Running on empty

[Dalloway]

Hello everyone,

I´ve just finished reading a book called Running on empty by Jonice Webb and I wanted to share my experience and maybe start a discussion on a topic that is very important to me and what I struggle the most with.

So the book described emotional neglect in childhood and it´s impact on our behavior later as adults. The topic was not entirely new to me, but it helped me to reinforce the fact that I´m not a weirdo for having odd feelings I can´t explain, I´m not "fatally flawed", as she named it, because everything I feel has a reason. I found myself especially in those parts where she describes that emotionally neglected people often feel empty inside, as if they were just looking at the world and people from the outside, the inability to really feel the emotions, to identify them in themselves and in others.

One of my biggest struggles is finding a clear purpose and a goal in my life that I can follow. I would like to do something, but I don´t know what my calling is and when I look inside for answers, I find nothing but emptiness and silence. That´s why this book resonated with me so much. It opened up a gate that was inside me, that needed to be opened, but didn´t give me clear answers on how to change the things I want to change.

So I wanted to ask you if you have any experience with working with the sense of emptiness. What did you find useful in the process of finding your way out of disconnectedness? Personally, I find it very hard to look for something that isn´t even there, cause the absence of it is the problem in the first place.

Thank you very much for your contribution.

Dalloway

[rainydiary]

Dalloway, I resonate with this topic.  I struggle with this too and am still finding my way.

Something that has helped me somewhat is working with kids.  That was never my plan (but honestly I never had any idea what I was going to do with myself career wise, didn't know how to be an adult) but it has been a good thing for me. 

It is also hard because sometimes I find myself responding in ways to kids that adults responded to me.  My awareness of this now is a good thing because I can take care to either be in a place where I can interact well with kids or repair when I mess up.

I also feel connected when I am with cats, near water, and in forested areas. 

All of that said, I still don't necessarily let myself feel what is inside my body a lot of the time. I spend a lot of time in my thoughts and it is exhausting.

I'm in a place of wanting to move forward in a way that is more meaningful to me and is not just stepping along in ways other people expect of me.  I'm a bit stuck in figuring out how to do that.

[Chart]

I resonate with this topic a lot too. Thanks Dalloway for the subject and book suggestion. At the moment all I really have in my life is my daughter. She's literally what's keeping me alive (and I'm not being dramatic here, it's the gods honest truth). I live a lot in fantasy. I want to move and imagine a new life in a big town where I can more easily meet people and be accepted. As for purpose however, I'm pretty awash. I am committed to giving a lecture/conference at the town hall in February regarding developmental trauma. My objective is to raise awareness in France and "train" for future lectures. I also want to do this as a kind of "explanation" to people as to why I am the way I am (weird). I almost want to apologize... I feel horribly guilty for forgetting peoples' names and faces. I want to explain why this happens.

Beyond that I've no idea what I want to do with the rest of my life. Getting out of constant depression hardly seems like a life goal, though maybe it should be.

Two years ago I had a relationship and a family. All that imploded and I'm starting over from scratch. The only difference is that now I am "informed". I'm hedging my bets. This new awareness of where I'm actually coming from does give me hope. Things are just as hard as ever (even moreso actually) but the difference is that now I feel like I'm really facing the problem square on. This makes me think that perhaps it can actually be resolved to an acceptable degree. I'm not there yet. Treading water does beat drowning. We don't have too many alternatives do we? I've decided to continue. Already that's a kind of purpose. Anyway, that's my take on it...
 

[MountainGirl]

This may sound kind of "empty," but it is what happened in my case. I'm now 68, but when I was young I had nothing inside me - no feeling, no hope, just emptiness. And then I acquired a business. That business work filled me with anxiety, pride, fear, hope - it stirred up a lot of emotions I had thought were dead. I guess I put myself in a risky position - trying to make a business work out -  and that somehow opened up an emotional response. Now , I have emotions, but they are often very uncomfortable and often they confuse me. But that's what a therapist is for I guess. I do know what you mean about the emptiness, and I bet you are  not alone in that experience. Not at all.

[Dalloway]

Rainydiary, Chart, MountainGirl, thank you very much for responding. 

Rainydiary - I feel that connection with children, too. It´s amazing how kids can effortlessly get close to you and make you feel safe and maybe even heal some of your invisible scars. They have the ability to do that and the genuine interest in human beings. Maybe we see that open-hearted, innocent, child-like part in them that we used to be and that´s what makes us feel at ease.

Chart - I can relate to living in the fantasies only too well. I´m doing that 90% of the time, imagining better, more fulfilling lives, in which I´m taking chances and making friends. To fantasize is sometimes the only thing that helps you through the day. I´m glad that you have at least one person in your life who motivates you and I think it´s pretty cool that you´re planning on giving a lecture, even though your motivation to do so is to "explain yourself".

MountainGirl - I´m glad that you started to recognize and feel your emotions you weren´t able to feel before. I think it´s a big step ahead when you start to focus on what´s happening inside and naming your emotions. Of course there are "negative" emotions that we don´t want to feel, too. That was the reason of disconnection in the first place - the unbearably painful feelings. So it´s hard to allow ourselves to feel everything fully.

Just a final note on this: I had a therapy session yesterday and we talked about this topic. My T asked me if I would like to try to feel in my body what´s happening at the moment (we were talking about the pain I felt about my lost childhood). I tried to feel that and I had a very profound experience - I felt pressure in my head, my chest and my throat and suddenly I realized that those were all the painful and suppressed emotions that want/need to be released, but I can´t let it happen yet. So maybe when I´ll be ready to feel those emotions that are buried now and face them, the emptiness and void will fill up with life and maybe I´ll realize that the emptiness is not as empty as I thought. It´s definitely a long way ahead of me.

 

[SenseOrgan]

...One of my biggest struggles is finding a clear purpose and a goal in my life that I can follow. I would like to do something, but I don´t know what my calling is and when I look inside for answers, I find nothing but emptiness and silence.

This one is hard to work with. I wrote a blog entry about this elsewhere and will go through that again and try to distill what I penned down at a later moment. I'd really like to discuss this with you.
I hope you are well at the moment.

Much love

[SenseOrgan]

I'm not sure if you wanted to close the discussion with your "final note on this". If so, I apologize for barging in here. I'm going to hazard it and share my thoughts...

I remember Bessel van der Kolk saying that trauma keeps people from dreaming, from envisioning other possibilities. It makes sense to me that dreaming is something like a luxury for a system stuck in survival mode. Existing in an ongoing unsafe environment at a young age limits the bandwidth in which our development takes place. Survival then becomes who you are to a great degree.

Purpose, meaning, and belonging are interlinked, I think. They are about our identity, our place within the bigger picture, and how this connects us to our environment. Physically, emotionally, spiritually.

Trauma is fundamentally a disconnect. From our authentic self, and from the world around us. I'm inclined to think that purpose, meaning, and belonging are like properties that emerge when we dissolve more of the layers we wear to protect who we are. I think a lot of us had to dissociate our authenticity, and as a result, that which has meaning to us. The more we allow ourself to feel how it really was for us, the more authenticity we reclaim and the greater the connection with what has meaning and purpose for us becomes. This is in line with your experience in therapy, isn't it?


I used to have reasonably clear goals in life. A long story very short; I failed at most of them (which is not a problem). Trauma would not permit me to fly, so to speak. The big dream I did end up realizing taught me this was not the answer to the despair I discovered I had been trying to escape with my drive. A lot of survival energy was mixed in with what I was trying to manifest in the world. A good part of it was a desperate attempt to create purpose and meaning. The underlying existential despair erupted in my awareness and I realized the answer was nowhere to be found outside of me. And inside I had poured in all my effort my whole adult life before that, eventually concluding there was nowhere to get there. Fortunately I did look inward via another route and this changed.

Later I realized that I'd been perceiving "purpose, meaning, and belonging" through the eyes of a very young, desperate child my whole life. The world could never provide what he longed for so much. Nothing ever came close. Everything appeared meaningless. My unprocessed, unfulfilled needs act as a distorting filter between me and reality. I have been through enough of it to conclude that when this changes, everything changes. It's hard to imagine pursuing something more rewarding, meaningful, purposeful than this. Even though it often does not feel like it.

I'm rather aimless without my drive to get stuff done in the world. Without that carrot to run after. It's liberating, yet it's very lonely to be dealing with this internal stuff in isolation and without something that brings me joy. I've been looking for some sort of middle way for quite some years. Thus far, not much luck with that.