Presence Process week 3

bluh... week three is hard.

I'm totally depressed.

Depression is like a splinter.  

If it's deep you might not see it but you will probably feel it.

Whether you feel it or not, if it is festering, it is going to cause you some problems.

So, in week three I'm having a bunch of unresolved feelings that were buried deep in my mid-brain that are starting to rise to the surface.

Here's the thing...

There are many different kinds of love, the greeks had five different words for love that meant different things.  Then there are love languages, are people loving the right way and blah blah blah.  THe saddest thing is that there are a great number of people out there that are so out of touch with love that they don't even understand what the word means, they say that 'you can't define it', that 'no one can really know what love is.'  There is a real reason why some people don't know anything about love, they have been loved in some sense of the word but never been genuinely loved, truly and unconditionally.

Most of us probably did not get the love that we needed from our parents because people cannot give what they don't have.  Our parents probably did not receive the kind of love that they needed as children, and so on.

I wouldn't say that I had a crappy childhood, but do know that I didn't get what I needed.

I'm not going to judge my folks about it, they just didn't have it to give.  They did the best they could.  But, I think that for my whole life I've been depressed.  Most people from the old neighborhood would probably have described me as a hyper-spaz clown, but those behaviors were just my way of sedating and controlling... boredom... the empty, meaningless monotony of life.  Now, when I was a kid I would have never been able to articulate that.  I wasn't aware of it because I didn't know that there was any other way to be, I couldn't see inside people's heads to know how other people experience emotional health.  

One of the things that I look forward to each day is coming home to see my daughter.  I like just watching her play and walk around and spout irrational statements.  I don't think that I got that from my dad.  My mom told me that he never changed my diaper.  That makes me sad.  

It is hard for me to think about a father not having that kind of expressed affection for their own child.  Ravi Zacharias said that for some people despair is a moment and that for other people despair is a way of life with moments of emotional peace.  I wonder if my father was depressed.  

This morning I had a really hard time.  I was trying to get my girl ready for school and I was just empty.  I had no love to give.  I tagged out with my wife and went out on my deck and drank coffee.  I know that there is depression on my mother's side of the family, but my dad is from west Texas, they don't need shrinks.  

Well, that's about it so far.  I'm grieving unresolved emotions from my childhood.  I'm getting the splinter out and it gets uglier before it gets better.