The recent stormy weather here with heavy rain and damaging winds is not unlike my relationship with my mother. I’m clumsy and angry inside this storm. Some days I feel I am rejecting my mother and being a bad daughter. Some days I feel shame for baring my fangs at the woman who professes love for me. However, for the first time in my life I am saying no to a role I should never have taken on.  I am saying no to my mother’s co-dependency. I am saying yes to my own feelings, however uncomfortable they are. Some people fight addiction. I am fighting co-dependant enmeshment from my mother.

As I cope with this co-dependancy it reminds me of my professional work with people who experience disordered eating. It seems that many eat either to defend themselves from this kind of energy or they restrict so energy can’t be allowed in.  Keeping emotions and other energies moving through the body opens the base chakra and is an antidote to food issues and addiction. It is extremely important to our energy, power and freedom. This is the basis for my own healing, also.

As a child experiencing sexual abuse, I couldn’t change my outer circumstances or manage my emotions, so I repressed them. I sat in the pain of the abuse (including the projected pain of my parents) and couldn’t figure out a way to balance all that energy or reconcile it in my energy system – until now.

My desire is to find peace and express kindness towards my mother, but I will also no longer deny my anger or the truth of my childhood.   What happened when my fangs were taken off as child? What happened when I couldn’t run big feelings through my system at the time they were present? What shut me off from my anger?

There are no simple answers to these questions. However, in order to develop emotional maturity I am releasing big emotions now as I feel them – through kundalini yoga, EFT, ‘safe’ hitting (my yoga cushion is getting a workout) and writing letters that are never sent.  My aim is to accept and release the rage in order to fully open to the truth of who I am.  I do the same for other big emotions. I am finally letting the buried emotions from childhood flow.  I am also expressing my thoughts and feelings in a way I have never been willing to before:  directly to my mother and without expectation. I am learning to set strong emotional and self-care boundaries with her.

My fangs are out. I can acknowledge my mother and then take care of myself. I believe it is the best chance we have for not just loving one another, but for actually liking one another. It is like walking against a straight line wind some days, yet I have hope a new sort of relationship may grow, just as there is new growth after a storm.

The post also appeared in the June 2017 Edition of Sibyl Magazine: For the Spirit and Soul of Women