Closing the back door

I only very recently learned that it was my five-year old brother and three-year old sister who welcomed me into the world. The story was/is unbelievable and when I first heard it I was simultaneously blown away and touched beyond words.

I was born at home, the midwife fainted, caught in the midst of some terrible flu bug, and so my dad, a butcher by trade, decided because he'd delivered plenty of animals he'd be perfectly able to deliver me. And, all credit to him, he did. But due to some frustration or other that was common for him, he'd thrown my brother down the stairs and set about beating our mum, way into the second stage of labour, with oil cans. I guess the ones that stored the fuel for the paraffin heaters. Meanwhile, as dawn approached, all ten and a half pounds of me was quietly making my journey here.

On climbing back up the stairs, my brother bravely re-entered the room to find me born, stretched naked and bloody on the bed. Our parents were still distracted by their fighting and my brother felt terrified. He knew it wasn't right that I should be left there unattended, so carefully lifted me from bed, took me to the little sink in the corner of the bedroom, cleaned me, wrapped me in a blanket and carried me to the bedroom next door to to introduce me to our sister.

This simple human gesture opens my heart wide with every telling of this story. It makes me feel a little teary, and then wow - that small boy, so brave, so tender.

And whilst I now have perspective and understanding and enormous amounts of compassion, empathy and love for us all; truly knowing that if my parents had had the wherewithal things might have been different, the long term effect this lack of early holding and support had on my life, and on my developmental capacity to relate, have been devastating. 

I remember standing in the playground as a tiny girl, looking around, wondering how on earth could I bridge the overwhelming chasm between me and the other kids. I felt terrified. I remember locating a small drain cover in the tarmac. It somehow offered me a place to be, somewhere to stand, something to hold onto. I skipped around and around it, humming an internal mantra of it's ok, it's ok, it's ok. I had no idea how to make contact, no knowledge of the 'normal' rules of engagement, and so, very early on, as we all do, I  developed strategies for coping. But when our earliest, most primal, needs aren't met, everything that comes afterwards is built on such shaky ground it leaves us, left me, in a permanent state of fear.

Given the bizarre nature of our household, where sex was on the menu in all sorts of inappropriate ways, one strategy high on the top of my list, was to use my sexuality as the bridge. So very early on I found myself engaging boys in ways I shouldn't even have known about. And they liked it. And that gave me a warped sense of power and a distorted representation of love. The fact that they liked me fondling their genitals, equalled, in my mind, that they liked me! That they maybe even loved me, wanted me, celebrated my existence. So whilst just being in a room, attempting to relate with another person made me shaky, grabbing hold of a boy's dick and doing the things that pleasured him, made me strong.

Taking this into adulthood, I found, in my intimate relationships, the constant need to have an exit strategy, to have a another man, or interest in a man, lurking in the shadows. They somehow offered me an invisible safety net to catch me should I fall. The clandestine nature of it all gave me an odd sense of power over my partners, they were my back up plan, so the then mantra to my partners became You hurt me and I'll fuck you right over! The terror of my own aloneness, and the unsupported rage at how my life had been, was misdirected toward my partners, where it crystallised into hatred that I, unconsciously, wrapped neatly around a controlling, codependent strategy that was founded on adapting and/or suppressing my own needs and projecting them onto them. If I focused on pleasing them and meeting their needs I wouldn't feel so alone, wouldn't tremble so much with fear. In reality it looked something like this - I'm the good girl, you're the bad boy. Why are you like you are? How can I fix you and make you better? If only you'd change then things would be ok. So they, unwittingly, bless their hearts, became the source of my discontent. In moments of despair, my terror stood in the way of my own sunshine. 

But from as long as I can remember, I've always had a deep, innate sense of compassion. It has always been, is always, there. And love too, has always been, is always, there, because after all, let's not forget, in essence, we are love... appearing as this. And so in time, the love light of my own being shone brightly enough to pierce the darkness and somehow guide me to a place where I began, so tenderly, to welcome all the fragmented aspects of myself back in.

The more space I gave to being as I am in any moment, the more my control strategies relaxed, the more relaxation, the more space and so it goes on. Surrendering to the wisdom of the invisible hands of life, being lived by life itself, rather than by my own contracted state of separation, I began to feel safer in the world. Little by little, taking baby-steps in exploring the natural flow of relating. Discovering how little relating has to do with content, how much it has to do with context; not what we say or do, but what dimension of our being we're saying or doing it from. And so in turn, this brought clarity, and it suddenly became quite clear, in fact totally fucking obvious, that in order to experience the kind of depth and expression of love I was longing for in my relationship with Daniel, I'd simply have to close the back door. And so I did. In the instance of my recognition, the door to my exit strategy slammed shut. And the longterm effect on my life has been profound. Being in an intimate relationship, the thing I'd once found most threatening, suddenly felt safe. Safe enough to share and explore the actuality of the vulnerability and fragility of my sexuality, realising I'd been relating to sex from my mind and not from my body, not from my heart, not from the divinity and wisdom  of my essential being.

The reality was, the trauma and displacement I'd experienced in childhood had left me so cut off from any felt-sense of my body that far from being the sex-queen I'd woven as my secret identity, I was in fact entirely shut down! But the containment created by closing the backdoor meant that thirteen years into my relationship with Daniel, I finally agreed to marry him. Finally found a place where I could be myself with another. Where I felt safe enough to explore and integrate my difficulties with intimate relating and begin to realise the potential we now live. And it took time and care, patience and tenderness from us both, to come to rest... here.

So what I discovered, coming from a family where boundaries were so loose we could hang ourselves, was this: I thought I wanted freedom, when in fact, what I was longing for was containment. And although I understand the hopelessness and helplessness of my childhood situation and have deep compassion for the difficulties my parents faced, what I've also come to realise is this: It was what it was, we can't change history and I learned so much from that time I now have no desire for things to be other than they were. But there's been so much relief in also allowing myself to feel that on a very human level it wasn't ok. None of it. It wasn't ok for my brother, my mother, my father, my sister or me. It wasn't ok that I used sweet boys and betrayed kind men. What I've come to realise is that on an unconscious level I/we were all acting out as we were in the hope of containment, we were all longing for someone, somewhere, to come along and shout Stop! For someone, somewhere, to scoop our blood stained bodies from the bed, hold us in their arms, and carry us to safety.

And so, in a world obsessed with finding freedom from limits, I challenge you to discover the joy and depth, aliveness and peace that containment; living freedom as limits, can bring.