It is the deepest loss of home...this migration from one's core. Like refugees fleeing a war zone in which their land has been pillaged and razed, the enemy has pillaged our home, leaving a searing pain that has forced our evacuation. Though milder sexual abuse, and abandonment that carries some compensatory behaviors by the parent may lessen the severity of pain, it still damages our command center with messages about us that are too painful to feel because they are messages we believe. They feel lethal to the rest of us -our peripheral - so we leave the place where they reside and move to the suburb of our soul; simultaneously hating that part of us and yet longing for it.
This interior rejection, or abandonment, creates an aching loneliness that cannot be assauged until healing occurs. But healing cannot occur without a journey home to embrace that quarantined sector that has carried the shame. This is why externalizing the shame is essential to our healing. We will not - we cannot - return to our disowned core as long as it is a toxic landfill. This interior swamp must be drained and the alligators - the lethal messages - must be removed before we can embrace that part of ourselves we have both feared and loathed.
This, then, is the journey for our healing...finding our way back home. It will take us through fear and pain; it will demand courage and grace. As with all journeys, there are the unexpected twists and turns, but healing calls us to the adventure and the journey ever calls us home.