Empathy is not one-sided

 Self care is the best medicine for me specially since I was raised by a self serving mother. Expecting that others care for me is a continued sense of betrayal and pain that I was putting myself through and sponged in more and more of my family's emotional neglect as a whole. I'll admit that they suck in that big time and could not be grown up enough for us kids, like, for my cousins besides me.

Besides emotional neglect I had to live back then which I didn't realize was to live in survival mode - live on high alert to make sure that my body, my health does not come in the way of making my mother feel better for that day. My health was in fact perceived as something bad as it let her down, as it made her ruminate on her past tragedy of losing my father, and made her feel frustrated and tired for coping up all alone by herself. She completely overlooked my feelings and that how these statements from her would make me feel. 

Hence, emotional neglect coupled with living on egg shells was the crossroads where trauma meets and kept walking to that and just as quickly as I reached that spot, I withdrew in my shell until I get up to meet myself there. I avoided seeing myself truthfully so much in this process that I preferred living in the dark of my shell rather than coming out and talking about how I truly felt back then. It became more and more disconnecting and a sort of numb spiral that kept regurgitating pain and avoidance without letting them out. I suffered due to my empathy towards my mother and went nowhere close to knowing how to be kind, reach out to myself and care for myself which is the best way out as it seems now.

Empathy comes at a price if you don't know the real value of it yourself - it's like a bite you backwards thing and my patient waiting that I am going to get what I put out just made me feel worse, betrayed, and disillusioned.

And then empathy seemed like a strained cord that you cannot stretch beyond a point no matter how soft and sensitive the giver's feelings maybe inherently. If empathy seems like the coping up that is best done for a self serving parent, then it's better to channelize for self care, clarity of consciousness, and just being present mindfully to oneself one day at a time.

And empathy cannot be one sided; it needs to flow from both ends and meet together at some crossroads sometime for reaping the harvest of the flow.