Fear of Losing my Child – Self-Forgiveness (Part 1)

This post is a continuation to the post ‘The thought of Losing My Child’. After sharing my experience during the time Syntia had tick-bite fever, I received awesome support from several moms, including Leila’s post ‘The Death of a Child, the Death of Me’. After taking everything in and introspecting on my experiences more, I moved myself to write self-forgiveness as an act of taking self-responsibility, deepening my understanding of what happened, and releasing myself from past conditioning.

Self-Forgiveness is powerful when spoken out loud, so I invite you to read this post (or the statements you relate to) out loud – and of course feel free to add your own statements based on your personal experiences!

I decided to post the Self-Forgiveness in two parts because it can be a bit much to process. This part revolves mainly on my experience when my daughter was ill – part two goes further in taking on the fear of losing my child in general.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that I have no strength, no trust and no stability when seeing my daughter be sick with high fever, refusing to eat, throwing up, diarrhea and especially in seeing how she is not her usual self, no smiles, no desire to play, crawl or walk, no spark in her eyes, which I interpreted as ‘she is fading’.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to react to my own thought/interpretation of ‘she is fading’ with fear, panic, helplessness and hopelessness – taking this thought as truth and a valid assessment of how my daughter is doing, and from within this emotional state seeing everything through a lens of pessimism, doom and dread.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to see how and the extent to which I accepted and allowed one thought to change who and how I was in relation to my daughter being sick, from the way I experienced myself, to the way I saw her, the illness, the symptoms as well as my capacity and ability to support her through it.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to speed up within myself, looking at each symptom and taking each of them to the extreme/worst possible outcome in my imagination and then holding the thought and image in my mind of my daughter on the brink of death – to then equally experience myself as though this was what was actually happening, and thinking I needed to somehow prepare myself for the possibility of losing her – completely catapulting myself out of the present moment and into an imaginary simulation in my mind – when in reality, we simply hadn’t identified what would be a good support for her, evidenced in how her demeanor immediately changed once we had.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to see, realize and understand that my daughter will not always be the same/her optimal healthy self, and that just as I had to learn to recognize and read the cues of her body when she is going through teething or growing pains, I need to learn about how her body does and changes when she is for instance ill, so that I can in turn be the best support for her and assist in nursing her back to health.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to trust my mind’s ability to predict the future, and at the thought and sight of what my mind presented as the possibility of my daughter dying, accept and allow myself to completely collapse inside myself, and lose myself in an experience of hopelessness, helplessness, loss, desperation and defeat – not realizing that my mind will present me with an outcome computed by my own knowledge, information, fears, desires, beliefs, ideas and opinions that I have programmed it with, and so common sensically, to realize that if I don’t have the knowledge, expertise and experience to predict or assess how well my daughter is doing and how she will progress, then neither does my mind.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to react to my experience of feeling like I have no footing, no reference, nothing to stand on, nothing to hold onto with fear and despair, believing that the only thing I can then do is collapse inside myself – instead of stopping, slowing down and asking myself what it is I am reaching for, trying to find or hold on to within me that is not there, to so understand what it is I need to develop within me so that I can create a platform of self-support and self-reference in moments when my daughter is ill.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to fear working with homeopathy alone because I don’t know or understand exactly how it works, nor have enough experience of using homeopathy or working with homeopathy in children.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to realize that I always had this fear in relation to homeopathy, but had masked it through thinking that I can always go to the doctor and get antibiotics for me, my partner or my daughter if the homeopathy alone is not effective.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to within that, mask my fear of homeopathy and simply tried to sway my worries, instead of supporting myself to see what it is I fear about using homeopathy and taking the steps needed to be able to trust myself in using it.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to realize the extent to which I have relied on medication and antibiotics to ‘take care of illness for me’ – within that accepting and allowing myself to stand in complete separation with my own body, the medication and the illness, placing myself outside of the equation and thinking/believing that I have no part in the healing process other than to medicate myself.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to investigate and learn about what illness is, what viruses and bacteria do in the body, how illness manifests, and in what ways mainstream medicines or homeopathy interact with our bodies and the illness.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to ‘abandon’ my body in times of illness and disease by adopting the attitude of ‘you deal with it’, and not doing my part in any way to find out what support my body requires and would be the best fit for my body, but rely solely on what doctors prescribe and further take no responsibility for the healing process.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to have abdicated all responsibility for my body’s health to outside authorities as doctors using today’s mainstream medicine, within the idea/belief that if they need years to study to become a doctor then there is no way that I am able to support myself when it comes to illness and disease, not taking into account all the centuries in which people relied solely on natural remedies to support themselves and their bodies, where people had a far better understanding of the properties of plants, and the effects of food and the environment on our bodies – and so I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to give up before having even tried/started.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to participate in fear, worry, panic and despair when realizing my daughter only had homeopathy to work with and that there was nothing I could directly DO to influence her healing process in the sense that she and her body are alone in that, and I have no magical powers to make the illness go away.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to realize that I do have an ability to support my daughter within this by living as her example, showing how me, my body and natural or mainstream medicine WORK TOGETHER through illness and disease – but because I haven’t done that up to this point and haven’t lived this myself, my daughter hasn’t been able to learn from me.

I forgive myself for not accepting and allowing myself to have developed my relationship and communication with my body sufficiently that I am confident in working with my body day in and day out, whether in times of health or illness, and so to create that platform of self-support that is lacking within me, that will empower me to not only remain calm and confident when I am sick, but also when my daughter is.

To be continued…