incompleteness/soul loss

I think one of the most terrifying things is to have other people demand things of you, or even get punitive, when you are in a mode of incompleteness.

 

When I first migrated to Australia, I was in a mode of real incompleteness and psychological shock.  As we know, that continued for some time.

 

But I also had a lot of hidden pressures.  My first pressure was simply to adapt to my new external circumstances.  But, as well as this, I had parents who began to lean on me as the eldest – not just a bit, but quite heavily.   I had to be the bridge for their adjustments.  But at the same time they insisted we are proud people who will not adjust our values or behavior or language to conform to the new norms.

 

Add onto this my father’s raw mental state and barely contained vengefulness, as he became angry at having to readjust midlife.  He had fully believed the ideology of the Rhodesian rulers about maintaining a standard for Western civilization based on Christianity – one that would have been superlatively good, in a society that was assured survival BECAUSE of its reliance on God despite monumental political and psychological pressures.   So when that was shown, by circumstances, to be false, he was profoundly rocked to the core of his being as well as subconsciously – but never openly – outraged at the betrayal, which had taken on metaphysical proportions by now.

 

So I had to cope with his extreme levels of aggression at me, and displacement of the blame for Rhodesia’s demise, onto me.   Nothing I did was ever perfect or good enough.   And because I had to constantly use a lot of energy to defend myself from his ventures into my personal space (both literally and figuratively),  I had difficulty recovering my own equilibrium and felt rather raw myself.

 

Along with this, others also never really let me adjust.   They kept telling me things I could not make sense of, implying that my life has been easy or “privileged” and that now I would have to pay.  

 

But my life in the past and even in the present was rather precarious.   In the present it was more so, since I had become emotionally blocked from experiencing my own sensations, since people kept implying that I ought to feel guilty about who I was.

 

So I became this de-sensationalized person.  And then people put on more pressure:  “You need to adjust.  You need to adjust!” – but I had lost my sensations.

 

This is, I think, “soul loss”:  one loses one’s capacities to function and one’s emotions make one frightened.  One feels that there is something socially unacceptable about having emotions of any sort at all – and one tries to constrain them.

 

But these blocked off aspects then become unknown aspects of the self and represent a puzzle and a source of danger.   One has to try to draw them out slowly, but that has NOW become a psychologically  transgressive motion and fraught with danger.  One is drawing out emotions that others have described a socially unacceptable.  

 

This process is terrifying, too. 

 

And then there are the secondary effects of all of this – people noticing your incompleteness and commenting on it.  That adds another layer of psychological difficulty and mental confusion.

 

So, to function when you are incomplete is very difficult.

 

I actually think it is almost unbelievable that I made it out the other side, into completeness, finally.   Given my circumstances, you would not think I would.  But here I am!