I’m feeling so much freer and happier and inwardly connected, lately. Not judging and negating my self as much. Trusting and helping Scott, reaching out to connect and get together with friends, trying with family even when they ignore me..it all feels so good. I had a dinner out with a very close friend last night..She was there when after Dad died. My partner of the time betrayed and abandoned me a second time with another woman in 1985 while we were on the island of Ios in Greece. Sue turned up there as she ran into someone we both knew who told her I was on the island and so she was there on that horrible night I found him in bed with someone else..In fact, Sue and I used to study together before all the trauma of family took me away from that first year of studying teaching at the college of advanced education and then our connection got broken for many years after we traveled overseas in 1985 and 86. It was restored when I came home in 2011 and when other ‘friends’ sidelined me due to PTSD she stayed true.
Her own brother had bi polar and addiction problems but lately he revealed to her he was being bullied remorselessly all through school. He acted out and stayed silent. Suffering from cancer now he has begun to open up to her.. He said to her a few weeks ago he thought family knew and were doing nothing but they were oblivious and he was getting death threats. This just shows how people suffering Complex PTSD from trauma get made to carry the ‘sick” one label. The truth is they suffered in silence and acted out the pain in ways others don’t fully understand. She told me the family tried to use ‘tough love’ on him but I reminded her of oncologist Gabor Mate who works with addicts and shows empathy to their true plight and actually says there is no such thing as tough love for those who underwent painful trauma.
She and her brother talk two times a week now. Like me he has been sober a lot of years and found grace through involvement with the Salvation Army. He never preaches God to others he just showers them with love and lately all the love is being returned by the carers who look out for him as he deals with cancer side effects. It just goes to show how soft so many that suffer addiction and mental illness are and how subject to emotional torment and also others being oblivious. But then, until we can affirm our true self and all we suffered we do not grow either.
I had a big push to get to therapy yesterday it was almost as if the pain in my head was trying to keep me in prison, telling me it was too much to drive there as I had to get out to dinner and get a gift for my friend soon after. I pushed on through and am so glad I did, I also got to have a conversation with someone who has both a sister and husband with bi polar, she encouraged me to make sure I take care of myself, she knows my sister and said often the people surrounding them get used up if they allow themselves to do all the running around.. Kat also said yesterday its okay to be there for Sue but its important I don’t attach to ‘fixing’ her.. I cannot do that anyway so it is a from of egoic hubris to think I can, never the less I hope being there for my sister gives her something and not judging and trying to affirm her true self at least means she is not as alone…
I have seen too much of how we get trapped in painful feelings to ever want that any more as a life sentence for myself and bi polar swings manifest in families riven by multigenerational trauma, cuts offs, separation, neglect and addiction which result in alexithymia manifesting in all parts of the family in different ways. I see it as the modern curse of individualistic materialism we don’t see the cause beneath the complex symptoms for a lot of the time to the deeper complex emotions underneath though I do believe this will change the more survivors speak out and share their trauma and recovery stories.
What I now know for myself to be true has had to come through so much inner work, reading sharing, exploring my own feelings and allowing the pain of difficult family dynamics. I haven’t run all of the time. But I am also learning how to self protect without cutting off my naturally empathic nature.. That to me is a gift and one I need to use wisely.. to own it means I understand my true self and honor it. Not dismiss, invalidate or downgrade it as I have so often done to myself in the past.
Emerging From The Dark Night 