Yesterday I have managed to track back the pain that I feel when relationships don't work out, the one about which my friends tell me that I'm hurting far too much and far too long. And yes each time it's the very same acute pain, I just blame different people for it, but it's the same feeling. So yesterday when it showed up again, I stopped what I was doing and asked myself: what is it? Where's this pain? I managed to locate it in the body. It was a sharp pain, as if a knife was just sticked into my chest (seriously, I'm not making that stuff up). And then I focused just on that bodily pain and asked myself: as a kid, when did I feel this pain?
And boom, I had an image.
Shit, each time such tracking back happens, the situation I recall feels so obvious, so "of course this situation caused it" - and in such moment the challenge is to stay in my adult body as the observer of this past situation rather than regress to it. If I regressed to it, I would not remember it later, also I would not be able to make any observations or to draw any conclusions. I would only bipolarly bounce between the state of vulnerable child and the healthy adult.
Okay, so the conclusions. I remembered me sitting in my room alone feeling this very same pain and thinking "why my dad does not love me?". There was no guilt, no shame, no resentment yet, only surprise - it must have been very early on. Maybe 2-4 years old. I did not actually think "love" as I did not know the meaning of that word, perhaps I would not be able to articulate any of that sentence back then - but when I translate my state in that past situation from the perspective of my adult me, I would verbalize it as "why my dad does not love me?". An honest "why?". A helpless "why?".
And then I remembered a song that would soothe that pain back then. My mother would play an album of a Polish male vocalist to me, and only this one song stuck in my head: "I'll find you,...". I looked this song up yesterday and the man is singing that "someone has just made us up, on that occasion they imagined our love too", and "I'll find you, and I'll start loving you again". Shit, even small children can understand so much!
I remember thinking some time later: "Could this man be my dad instead? At least this one seems to be able to love. How can I find him?". And actually it goes on, next I remembered being around 10 years old and seeing how my dad liked a song about a man that drops everything to drive to meet a woman who writes him a letter that she is scared and needs him, and then it was soo painful to think "okay so he gets the idea, he just doesn't love me".
Yes, I could read up on the Internet how women with daddy issues look for a substitute for the love they didn't get from their dad, but again, reading about something and actually discovering about yourself it is a whole new story. And having that direct access to the past emotions and feelings with the capabilities of the adult brain lets me identify what's going on in the present, it also fosters healing of those wounds. I did a lot of crying yesterday when I realized what the little girl felt.