Question

[Anthology]

a therapist who worked with a ton of clients with severe trauma (for years and years) once told me when I was talking to him about this very thing was that one of the absolute hardest things for people to realize is that what they're looking for is actually within...
I think about this a lot sometimes because i've spent a lot of time wrestling with the looking, not even towards my FOO, but to others in that sort of role, and it seems like to me that part of what makes it so hard for me is that in order to recognize that I can offer that to myself and find ways as an adult to healthily get those needs met requires me to make the distinction between who we are now as an adult who is able to care for herself and has the power to get needs met and who we were as a child who was not able to care for herself and without the power to get needs met, but merely at the mercy of those people who were supposed to be meeting those needs.
Sometimes I run away from this distinction because it's super painful and accepting it means that I can't change the past and that we can't go back and get those needs met in that time and place...in some ways at least for me, that acceptance and that acknowledgement that we didn't get our needs met and that there's no way to go back in time and do that and that there was nothing that we could have done to change that back then is just filled with grief...sometimes, every now and then I can see the benefits of that acceptance...or at least glimpses of it, but it's so very hard to hold onto.
Anna