🔥 LORENA 🔥

Deeply flawed

🏳

My white picket fence rose

I grew up loving dolls—baby dolls, makeup dolls, barbie dolls —but eventually learned to trade them for other forms of play, like video games (like the sims, tomb raider, street fighter, mortal kombat, need for speed), board games, outdoor play etc.

I also tried to co-regulate through my survival mode of pleasing others/fawning, prioritizing their need for relief over my need for healthy nurturing.

Somewhere along the way, I lost a significant part of that deeply nurturing, trusting, gentle and playful side of myself.

This enmeshment made it feel less and less safe to express this part of me.

Yet it never went away completely.

The need of my inner child mode to nurture healthily still needs to be met be met; to care, to soothe, to play, and to create safety.

This is also how my healthy adult mode processes grief—mourning the perfect mother I once imagined I would be by now.

That’s why I’m choosing to recover in the safety of my home, and embody* this caring side step-by-step.

This choice restores the parts of me I thought (due to my toxic parent mode) I was obligated to abandon.

This emptiness might seem distant, performative, and robotic, but fortunately, this defense mechanism is needed less and less.

I get to be more present and can hopefully grow into who I am.

I am nurturing, trusting, gentle, playful and that’s okay.

*I tend to overeat to the point that my stomach swells and I look pregnant. Embodied care might help me reduce this tendency; I’ve also started baking cake only once every two weeks now, instead of every week.