My father was a pirate. Traveling across seas, he chased his dreams and treasures, avoiding responsibility. My mother was a hippie. Dancing, she escaped from her memories and embraced love beyond herself.
Understanding your origins is believed to be key to discovering your true identity. It is also said that traumatized parents pass on the same experiences or the consequences of their pain in unhelpful patterns and behaviours to their children. By traumatic experiences, I mean a broad spectrum of loss, violence, fleeing, oppression, not being seen and heard, discrimination, poverty, and abuse.
With my mother I have a special bond. Even as a child I became closely intertwined with her fine mood and also with her emotional pain. Her childhood, life and love experiences haunted her and from time to time it was like a well of unprocessed emotions opening up. She then could not help but cry and scream, so intense that she fell to the floor and let her body move to the rhythm of her grief. With my father, it was party time. At least, that’s how I experienced it. Cheerful and carefree, he strolled with my sister and me along the beach of Scheveningen where he himself swam in the sea until late October. And his squatted house was not a home, rather a playground with instruments and paintings everywhere on the wall. With both my mother and father, there were no rules or educational principles. But there was music and love, at least: they were kind to us, that’s what I have always remembered.
My finest childhood memories stopped at age six during a visit to an aunt. It was winter, just before Christmas and on that day I was told that my father had gone back to St. Vincent; his native country. That couldn’t be possible, could it? He wouldn’t leave me behind, would he? For the first few weeks and perhaps months I waited for his return. If a plane flew over he was surely on board. Or he was locked up in one of the construction containers along the road; at least, that’s the feeling I got as I walked past. My world collapsed, the story of why he had left got no words.
My foundation: dad absent and mom psychologically vulnerable and emotionally unavailable, resulting in a childhood of poverty and many problems. Now, as a radiant adult woman, my inner child sometimes still cries over the deep sadness and loss. At the same time, now that I have so many experiences of my own and being a mom myself, I know how unprocessed (childhood) traumas block your energy and affect your further behaviour, choices and relationships. This applies to my parents idem, they too struggled with raw heart pain. In recent years, I have started to look at what I went through with a different perspective and find that (for me) everything makes sense. Now I see especially the magic of my life journey, how I have grown and I discover(d) that the core of deep sorrow not only comes from your own experiences and those of your parents, but also from grandparents, great-grandparents, maybe from past lives; who knows and from the collective: Healing of yourself is also healing of your environment: so inside so outside. More and more I am recognizing, feeling and accepting my intense emotional life and dark pieces, and it is allowed to be there without judgment. My true SELF/identity experiences, plays, learns and is FREE. Free from projection and free from imposed values, norms, beliefs and culture, and goes beyond DNA. I am grateful to be allowed to discover that.
Natalie
(Foto Daniel Dan @Pexels)