This article was published in inSpirit Magazine 2009 March issue.
My seven year old came to me with an anxious face and said he wanted to have a private conversation. I sat down with him, concerned, as any mother would be, and encouraged him to speak up. My relief was slowly transforming into a mild jealousy as he was telling me about a peculiar feeling in his tummy. He described it as a fizzy feeling and he immediately connected it with the fact that the next day was their class excursion to Sydney Aquarium and he has been really looking forward to the event for weeks. He proceeded to also explain to me with his common sense seven year old logic that he had felt this feeling before and every time there is something highly anticipated is involved.
I reminisced as he was coming up with an endless list of examples of events that had caused him to have the same sensations. When was the last time I had felt something even remotely similar? While searching the deep cavities of my memories I realised it has been so long I don’t even remember. How I envied him for a moment to have that sensation, to have that anticipation: the feeling of having something to look forward to like a countdown to something extraordinary ... a class excursion to Sydney Aquarium. Is my life being so mundane that through the everydays there is nothing that is worth that emotion or have I simply forgotten how to feel it? It is almost as if I am being transfixed on my day to day tasks so intensely that I had lost the ability to recognise the amazing and remarkable that surrounds me. Sure, I get excited when I can get something on special that I wanted for a long time, or when one of my kids comes home with an award from school. I am however talking about that blood pressure raising, breath quickening, almost giddying sensation, that barely balances on the verge of being sick ... the fizzy feeling of great anticipation.
Tracing back through time I am going back further and further into the past, looking for that last buzz, that final event that I recall had given me this very human sensation. I suddenly realise that I have gone back so far, that my memory is becoming fuzzy, not due to old age, but to the fact that my awareness of the world at that age was very basic and almost exclusively limited to playing, sleeping and eating, not necessarily in this priority order. I now have an acute awareness of the impact the lack of this emotion currently has on my life. Do I have to go back and find my inner child to somehow recover this part of me, or would be better off putting my effort into rediscovering only the feeling itself through self-healing? Doesn’t matter which way I look at it, it needs to be a process of self-discovery and healing.
I recognise the fact that I need to find the reason why I had lost the ability to feel excitement and the first step is to acknowledge the events that slowly and gradually lead to that. It is now obvious to me that I need to go back to my child-self and start the healing process there. For some it may be a difficult idea to grasp, but for many it has clinically proven to be an important tool on the road of self-healing. Going back to my child-self and help healing my then “self” by being able to see certain events from an adult’s perspective, the traumas that were inflicted at the time that I understood and viewed with the eyes of a child will get new meaning. This not only applies to the loss of the ability to feel excitement, but to the whole range of human emotions. The sense of self-preservation I think is behind this phenomenon. When you face with one disappointment after another or any other kind of negative response to being emotionally expressive may in time bring out a sort of reflex reaction that I feel I am now grappling with. To allow myself to feel anticipation I make myself vulnerable to the possibility of being let down. In a child’s mind that is often associated with the sense of not being able to control one’s environment, the people in it or any outcome, which only makes the disappointment feel even deeper.
In my case this is a learned behaviour: don’t anticipate much, this way if anything goes awry, I will not feel as let down as I would have otherwise. What I did not realise at the time was that my self-preservation reflex developed into a total disinterest and distrust in my environment, including the people in it.
How much I’m longing now to have that feeling back: the ability, the freedom to express what I feel without the fear of being ridiculed or reprimanded. I envy my children for fleeting moments that they are free to do what I wasn’t, then I give thanks for the opportunity I am now able to give them due to the recognition in myself. Maybe my healing process is through them.
As cliché as it sounds I have made two New Year resolutions. One of them is for another article, but the second one is about healing my child-self. I want to go back and embrace again that wide-eyed innocence that children possess before they are “enlightened” to the harshness of the “real world”: where everything is simple, logical and uncomplicated. I want to give myself a fizzy tummy!
