Today I am in that strangest of liminal spaces. As someone who is drawn to astrology and have experienced how liminal life becomes with all kinds of strange feelings and reactions floating around when I find myself in the middle of a an ‘eclipse season’ I know there this something powerful going on. Add to this that in the midst of two eclipses – the first a lunar eclipse at 15 Leo and Aquarius that took place on the 7th August and the second a solar eclipse that takes place around the 22nd at 29 Leo we are also in the start of a Mercury retrograde period, a time when energy can feel held in, drawn back, repressed, confused or mixed up then there is a powerful feeling for me of being strung between two worlds – that of the soul consciousness where so much is fluid and not as it seems and the world of waking reality which is full of energies and influences from others just outside of our own conscious control that we, most especially those of us who have suffered emotional abandonment, struggle with.
I struggled to control a situation yesterday in response to painful feelings evoked when I hoped to be able to spend time helping my Mum, but at a deeper level that impulse to help was not totally honest, in that I also wanted to have time away from those connections that at times hurt me or put a bind on my soul when my soul most wants to be free just to live my individual life, outside of a family that I never much felt myself to be a part of. And I have to face a painful truth and ask myself how honest I really am when I try to be the ‘good daughter’ also in some strange way trying to make up for failures that were not mine in the first place. I have been trying to fill this mother void in some curious way for much of my adult life. Initially it was the illness and trauma of my sister who was like a surrogate mother that drew me back into what my ex partner used to called ‘the family vortex.’ Then it was the illness of my other sister and my Mum’s various health challenges on the back of a botched up knee replacement.
I kept being there even when really it would have been in my best interests to pull back. I did it out of love though and to deny that impulse for love would be to cut of my true dependent self off at the knees. I found myself crying after watching the movie Burnt on Sunday, the day I experienced old abandonment wounds retriggered. In it Bradley Cooper plays a world class chef, a high level narcissist who is newly sober and looking to restart his career after epic failures following a descent into addiction. He isn’t a likeable character as he is hell bent on covering over his deepest wound – a lack of trust due to deep abandonment as a child, but in the course of the movie, yet another ‘failure’ forces him to face it. The movie triggered me a lot because last week in therapy what came up is my own anti-dependency and the fact I have always had to ‘pull myself up by my own bootstraps’ due to there never being anyone available at critical times of despair and need. Its very much a continuation of my mother’s story. I got to be the stoic ‘strong’ one who was always there, but had no one there when she felt weak or vulnerable and so at times I just push, push, push myself with a remorselessness I would never show to others in my life.
In therapy yesterday I said to Katina how horrific it is that I blame myself all the time for other’s very real failures to be there for me. I blame myself and devalue myself and last week I ordered the book The Devalued Self from Elaine Aron’s website for those of us who are highly sensitive and never given help to affirm that self do tend to devalue ourselves, comparing ourselves with others less sensitive and feeling we should not be or feel as we do. It is also an issue that James Masterson addresses in his wonderful book The Search for the Real Self. He explains that those who end up with borderline conditions have only a devalued self. They begin to learn very early on in their life to disidentify from their strengths, competencies and talents because when they try to assert the real self they are shamed for it. It may threaten the parent with their own weakness or difficulties. The parent tries, often successfully to shut that part of the child down the child comes to feel ‘bad; just for being angry, or sad or happy or full of energy happiness, creativity, assertiveness or joy. All that stuff gets stuffed back inside where it becomes bad and then has to burst out surreptitiously or not at all. Its a critically painful dilemma to be trapped inside with the true self devalued or negated.
There is so much more I want to find out and write about but at the moment that is enough for me to be digesting and going on with. I want to share more from Masterton’s book most especially about the subject of abandonment depression. I have written about it in several other blogs and its something Pete Walker addresses in his book on Complex PTSD. For those of us healing from narcissistic or borderline conditions both of which involve loss of the real self, we must face the abandonment depression at a critical stage of our healing because it is only by facing it and knowing the feelings it contains, what Masterson calls the Six Horsemen of the Psychic Apocalypse that we heal. Its painful emotional territory but we must cross it. And we may feel on the way through that we ‘lose our mind’ because the secrets trapped in our soul overflood it and destroy it on some level. More than that I cannot articulate clearly today. Its Mercury retrograde liminal space and Virgo deals with the complex relationships between mind/psyche/body and feeling. That is all I know and not even every clearly as I struggle to articulate emotional truths after a day yesterday when I tried to do it with my Mum and felt her holding up a defensive hand to say ‘No’ your feelings are not okay. I must struggle hard to own them though. They are my true feelings I have a right to them. No one else has the right to deny them. Its a breeding ground for insanity.
Emerging From The Dark Night 