And after the flood : a clearing opens up

 

I only slept four hours last night. I know that I had two huge days over the weekend.  I was feeling the depths of so many things and connecting the dots on so many more.   I had contact with an old friend with whom I had had a very traumatic experience just over 5 years ago.  I was hesitant to mention any of it in my blog, my friend knows I write a blog but guards her privacy.  In the heat of our difficulties she was upset with me that I had posted a comment on an astrology site about what happened between us back in 2010.  I was only trying to find some clarity in what was a deeply confusing situation in which so much was undifferentiated for me.  We had made a visit to a monastery in the country which she loved but I felt to be steeped in pain. From the moment we arrived there I could not stop crying and I was not the first person to respond in this way.  I know now, knowing the history of what took place there that my feelings had a reason based back in time and also as a resonance for our own emotional abandonment issues.  My friend responded to me in the way my mother would. With a sharp look and the words ‘what’s wrong’.   I saw red.  I left the room and I went into the chapel and screamed.  I did not have the words to express my frustration and anguish in any other way at the time.  I see my part.  But after we got back home my friend said some really nasty things to me and accused me of being off the recovery programme.  It really hurt, I sought clarity with a very talented therapist at the time in order to try and make sense of what was happening.

I think all of this came to a head on Saturday as we had contact.  My friend kindly made a very sincere apology to me and told me she thought she had been cruel to me.  I had brushed it off which is something I should not do. When things hurt me and are wrong even if its just emotional ignorance on the part of someone else I really do need to say how it hurt.  Apparently this is one of the major lessons for someone with a Leo North Node and South Node in Aquarius.  I also know with all the air in my chart square to deep feeling watery Neptune in Scorpio my intellect often runs all over my feelings.  I intellectualise instead of feeling.  Its not that I don’t feel but my capacity to articulate what I feel has in the past been very poor due to the fact my true feelings were not mirrored or contained in childhood, most especially neediness, self assertion, frustration and anger.  My response is my issue and I cannot really blame my friend for just triggering something deep for me.  At the same time as an empathic person who is also very sensitive to energies and environments I know I do pick up on things and those things may mirror some issues for me.  At the time I lacked certain awareness and emotional skills which   I would have now.  And there was a failure on her part to empathise.

In my home growing up my Mum expressed all the anger and frustration, while my father either ignored it or laughed it off, this included injuries and pain which we were told we were not feeling or had not happened.  It was a crazy making, emotionally confusing and invalidated environment that gave me absolutely no help in dealing with and understanding my feelings.  On the top of emotional neglect, being left alone a lot and other losses it contributed to me burying all my pain and need and feeling in addiction for 14 years.  Even in recovery lately I have recognised that I use milky food and sweets to swallow down my feelings and as a substitute for the emotional nurturing and nourishment I hunger for.

Last night I dreamed I was giving birth to a baby, but I did not have a name for her (she was a girl) and I did not feel I had the capacity to care for her.  This reflects that even now I don’t always know how to protect, care for and nourish the young self in me that is being born within and trying to mature and it speaks to the central issue that I had with my friend, neither of us had words for feelings and this was expressed in the conversation on Saturday.

I also recognised this morning when I woke after only four hours sleep that much of the feeling that poured out of me with Mum yesterday was about my emotional neglect, as well as that me carrying feelings of sadness around this time of year that have gone underground in our family and never been spoken about or shared.   I become the syphon or the sponge that soaks up all the feeling and then expresses it but in a very intense way that others cannot understand.  But I am slowly finding ways to articulate my feelings with loved ones.  It is the work of ongoing emotional sobriety.  I carry a lot of damage with in me that exists as tender, raw wounds.  I need to recognise these and apply my own salve, I can recognise when salt is being poured on my wounds now and take steps to step away, but lately, luckily that is happening less and less as I recover deep and complex emotions.

With the split in me between heart and head often my feelings just become bodily pain.  I was in extreme agony bodily all weekend.  It only abated yesterday after contacting my therapist and expressing real pain over not being able to have an extra session which I felt I needed today, her diary was too full.  I expressed the pain as knives all through me and she responded with a call which soothed me right away.  I know I was angry with her but she is so consistent with me and loving that anger could not last.  For today I could not get what I needed from her but I will survive and be able to carry it over to another day.

Today by a weird act of weather synchronicity I awoke to a deck made soft and shiny by rain.  We have been having 30 C degree days here over the weekend and the rain was a welcome relief.  I could not help but feel that on some level the weather was mirroring what occurred for me yesterday during and after the inner flood of grief.  Today the sun is out again metaphorically, or at least I am bathed in a soft light as awareness has come through the bearing with the pain of the dark days over the weekend and in reality as I type this at 7 am there is a soft grey sky outside my window.

I feel the approach of Christmas stealing in with its ghosts, shadows, pains, memories and echoes but I also feel a real sense of hope.  I have a sense in my family that some kind of communication is going to open up.  It may not come to pass but for me I will be in a far better position this year to have insight into my feelings and better placed to take care of myself in the midst of them.  I need to learn how to care properly for the child in me that is being born.   I need to be the loving disciplined adult that child needs to grow.  Sadly its only happening for me at age 54 but hopefully there are still years left, years in which to love, to learn, to reach out, to grow, years in which insight and growing emotional awareness and capacity to express and contain my feelings can evolve and lead me onto the next stage in my journey.  I want to grow and mature more deeply so I can be a real force for love and healing in my world and make the years that are left productive, healthy happy ones that allow a place for all emotions but in a balanced healthy way which has the power to connect and deepen intimacy between me and others rather than sever precious relationships.