness of how to even begin let my walls down around him.
Because every time I try, there is some small and, from his end, completely innocent word or action that will trigger an emotional memory that has my walls going straight back up and firmly locking him out.
And this is just a vicious cycle of feeling more isolated and alone and getting more triggered and falling into a spiral of anxiety and depression.
It is a trap that I am constantly finding myself falling into and not knowing how to get myself out of.
Complex trauma is a fucking hard thing to navigate, man. Especially relational trauma. And especially when it comes to trying to build healthy and adaptive relationships in the present, while trying to navigate the trauma of the past.
I wish I could say that I knew where to go from here towards building more resilience when it comes to my relationships and the openness and vulnerability that they require, but the truth is, I have no fucking idea.
I guess the best chance I have is trying my best to stay open to learning from every experience that I have with my husband and continuing to collect evidence that he is someone I can trust, while also doing the personal trauma recovery work of processing the memories of the past to give me a better chance of being able to live more in the present and build a more connected and open future with the family I have worked so hard to build.
I can’t change my own past, but I can do the work to make sure my daughter’s present and future is a more loving, safe and connected one.
And I can continue the work of deconstructing these walls, brick by brick, to begin letting my husband see the real me, rather than the me I manufactured in an attempt to keep myself safe from getting hurt again.
Because these walls don't keep the pain from getting in, they only keep it from being able to come out.
Love,
Lulu x