Missing things from the past
As I was driving down the freeway today watching hundreds of people going to work, etc. I wandered why with so many people in the world lonliness still exist? I have gotten better at letting things go and I try and go about my everyday life staying busy and concentrating on work. But, still...there are those moments like this morning that I was missing things from the past...my now estranged adult daughter when she was small (I often have dreams of tying her shoes), my father-wandering how things might have been if he hadn't gotten sick and was still here, my ex husband-if he'd actually done the things he promised to do, what my life would be like if I stayed in NJ this time last year, If I continued to make risky decisions and might be with the one I truly love today.
I'd like to think we make the best sound decisions with the doors we are given at the time. I think there reaches a point in time where we get tired. This scares me. Because, I feel if I get tired I will settle or just except things and stop changing. My biggest fear in life was becoming like my mother and I feel I have become like her. I was estranged from her for years as I am estranged from my daughter now, she was in a loveless relationship as I am now, she was depressed and slept constantly which I am now. Never in my life did I want to be her but, it seems history repeats itself.
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I think history only repeats itself because those deep seated beliefs that run our life is like a computer program running in our minds. How do you reprogram yourself and break out of that box, is the question.
I heard from a Higher Source that the past is an illusion and only the present is real.....the present is the only part of life, we have control over so when we revisit the bad memories, of the past, we are contaminating the present so I always try to stay focused on the "now"...It takes practice but the rewards are great when can do that. :)
God Bless
The now out-dated psycho babble of "The Therapy Funeral" I participated in during the mid to late 70's devoted considerable time and effort to the inevitability of inheriting family traits. As out-dated as that 70's therapy is, I still use the exercises whenever I feel those inherited fears. They help. Is it tragic that I don't get to re-write my nurture, much less the nature of my DNA?
Perhaps the hardest day of my life was when I looked in the mirror one fuzzy morning and said, "Hi, Dad." Need I remind you that I am a woman? It can be hard to tell over the internet.
I see both parents in me. I get my strength from my dad but, I also inherited the people pleaser trait from him. I get the lonliness from my mother. She had the keen ability to drive people away from her.
I can buy that anti-social might be in the DNA, maybe, but isn't loneliness more choice than hard-wired? It certainly feels that way inside my own skin.
One of the exercises inside that out-dated theory of therapy funerals is imagining what my parents could have been without the mental illness that plagued their lives. I generally don't like What If games because they have played in to so many of my psychotic breaks, but this particular What If game lead me to healing places. My DNA is the material I have to work with. To at least some extent, I get to decide what I do with ^it^.
They way I tend to cope with it is to look at my parents as victims of their circumstances. Mental illness was not as commonly talked about in their youth. I remember my great grandmothers advice to me as a lonely kid-she said "Go in the corner to cry, and come out with a smile". I think this is why my ex labled me as stoic and unempathetic. I always came out hard as rock with little expressive emotion-as all the crying was done in the "corner" alone.