One of the most negative aspects of trauma, especially attachment trauma or intense violations is that we remain trapped in that place for a very long time, some of us arrested at an earlier phase of development.. It has taken me quite a lot of work in therapy to see where my own developmental arrests lay, and even now I look back at ways I reacted or stayed trapped in situations and see the potential was there to react in another way, but not the possibility due to my own trauma and the deep and painful legacy of attachment trauma.
It is so interesting to wake up and have a memory flood your consciousness to the point that it feels you are quite literally back there. I believe Echardt Tolle even says that the Now contains both past and future. This morning I was taken back to the time just after my ex husband and I met when he first came to visit me in Sydney.. We met on a weekend when he was visiting from the South Coast where he was working on a landscaping site with a friend. He then decided to come back to visit me two weeks later. I vividly remembered this morning going down the long escalator leading to the station platform to greet his train..
This was such a pivotal time in many ways and I do feel for my ex husband lately as I see that meeting him before I got sober and had done any emotional recovery work was hard on him. He went through a lot with me getting sober a few months after we married. I also went through a lot moving back to the UK with him in 1999. There were a host of family issues, especially between he and his mother and his family didn’t like the fact I was sober, they thought I was dampening down their son or brother’s ‘fun.’ It never bothered me that Jonathan drank, he didn’t have a problem with alcohol and I was happy for him to see his mates and go out for a few drinks, but I guess the rub came when my emotions began to emerge of grief for my Dad and so many other things, as Jonathan also lost his father around the same age as me, he was also left by a partner shortly after and traveled overseas but luckily made friends with a young family there and they gave him some support.. For me it was my God parents who tried to support me when I returned from overseas and was a bit of a mess really, having not dealt with anything and still drinking at that stage. (1987 – 1993).
I look back now and accept the way things unfolded. We do not always grow together when we choose to get married.. I aborted a pregnancy at one year sober and that hurt my husband.. I feared passing down wounds to a child or having a child who ended up with parents who separated.. I also knew I had so much inner work to do, even at that early stage of sobriety.
Jonathan and I had our two years of freedom overseas from 1999 to 2001, then the trauma with my older sister brought me home but i could not face living in my home town so I stayed away at the coast then went back to the UK to do 6 months of therapy leaving him all alone.. he then went back for a holiday in 2004 and rang me to say he had decided to leave me.. He wasnt planning on coming back but there was so much to sort. I remember just after this phone call I had a mouse in the house and had to trap it, sadly I killed it and buried it in the rose garden but this is exactly the same thing that happened just after my father died in 1985. I remember crying over the mouse as the deepest pit of anxiety opened up over being left again. This was the opening into the most consciously painful time of my life which reached from 2004 until 2017.
I am so glad all of that pain is in the past now. I am getting to be comfortable on my own lately. I have even given up on the idea of Scott and I meeting, he is still determined its going to happen but I have been at the end of help for some time now… and my feelings have changed in terms of seeking that strong solid masculine outside of me.. I see now that he came to help me sort out a lot of unresolved boundary stuff and emotional wounds. This was even shown with his strong Uranian ‘signature’ – Sun Mars and Venus conjunct Uranus in the late degrees of Libra sextile my natal first house Uranus in Leo as I underwent the Uranus square to natal Mars Saturn Moon. It was on another square to these planets that my husband went overseas in 1999. My therapist told me a while back that even if I had to give a lot of money to learn the lessons with Scott it would be money well spent. Scott is still swearing my money will be returned when he finally gets free and can verify his own account that got frozen early in 2018. Its all out of my hand at this point.. The only life I am interested in saving right now is my own. I am at the end of an old pattern and my toxic guilt is vaporising.
I draw my comfort a lot from silence lately. I am loving solitude.. Jazzie and I just got back from a gorgeous Peace Park walk. I saw the family of swans with 4 baby cygnets and they are fluffy and growing a little more each day.. The swam so close to us and I fed them some grass. We then walked on and watched a couple doing some Tai Chi moves… then went and got our morning coffee which we had sitting by the river back in another park. I the came home to do my wriitng. I am loving this routine I am establishing and in many ways over the past weeks of Mars moving forward again I am feeling free.
My life feels enough even with all the past pain and loss, those endings were not the end of everything, although when we go through the dark path of loss it can feel as though everything is taken. However, along with Thomas Moore I believe the dark night of the soul also is a profound time of gestation as well where husks are breaking open as need seeds are released even if we cannot see them. And the amount of psychological and deep spiritual work that can open up with retrogression may take many years to bear fruit.
I was thinking a lot of Carl Jung in the park today.. When he had a similar transit of Neptune to his Sun Neptune square (which I also had from early 2000 onward) he had a long time of breakdown too. He retreated and began to connect with his inner child as well as work with stone and other substances to build, as well as having so many powerful dreams that were pivotal to the development of so many of his ideas about the personal conscious and collective unconscious.. He also had to have conflict with and break from Freud whose ideas were so different to his own during that time and it seemed to send him a little ‘mad’.. into what medical intuitive and spiritual teacher Caroline Myss calls spiritual madness..
I was drawn to Jung during my early 20s and I can understand why now. One thing he said is that before the age of 40 we are only doing research. The later years in life he saw as a time of meaning making.. echoing the thoughts of the romantic poet Keats who saw this world as a place of soul making, Keats died very young but I love the idea of the soul journey and its power and it is an individual journey for so many of us. For mine, ancestral connections have played a huge part where as for others they may not even figure..
Kat talks to me a lot about breaking out of a family ‘capsule’, We are not all psychologically born by 30 years of age, for many of us it takes far longer.. Kat says of my sister she has not yet managed to break out of the old family system and its roles… I now know it was perfectly natural to have felt such of a ‘misfit’, not only in my family, but amongst my peers.. I was still being shamed by old school friends in 2013 when I first got back home for only being ‘half alive’ and full of anger.. Then one of them apologised recognising she had never had half of the trauma I endured.. I have been on the receiving end of this kind of thing so often now.. But I won’t let it take me down any more. I know who I am and what I have endured, it truly may have broken a weaker person, and my gifts are inner gifts, I am still working out how to unpack some of them. I will continue to fight the shaming and stimatising of so called ‘mental illness’ which I actually see as an individuation struggle as well as a form of spiritual emergence, a term coined a while back by Stansilav and Christina Groff. We are emerging out of old systems and that requires a kind of breaking down, apart and open… It also involves the embracing of transpersonal forces while learning how to ground ever more deeply into our true spirit on earth, embodying it in a real and authentic way.. This is what Mars in Aries is now demanding as it moves ever closer into square with Pluto in Capricorn. Capricorn has to be real and often the mountain goat becomes a scapegoat and has to walk alone or climb a big rocky mountain. Sometimes the price of knowing ourselves involves a profound and shattering break with the collective conditioning that still is functioning in this world to keep so many in a trance. But nature and spiritual emergence are calling and the power of this call cannot be denied in the lives of so many of us.
