Recently, I met with a client who has lots of trouble with her family. She frequently feels a heaviness in her chest…a great sadness. She also has trouble in her marriage, is already on her third marriage, and is finding it hard to be independent and successful in life.
Where does all this come from?
When we look at both sides of her family, there is great sadness. Her maternal grandmother lost her mother at 9 or 10, and then was sent by her father to live with a distant aunt. My client recalls this grandmother as a woman who is laughing all the time; even inappropriately. My client’s mother is sad and lonely and distant with her daughter.
The client’s father is the oldest of two live children, and about the 4th or 5th of siblings, with twins dying young, and a few miscarriages in between. Dad became overly close to his mother and she could do no wrong in his eyes. He was a mommy’s boy and not really fully available to anyone else. His mom was very sad.
What was beautiful was that this woman, my client, saw the sadness, and also saw and KNEW that much of this wasn’t really hers. Here she had spent most of her life feeling sad and lonely. By the way, I forgot to mention that she is also too close to her dad, and is a daddy’s girl.
She looked at all the sadness before her and behind her, and the distance and sadness in her mother and in both grandmothers and she knew that was what she was feeling.
Yet, this family IS hers. If she gets too close to all this sadness, she feels it and takes it in, and she has spent much of her life trying to stay away from it. Instead, she saw that by getting close enough to the sadness to see it, she realized that it was theirs, and not hers. She could leave it with them. When she stayed away from it, she felt it the most. The distance she was away from the pain was the distance she was from herself and others.
So what do you do when you don’t like your family? You get closer.
Until next time. I hope this timely post helps you all through the holidays!
With abundant care,
Gail
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The other day a grasshopper graced me with his presence. I was sitting outside enjoying the sunshine for a few minutes. Even though it was enjoyable, my mind was still running wild. He stood and looked at me for a few minutes, then turned around and slowly did a 360 degree dance. I looked at him, wondered for a minute how long he would stay, and then just quieted my mind so we could tune into each other. I can’t tell you for sure what he said to me, but I knew he WAS telling me something, and it was a good feeling. One feeling I experienced was regarding the coming of fall; to enjoy this warmth in the sun because all too soon we would all be turning more inward and gaining our light from the inside for the next few months. So the main message was to sit, enjoy, and take it all in.
