I learned a new word today – Salvation Fantasy. Registered trauma therapist, Kina Wolfenstein (@cptsdtherapist) mentioned this in an Instagram post that I was meant to see today.
Because yesterday, while falling asleep, I fell into a salvation fantasy: I thought of how “cool” it would be if my last ex came back and apologized for being rude to me and ghosting me at a certain point. How nice it would be if he said that he still missed me.
It wasn’t 100 on the desperate scale thanks to all the therapy I have infused into me, but just a whim of wonder like taking one cocktail to get that nice buzz and stopping there. There is a manifestation “game” that Esther and Jerry Hicks recommend in the book Ask and It Is Given called “Wouldn’t it be nice if X happened?” This is what it felt like.
According to Kina, “Salvation fantasy is adaptive – it often serves as a protection against the grief of fully realizing that if you didn’t have loving parents, no one can replicate that experience for you.” Ever. “Even the world’s best friends, partners, or therapists can’t serve the same role that parents are supposed to serve for their children,” she went on in her post.
Is there grief that my childhood was a haze of control? Yes. Is there grief that I didn’t feel like my opinions were respected? Also, yes, but this is quite “normal” in a South Asian upbringing. Many South Asians and Asians in general, whom I meet as clients, friends, and acquaintances, struggle to articulate their needs or even identify them because they (including me) were never listened to.
To be fair to my parents, nevertheless, I still did what I wanted to do in the most important areas: I married my ex-husband, who was from another race and religion. I moved to the US for my MBA.
But, feeling unheard and uncared for emotionally is an older wound than my MBA and my marriage. Psychology would confirm that this wound was most probably formed before I turned seven.
So, there is grief. For a childhood I never had. For not having the perfect parents, not sure if that ever exists, though. For the rising pit of fear of going unheard or misheard when I post on social media, even now.
Due to this grief, there is fantasy. The salvation fantasy, as I learned today.
But the grief is not fully for my ex, maybe partially, but not wholly. This is something we often miss. The root of the grief. Does it belong to the direct subject of the grief, or something or someone else from a long time ago that’s somehow connected to the currently felt grief?
