About Fear of Intimacy and Abandonement

As I go by the weeks reading The Artist’ Way and going through most of the weekly tasks I find learning so much about life and today was no different. The Title of this week’s topic is: Recovering a Sense of Possibility and it talks about how we tend to settle with just enough, and how we don’t feel like we can accomplish great things. We are encouraged to create a dependency on our creator as it will give us freedom from all other dependencies. By trusting in our creator, in other words, having faith, we open ourselves to more intimacy with other human beings because with our faith we are freed from our terrible fears of abandonment and are able to live with more spontaneity. Our peers will be freed from our constant need for reassurance and will be able to love us back without feeling so burdened.

This statement has been very eye opening. For most of my life I have felt as if everyone who has ever been close to me is going to leave me. Many have left, yet many have left and come back in some way. I have developed an intense fear of abandonment that I believe started when my parents got divorced when I was about 2 years old. I have really vague memories of that time, yet my first memory ever is that of me hiding under the bad in my grandparent’s house because I didn’t want my father to take me away. I can see a car outside through the window; a man taking some of my clothes and toys away. Feelings of despair, of pure fear. My mom tells me that I told her that day that if my father where to take me away I would open the door of the car and jump out, that I would find my way back home. My mom claims to have been terrified and she prevented my father from taking me. He never came again to visit me.

I never heard anything else about my father, or at least I don’t remember. The next memory I have of my father is when I was 5. My kindergarten teacher tells me that my father had sent a birthday gift for me and she had it. My response was: “You can keep it, I don’t want it.” Quite a strong character for a 5 year old.

My mom changed boyfriends fairly often and we moved every 2 years since I was born. No daddy, no home I could call my own. My mom tried to keep me in the same school as to allow me some kind of stability. But my school was the only stable thing I knew, maybe that’s why I loved to study so much. I loved school.

Since then I have tried not to get attached to things or people, as I don’t trust I’ll have them the next day. I tend to get afraid when I notice developing feelings towards someone, when I see myself making new friends. A huge wave of emotions drowns me, as if gallons of love where poured over my whole body, and I withdraw from it.

I have an intense fear of abandonment, and when I start to like someone, I withdraw. A little voice inside of me calls out for reassurance, it asks me to find out if that person will like me, will care about me FOREVER. I want people to like me FOREVER. Several years are not good enough for me, and I start to feel a neediness creeping from inside of me, then I withdraw. If I can’t know for sure if they are going to like me forever then I can’t handle it. So I create a barrier around me, a barrier that keeps me close, but not close enough to get hurt too much.

According to Julia Cameron, “as we come to trust and love our internal guide, we lose our fear of intimacy because we no longer confuse our intimate others with the higher power we are coming to know.” We give up idolatry – “the worshipful dependency on any one person, place or thing. Instead, we place our dependency on the source itself. The source meets our needs through people, places and things.”

About Death...and other things.

I have not written in a while... because I said that I was going to give this Blog a purpose other than healing myself from my fear of writing and expressing my feelings. Well, I do have a purpose of this blog, however I realized that I am still afraid of writing because in the past few days I had to deal with the loss of my step dad and I've been sad and angry and many feelings came out that I was so terribly afraid to put in writing. I tend to swallow my feelings and make them get dissolved into my body and then I tend to loose contact with them. Is like they disappear. The story with my step dad is very long and I'm not sure I want to re-tell it all here, but at the time of his death I started to feel bad that I never got to send him the father's day card that I bought him. That I wasn't there at his funeral, that I didn't send him the latest pictures of my kids or a letter or anything in the mail. But I was glad to know that back in April I was able to spend 2 days with him and the kids and hang out for several hours. I was glad that he got a chance to come from PR into NY and spend a few days with me and my family and that he was able to attend the graduation of the College where he worked in for over 25 years and that he was able to see all his friends and live the happiness of that. I was glad that I was able to wish him a Happy Father's Day even if it was just over the phone and I was glad to hear his happy voice telling me how happy he was that he got to see us in June and that the pictures I gave him where beautiful and that he loved spending time with us.
I am sad that his family and mine are in such a feud that I feel that getting close now will cause more problems than not. And I feel angry to know that his will was not accepted by his family and that he was not cremated as he desired, and that his organs where not donated, and all that.
There's a part of me that wants to get his will and follow it through and fight for what he wanted, but I also have to think that I live very far away, that I have 2 wonderful daughters that need me, that I have to keep my job in order to provide them the best that I can and with this economy I can't afford to risk loosing my job by flying to PR and fighting this off, and causing a feud with his family. I don't know.
I wish I still had my dad with me. But I know that he was a church going man and I'm sure he is in heaven now having a better life. Papa! I love you soooo much! We miss you! You'll always live in out hearts and your legacy will live on!

PS: I called his lawyer and told him that he was not going to be cremated as he requested on his will and then he went and got his family to cremate him. At least some of his wishes got respected.

A Purpose for this Blog...

I have been reading other Blogs recently instead of writing. I've been thinking about how to go about making this Blog into something with a Purpose. I started this as a way to get over my fear of writing. After being a wishful writer for some time and then a contributing writer and editor for a local magazine, I found myself with a phobia to writing. This phobia to writing (yes, phobia, panic attacks and everything, at the mere thought of having to write anything that came from my soul) I got it about a year ago after going through depression and pouring my heart out in the form of writing, and then having my privacy violated which brought about a chain of events that dug me deeper and deeper into the depression... Well, to make a long story short, after several months of therapy and getting started on medication for hypothyroidism (one of the symptoms can be depression and probably was making my depression even worse!) I feel like I am able to start feeling like myself again. And feeling less scared of writing. Although I still have fear, I mean, I have not advertised my Blog yet, nobody has read it...at least not to this day. But soon. I want to give this Blog a different purpose, I want this to be a place where people can come and learn something new that can give them an insight as to anything that might help them towards their self discovery and acceptance of their True Identity. This is a new step! Will be taking it soon!

Well, I'll think about my very first informational Blog entry coming hopefully next week!

Have a nice 4th of July weekend all!!!

Big Hug!

About Hope...or a better light on things...

A long time ago I read on a book about metaphysics that HOPE is not good. How so? Well, for a person to have hope in something means that they have a certain degree of doubt, which means that they lack faith. And lack of faith is along the same lines of Fear which is the opposite of Faith. If you really think about it then it makes sense, because if you have total Faith in something, then you don't need to have HOPE in it. Hope is like a wish, a desire for things to turn around for the better, and it is not FAITH of things to be better...Is something to think about...

Today it was a better day, I started to see some light at what seems to be the end of a tunnel that I've been crawling in... This morning I saw my neighbor Tony and I tell him about how someone messed my car and I have made the decision to give up my car... He tells me that I could take it into the Junker half a block away and to tell them that Tony sent me... So he gets some of the kids from the block to go into my car through my trunk and open the door for me so that I don't have to do it. And then I head out to the junker and they are very nice and tell me that they buy a lot of repossessed cars in auctions and stuff and that they sell them back and that if I wanted they could give me a good deal on a used car. So there it was! I could possibly get a better car from this...

Tomorrow I'll go and check what kind of cars they have and then I will see what steps I'll take after that...

I like when things get brighter! :)