Yet, the complicated inner turmoil I felt around breaking away combined with the family crisis to postpone that process. Until we came "home" again, I’d been able to stash any thoughts of separating somewhere off in the farthest reaches of my mind.

When we came home to California, we had a very difficult re-entry. We were planning to live in my old bed-sitter van in a friend’s driveway. Hoping to give ourselves some room to decompress from the move, the drive through blizzards and the stress we’d been through in Indiana. Hoping for a few quiet weeks at our friend’s before beginning the search for more permanent living arrangements. That clearly wasn’t to be. With two cats, extraordinarily heavy rains, unexpected leaks, incredible mud and our friend’s life having pretty much fallen apart just before we’d actually arrived, things were rather impossible

We tried a week to week arrangement at a motel with a hot plate and our ice chest. In the continuing monsoon rains, this turned out to be another depressingly gloomy and very disconnected situation. Having no real "nest" and no comfortable separate spaces added to our stress and dislocation. These endlessly challenging physical circumstances served repeatedly to underscore the enormous differences in values, preferences, coping and interpersonal styles that were so much a part of our endless struggles with each other.

I wanted so desperately to be able to throw in the towel, to say I was done with it all, to end the desolation of our painful integration. I’d more and more often come almost to being able to speak for this. Then I’d be overtaken by overwhelming fear. Gut-wrenching terror would constrict my breathing, blur my thinking, leave me panicky and utterly undone with confusion. I’d hover at the brink of speaking only to bolt backward into the miredness.

I hated myself with such intensity for being so unable to do something for myself. I felt so humiliated by my self-betrayals as we decided to move forward together. Finding a place to rent. Buying "stuff" to replace what we’d left behind in Indiana. Beginning again to make a home for ourselves. All the while being subject to a ferocious, devastating, relentless litany of self-condemnation from my inner critic (the "Hatchet Lady").

For months, as we did this and as I worked to build yet another psychotherapy practice, I sank more and more deeply into despair and self-blaming. Depression, numberless sleepless nights of obsessional thinking, vicious self-criticism and unremitting self-condemnation.

We’d move between tense, cold silence and long hours of trying to talk and process together about what was happening between us. Yet, I could never even begin to speak the deepest truth of what I was feeling. My needing so desperately to be able to find a way to leave never spoken. I hated how I would distort my experience during those hours of trying to "problem solve" problems that were truly beside the point. I hated myself for feeling so crazed and crazy. And, most of all, I detested myself for so violating my strongest, deepest life commitment–to always speak my truth.

All the self-blaming, the self-hatred and the self-criticism for being unable to find some way to extricate myself from living such a destructive lie-of-a-life only further undermined my already devastated self. I could barely get out of bed each day. I wanted just to die. That seemed the only way I’d ever get free of this tangled, suffocating enmeshment.

Somehow, being ready to die opened a tiny crack of possibility for me. I could finally find the strength to risk leaving physically, even without being able to speak my reasons. The emotional enmeshment continued and actually escalated with much coming together and moving away from each other again. Yet being in my own separate energy field at least some of the time was enormously calming. And, in my desperation, I was actually able to let in the incredibly loving support that some new friends generously and unconditionally offered. It was clearly okay with them for me to be as crazy, confused, obsessed and even as self-destructively addicted to the excruciating relationship as I might be. Their commitment to just staying with me–wherever I might be–without any judgment was enormously helpful and healing for me.

Their acceptance of my process. Their clear willingness to just let me be wherever I needed to be until I was done being there. Their clear belief that I would indeed somehow, someday actually be done being there. Their capacity to stay out of trying to "fix" me. All this began to give me a template for being with my self differently. Slowly I began to talk very differently to myself. I began to be able to hold in a more generous way all of what felt like my craziness: my devastation, my inability to speak my truth, my inability to let go of this destructive emotional enmeshment. To hold all of this without such scathing self-hatred. To remind myself that I was truly doing the best I could in the moment. To give myself permission to be just where I was in my process, even if I hated being where I was being just then.

I began to see that I would be where I was as long as I needed to be there. That despite how convoluted it might all look to my inner critic, it WAS truly a process of trying to heal myself. I could feel how differently it felt inside of me when I could give myself the very permission I’d been helping my clients to give to themselves for years. The permission to let myself be without judging myself for where I might or might not be. I, too, could be allowed–honorably–to be imperfectly stumbling along until I found my way. My friends had given me the "outside voice" of permission that seemed to be essential to helping me create a strong inside voice of permission. This new-inside-of-me voice was what grew into the good-mommy-inside-me.

I slowly became more and more practiced at being more accepting of my so difficult process. I became able to hate how tangled I was feeling without hating myself for feeling so tangled. I felt sad for my poor struggling self. As I could be more caringly accepting of and compassionate toward this struggling self, I could actually be more completely present in my experience. At the same time I also became more able to lovingly witness all of my turmoil.

As I could be more fully both in the experience and in witness to it, I was blessed with glimpses of insight into what my struggle was really about. Glimpses that judging and criticizing myself had kept me from seeing. I began to see and understand some of the complex primal attachments that were keeping me tied addictively to this very undermining relationship.

When we had first begun our connection, we were two seemingly quite empowered figures in our community. Yet, I had been almost magnetically drawn to the broken, damaged, wounded little selves hiding beneath the surface of my partner’s public big-person persona. I’d found myself irresistibly, immediately and incredibly devoted to nurturing these wounded parts of my partner. I’d never had permission to own or to nurture the similarly damaged little selves hidden within my own self. But in this relationship–and unbeknownst to me–those wounded parts of me were able to identify with my partner’s wounded parts. When I’d loved, nurtured and mothered the wounded parts of my partner, those parts of me were able, by identifying with my partner, to have some illusory sense of being fed by me.

Leaving the relationship with my partner would have meant cutting off the minimal vicarious nourishment that was all the sustenance these parts of me were getting in the world. These starving parts of me were terrified that they would die if I left the relationship, if I stopped nurturing my partner. Every time I would take another step toward emotionally separating from the relationship, I would feel terrified of annihilation. Annihilation both of myself and of my partner. THIS was the terror that would, each time, pull me back into the enmeshment.

Giving myself permission to recognize these hungry, wounded parts of my self as really IN ME provided a doorway for healing to begin. With this permission, the starving parts of myself became more visible to me. I could own–without judgment–just how broken I really was beneath the layers of strength from which I’d lived. I could feel as loving and compassionate toward myself as I’d been so able to feel toward my partner.

As I could give myself permission to turn my now well-developed unconditionally loving mothering toward these broken little parts of me, I began to feed the deep hungers within me. And, this began–in earnest–the arduous and ultimately successful process of individuating out of the negative enmeshment.

Always, giving ourselves permission to be just exactly where we are while we’re there allows us to be fully present to these trying, challenging, difficult times. The more fully present we are to these times, the sooner we learn what it is that we need to learn in them. And, the sooner we come to the other side of them. This is true even and especially when where we are is someplace we hate. And, it’s even more especially true when we seem to be staying in that hated, very uncomfortable place for what seems like an excruciatingly long time.

Consider giving yourself permission to be just exactly where you are while you’re there–even when you really wish you didn’t have to be there at all,

P.S. So many of your delicious e-mails send appreciations for the affirmation, support and nourishment you receive from the site. When I answer them, I don’t always remember to let you know that having your own deck of the Rememberings and Celebrations cards is a way to bring this same loving voice into your everyday world, to have it at hand as you need to remind yourself of the "real" truth moment to moment in the crazimakingness of the so-called real world!

© For the Little Ones Inside - All Rights Reserved

The card on this page is part of a set of 64 handcolored bookmark-size cards called the Rememberings and Celebrations deck. They can be used as an oracle, a meditation focus or a "book-in-pieces" to kindle and grow a compassionate, gentle, unconditionally loving, fiercely protective inner-Mother to help you carve safe healing space for your emerging self and for the wounded little ones inside.

If you'd like a deck of your very own to support you in your journey, click here to download Order Form.

Please feel free to e-mail me at rposin@hotmail.com. to share your reflections and responses to any or all of what you find here . I'd really like to hear what touches and nourishes you!