Reframing : coming back up into the light

Thank God for my afternoon therapy session today.. there were so many tears I needed to cry for the young woman who found herself at 3 am in the casualty department of the hospital after driving herself with stomach pains because her boyfriend would not wake up, waiting and waiting alone in the dark to find out what was wrong… It occurred to me today as I was crying with Kat as witness for my 28 year old self that it’s the emotional pain and grief that we cannot grieve that really keeps us trapped in the Underworld.. It’s the pain we don’t register in our body or bring up and out of us that keeps us trapped in depression or repetitive cycles of pushing away the imperfect love that tries to find us all along the way.. that said if someone loves you they will try to understand why you are reacting the way you are and in the case of alcoholics in and out of recovery, there will be a reason that may be hidden in the past.

Today with Kat I got to understand again why inheritance stuff is such a trigger for me.. Mum could not give any of us kids emotional holding, as she never got it herself, so she tried her very best to give us the material things, but in the end they are poor substitutes for what we really need.. When I had to have that termination of pregnancy in 1990 it was my God parents that stepped in to help me.. I never went back to the share house I lived in, instead I moved back in with them and then Mum gave me help to buy a place to live, but as usual it was all on her terms and it occurred to me today that what I really needed at that time was to be with my Mum, just as I needed that in 1985 in that year after Dad died and my partner rang to say he didn’t want me to meet him in India and did not love me.. I also needed her in 2005 after Jonathan left me, but the family pattern was instead to go away and have to cope alone and bury all the emotions..

You see, I think by their very nature emotions most need us to share them.. our pain needs validation for it to become real. As a child what we feel doesn’t truly become real until someone mirrors it for us, and so, if we have faulty mirrors or one way mirrors or opaque mirrors that affects our emotional development and capacity to experience, relate to and articulate those emotions. In my childhood all I saw was control and anger I never saw grief, although as a youngster when Poppa died I know the family was in grief as there was Gary and Judy who had him in their lives for the first 17 and 18 years and my sister Sue who had him for 9 years.. For me I never got to know my Poppa at all except as a ghost and in the case of Dad’s father we never met and his Mum, Oma only came for a brief holiday when I was a baby…anyway I have digressed.

I noticed this afternoon I am back in the happy place, full of life and joy because in my session with Kat I was finally able to witness my inner self’s pain and feel the full brunt of what I had to carry all of those years ago and this pain lives in my body and is always triggered with the first approach of winter (even though its actually late spring here now).. When I feel release and shed these feelings in relationship I come back into the light and gain back a piece of myself that was lost or trapped so far below.

Today, I was able to feel the longing for my mother’s holding which she could not give in a bodily way, only through the distance of money today and I also was able to find another kind of forgiveness today… Most of all I feel the need to forgive my parents for not being perfect, for being disconnected, for often not being able to give me what they never got and I need to show appreciation for the fact my two remaining siblings do try in their (at times emotionally disconnected way) to be there in practical ways, something my AA friend helped me to see yesterday after I rang him in a state of meltdown. And maybe as the youngest, born in the 1960s its up to me to carry the light, even if at times it comes through having to bear witness to the dark side that is so often hidden or glossed over.

I can only say this is a dark time for some.. I just read a comment from someone undergoing something very dark too.. I was actually on a long call with my nephew as when I reach these places of understanding its only natural to want to reach out to others who are alone and suffering too… I can only say that today being able to cry for my younger self birthed a lot of forgiveness. Things may be dark but never as dark as when I don’t find someway to find forgiveness in my heart for it all.. its all evolutionary really… who is to blame? At least we can try to understand the depths of it.. at least we can be real for and to each other. Its only when I stay trapped in fear of how I feel, hatred or blame that the Underworld claims me. Then when I am triggered I act out the pain of being overwhelmed or feeling unseen or unheard, but the deepest pain is really the past pain, the pain I haven’t allowed myself to feel and make sense of, the pain that is only being triggered by someone else.. the pain that asks for a witness and help with the holding.