Find your voice and have a say in your life

 Children of narcissistic mothers yearn for true, accepting love from their mother and what they instead find is a person who has no idea where she starts and where her children end. She has no idea of what her identity is outside of manipulating and controlling her children and conveniently wears the disguise of victim just to invoke sympathy and attention from others.

The narcissistic mother may not have been secure and loved for who she is but since her ego has unmet needs and a tendency to want to prove others wrong at the cost of earning her rightful place which she assumes is by projecting a false sense of self and brainwashing her kids to hero worship her while slips her true personality under all the drama which she creates over and over until people believing that it's true -  the truth is that they can't stand to face themselves and need others shoulders to push their responsibilities on and if they don't seem to match to her expectations, then guilt trip them and keep them in the fog and blames them for lack of their responsibility to take better care of her. She intentionally does this so that her own children get projected in the wrong way so that she wins this battle, this competition, this war, so that she survives by wearing her children out, by dehydrating their spirit, and keeps score of how much to give back in unnerving, destabilizing, and overshadowing ways in case she senses that they are on the winning side and have control in their hands, and all the while living in the pretense that she creates that she is quite adaptive to her children's decisions and will support living with them.

She cannot live apart and needs her children to live through them. Narcissistic mothers need to feed off their children's open mindedness and has to find a way to fit in even in the smallest spaces that separates her from her children. Children of narcissistic parents need to develop more self love and empathy for themselves for coming so far with their mothers that all the time, opportunities to explore and have fun in their own ways separate from the intertwined web of living with their mother seems to have gone and there's nothing that could have been done to undo all the time gone by.

The inner landscape of children of narcissistic mothers is a dried and saturated space which has their mother's presence written all over it -  narcissistic mothers can exploit the concept of motherhood to get what they want and go to whatever extent they want to make sure they stay in the center of the child's attention span. The children have to become the grownups in order to accommodate their narcissistic mothers at the cost of giving up on experiencing their childhood and all those precious experiences which would have made lovely memories that go well into adulthood and beyond. 

Being securely attached to a narcissistic mother is next to impossible as she needs you, your innocence, your energy, your trust, your spirit, your attention, your kindness, your time, your life, and your everything in it to sustain her. Feeding her off off you is going to disempower you as the child of such a parent and the more you step into your gut instincts, your intuitions, your nudges, your restlessness, your spontaneity, the better chances you have to organize your life around yourself. You need to keep reminding yourself that your life matters and your priorities in life are different than what she leads you on to believe. 

Let her live under the impression that she is your omnipresent, omnipotent God, and she has gone through whatever she has gone through to make your life what it is today, but never allow her to soften your will. Your will is your power. Don't let her break it and use it against you. The trauma is not in the weakness she makes you believe you have(be it physical, mental, financial health) but in your losing your clarity by being attached to such a toxic attachment and allowing her to win, to control, to manipulate your life and which only adds up to losing a sense of your self, which is a far greater loss than any of these.

Narcissistic mothers need boundaries while you need your balance. Your perspective of what life is for you matters and not their defining you on their basis of what they see is fit and right for you, because what was right for them at some point in time need not be right as time progresses and you start to grow -  not for them but for your highest good which would ideally make them feel good and not the other way round -  using their children's will manipulatively against their knowledge to get what they want and grow off their separate roots and make them become dependent on them unconsciously.

Living for yourself is not a crime and so don't feel guilty if you begin doing so. Self love is not an antidote against narcissistic mothers, but a healthy means to gradually and slowly connect to oneself piece by piece day by day.

You don't have to pay the price for being created by a narcissistic mother, but stay enough motivated and energized to want to invest in yourself and your dreams no matter how small or big it may be. Because it's finally your life and if you don't get to have a say in it, then who does?

Emotional neglect

What does emotional neglect feel like? It feels like you are invisible despite being physically alive. The part of you that craves for attentions becomes cold, numb, and goes to the point where you stop feeling your feelings because you don't know what they are and how to address them. 

I was so trauma bonded with my mother and my mother emotionally insecure more so after losing my father suddenly in a massive cardiac arrest, wanted to live through my blind trust in her and which as a child I thought was what was right for me, but little did I realize that she thrived on self pity and sympathy from others and that's what I was used for in order to project my sensitive health as my weakness so that her brothers and their families with whom she and I lived would continue to feel sympathy for her and with this she can sustain being in her self pity web with me alongside entangled in it.

All this complicated layering was too confusing for me as a kid as I assumed that my presence in her life meant something to her but I felt so betrayed and angered and saddened when I realized this fact that she simply conditioned me to be her shadow and the more enmeshed I lived being one, the more restless, sick, and sad I started to become but kept repressing this as I could not bring myself to process, to understand, to distinguish my feelings separate from hers and all this blur that it created in my life was something I didn't know how to deal with and so continued numbing it going to the extent of self forgetfulness, self neglect, lack of setting boundaries, and constantly seeking a sense of exploration, flitting sense of attachments with projects, creative pursuits, and again detaching myself from pursuing my interests more and more as I was too uncertain, overwhelmed, confused, afraid of stepping into being an individual and living like one. 

And so individuality remained a 'concept' in my life and the more I studied on self help, spirituality, philosophies, psychology and so on, the more far away from actualizing my self I became -  it again became a means to detach from putting in efforts to know myself and give attention to myself. Because I was so used to being emotionally neglected and so used to trying to cope with all the material things given that I didn't realize that individuating is a powerful and needed process to discovering who I truly can be. The material things provided satiated and made me feel stuffed, indulged, and somehow cornered into giving in to all the material comforts as if it will stop occurring to me to pick myself up and channelize my energies into putting efforts to becoming more of me. 

I was less of me and more of my mother for decades together that my consciousness, thoughts, feelings, emotions, and anything or everything that I could discern as me was so convoluted living as her shadow, living off her, and living away from me. All the 'effortlessness' it seems to live in my body but live disconnected from my feelings, my mind, my true desires, whatever that be, have made me sort of a clouded headed person who's trying to wipe the spillovers of her mother's influences from her head screen. 

This basic disconnect and confusion within myself doesn't mean I am detached on an elevated sense, but since I was for long neglecting my mental health, I assumed that seeking spirituality would be some sort of bridge to fill this gap within me. Agreed that God or a Higher energy is all about unconditional love and acceptance, compassion and forgiveness, but to expect that He/She do that for me is again cutting myself from connecting to my core which is love, acceptance, compassion and forgiveness (of self and others) and maybe much more. What is within is what you discover and become more of and what validation you seek from outside does not make you more of you -  it just is a hook to seek external understanding of your life situations and conditionings. And living in the midst of a parent who is emotionally neglectful, who has been passed on emotional neglect from her parents and brothers and who just learnt to make do with it, but wanted to latch on to my life, my energies, and my vulnerabilities and trust from my childhood so that she can get a sense of control over her life and my giving in to her reliving my father's sudden demise, her sadness on seeing me get sick which somehow is similar to my father's health and constitution, was just her way of disempowering me and drawing my helplessness, my cloudy judgements, my lack of being connected to my personal ego, space, will power, as means to encroach and cut through my weak boundaries and constantly live off my forced empathy which was a major source of energy drain for me.

And so detaching from these conditionings of my mother's over shadowing, being an indulgent parent, and becoming aware of self care, self discipline, and discovering ways and means for healthy self expression is a new way of life for me. How much loss of mental health and sadness over losing my time, energy, and giving into the dramatic trappings of my mother and her family was something that prevented me from discovering my inner self. I assumed them to be some sort of protective shield which/who kept me safe when I was feeling sick and tired, but little did I realize back then that living in such an emotionally dysfunctional family environment was making me believe that I was weak, helpless, and that my choice to overcome all these is by hiding under this protective shield. I was in fact blocking my natural flow of creativity, spontaneity, and all the ideas that I used to brim with, but since there was a blatant lack of support from my family including my mother in order to help me with a bit of support mentally, emotionally so that I could have opened up freely to talk to them about what I am feeling and what's holding me back, I just caved in, became more and more lazy, dissociated, and ruminated in a make believe fantasy world where I am honest, bold, assertive, communicative, and unafraid of speaking up my thoughts, opinions, and feelings.

I feel like I was some sort of a body without a head, without a sense of direction of where I should go. The intuitions that seemed to whisper, sometimes yell in my ears, and sometimes is an uncomfortable feeling, seemed for me to come from outside, but I only realized gradually that intuitions are answers from a different source, agreed, and not thought out from my mind, but they are responding to what I truly need and are talking to my soul. Since I felt so non existent, I could not piece these sudden messages that seemingly came from outside as I felt and were more or less divinely guided. Although I was not so ritualistic or religiously following pujas or activities and through which I was going closer to the divine energies, but it is their protective energies and guidance and timely blessings that have helped me remember my place here on earth in the midst of challenges, learnings, growth, and reflections, and so on, and so made me understand that I am not entirely all alone as I assumed myself to be. 

Do not allow emotional neglect to grow on you and eat their way into your roots, your life energy, your spark, and your personality. Because emotional neglect keeps you in the dark of your own feelings and emotions, your needs, your highs and lows, it's like an overdosed tranquilizer that seems to cut you off from being human which is all of these and so much more. 

Thriving in emotional neglect is trauma and it cannot be compared to the traumas and challenges of others no matter how big or bigger others problems may seem, but it does not give anyone the right, the power to belittle your struggles, your emotions, and your growth through thick and thin. Because your fights within yourself is real, your restlessness to want to break free from the numbing walls is real, your sadness on having to cope up with others lack of emotional and mental support and for their lack of time, attention towards you is also real, and all these hurt and break you down, but the perseverance to want to rise and stand up and be your own friend, support to become the individual and the human that you can become is also beautifully real. Embrace all this. The most potent antidote to emotional neglect from your parents, your family, your friends, neighbors, and so on is self love.

Self love through awareness of who you are as you discover yourself more and more, your basic likes, moods, opinions, feelings and a lot more is opening that window for genuine self expression, and when being yourself with all these feels just fine, then you don't have to seek approval from outside, because you are enough with what you have, what you don't, they are all part of you. And so, embrace it kindly and without criticism because you deserve it.

Self love - the joy of being yourself

The joy to want to live to the fullest and explore life with all its charm, unexpected glories, and beautiful surprises is what I had wanted to live for and still hope to live for. The sadness of an unexplored, unexperienced, unfelt life is huge and words can't explain the vastness of this vacuum. I lacked the willpower to be true to my life and what it could maybe unfolding. A closed bud is part of nature as well but unless it wants to experience its growth through sun, rain, heat, breeze and so on, it remains an unopened creation who is too absorbed in her past pattern of remaining closed in due to her fears, worries, tall expectations from herself, and staying stuck in whatever comfort levels of her daily life so that she can resist growing and discovering her true beauty inside and out.

I am more accessible to my mood swings, anxieties, and frustrations now having realized that they are a healthy part of growing up and do not repress in order to want to 'fit in' with the concept of ideal someone or the other. My parents' collective trauma from their individual personalities and from that of their families on them is part of my DNA maybe but the joy to being true to myself by exploring my inner world, mental, spiritual landscape is something that was not all joy at first but an unexpected yet spiritually awakening journey which asked me to affirm my true self and courageously embrace my faith in myself and on the Higher Self and Divine energies which have been guiding and protecting me from falling back into the traps of numbed feelings and unresolved emotions and fantasizing my way to make-believe reality in my head which involved my consciousness, imagination, time, and energy on that. 

My reality is still a distraction away from facing myself and sitting down with what my goals are and how can I work towards them and that distraction I assume comes in the form of tv, mobile, content surfing, making grocery lists and buying home essentials from time to time, and putting my focus also on getting stuff which my mother needs from time to time. It's like as much time and space I have staying away from my true intentions and work towards manifesting them, then that much I can just forget or neglect to concentrate on myself which is and which has been my way of living -  as if my feelings, frustrations, expectations, highs and lows don't matter - they do and when they have been repressed so much by further staying distracted in day dreaming and fantasizing it's like I've deprived a part of myself which is as true as the other random parts which all come together to make me who I am. 

My mental health needed support but it lacked the voice to ask for help and am happy I have found my voice in reaching out and expressing what truly I am going through not just from a physical perspective but also mentally as well. 

Maybe this is self love - Learning to connect with your own voice and expressing yourself through the passing situations and what I experience through it all in my own ways is key to unlocking this stuck, stagnant part in me which I have begun accessing.

When you learn to love yourself in thousand different ways and more and honor it with a well deserved space in your life, then you have understood self respect and the many beautiful ways to be grateful to yourself for being blessed with this opportunity to know yourself more and more. No one can provide that space and no one needs to approve of this space for yourself in your life. You are enough to do so.

Crab in the well

 My mother in law is a hard to please and high on expectations to want to be pleased person. She is like on this constant roller coaster where her emotions run high and become the reason she gets on a high and swings all her worries to the air no matter how self centered she might become in the process. She feels this deep unlovable her over and over and wants others to love, care for, and nurture her back to being loved almost every single day. She is the most cantankerous inner child that she can be at best projecting her feelings, fears, hearsays, sadness, anger, tantrums, stubbornness and more assuming the world at large would just have all the time to carry it all with maturity and grace that she never wants to learn to embody anyway.

Loving an insecure person is hard. And that she knows deep down is the reason why she doesn't seem to draw the right people who can make her feel good enough about who she is  -  she is not prepared to receive the honesty in people's feedback and would rather shy away in her well of hopes of being liked, cherished, respected and keep wanting others to reflect on her projections staying in the well and give her what she needs. It's like people see her all over being in the darkness of the well trying to silently scream loud enough for people to hear but they are too lost in their own voices and only respond to their judgements on her rather than who she truly wants people to look into -  she has become the ripples in the well in trying to make noise for people to pay attention to her and has lost her own unique flow. She has cut herself off discovering who she could have been had she chosen to venture out of the well but instead sought comfort in the darkness of the well and not feeling inspired in the true light of her actions once she totally and fully decides to come out of it.

She is crabby at best and can only know what feels best for her -  the deep dark waters of the well or the sun scorched sands of a life outside. She needs to seek her shell and take a pause on how far she wants to venture out and discover life outside of her choppy emotions, insecurities, comparisons with others, and a slow burn toxicity which has made living in her space more and more restrictive and instead of coming half way to meet herself and her true aspirations, she has chosen to rest in her past glories and pursuits and interwoven them with the duties of her present and chosen to stay away from staying att peace with her present.

There's no treasure trove in the past life diggings for her but sadly she relates doing that to fetching value for herself and proving how right she is in doing so and lost track of her reality in major chunks of time here and there. It's like she can tire people out by being who she is but feels hurt when others suggest ways to sort of undo that -  she can't be a blessing onto others just because she has survived many a trauma in the past and assumes she has done a favor by being in our presence or in our lives. 

The race to outrun one's true desires and feel low and lost when others don't fuel her enough is an exhausting job for herself as well as those who try to look out for her. She has chosen to lock her potential and has not worked on earning the grace that time brings into one's life and hers is no exception. 

To age gracefully doesn't fit her crown and as much as she expects others carve it out and place it with all the love and respect that she thinks she needs, her genuine love and respect for herself is so lacking that no jewel can fill this chest or head.

I have tried liking her and I do in some aspects but it's still an effort honestly to respect her for who she is and I have just accepted this fact for making peace with myself. Age is just a number and things only add up when efforts are taken and channelized from time to time, and if she has given up on that as she seems to have evidently and wants to rest on her past laurels, then she is technically living but not willing to respond to many other challenges, and trust me she has seen a lot harder ones in her earlier life and should have found enough will and confidence by now to take on the rest which are nothing in front of her past problems.

But instead she has become bitter, cynical, manipulative, vengeful, and that doesn't add anything to her overall life resume which could have been truly wow had she learnt to move past her past traumas. She has allowed that to define her potential which is far greater than any financially limiting situations, challenging relationships, physical sustenance testing phase and so on. Her greatness does not lie in speaking at great length of the miseries that she wore until they worsened, but changing into a fresh new attire with some new sets of attitudes without waiting for someone or the other to make  it tailormade for her. 

Let old hurts be just that. You can't keep wanting to fix them so that they would somehow give you the healing you need. There's no bigger remedy than peace and wanting to be ready to release the wounds out and just allowing oneself to look at life from a new perspective could be life changing and she didn't seem to want to choose that - to let go her past would mean to forgive people, to accept her own lack of awareness, to come face to face with the fact that not everyone is going to like us or accept her, and that she is the protagonist of her life and choosing to play the role of a wannabe role model without tons of drama would have been some sort of do over, at least from my point of view.

A crab that wants to stay in the well and is sadly stuck in the well for she is so caught up in the slippery moss of her own unresolved feelings that she has not found her grip to get her teeth to hang on to life by reminding herself that 'let all things go to hell and I am just off making my way out of this well' would be more of the nurturing that she might need. 

Realizing Lord Muruga...

 Lord Ganesha, the beautiful and generosity personified God who has earth as his belly it seems and unshakeable roots to want to hold on to - something high and above us as his presence holds strong ground and reassures us that our faith in him be as unswerving and organic to learn to accept, confront, and come out stronger through our given lives with him by our side.

Invoking Him is a clarion call to hear our prayers out as he raises his elephant faced trunk in blessing to take on life ahead no matter what obstacles come our way.

Lord Subramanya, the divine sibling of Lord Ganesha is the beauty, grace, and compassion of a thousand beaming peacocks. It's a breathtakingly beautiful sight to behold as Lord Muruga (Lord Subramanya has several adorning names which never do him enough credit but each has a divine calling to the discerning souls) with his mighty, shining Vel stands tall and ready to pierce through the darkness of hearts dried off love, courage, and wisdom.

He is the fountain of jet springs of hope bursting from an aching heart that has been in waiting to be touched, blessed, and protected from being abandoned and is the essence of true love that heals all wounds from within and out. He breezes through his mercurial speed slicing through the blue and grey blanket of a fuzzy sky and enchants us onlookers as carpets of rainbows welcome Him to new beginnings and fair endings.

The new beginnings lets us know that there's still time ahead to love him truly and deeply and no matter how broken our connections within us, but a thread of honest surrender goes a long way in sewing ties back to the evergreen divine canvas of enchanting Lord Muruga.

Everything and everyone has a space in his lifelike spread of his presence as he gently guides us while wearing the universe like a glove.

When he casts his eyes on you, listens to your deepest sighs and cries, and is present with you as you rise to meet the demands of the day, it feels like all the pain and heaviness was worth it because he makes you feel held, feel loved and understood when no one else would, he alone is enough for you to live life fearlessly and to the fullest and choose the peaceful feeling that this reassuring energy brings that it's going to be okay now. It's in so many here and nows that he waits for you to pour your heart out and comes in as a gentle breeze to dry your eyes as gratitude, love and so many unspoken but difficult to express yet raw emotions find their way through the walls of your heart to his.

It's bliss to discover that your heart cannot hold the amount of love for him as much as it wants to and just wants to hold on to his feet as a way to balance yourself …it's a journey of many miles to go ahead and with Muruga by your side, it's rest assured that you will not be alone moving on.

 

Hardened bubble bursts

 I have never created a schedule, a personal flow f activities of sorts which could be applied on an everyday basis. It's an abstract concept, this schedule thing and since my individual willpower to work towards that was broken for long, I am on the building it from scratch without superimposing acquired knowledge from outside to strengthen my willpower.

My choice to stand on the sidelines and see life happen for others has been so deeply etched that I feel drained out just thinking for how long I have been doing this to myself but did not know then due to self neglect and wanting to stay in invisibility mode, but know now that the vitality needed for living a life as fully and wholly as possible is a choice, a decision, which stems from the roots of strengthening individual willpower as much as possible.

It's not a life well lived if I don't risk it -  risk the losses, mistakes, learnings, finding ways to trust myself and picking myself up to move on as part of the process of living and living it all inclusive of the consequences of risking to want to genuinely explore myself. Sometimes it could come at the cost of unsettling others or being misunderstood. But unless I go full way into getting my feet wet, I will keep looking back the footsteps that I could have chosen to walk maybe in some other way in order to have avoided mistakes, in order to be error free, in order to just be an unreal, analytical concept of self who is stuck in overthinking and stagnation and is tentative on taking the plunge all the way through the ups and downs.

It felt like my health, my body was some sort of mistake back in my childhood days and the best way I thought to move on from that feeling was to neglect that but it kept coming back to me in the form of my mother's fears and insecurities which she knowingly or unknowingly rubbed it on my face and there was a major hit to my ego over and over and I assumed just going with the flow as I am responsible for making her feel frustrated over my health and sensitivity and hence lived in stagnation and just wanting to escape feeling miserable and guilty but in vain.

A dent to one's ego is not how one lacks strength in perceiving oneself but how one is made to feel and when one starts to believe that to be his/her truth. 

"Too sensitive, weak, " and so on was something I grew up listening to over and over and at one point stopped fighting with it from within and just started to imagine, fantasize a stronger, assertive, and bold person which was some sort of go to but I ended up getting sucked more and more into this make believe world which was a pleasant or a different space to be in and which didn't require me to directly get in touch with myself, my core feelings, and I eventually ended up losing vitality or that spark to live an authentic, real life which is just which it is and not what I project it to be.

There were tonnes of layers of stubbornness, fatigue, sadness, anxiety, suppressed anger, ruminations that I had picked up as a result of trying to sustain a fantasizing life and started to get irritated or thrown off balance when reality with its own challenges kept calling in some form or some situation or the other where I had no choice but to be present to it.

I read self motivation books, poems, short stories, anything feel good just to want to stay stuck in this hardened bubble. But nothing hurts more than the truth that the more I look back and grieve over missed opportunities, not being understood enough, not working with more focus on building myself through my core willpower and just compulsively was perseverant in order to tolerate my sensitivities, pains, and sufferings, which just made me want to stay numb and stay disconnected from who I am, the more I realize that life is about learning from this second chance at living through awareness and that such knots and blocks are ways to arrive at awareness.

This pain of realization is better than having lived fully under some conditioned fog and these tears of truth is just a beginning to lift them up layer after layer.

Because what I put myself into, I need to get them out as well. And quite simply, we can't escape from our karmas and as much as time catches up with us leading us towards our end, karma too is not done until it does what it intends for us. To choose to work for one's higher good and for that of the environment that one lives in and the society/community that one is part of facilitates for the template to work on our karma but when done without holding onto expectations too much and within the time given to us to make it happen is all that matters.

Personal ego

 I didn't realize for the longest time that personal ego was such a main ingredient in one's making good decisions and my lack of vitality which I used to feel in almost every aspect of my life was due to a poor personal ego. I was too afraid to be my own person but tried to acquire skills, studied some courses and tried keeping myself busy with something or the other, but this numbness which felt like sadness didn't go away. It felt as if I kept shooting arrows in the dark and was forever lost in a space that made coming home to myself harder, specially as I didn't know how far I had moved away from myself.

I played the group person part very well because it was there that I had to be the listener the most as I got used to being one and that became one of my hiding spots of sorts as the real me can remain in a shell and just go along with the flow of people's opinions, discussions, and not that anyone cared to know my opinions truly but I didn't take efforts to put forth what I genuinely felt but just sided one person or the other or gave a neutral response which was layered with diplomatic niceness. I never confronted either. On second thoughts, it never struck me that my mind, my ego was something that actually mattered, and just repressed it almost naturally as if it didn't strike me to have a voice of my own. I yearned to have my very own individuality but was not having enough back bone to back it up and expected that I would be supported by my parents but I was viewed as a sensitive, weak person, and the more that I avoided talking my heart out with anyone in the family, the more denser, crowded, and noisy my inner world became.

It increasingly felt like I did not have a say on my life and lost a sense of joy and adventure in exploring my life. It became more and more wired to shoulds, should nots, ideals, other peoples approvals and so on. I deserted myself for the longest time in search of finding the true me. What's right within me is my right to feel connected and inspired being myself and that has been work in progress for few years now. This is not to prove anything to anyone, but just find closure to my stifled voice and bring myself to say that life is really short and the more time I had wasted in being someone else's idea of good enough was never truly enough to be my very own person. And so, stop trying to fit into shoes that don't fit and wear your legs out with your own decided journey to live, laugh, let go, respond, forgive, and most importantly love - love yourself fully to be able to acknowledge or respect the other for whoever they are. 

No amount of knowledge, no amount of learning will make you prepare better for life because they mostly don't. It's what you learn hands on when you make mistakes which is what makes you true to your life and not how insulated and error free you encase your life and be so afraid to fail which is what makes the moving on harder, the drawing the lessons more painful and letting go the mistakes of oneself or the others a ruminative drill in one's head.

Now I get the reason why I took to proofreading, transcriptions editing as some sort of personal mission was because I could get to fix errors and completely sacrifice my time at that and pack the content in some sort of encased, formatted, client friendly document, and each such attempt was a means to bring my broken self together but only for so long. Because not wanting to be wrong, not wanting to make mistakes, and wanting to be accepted was something that I had taught myself from childhood and it robbed my authentic and natural sense of freely expressing myself no matter what. And when that didn't feel possible on a personal level since my personal ego was almost invisible, I tried hard to latch on to something that would/could make me feel like I belong somewhere, like learning some courses, working on some skills, and so on but just remained to live in some sort of void within me as I was not strong willed to make my individuality happen and gave in to the flow or the situations around.

Personal ego makes you who you are and to feel like you are worth it from within is a personal decision to acknowledge your mistakes, to accept yourself, and to stay connected with your essence.

  

 

Don't neglect your Soul purpose

 Emotional neglect to a child in a middle class family is like wolf in sheep's clothing -  the material things are provided and in exchange for making the child feel "comfortable" enough to sustain neglect from parents as a day to day conditioning and thus making them believe that that would be enough to support the child and it would not probably incur any complaints from the child.

The child grows to believe that it deserves the neglect for the way he/she is being if the child does not satisfy the parents expectations whether it is through health, academic grades, extracurricular skills, survival skills, smart personality and so on.

It's like the parents simply don't acknowledge their lack of awareness and just want to manifest their expectations through the child or children. The child is expected to grow by itself, emotionally and mentally, and no support whatsoever is given meanwhile to understand the child's adapting to neglect, and the survival skills if any of the child is to brave it through all the emotional neglect and live in some sort of inner frozenness and lack of trusting and opening up and expressing of what he/she truly needs from the parent(s).

This is why the priority for self care for the grown up person who has gone through severe emotional neglect feels almost alien and overwhelming. 

To uncover such thick layers of parental indifference as in my case was quite painful. I am raised by a single parent and was also part of a joint family consisting of my mother and her elder brothers and their families. It seemed like the elders at our house were so full of themselves and their silly egos and wife controlling habits and simply disrespectful of one's boundaries, whether it is of a child or a grownup, their all pervasive control (specially the uncles) was worthy of numbing myself and shutting myself down to avoid any sense of interaction with them unless it was absolutely necessary.

Joint family broke the image of "my family and my people" for me over the years as it was simply a bunch of broken and temperamental people who needed help and who were of no help, no guidance to us youngsters back then. A lot of projection though from the elders as they liked to believe that they were unique since they all chose to be (mindlessly) together and simply liked the appreciation from friends and their families for still being in a joint family and this was almost 4 decades ago when joint family concept started to crumble more and more.

Emotional neglect is a real pain; it's not imaginary and it's totally true to one's difficulties in coping up with lack of attention and acceptance for who one is from the environment where the child is raised. It's not just parents who raise the child to an extent, but it's neglect that ironically the child learns to grow up to fall back on and gets used to being neglected. 

Self care is not just putting back the care and attention in the self all over again but learning to do so with kindness and patience as a soul/sole purpose of living. It's as much about discovering your inner wounds that were born out of your parents neglect of you and also learning step by step to reparent yourself each and every day as much as it's possible.

Your inner wounds when truly empathized with makes you feel seen, makes you feel whole, and no better person than you to look within yourself. Just choose to be there for yourself over and over as if your entire life depends on it. It truly does matter no matter how late this inner journey might start for you. 

Remember that you are alive to feel your life, so don't hide under the "comfort" or shell of self neglect.