How to survive when no one has ever fought for you

It took me a very long time to stop apologising and feeling ashamed of my own sensitivity, but there are some of us who are highly sensitive people struggling with deeply felt pain that others seem to be able to shrug off and move on and, in doing so, move beyond.

For those of us who are constantly told, "You’re too sensitive", when others cannot relate, it is their level of being a 'feeling being' that you are trying so hard to become, even though you know that you will never be able to “be” that way or “like that”. Somehow you long for just someone to see.

If you truly understand or feel honestly that nobody fought for you, and that left you perpetually on the outside looking longingly in, then these words are for you.

When your sense of 'brokenness' never leaves you, and often becomes the radar for predatory people who love these vulnerability ghosts who live on inside of you, who then reel you in, and then take you apart piece by piece for their own gain until you cannot even begin to trace the trail of who you once were.

This mark of never being cared enough about or fought for can be a powerful core wound, and it may colour all you become, all you do, who you choose, who chooses you, and also your own felt inner identity. 

It can be hidden by faux strength and faux resilience that is surface and external, but as soon as you are behind your own door, or your head hits your own pillow, or you face the day walking in your own shoes – it is there behind your smile, your designer clothes or whatever facade you may be hiding behind, your true colours spilling out into every vein in your body.

It takes you down.

So let us, together, be honest.

If we let this become host to our innate self-belief, then it is self-betrayal, and none of us can be there for anyone if we cannot be there for ourselves.

Mending the sense of 'brokenness' 

Here we have to think of this internal frost that stays and lives on somehow to freeze our own hearts,  and we must turf this cuckoo out of our own emotional nest, where definitions invented by others and years of silence and shame have left us little choice but to shrink to be loved.

No.

Where we begin to shine

We start with an empty space cleared of others' rules and condemnations and our own “mend and make do” where we have let its adopted calumny win our days.

Imagine in your mind’s eye how you can empty a room where you have hardly been able to move or take a breath that wasn’t haunted. Where all the choices were made out of fear, and out of the fundamental need to survive alone, where there is nothing or, at best, very little that is your own truth.

Empty this and feel the space to free your spirit. Piece by piece, visualise this room emptied.

Allow yourself to sit in this newly emptied emotional space and meet yourself in all the disappointment, in all the loss, in all the shame, in all of the “I must not be good enough”. In all the " I will be alone forever, in all the “when” of Psalm 13.

You are actually a child of God, and He did not either mean or want this for you.

Now, I am not going to get all religious on you because I am a Christian; this isn’t about religion, it is about love and worth. 

The love and worth that you so deeply want and need, whether it comes from the Son of God for you or the universe, or the trees that are green in the summer months or shed their golden leaves in the autumn. Or even in whatever your own disbelief is, somewhere inside you want to belong and be loved, loved enough to be fought for.

It is here in this emptied space where you can begin, please, to fight for yourself, because you are so worth it. Because it has been far too long.

Sometimes it is from within our own felt brokenness that we can allow our honesty to say something gentle to ourselves that we have been longing so long for another to say because we are seen.

In childhood, we want to survive, so we have to depend on our parents or others in their place of care to protect us; if they are just surviving themselves and struggling, then we are not mirrored or focused on enough. Sometimes this is inevitable because of their own circumstances, or through deliberate fault; either way, the wound it can create is the same because we cannot, as children, filter this experience through rationale or executive functioning because we simply do not have it when we are children, so we assume we are not enough if we are not seen, heard, known or understood.

So we fit in, we hide, we shrink, we fix, we look after (or look out for) those who can't, or don't, do this for us. And we may carry this into adulthood with us.

The corrupt belief

At this stage, whoever committed the 'original sin', so to speak, likely either couldn’t help it because they were wounded themselves, may never understand or may not be willing to face the effect it had on you. So your blame can just keep you tied to all of this pain.

Here we have ourselves, and we can leave the lies behind.

We can embrace our own sensitive hearts and listen to our own truths.

We can pause; we can change our ways with what is felt as genuinely best for ourselves, without the guilt and shame.

We can learn that those who are for us do not have to be convinced to care, or to love and value us.

We can examine our relationships that are not two-way, where we feel small and invisible, or where we are constantly compared to things that are not lauded by us, because they feel inconceivable. We can explore and discover our own values alongside our own allowed value and its system.

It is time to live in the light of our own truth, not in the shadows of an everlasting not enough.

The how

I have personally found that this begins with quite a lot of less is more.

• give less away 
• stop oversharing 
• observe 
• learn to see patterns
• be less available
• reflect 
• take walks of awe
• find a therapist you feel gets you
• buy yourself flowers
• cook lovely food 

There are many things you can discover about your own heart 

In the space, you can begin to discover the things that truly matter to you, and piece by piece, your internal landscape can become a gentler place to dwell when you choose what belongs and stays with you. This is because it will only be there because it is your choice, not biased by fear.

This is sovereignty, and it is a very, very beautiful thing.