Burnt

Another post I wrote but struggled to finish and publish last weekend, I know it contains a lot of my own trauma projections but writing it helps me to make sense of these.

I have felt literally scalded raw over the past few days.   I keep thinking Pluto energy must be strong and I am aware too that over in the Southern Hemisphere as we inch by slow increments towards the shortest day that I am familiar with this slow dive into past pain remembering it always becomes so acute as we move towards the month of June which is the anniversary of several deeply painful past traumas including the accident that caused the head injury that has affected me for 12 years since 2005.

After a really tough day yesterday in which was also tied to a late night and so much old trauma coming up I was committed to see the Sydney Dance Company with a friend.  The first part was magnificent but the second was so violent emotionally that I had to walk out.  The sounds in the discordant music were deafening and the sense of fear, threat and menace both in the choreography and the dancing as well as on the faces of the dancers I realised later stirred up old memories of deep dark nights in my addictive life where others and I were zoned out on drugs and alcohol.

After 20 minutes feeling both deeply uncomfortable and also pinned to the spot, I simply had to get out of the theatre about 20 minutes before the second part of the performance concluded and when I did my heart was punching so hard in my chest I felt I was having a heart attack.  I was obviously in a flash back at that time, I now realise and having a panic attack.  It was a feat of courage that made me stay in the foyer and wait for my friend to come out of the theatre because all I wanted to do was run and all I could think of was how I longed to be home with Jasper cuddling his soft fur and looking deep in his eyes of doggy innocence.

Today I was aware to an even greater degree of how open this healing journey has made me.  And I do feel that much of our modern society and art is very violent in nature and comes from the fact of past generations having numbed themselves to certain atrocities.  I know when I write this others wont agree and they will not perceive things this way, but I can only say what my emotional body feels and knows.  I feel it when I am in the range of hardness and something in me snaps shut or closes over and wants to withdraw into foetal position.

I was thankful yesterday that my therapist who has been away at a conference was able to call me to connect.  I really needed to share what happened on Friday night with her and she immediately understood.  I was crying so much and really wished the call did not have to end, that to me is evidence of how much I needed from emotionally absent parents who were NEVER THERE fully and also of how much of my own and other’s trauma I absorbed in the years 1979 – 1985 and tried to numb out with my addiction.

The performance last night reminded me of being surrounded by strangers at dance parties where in the late years of the 1980’s I was using ecstasy a lot and of the terrible feeling of coming off of that drug with the trauma history of deep emotional abandonment I carried.    I was in those years like a lost child looking everywhere for connection but not really knowing how to connect and come to think of it in the dance sequence of the second half on Saturday night, that was what was being portrayed.

It seems that all I found in those years was coldness, hardness and numbing all around me.  I really don’t know how I bore the deep spiritual void as I look back, it truly was like living in a kind of hell.

I am sure that all of that cold menacing threat was exactly what they were trying to portray last night.  The set design had eight dancers in a glass room staring out, the glass room was alternatively illuminated by a series of different lights.  One by one the dancers would come out of the glass room and do a super intense angry dance of massive athletic proportions before retreating back into the room where later in the set they were set upon by other dancers.  Maybe the choreographer was trying to express his own deep feelings, that is all I can really come up with as I write this.

The important thing to me is that I was able to honour how I felt and leave the theatre when I needed to, though the inner critic was forcing me to stay so as not to cause any disturbance,  the only disturbance was people having to get up from their seats to let me through, not a major problem so why was the critic giving me such a hard time?

I wrote this post a week ago and now I am a week out.  I am not sure that it is interesting enough to others to post.  In it I was trying to express how it felt to go through want I did last week and to come to terms with what was triggered for me.  I know that the past is never fully gone from me.  It lies dormant inside and can be retriggered in the present, by engaging in a sorting process I can work out what is past and what needs to be shed, I can release the charge that I may have held inside over years, my skin and inner being may burn as a consequence, but burnt flesh does heal if the burning isn’t too severe, severe enough to leave scars.  The fire of transformation and trauma is real, this is what I know and last weekend on some deep level I was taken into the fire.