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The day I wrote my post on attachment, +HOW DOES THE SELF GET FORMED? HERE’S A WHOLE LOT OF IMPORTANT INFO, I found myself feeling the foreboding, dread and underlying terror that I then wrote about in a second post that day, +LIVING WITH THE AFTERMATH OF INFANT-CHILDHOOD TRAUMA AND TERROR.

Today, after presenting my post on empathy, +EARLY ATTACHMENT ORIGINS OF EMPATHY, I find myself writing a second post today about the other one of the two major emotions that I chronically feel:  overwhelming sadness.

Often these two emotional states, the foreboding and the sadness coexist together at the same time.  Yet, like the other day when the dread was very noticeable, the sadness seemed to be at bay.  Today my experience is the opposite.  I don’t feel the dread, I feel the sadness.  It is this sadness that I wish to say a few words about right now.

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This sadness seems to fill the entire inside of my body, as if it exists in all of my cells.  I experience it as I might a loud noise, or sound that cannot be ignored, stopped or controlled.  It is overwhelming and pervasive.

After having just written about empathy, and knowing that empathy operates as we consider another person’s circumstances and feelings, not our own, I realize that at this moment it provides me with a little comfort in knowing that there are other severe infant-abuse survivors who were never loved and were chronically abused who probably know exactly what I am talking about – because they also live with the reality of these feelings on an ongoing basis.

There are times when I can be phony and pretend when I am interacting with others that I feel otherwise than they way I do.  Any reprieve I might attain by distracting myself in one way or the other (including learning my piano) is completely temporary.

I do know that during times over the past 9 years that I could look forward to seeing the man I love, and during every moment I was in his presence, these two feelings vanished completely.  This was such an unusual and foreign experience for me because I had never had it before.  Of course, I miss that reprieve – but it, too, was always temporary.

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I have been ‘diagnosed’ with reoccurring major depression, yet knowing that word could be assigned to how I actually feel does not give me comfort.  I continually live and act in spite of this sadness as I would have to do with any other chronic pain.  The pain of this sadness is very real.

I was thinking a few minutes ago about the feeling of being hungry, and about what it might be like to live with that feeling all of the time while nothing I could do could possibly take it away.

I always think that if I can just learn the right piece of information, it would act like a magical key that could unlock the solution that would end my experience of my chronic foreboding-dread and sorrow-sadness.  Mostly I believe it is built into my body-brain in such a way that it is a permanent part of me.  I assure anyone who does NOT experience these chronic states, they are a burden.

I absolutely believe that 18 long years of being despised, abused, hated and maltreated would be enough to engrain these emotions into the cells of anyone’s body.  Had this abuse NOT occurred during my infant-childhood growth and developmental stages, perhaps I could escape these emotions and peel away my experience of them as one can peel dried Elmer’s glue off of the palm of their hand.

I think living with this kind of chronic consequence of severe infant-child abuse requires heroic effort.  It requires courage.  It requires a commitment to those who love us to not find a way to exit the body whose cells retain feeling memories of terror, overwhelming sorrow and trauma.

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