Grieving a Lost Childhood

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(10-11-2012, 11:33 AM)MakersDozn Wrote:

(10-11-2012, 12:37 AM)Tangled Web Wrote: Then you start to nuture yourself and give yourselves the love and protection you didnt get when you were little by doing nice things for yourselves.
And teaach them, the lils it is ok to feel the love you have to give and you will protect them.

Hi TW and anyone else reading,

It's not the children who feel the loss. It's me and the other adults inside.

We're the ones with the problem. Not them.

I can't nurture myself if I was never nurtured. There's a giant abyss within me, a giant hole where all the received nurturing, the bonding, the feeling of safety and security and inner strength ought to be. How can we give ourselves something that we never received?

We're sad and angry and lost.

Thank you,

Charity

I don't claim to share the totality of experiences covered in this fine thread. I have some input and encouragement to give.
The expression of nurturing is dependent on both the nature of the person and the care, or lack thereof, received as a child. I wasn't loved or nurtured by anyone, except for my grandfather who passed when I was 4. I don't know what would have happened to me without his gentleness, but even he folded in f**r of my mother, who was cr*zy.

I had to learn how to nurture myself. I think I did a decent job. However, her vicious hypercritical influence has been hard to displace, as this was what replaced nurturing in her nature. I not only have acted that way against myself, but with people I care about. I finally reached a point where I had to stop it, because I loved someone that much (who won't talk to me for any one of number of reasons I've given up counting).

I replaced this acidic trait with "Be Kind." I got that from a movie, "Holy Smoke," which launched my late-life transformation.

Before then, I saw examples of good parenting in a friend and tried to internalize what was going on. It didn't work. As I discovered years later, what I got out of it was that I felt almost jealous that I hadn't been treated well as a child. That feeling completely surfaced much later in life.

I can love, but nurturing and comforting is kind of foreign to me, and takes immense effort because I often don't get much out of it. It's hard for me to connect that way. Everything we do is to some degree driven by a feedback mechanism.

I have something else to say, but want to post this now because I can lose posts easily. If my email didn't have a save feature, I'd be out of luck. It's like I'm typing, the letters can move to different lines or I lose the page altogether.
be right back,
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