We only know warmth through cold, he does not say, but well could have, and in the event, did.
The pain of feeling emotional coldness, of feeling unfelt, of feeling radically alone, abandoned, unwanted, is, I feel, the true root of all human evil.
This feeling is sickening. It makes you dizzy, like trying to imagine infinity. It is something normal people will—and do, every day, in every city and every village and everywhere in between—pay nearly any price to avoid, to keep hidden.
To be sure, in healthy cultures and healthy homes, this feeling is absent. People get, more or less, what they need. They get, to use the au courant phrase, “good enough” mothering.
And it IS mothering. Fathers and grandmothers, and grandfathers, can be “mothers”. But this energy is paradigmatically maternal. There is no humane reason to pretend otherwise.
As I’m sure I’ve shared, one of my daughters—my mini-me as we took to calling her—once told me “you look like my daddy but you are really my mommy”.
I’ve thought about all this, and come to the conclusion that I instinctively gave my children everything I lacked emotionally in my own childhood.
I gave but did not take. This is the firewall.
But it left me feeling cold, alone. It was a necessary sacrificial process that was e traorinarily difficult. I only had them on weekends for much of their childhoods, which was best, because it gave me time to recover, and to remain emotionally present most of the time they were with me.
Lao Tzu speaks of “darkness within darkness: the gateway to all mystery.”
I will speak of coldness within coldness: the gateway to love.
Until you can feel where you are, see and feel the water in which you swim and breathe, it will define you, condition you, limit you.
I feel the cold in me, which can only mean I am continuing to thaw.
I do t know where I get my pain tolerance (my “unnatural” pain tolerance as one therapist put it), but it is what allows me to continue my work, and for that I am grateful.