The Disease of Invisibility

In order for a child to grow into a healthy self actualized adult, a number of emotional stages of development must have been accomplished.

Perhaps there is no greater need for a child but to feel 'seen' psychologically.

As a child growing up in the care of two adult children of alcoholics, I felt very detached from those who raised me. I felt invisible both physically as well as psychologically. When I fell, I was told my bleeding knees did not hurt, and often my cries for attention went ignored. When I danced wildly at the age of three in the hopes of feeling seen, and perhaps paid attention to, my parents ignored me, or shamed me into believing that craving attention was 'bad'.

What then does a child of 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 do, when their little hearts are starving for human affection? Where do all those feelings of wanting love go?

My mother was one who busied herself constantly with cleaning our home. Her disposition was anxious and her aura was cold. My mother was not warm or inviting and in fact, I often felt I was an intruder when in her presence. My father was a workaholic, whose obsession with money often made me fear our family was poor and near destitute. My parents relationship was one that felt more obligatory than loving. Often when my father upset my mother during a phone conversation, she would refuse to defend herself, and instead did her best to keep my father calm. In so doing, she taught me that her feelings were irrelevant in relation to his, and so it was that the enabling mindset in me was created.

Blind to her own self, my mother too smiled when she felt like crying, and silenced her self when she felt like screaming. Her tendency to enable my father, gave birth to the sense that other people's feelings were more important than my own. In the presence of my father especially, my mother consistently tended to his emotional whims as if a puppet on a string. The denying she did of her own self, rooted in me very much the same sense of invisibility.

My mother could never have known she was infecting me with the same disease she had been infected with as a child.

The Disease of Invisibility had been born in her many years before the disease had been passed along to me in my own life.

My mother, so blind to her right to own who she was, to hear her own voice, to expect to be respected by the others in her life, to love her self from the inside out, could never have known that through the disowning of her own right to know her true self, she guaranteed I remained a stranger to my own unique self. She could never have known that through the care-taking of others and the abandoning of her own needs, she inadvertently severed the lifeline that was my birthright that connected me directly to my own source.

Why The Self Hides/My Story

Rare human beings ask, "Who am I?".

Until my life began to spin wildly out of control, I thought I knew the answer to that question.

Not long after the birth of my third child, I asked my husband for a divorce. He did not take me seriously, and like many times before suggested I was crazy for ever considering such a thing. He told me he was happy, and that if I wasn't there must be something wrong with me.

Thinking perhaps maybe my husband was right, as well as wanting to still seek his approval, I entered therapy expecting to be told I was in fact crazy. Sadly a part of me wished this was so, for deep within me laid an intense desire to finally feel validated by my husband. Somewhere on some chaotic plane of my existence breathed the sick sense that whispered, "Maybe if I am told I am crazy, this will make my husband happy". This dysfunctional thought actually brought me some relief on some twisted emotional level.

During my first session my therapist Ed asked me, "So, who are you? Who is Lisa?".

I quickly responded, "I am a wife. I am a mother. I own and help operate a business with my husband. I am the head of security at my children's school, and I am a member of the PTA."

Thinking I had answered fully and intelligently, I felt satisfied with my response, until Ed came back with, "I didn't ask you what you did. I asked you 'who' you were. What makes Lisa Lisa?."

I remember feeling as if my brain short circuited for a moment or two as my mind scurried its corners for some clue as to how to answer this authority figure. But there was nothing.

In those moments that followed, I began to become slightly aware that for whatever reason I was truly messed up. Something within me began to become very much aware of how far off course my life was. I could feel a rush of wanting to know what that was that was wrong within me, for I knew not being able to answer such a simple question meant I had a lot of work to do.

"My husband thinks I am crazy for wanting a divorce, so that is why I called you", I said to Ed.

"Do you think you are crazy?", replied Ed.

"I am not sure anymore. I don't know what I feel anymore. I just know I don't have any more strength in me to deal with him. I feel like I am just done. I am dead to him. I am numb."

"Well you're not crazy, but you are codependent, and you need to learn how to stop enmeshing your self with his wanting, and his needs. You probably anticipate the needs of others quite well, and yet cannot hear the calling of your own voice. You probably care more what others think about you than what you think about you. You probably judge your self quite harshly, and yet allow others to take full advantage of you. You probably seek validation from the outside, rather than the inside. And if I had to guess, you probably have alcoholism in your family", Ed said to me, as I sat still hinging on every word that fell from his pale pink lips.

Ed would be right on all counts.

From that day on, I not only listened to every word Ed spoke, but I heard them as well. At his urging I purchased and engulfed the book "Codependent No More" by Melody Beattie. In this book, I found a home. I found a friend. I found my self, the old and the new improved self that is me.

The journey I began that day has not been an easy one. But it has been the greatest adventure of my life.

Up until those moments, if you had asked me who I thought I was, and if I believed that I had self esteem, I would have answered in confidence, believing that I knew who I was, and that yes indeed I had self esteem. Based on the level of self awareness that I had at the time, I would not have been lying. Many years later however, through the jagged peephole that is memory, I now know that at the time I knew very little of what it was that was this thing called 'my self'.

It could not have been any other way for me, for I had been taught throughout my life to deny, ignore, disown and distrust this thing called 'my self'. Born to two adult children of alcoholics, who had been taught to deny, ignore, disown and distrust their own 'selves', it could not have been possible, unless through the miracle of awakening, that my parents could have taught me to honor that which they did not know to honor within themselves.

One cannot teach a child to love that which the one has no knowing of. Alcoholism had robbed my parents of the joy of discovering and loving their true selves. Their lives were lives that were built on survival. My mother was a child who worried where she and her siblings next meal was going to come from, and how it was they were to be able to get their drunken mother off a bar stool and up to her bed. My father was one who was verbally, physically and emotionally abused by his alcoholic father and who in addition was abandoned by his mother when he was four as the result of her suicide.

My mother was only nineteen, and my father twenty when I was born. Children themselves, without an understanding of their own uniqueness, could never have known how it was they were to nourish in me an appreciation of the unique being that I was. Instead, I was taught to smile when I felt like crying, and to be quiet when I felt like screaming. In essence, I was taught that not rocking the boat was far more acceptable than telling the truth. I was taught to fear what the neighbors thought and to conform to what it was, that was impressed upon me as to what was acceptable. Although every cell in my body begged me to break out in individualism, every being in my environment did what they could to shame me into obedience and conformity.

A love for my self could not have been, for without its reflection in the eyes of those who raised me, its soul could not have been born. Self, must be mirrored back to the innocent as they grow, for if the self is denied, life for the innocent child becomes a maze of misguided internal communication, which results in a life that is very much lived in search of love and acceptance from the outside, when in reality, love must always first come from within ones own being.

What Is The Self?

You are amongst a rare breed of human beings. Something within you has drawn you to these writings. My friend, that is a good thing. For in your wanting of knowing, or in the figuring out of why you are where you are, or how it might be that you have more, or perhaps there is something within you that simply wants to know how it is you are experiencing what you are. Whatever the reason you have found yourself here, allow in you a resting sense, a peaceful sense that you are where you are supposed to be.

Life for some is more of a struggle than it is for others. Some of us have been born to more enlightened caretakers than others. But all beings struggle eventually to gain control over their lives, hoping one day to finally find themselves upon the mouth of their dreams.

Our journeys are hilly. They teach us much through the scrapes, through the bumps and through the bruises. But if our heart is focused upon wanting to understand our truth, and in the figuring out of our purpose while here on earth, eventually our dreams open wide and life becomes delicious.

I have traveled through the treachery of what has been, and I have found my way out of that turmoil of what once was. It has not always been pretty my friends. There were many lies I needed to weed through. There were many tears I needed to allow to leave me. There were many ghosts I believed in, and needed to free. But I am here. My soul has recovered, and I am now a deliberate creator of my own reality, knowing and appreciating my life as all that I desire manifests here and in the now.

I have chronicled the journey I traveled from there to here, in a way that suited my own way of learning and processing, for my mind is one that needs to understand all things at its ground level.
In order for me to allow myself the joy of 'having', I needed to first uncover 'me', 'my self'. Further I needed not only to uncover my true self, but needed to learn to love my 'self', which was the most difficult part of my journey.

My belief is that I have much to share, and much to teach those who are in search of a healing.

I know without doubt, that if you are ready to learn, if you are ready to embrace the challenge of learning to love your self, here, through my words your cleansing shall arrive.

Let us begin with what it is you are in need of loving; The Self

We have all heard of the term the self, but what is the self?  Is the self your body?  Is it your mind?  Is the self your thoughts? Is it your soul?  

We are told these days that healthy people have high self esteem.  Esteem is defined as to revere, admire and honor.  But if one does not know ones own self, or if even that they possess this thing called a self, then how is it one can ever hope to achieve health through high self esteem?

If most of us don't even know we have a self, then how are we to ever have this self esteem so many say we need to have in order to live a healthy life?

To begin, it is sometimes easier to define what we are not.  We are not our bodies.  We are not our thoughts.

Our bodies are a physical container if you will, that the rest of us gets to walk around in. We need this physical suit, because our world is made of physical matter.  Having hands helps us manipulate other physical forms.  Our brain has the ability to carry thoughts.  We have an impulse to open a jar of peanut butter, and our physical body allows us to perform that task.

What then is the self?

If your 'self' is not your brain, or your looks, or even your thoughts, then what is it?

Scientist have yet to uncover the very thing that causes creation. The life force within an apple seed that enables that seed to grow into an apple orchard cannot be looked at under a microscopic slide. It is something no one has ever seen, heard or can touch, yet it is a life force nonetheless.

This life force that makes it possible for a male sperm and a female egg to come together and trigger cellular division is the same life force that causes rose seeds to bloom into strong, beautiful and fragrant gardens. It is the same life force that exists in creatures of the sea, and of the sky. This life force is not your 'self' yet it is very closely tied to that which makes up the unique being you are.

The reason I set forth such a clear description of what life force is, is because you must first understand that, that which created you created all that is...therefore you are tied to all that is, all that has ever been and all that will ever be. You are as glorious as the sun, the moon, the stars and the oceans. You have nothing to prove. Just as the sun does not need to prove it is the center of our solar system, nor do you need to prove to anyone or anything that what you are is simply enough. You are enough.

Your self is the culmination of all that which you are including your life force. Your existence here is nothing more than an opportunity to express your innerness. You have an opportunity to embrace all that you are, and all that you feel from within. Here, on this planet is your chance to learn to listen to the guidance you feel from within so to become one with that which makes you unlike any other being.

Your self is the part of you that gives you clues as to what direction you should be going in. When your feelings are negative, that is your 'self' alerting to you that you are going against what is right for you. You are falling out of alignment with that which is right for your unique self. When you experience positive emotion, that is your 'self' sending you guidance that signals you are moving towards what is in alignment with what makes you your unique self.

Life force is in us all. It is in all that is. A self however, is that which makes each being unique unto all other beings.

Each human being has a self, but not every human being is guaranteed a knowing, and or appreciating of his/her own unique self.