The Gift of My Woundedness

What is the gift of my woundedness? It has required going into dark places to find that gift.

It is hard to think of myself as wounded. Sure, life happens. Losses mount up. But is there really a wound, or am I just weak and not strong enough to deal with life? I think my deepest wounds are not caused by the obvious. I think the deepest wounds may stem from things that happened when I was very young. My deepest wounds were mostly caused by careless words and attitudes, not overt actions.

For example, when I was three, I talked constantly. I was fascinated by the sound of my own voice. One night, my parents told me to be quiet. I understood it to mean that I shouldn’t talk, and I have been a quiet person ever since.

My maiden name was Barbara Byler, initials being B.B. When I was a teen my dad and brother jokingly said those initials stood for Broad Bottom. I was secretly devastated and my confidence and self-esteem plummeted to rock bottom. Not only was I quiet and shy, in the eyes of the people I loved the most, I was also fat and ugly.

Growing up in my household, children were to be seen, not heard. If we questioned anything, especially my dad, it was considered “sassing.” If we were angry, we couldn’t express it out loud. We had to go to our rooms until we cooled off.

These things added up. I desperately wanted the approval of my father and the male authority figures in my life. I learned to be quiet, polite, and compliant. I learned to never express my true thoughts, although they would pop out when I couldn’t hold them in – mostly at the most inopportune times.  I looked for approval and validation from people who would never give those things to me.

So the dark times in my life were the times that made me realize the extent of those old wounds. Going through an ugly divorce helped me to see that I looked for validation from the men in my life, and that those men were incapable of giving that validation to me. Bottling up anger led to shows of temper and ugly words that couldn’t be called back. Lack of self-esteem led me to wrong choices in men and other authority figures. But through those dark times, I was learning.

In the dark, I began to see that I was a strong and capable woman, that I don’t need validation by men. In the dark, I began to see that expressing my anger constructively was better than exploding. In the dark, I began a journey of transformation that continuously leads me to becoming my true Self. In the dark, I discovered the Goddess of Life and Death, the deep feminine, sacred ground of being. Without that woundedness that drew me into the dark, I could never have imagined that life could be different, that I could grow into the manifestation of the Goddess that is my birthright and my greatest gift.