Returning from Emotional Exile
From all outward appearances, I’m relatively normal for an American. I work, pay my taxes, drive my car, watch movies, shop, clean, eat and sleep. But residing just under the surface of my normalized affectations, is a hermit, an exile, a part of me I reviled so much I blamed it for all my adolescent failures and cast it out for three and a half decades.
OK, that sounds pretty dramatic. The reality is that I do not have more than one person living inside me. I am who I am, and I can comprehend the intellectual reality of that fact. However, I compartmentalized my inner emotions and drives and personified them as different people. I used to think this was normal, because I didn’t know any other way. Then as I started to go on my path towards emotional healing, I discovered that I was not actually different people fighting for ascendancy. I was surprisingly only one person. It was that moment just like in the movie “Fight Club” where Jack realizes the gun is not in Tyler’s hand but in his own. I personified my anger, my sorrow, my sadness, my comfort mechanisms, and these fought and fought in a cycle of punishment, depression, and self-soothing behaviors. All the while my life was passing by and I never excelled in my relationships, my career, and in my sense of being a person worthy of love and respect. Two marriages and two divorces later with a foreclosure and a custody battle on my hands, I started to think that I might be the one shooting myself in the foot. I started to try to figure things out.
I was under a lot of emotional pressure from within. Every day I woke up feeling miserable, in physical and emotional pain. It took years to untie and unwind the negative forces in my heart and spirit. I went to counseling, a men’s support group and Codependents Anonymous — all these things helped me come to terms with certain realities. Only recently did I really see my compartmentalized personifications and realized how much I cut myself up into virtual pieces.
That’s when I read an article in Full Frontal Psychology called “The Psychology of Exile” by Wray Herbert. He stated that those who face extreme loneliness were more apt to invent companions to keep themselves company — humanize objects and even imaginary supernatural beings as a substitute for “true human connection.” Humans are social creatures, and in situations where we can’t socialize, our minds create virtual communities to interact with.
I realized that in my adolescence, a time of intense loneliness, social isolation and shame, I started beating myself up a lot. I had a hard time reconciling my worthlessness with the need to appear secure in front of my peers so they would accept me. Everything became a lie about who I was. My parents saw that something was happening with me, but they had no idea what to do. They were not horrible people — I mean they provided a middle-class life for me and sent me to private school — but emotionally, they were exceedingly negligent and completely absent. They were so self-involved that they had no concept (and still do not) of how people work and what a human being needs to survive and thrive. This inability to understand people, I believe, boiled down to a fundamental narcissism. So when my behavior started changing, namely when I brought home my first B grade, they reacted negatively, reinforcing my own feelings of inadequacy until I became even more distant, substituting lies for actual communication and retreating from reality to my own isolation. As things became worse, I tried to communicate with them. I even wrote out all my emotional hurt on large poster paper and taped it up in our entry way for my mother to read, but I was horrified when my stepfather was the first one to get home. He was very angry with me and made me take the posters down before she could see them. I never tried that kind of action again.
I gave up a large measure of hope after that. I was not an outwardly rebellious child, but I tended to react passive-aggressively. I developed an active fantasy life, ate more, spent time in my head, but I felt ugly, unwanted, awkward, and shameful, especially with the onset of hormones and sexual release. The latter things just made me want to spend more time away from people, because I felt completely socially unacceptable. It was in this situation that I started personifying my anger, my hunger, my sexual drives, my procrastination — fueled by perfectionism, I blamed myself for my emotional exile. More specifically, I started an internal drama with no resolution. My coping mechanism became a method to deal with the life I had while believing deep down I wasn’t worth anything. Instead of tackling challenges head-on, I procrastinated, felt ashamed, ate, and went into my self-soothing routine. It became a state of near-arrested development. By the time I was in university, I failed three classes and was put on academic probation because I would retreat in the face of challenges. I started taking time off from school and traveled, but this meant it took nine years to finish my BA. This way of coping has been at the expense of a lot of things, but mainly at my less than stellar career in IT, a job I initially took only to pay the bills. In my adolescence, a pattern was set for adulthood, a pattern of drama, frustration, isolation and a stasis which made for a constant source of angst and feelings of inadequacy.
It took decades for me to understand this dynamic, and to find all the strands of interrelation and cause and effect. I found that the way to unearth these connections was to speak about my feelings and emotions to another trusted person. Sometimes this was a friend, or through group therapy or just an individual therapist. I realized I needed a safe harbor to dry dock my ship and fix all the holes and structural issues there were from when I was too young to know what I was doing. This process of externalization was the only way I could evaluate, restate my purpose and try to reset things more favorably for myself.
A breakthrough finally came one day when I was visiting old friends in California, and we were discussing social issues, politics, and religion. I realized that my opinions and outlook were distinctly different from the mainstream, and I could see patterns and interrelations that were not discussed in the media. I suddenly realized with all my problems fitting in, whether they were in education, social interactions, religious beliefs, political outlook or even my country of residence, ultimately these culminated in some personal strengths in being able to observe trends, behaviors and actions and understand the overall meaning and qualities of people and groups regardless of what was stated in the news or from their own mouths. Because I spent so many years outside the “system”, I was not indoctrinated by it. I could think outside the box and be more independent when it came to verbalizing my ideas and opinions.
In the end, I started to heal and let go of some deep seated feelings of misery and frustration. I’m still in the process now, but every day there seems to be a new insight and some kind of progress to accept my fundamental oneness of spirit and mind.
The reality of living in emotional exile is that it is damaging at first, especially when done unwillingly. But ultimately this can be a source of strength if we realize that the damage which happens is only to dismantle our misconceptions and the illusions we cling to. Exile can remove veils and reveal a purpose or path in life. Every shaman, prophet or religious messenger spent time alone with their God to clarify their vision first before they returned to “civilization” to deliver their insights. I need to thank the universe for my exile, to find solace in it and to perhaps deliver a message that it’s not the death-sentence that people perceive it to be.
This is not to say everyone should do it. But to adult-children of narcissists who feel exiled already, there’s a purpose in it. I’m here to say that first, it’s not your fault. And second, it’s the best thing that can happen to you in your path to understanding yourself and the world around you. Exile is the way you’ll come to feel whole again.
