April 12, 2008

The "Primal" Wound ~ "Here I Lay"

Baby in Crib

                                  © Photographer: Qwasyx | Agency: Dreamstime.com
 
 
"Here I Lay"
 

Alone in the nursery I lay
Cries ring out like radar
Searching, searching, searching

In circles around my bed they reach
Striving to find the woman I know
Her breath, her hair, her touch
No where.

Alone in the nursery I lay
The ceiling so far away
Arms flinging, hoping to find
Nothing but emptiness I feel

Where is she? Why isn't she here?
I am lost and alone. I cannot feel.
The cries stop. There is no use
She is long gone

She or me? I do not know
Here I lay in the nursery alone.
 
by Peach


(Below is an excellent explanation an adoptee author/therapist gave regarding the "Primal Wound") ~

"What you describe is the narcissistic wound. Before the age of 5
children tend to regard all events as being caused by them or happening
because of them. So when we are taken from our birth mothers we think it's
our fault.
This is an irrational belief but because it's traumatic and overwhelms the child's ability to cope it becomes hard wired into the brain. A child's brain is sensitve to events because of the hormones and explosion of brain cells primed to react to an
event. The more powerfull the event the stronger the brain reacts to it.

Now let me insert a theory by Silvan Tomkins; memories are not linear
they are organized in accordance with the amount of affect(feeling)created by
the event. That means memories dont fade with time when they are part of
an intense emotional event like separation. That memory will be as
strong 50 years later as it is the moment it happened.

In our case this affective event manifests as the primal wound and it
doesn't go away on its own. It creates a sense of social isolation, feeling lost,
dissconnectedness, loneliness in the presence of others, emptiness, and
the big affect that you are experiencing shame. We believe that since we
are responsible for our own mother's experience of relinquishment that we are not
worthy, hence the shame. Its a perfectly normal reaction. It is created
and recorded in our minds before we can think and then when we grow up
and can think logically, we ask "what is this I feel and why do I feel it?"
--

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for writing this Peach.

It really helped me understand "why."

- Mei-Ling

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