Gaining ground giant steps

• Gaining a sense of Safety by addressing Attachment Deficient Disorder.

I have lived a life trying to keep myself safe through being set apart. Believing that I never really belonged here on this earth. I thought I was a mistake. I knew about what the scripture had said and that got me through. Faking it until I made it. Faking it to gain the acceptance of the church-ed folk kept me trying to belong. I never really ever felt safe. Although I knew by an act of faith that Jesus accepted and understood all that I was going through. I was broken and it took gaining insight into what that brokenness was to heal or at least begin to heal the ability to let my self attach. To begin to understand that I am safe.
I did keep my self safe many years of many horrid things. God yes was who kept me, but he taught my spirit and soul to do so. I did make it out, but my lack of maturation in the simple ability to bond to truly bond with other was at a broken infantile stage. I am progressing along in this at great speed. You know we perish just because of a lack of knowledge. I never cry and I though about this...I did keep myself safe if I would of cried then it would of been much much worse for me. By not crying I kept safe from more of the wrath that I so wanted away from. Understanding that I am keeping myself safe helps to remove some of the padding I keep around me as a false safety net.

• Gaining a sense of the self has been addressed by studying the difference between ...living with the idealized dream of life verses the acceptance of the reality called my life. Letting go of the ideal to embrace the reality. Is a very strange concept but it makes perfect sense really. I focused on what I wanted...A Life Someday...Well the question was offered up to me sometime ago.

"When will you know that you have done that?"
Life killed the Ideal that I had. This is not a bad thing. The ideal must die to accept the reality. No matter the reality unless accepted it will nor can it ever be changed. I kept trying to make life adjust into the ideal and it just plane wore me out into despondency.

That really started a rolling of understanding that if I had accomplished that goal I had set out for why did it not look like it. I had this ideal of what my life would look like. I kept that before me both day and night. All those years when all of the horror around me meant to take that promise from me. When beaten, when raped and when tortured. When neglected wishing that my parents might notice me.
"when I grow up I will...give myself a life someday I promise" That literally was a mantra, a place I went into when the body endured what nobody should ever even know about.
Well I would just be perfect and make it perfect. Not to ever let my life be like it was then but the polar opposite.
I had to face a painful blow not unknown to those of us who were dis attached to this world through the lack of bonding into to it due to abuse.
Because the life I fought so hard for was not that ideal I kept pushing on trying to make it look like that (I think this is a great root of much of the dissatisfaction in the world that leads to many a divorce).
The Ideal verses the reality

I succeeded in giving me that life someday that I promised. I am a wife of 27 years to a wonderful man who is imperfect (no you can not create them into what the ideal wants them to be). Often they have their own ideal to let go of.  I have two great kids (yes I so failed the ideal) . I wish I were so much better a mom. That my children were better mannered ect. I have perfected the art of homemaking into a science, it is still not the ideal. Reality is that it is what it is a wonderfully imperfect home. Now I can rest, before...no never was it good enough. I had to either kill myself with effort or exhausted feel like I was a failure. All because I could not measure up to an Ideal.
Reality is My family is not an ideal (close to it HA smile) no really I had this value assessed to moral codes and such. Being married my husband  always felt he let me down in this/ I think many mates feel terrible about not measuring up to a persons ideal they really want to please us but they also really just want acceptance too.  The kids must of felt this way too to some degree. Mom Me came off like a prude in order to just try to form this Idealized view of what a family of my dreams will look like. It made them all a bit miserable and truly and unintentionally unaccepted. Oh what if we were embarrassed by the judgments of others we then constrain each other into little robots of acceptable performance.
Learning to take action once reality is accepted to create what you desire it to become. As best as your able too. I have a life and I have accomplished it.
Where change is needed it can be accomplished from a proper motive.
I have struggled to be the best wife, homemaker, mom that I can be. I wanted to be the best friend but it never looked like it did in my mind...the idealized image that one day I would attain if I just fought for it.

Thankfully life is to be lived not fought through.

Yet in doing so the idealized view no longer serves us once we live and let go of just surviving.
The stress that striving for that ideal, the damage to my self view as a failure no matter how hard I tried.
Now I am free to see my true success and learn to accept my true failures. In this context however failure is just another opportunity to set a mission to become more competent in this life.

• Gaining affiliation. Striving for a sense of affiliation a sense of belonging. Believing the lie that "no one will ever be there for me to "take Care of me" no matter how hard I search to find that. It is not the job of anyone to take care of me. It is true that holding onto that childhood wish for someone to care about me crippled me. It set me up as a failed friend for I could never really be autonomous in friendship. It is in letting go of that lie that the truth is...It is I who must learn to take care of me. It is also for you not me to take care of you.
  

I did not know how to take care of me. I faked it through out my many years of adulthood. But secretly longed for a someone anyone who would care for me and feed me and tend to me like a parent might. Of course this is not reality. Although through  many events of my adult hood friends have loved me. This was always the only time I could ever cry. Literally when someone came to care for the kids after a surgery or injury I would feel so ashamed. I knew that it was embarrassing and immature to want it. Certainly there was nothing wrong in receiving the help given. It always felt however like a deep need filled that confused me.

I understood the years of looking at others to see how they did life. I would watch folks that I admired. Always looking as it were for a mentor of sorts. Once or twice asking for one only to see human nature take over in them and it go to their heads. I would be left feeling like I had really embarrassed myself and I'll never ask again.
Recently I asked a wonderful friend and she did not treat me like some unintelligent child. She told me what her morning routine looked like. Step by step. See I had figured a lot out in my 48 years but there were voids that I had left as insignificant for they had to do with taking care of me. Or simple self care things that I had never witnessed as a part of family daily routine.
I never really had an example of that growing up. It just became a part of who I am or was.
For a week I tried to do it like another and for the first time I saw an amazing change in my stress level, the quality in my parenting was wonderful. Morning became relaxed and fun. All because of an example of what it looked like to take care of myself in the morning.

I belong to me.

I need me to be here for myself.
Loving others as Jesus loved me...I have loved others with such intensity. Imagine if I learn to love my own self like that? What if I were as accepting of my own flaws, what if it changed those dark secrete criticisms I have over others that I often feel so ashamed and guilty for. That is just a reflection of how I am not accepting of my own soul. Pretty profound stuff.
There was always a Vail as it were between me and the world, the people in it. Even those in my a mediate family. My husband and children too. If I let them in?
There have been times in my life of boundlessness that have left me vulnerable. Who was there for me then? Not me.  See it effects things pretty basic.

• Gaining a sense of Mission.  Behold all things become new. It is not just something to count on as a promise of scripture. It is a promise to act on. Faking becoming new through actions only is not the same as the heart change of really becoming new. It takes work. Hard honest work. Facing the way we are and why. Then learning who we long to be and how to do it. Then being willing to do the work to do so. What is your purpose?  It has been my mission to become whole. 
• Gaining Competency in what really is most important. Learning how to love me the way God loves me so that I can show others that love. Learning what that looks and feels like is the best success I can achieve.

Now I finished this post. It was my mission to set out to do so. Now I better go join my wonderful friend  my husband as he sleeps taking care of his own self. I need to go care for my own self and sleep. I am an important person here. Many are counting on me in the morrow including me. I will be here for me. I need to sleep and to be safe from the stress that the lack there of can bring.

Good night and be blessed.
May this help another.
One day may it help my children to better understand those early years when Mom was always stressed out trying so hard to make everything just right. Always feeling so bad about not doing a good enough job at some ideal she had fostered.
May they see the importance of working within the reality you own. It is in owning it that you can cause it to become what it is longed to be. It is in owning it that limitations can become opportunities for the unknown to open up a whole new world. Changing our destiny into who we were created to be.



Safety
Sense of self
Affiliation
Mission
Competency