I haven’t written in a few weeks. I’m full of too many thoughts. They’re tangled and wound up so tight I can’t find an end to grab hold of to even begin.

Expressing myself is frightening. I recently realised that I am in fact scared of my own feelings. I know that sitting inside me there’s this mass of anger, grief, regret and sheer pain. I can say it’s there but I can’t own it.

By owning it, I mean fully identifying with all of those feelings. I mean really holding each of them, really attaching them to myself and my experience.

Right now, I’m adept at dissociating from it all. In observing that black mass of terrifying emotions, I watch it all from afar. It all belongs to a part of me that I flatly reject. The young, vulnerable part that was manipulated by her big brother. That part who loved and looked up to the people in her life that should have protected her and didn’t.

That child part is the source of so much pain. And worse; the shame, disgust and horror at what she was a part of. I’ve read about ‘inner child work’; these courageous people who reach out to those wounded parts of themselves and learn to love them. They learn to be the person that child needed long ago.

I see those brave people and I see something impossible. It’s inconceivable to me that I could ever love my broken inner child. It will sound callous, maybe even monstrous to anyone on the outside of this, but I loathe that part of myself. I am so powerfully disconnected from her because I reject her experience. I reject that it was mine.

This leaves me in a cycle of destructive self-hatred. No matter what I achieve as an adult, how much love I am given, I can’t give up hating myself. When I think back to the violence I’ve inflicted on myself, I can see a clear motive. It’s hugely misguided, but I want to destroy her. She is a poison. Somehow, somewhere in my subconscious is a drive to kill of that toxic part of myself.

In therapy today, I didn’t want to speak. I wanted to hide and at one point I even considered getting up and just walking out. I think this is partly because at the moment, that young part of myself keeps surfacing when I am with J. I can’t help but switch out of my adult thinking and become consumed with her horrible, dark emotions. And in that state, I start feeling like a cornered animal. I get defensive and prickly, but mostly I just feel so scared of showing something of what’s inside.

Photo credit: Kasia, Creative Commons.