Over the past couple of years I have been doing a deep dive into understanding many of the things that I found to be traumatic and painful in my life.  A lot of it was centred around my mother and she, very firmly got the blame for almost all my woes in life.  It’s a generational thing.  She did the same thing with her mother and my daughter has done the same thing to me. 

What I have discovered with my delving into Who I Am Without My Wounds, is an understanding that is both deep and profound.  I have come to understand my mother’s wounds and also the things that she, so silently, battled with.  I have come to understand these things because I too have fought those same battles as, I believe, has my daughter. 

The understanding started when I was diagnosed as autistic along with several other neuro-divergent traits.  I started to recognise these traits within myself and I was faced with a choice.  Do I continue to hide these things, to deny them, or do I face them and acknowledge that my brain works in a different way to most other people.  I chose the latter path. 

That was probably not the easiest path to choose and it has involved my learning to let go of the high-functioning mask that I have shown to the world for my entire life.  It has involved giving myself permission to stim, learning that fear is the only emotion I fully understand and can recognise.  It is accepting that I am incredibly literal in my thoughts and speech and that sometimes that can result in my saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.  It can also make me very compliant when dominated.  I’ll do anything if it means that I won’t have the focus on me, that I won’t have to carry guilt even when I have nothing to feel guilty about.

What I have come to understand is that all the mental health issues that I have faced, my mother also faced.  In her time, such things were unknown and women were frequently overpowered and belittled by the men in their lives.  My mother was powerless.  Her mother had cruelly dominated her, and she didn’t have the knowledge of how to find her own strength and hold her own.  When I was born, I became her victim just as much as she had been the victim of her life.  My extreme compliancy, her domination and my autistic tendencies resulted in me being ‘programmed’ to always tell her – or someone else – every single thing that I do.  Literally.

And this training still holds tight to me even though she has passed and I am now 69 years old.

This is the final stranglehold I have on myself.  The Act of Telling now shows in just two main arenas.  One is on social media and the other is talking to my spiritual teacher and friend Essence Ka tha’ras.  On social media I find myself writing responses to questions posed that I I really have no connection with.  It is the well-programmed urge to explain everything that my mother had demanded of me.  This one is easier to manage now.  I allow myself to write those responses every now and then, and then I delete instead of posting.  This blog is also an aspect of this Act of Telling that is so strong in me.  Essence has listened to me over-explaining and over-sharing for almost a decade and I know I have tested her patience, for which I am very grateful.  She has definitely helped me immensely over the past years, but as she is known to sometimes state that she needs to learn more patience, maybe there is a reason I am in her life too! 

There is a third method regarding my programming in the Act of Telling.  I journal.  This is where I can without any guilt, really vomit out everything that my childhood programming urges me to share.  I am Telling, but only I am listening.

This intense need to explain myself in the Act of Telling is, I believe, one of the final aspects of my finding peace within myself.  I have come to understand the how and the why of the dominance my mother held over me.  I have come to understand the struggles she had and the mental anguish she carried as an undiagnosed autistic woman of her era, dominated by the men in her life and by her mother. 

I have come to understand through my own journey that programming in childhood can lead to immense difficulties in adulthood.  It can be so very hard to break such programming and for me the journey started with gaining understanding of why I was programmed in such a way.  When understanding can be found, my next stage was to accept that my mother acted out of the programming that she received and from which she had never found her way out.  With acceptance, forgiveness is finally possible and it is only in forgiveness – that is, not only in me forgiving my mother, but in me forgiving myself for the actions and thoughts I held about my mother, that it is possible to move forward towards Inner Peace.