Many of us lacked an accepting, acknowledging and attuned presence in our early upbringing.
I call this this type of experience, “benign neglect” and it is incredibly common place in the majority of clients that I see and it leaves invisible scars that show up later in life as being out of sorts, disassociated, depressed, ill and getting trapped in self defeating and relational trauma loops.
It can lead to self loathing, emptiness and addictions as we desperately seek to fill this void handed down to us.
Yet it is in the main intangible and goes below the radar of what causes most people to go from one relationship / healing modality to another and still not get to the roots of what plagues them because a training in this type of space holding is rare and subtle.
More often than not these roots go back generations or past lives and it takes a specialist space holder to pull these frequencies and patterns out without getting enmeshed. I am so grateful to my gestalt psychotherapy training for imbueing me with this clarity and my Other trainings with Chung Fu and Mas Sajady that have deepened and held me with so much grace and awareness.
This form of absence of parental presence tends to cause untold damage as the developing child within us can’t sense its own innate beauty and wholeness in its imperfections and emotional loss and instead feels shame, lack, inferiority and dis-ease where it should have developed an embodied sense of goodness, emotions and healthy knowing of boundaries of self and other.
For this self honouring builds within us a healthy physical container in which we can house and connect with Source and feel that brilliance that is the essence of divinity itself that resides within us all.
We all need this level of clean reflection to see what is holding us back that has become so habituated and yet is somehow not actually “us”.
In my radio show and post last week I discuss this phenomenon known as an insufficient narcissistic supply – check out the passage below that absolutely nails what we all need and melt back into your soul.
“There is a primordial longing wired into us as infants to be seen, for our experience to be held, mirrored, and validated by another. In an environment of embodied attunement, we are able to rest in the mystery of being. We can explore unstructured states of consciousness and enter courageously into the dark and into the light. In this sense, love is an alive field of presence in which experience can unfold into greater levels of integration and cohesion.
From this perspective, “I love you” = “I allow you.” I allow you to have your own experience, to organize and make meaning of the world in the way that you do, and I will surround you with presence and with warmth even if I do not understand you. Even if by being yourself I am triggered with surges of previously unmet vulnerability and unmetabolized feeling, I allow you to be what you are. While I will not allow you to abuse me or to act violently or break the agreements and boundaries we have established, I will allow your inner experience to be what it is. While I may turn from you in the external world, I will not turn my heart off. Because I love you.
Many have heard of the term ‘holding environment,’ introduced by the great British analyst Donald Winnicott, to describe this field of presence. We can see that any good holding environment is made up of the essential qualities of contact and space. Through making close, embodied contact with another as they are – and by offering an attuned home in which their experience can unfold – we become vehicles of love in action. We care so much and are willing to take the risk of coming so close. We enter into intimate contact with another and their experience as it is, but not so close that we lose perspective and become emotionally fused with it. In this sacred middle territory we offer the gift of our attuned presence.
Simultaneously, we infuse the other with the sacred offering of pure space. For space is our true nature. By resting in the organic space of being, we seed them with cosmic trust that their experience is valid, that we do not need them to be different, to change, to become ‘awakened,’ to be in a ‘high vibration,’ or to ‘heal’ in order for us to love them. We will no longer place the burden upon them to take care of our unlived lives and unmet emotions for us, and we will honor their unique process and journey, by being there for them if (and only if) we are needed.
While not talked about as much, we can provide this same contact and space to ourselves. In any here and now moment, we can discover that our nature as awareness itself is in fact the ultimate holding environment. While as an infant we depended upon another to provide this environment for us, in which we could rest in primordial beingness, it is actually here at all times. While we deeply appreciate the ways in which the ‘other’ can remind us of this, it is here now, pouring out of the unseen and soaking into every cell and strand of our DNA. With eyes and a heart wide open… just look and you will feel it surrounding you… right now.
While we may not always understand our experience – and while it may never conform to our ideas, hopes, and dreams about the life we were ‘meant to live’ – we can come to trust that it is unfolding according to a unique blueprint which is emerging out of the unseen hand of love.”
quote from Matt Liccata’s Facebook writings