How to Deal with your Emotions - The Mother and Daughter Relationship

Dear Unique Everyone

Wishing you a Happy, Hippy Summer? Isn’t the weather just gorgeous, then again isn’t the weather wonderful all the time. It just depends upon how we experience it all!! – There I go again I can hear some of you say.

I have had so many people contact me to say when will I be sending out my newsletters on a more regular basis. Apologies, but here I am!!

Many of you may know that I lost my younger sister to breast cancer 4 years ago. That in itself was an incredibly painful journey to watch and to walk alongside of. It was never a place I would want to venture myself. Yet recently, my mother was diagnosed with cancer in her large and small bowel which were both removed on Thursday last week.

Up until now, I have felt greatly challenged by my relationship with my mother. I have been working on me around this for the best part of three years. Up until two years ago, I was not able to sit in a room with my mother on long occasions as my inner child would simply freeze and withdraw and I’d be bound by fear. If my mother looked at me, I was unable to look her fully in the eye as I still felt and saw through my eyes the condemnation and criticism that I had grown up with. Then two years ago, when she came to visit me, I realised I did not want to live my life fearing her anymore and had to do something about how I was dealing with this.

I went for some healing around this and I had to explore many aspects of our relationship, lay my soul bare, and then put me back together - OUCH. Yet what helped to release me and start me on my journey was learning to accept who I was at that moment in time without judgement, without criticism, simply Esther for who she was. My next step then was to accept that my mother did the best that she did with the knowledge that she had at the time when I was a child and I had to acknowledge that. I also had to acknowledge that she too was a product of her childhood – one where she lost both her parents very early in life and where she knew only the burden of working. Coming to this country also had its own tremendous challenges and life became one of survival. My next step was to learn to love me more and then, hopefully, my mother.

I am still at a place where I am mindful and working through this relationship. I do not blame my mother for how she was, yet I reacted to how I felt she was towards me. What has helped me to build a relationship with my mother is Esther working from a place of love. (Not always easy as on occasion I still walk out the room because at that moment in time, I am not ready nor in a place to handle how I feel.) However, having the above understanding means I can respectfully and non-judgementally sit with her, speak with her and be there in whatever supportive capacity I can be, but also that I no longer choose to enrol into her dramas, if she so choose to play them out and I am mindful of my own dramas as well.

Yet isn’t life simply a paradoxical play on the stage of life. On Thursday when my sister and I went to visit her and attended the ward she was supposed to be on, her bed was not there. At once I felt slight panic whelm up within me. We then went to the nurses station to find out what had happened as the day prior to this, her operation had been at 12pm and by 8pm there was still no sign of her. Waiting for the nurse to find out where my mother was, I was suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of “not again” as memories of my late sister started to come through. This also got me thinking – do we really have to wait to come to a place of realising what is important or to deal with ‘stuff’ when someone dies? Because if this is what it was going to take for me to shape up then I had more serious contemplating to do. Yet again, I challenged myself with this line of thought. I too was mindful that I was doing my best in terms of my emotions at this moment in time, and that being truthful and honest with myself may not mean I would be overtly huggy and blowing kisses at my mother – I had to keep things real. Yet I could kiss and greet my mother on the cheek and help to nurture her back to health – and for me that is operating from a place of love.

A beautiful quote by Louise Hay, Author says “Love is everywhere, I am loving and lovable.” The more I repeat this quote is the more I have been able to feel acceptance for what I need to do. This quote has served to resonate so far into me that it brings a sense of peace and calm and knowing that love really is the key.

I still have a journey to go. We may not always like what we are faced with, which is often ourselves, yet when we learn to become non-judgemental about ourselves or situation and just to accept it for what it is, then it is easier to face those so called ‘demons’ in order for us to learn whatever lessons we need to learn, so that we can then embrace life more fully and abundantly.

My lesson here I feel is one of many and that is of compassion, of continuing the work on being non-judgemental and always trying to be present from that place of love.

I have been working with a few clients whose lives have been paralysed by words, deeds and actions, criticisms, put downs by their parents and other people. One client has internalised her experienced so profoundly that her pain is so deep that she even fears to hug her own children for fear she contaminates them. When she looked at me last week with tears in her eyes to say “Esther, I just want to release this stuff so that I can be me, I have never been me” – This is why I do the work I do, why Qarma Broadcast will be one of the many mediums through which I can reach out to share knowledge and to empower peoples lives, along with all those wonderful people who share their stories and knowledge with you over the airwaves.

“If we were more aware of our own shadow, we would not be afraid to look in the mirror”

“Be the change you want to see in the world”

Esther Austin