“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi
There is a specific type of presence we search for in early life. An abiding presence consisting of patience, contact and recognition, and when we’re able to feel blanketed in the warmth of these components, a special trust forms. This is the bond we as children were intended to experience with our parental guardians and protectors set in place and functioning competently.
But not everyone was able to access this consistent presence, instead were exposed to instability, emotional immaturity and impatience, thus causing a series of misgivings about the world and its inhabitants to grow inside and be brought along into adulthood.
And even if the distrust dwelt invisibly dormant inside an adult heart, or didn’t manifest itself within every relational dynamic, it did risk being activated during the most significant relationships.
It did cause some to roam the earth in search of real love, never fully understanding what it even looks like.
Due to being met with emotional unavailability as a child, a lack of trust began to grow inside me and resulted in an insecure or impaired intuitive system. I was uncertain about clear situations or disconnected from my core and went against my gut instincts. If that sounds personally familiar to you, many of us ended up in similar ways in which our developmental growth was impeded or interupted by ongoing stress within a turbulant homelife.
Rather than having someone model healthy presence or learning how to cultivate our internal guidance system, we felt the struggle of not knowing what to do or how to handle a difficult passage. We might have found we were, instead, making rapid, rash decisions. Or perhaps we found ourselves becoming immobilized in the heavy feelings of alienation. Perhaps you looked around for a parent figure whenever you didn’t know what to do or where to turn — or help you reconfigure or process your feelings. As a grownup, I now comprehend the challenges my parents lived with and the context of their limitations. I understand trauma survivors have children and there was no way they could attend to every child’s needs adequately, given the circumstances. And I know I learned other ways and places to secure guidance in my younger years through that of my older siblings, but I was still incapable of managing or understanding my difficult or big feelings.
The emotional severance from a parental figure in childhood is an injury which forms a barrier. Once recognized, the barrier transforms into a signpost directing us towards our inner-work of re-establishing, reconnecting, and rebuilding a foundational fortitude to live confidently.
To Repair the Lack, We Must Identify What Was Lacking…
If we turned to our parents and were met with their own lack, like emotional unavailability or inability to cope and manage their own feelings and frequent gaps in stability, this lack and negligence was in itself a vacancy that filled us with lostness and loneliness. We knew something was off, so our instincts were working it out based on the absence. We can either get really good at suspecting untrustworthy people or find we’re shaky at forming solid bonds — or both traits reign simultaneously. And not being emotionally cared for and attuned to goes on to feed the sense of deep loneliness we possibly carried into adulthood. We can be wary when there’s potential ground for legitimate trust to flourish, or we might rush in when the danger flares have already been fired.
The lack of healthy, parental presence to nourish growing trust can inform our adult attachment patterns. It can result in silent or obvious addictions, and for some, an actual disconnect from their emotional field. And not being able to articulate emotive responses and feelings throughout life is like being lost without a map to refer to.
If this is still sounding familiar and all you seem to be capable of pointing to is a massive cloud of failure threatening to engulf you, the good news is, it’s not the end of the story. You can look at it as your internal system alerting you you’re off course and it’s time to come in closer and land inside your heart. And what’s been hurting inside your heart? Is there a voiceless pain of psychological or emotional abandonment, physical estrangement, early life betrayals, or unavailability when you needed strong, attentive presence in the shape of attention, affection and assurance?
Understanding this deep suffering, some people go on to become more connected parents and make conscious efforts to meet the needs of their children, and breaking the isolating pattern. Some people learn to exercise trust in themselves and reconnect with their intuition and emotional health and secure a satisfying degree of aplomb and equanimity. Some further hone their discernment skills so they can unequivocally trust themselves to open to certain situations and behaviours, while being capable of identifying indicators of what they want to avoid and steer clear of.
The Dance…
We know our most profound relationships test our resiliency and trust levels and our ability to work through the sort of issues that create barriers to gaining desired closeness and securing warm moments of real intimacy.
Without the specific type of intimacy our primary relationships require, we might begin to feel alienated from the loving shelter intended to provide peaceful retreat. If you place your heart in the hands of the one who is promising to offer concern and commitment, only to have your basic emotional needs ignored or skirted, the painful disappointment is resurrected from childhood. There’s no present outline of emotional maturity to adhere to and it is up to you to work it out and carry on. It sounds like a similar path you escaped and certainly don’t want to trek.
Or, if you are the one who is caught in a cycle of avoiding or declining your presence to someone who looks to you for that type of trust, you will still feel the absence of closeness. And if it’s both people engaged in the dance of avoidant or anxious behaviours, the energy becomes the push and pull between the pair, as the tension fails to hold them close. They don’t mean to recreate the exact struggle that bars them from entering the shelter of trust and honesty. They don’t want to exist in the pursuit of intimacy and a secure bond. They don’t want to invite love in, only to drive it away with the very things that maimed them in childhood. Yet, here they are, feeling the painful isolation of emotional distrust.
Securing and Maintaining Trust and Honesty
For Reflection
Have you ever believed you’d successfully connected and secured to someone you valued and was equally met in honesty and appreciation, but it wasn’t lasting? Sustaining the presence of deep, abiding trust and closeness is an intimacy we crave as human beings. The infrastructure of a relationship relies on the stability and care we bring to it. It’s true, being open and receptive within our primary relationship and moving with the flow of active energy and situations around us can seem like a feat some achieve and few can rely on. The rapids of regular life can move us into strange, unknown areas as we’re faced with real-time. Losing our place, getting impatient with our partner, falling into a state of dysregulation or overwhelm comes with being human.
When common or uncommon occurrences are in the field and knock you about, do you tend to jump ship and believe your relationship is doomed to sink or fail? Would you prefer to adhere to an anchor in those times, and can that anchor be built by both of you consciously exercising trust moments? I know, for example, agreeing to use open communication, or going to sessions together, or reading a helpful book together to strengthen your communication practices are basic solutions that don’t always work out because of the complexities. But can you begin with YOU and work on trusting in yourself as you reclaim sefl prescence?
Working on strengthening your communication skills independent of your partner can guide you towards facing and describing existing anxious/avoidant tendencies, unhealthy patterns, or characteristics of developmental trauma which can leak into any of your ongoing relationships. Knowing you’re doing your part to contribute to the art and design of a resilient and reliable infrastructure and believing it will hold you in uncertainty is part of your maturing process.
Are you able to offer repair to small rips and tears in the cloth that allows your relationSHIP to sail efficiently? We do have to pause, stop, or step away from the busyness of life to make repairs along the way and nourish our hunger for affection and offer devotion to our significant person. Mending broken trusts, improving on communication styles, and sometimes reaffirming our commitment are ways we restore our faith. Working together on attachment issues or stresses that may be reanimating those old wounds of feeling lost and alone (or anything that might be creating a barrier to intimacy and feeling loved) is vital for the long haul. We can take one another for granted or come to feel slighted if we dismiss the necessity for repairs that usher in closeness and intimacy. Restoration can be a routine that reinforces closeness like recalling positive experiences and memories. It can be a regular meal without outside interruptions, a conversation about something that hurt, or a sincere apology that needs to be given so forgiveness can carefully seal an open gash.
When you’re finally able to identify and language your wounding and recognize the ways in which it had been isolating you from your own feelings and growth needs, it’s like stepping onto the vast, inner terrain and envisioning the barriers inside. To know and love yourself is one of the initial steps. To understand what was lacking and what you truly need and deserve in order to give and receive love honestly is key to continuing the journey. What things are you seeing and how does it all connect to your search for love and closeness?
Demystifying the darkness is the shadow work, attachment style or inner-child work, and everything else it takes to walk into the center of self-honesty and create a strong, enduring, mature presence. The sort of presence you needed but lacked, then had to build inside yourself through a tough and personal recovery process.
And at times, the focal relationship is, in fact, YOU. The value of working through something that has been calling for attention or for your peace and contentment is priceless. I hope you were able to find the piece that speaks to you, reminds you of your worth, and offers an opportunity to grow ever closer to understanding and offering clarity to your lived expriences.
Dear Reader,
Thank you for taking the time to visit. Please feel welcome to subscribe and receive my newsletter created to support your healing journey. If you enjoy or would like to practice writing, you can visit my other posted newsletters featuring heart opening prompts, questions to ignite your reflection and process, along with encouragement to keep you going. In short, I hope to simply help you connect to your feelings and know you’re allowed to own them.
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With love, care and kindness,
Susan
Love your ‘ Securing & Maintaining Trust & Honesty’
I see Love Soul Contracts being drawn up. Agreements for Restoration.
Susan, you speak to me every time ❤️
Thank you Susan. There was a great deal I could relate to in you writings. I have to say I really admire your writing. It is poetic and speaks to me deeply. Thinking back I recognise that I feel the 'loneliness' you speak of. I normally just pull myself together and get on with my day but that may not be the best way to deal with it. It's definitely a recurring theme within me.