Painting ourselves as the victim : some thoughts

In childhood we are powerless over a lot of what happens to us.. John Bradshaw makes the point that a three year old child cannot pack his bags and leave home, though many of us try to do this when the frustration of it all gets too much.. Later in life we cannot always know either, what happened to us consciously, though it is my experience that our body remembers EVERYTHING. Later in life somatic memory is reliable if confusing as the messages get distorted.. Add to this the holding in and letting go. (expressing and depressing). I find sometimes I am not even aware I need to go to the toilet and Dad would often make us hold it all it on long trips, sometimes it was agonising.. He also denied when Mum was hurt and sometimes we got in trouble for being hurt for no fault of our own, or I was hurt by parental carelessness in leaving things like fishhooks lying around in sea grass matting, that time it pierced me right through the webbing of my big and second toes it was agony to get out.

A therapist once named this benign neglect. My parents did not have ill intentions though Mum flew into rages and could attack us, and then deny we were hurt… It made much sense to me when struggling in sobriety to see how I was abused when I came across the term Childhood Emotional Neglect coined by therapist Jonice Webb in her helpful book Running On Empty. I identified with all the ten symptoms of that that I have explored in other posts.

https://emergingfromthedarknight.wordpress.com/2016/08/30/signs-you-may-have-been-emotionally-neglected/

However on my mind today after an outburst of feeling, sorrow and regret over things happening at the end of my marriage and in a second relationship is the way we can stay as a ‘victim’ and trapped in a false sense of helplessness and powerlessness. My ‘mate’ Alex from Evolution of Self often says to me “no one wants to be the villain, only the victim” and that can be true.. Truer is we WERE VICTIMS at one time but if we take that on as an identity later in life its not only toxic but can be lethal. How can we take positive action if we feel powerless all of the time? How can we fight for our right to be if we do not develop healthy self fighting boundaries? And what if all of that was not only punished but shamed? A LOT OF RELIGION DOES THIS.. WE HAVE TO FIND A HEALTHY EGO BEFORE WE CAN SURRENDER IT IN APPROPRIATE WAYS.

In AA we are not returned to our full power all of the time though we are encouraged to do a lot of work with grandiosity or the taking on of burdens not ours.. The truth is co-dependents just naturally take on the suffering of others.. We may be conditioned to do it in childhood. Today I thought driving home from the markets of how drowning in sorrow I have been pretty much since 2001 I also saw it is not the truth of me almost like a split between these two parts of me is now becoming more obvious 27 years into trying to recover WHO MY SPIRIT ORDAINED ME TO BE…

I am not a sad person really, I am happy full of joy and exhuberance and love life.. I don’t truly fear my fellow humans but the child in me learned to fear and then never got to set GOOD BOUNDARIES or develop A HEALTHY FUNCTIONING EGO. something Spartan Life Coach, Richard Grannon deals with in this video posted a few days ago.

That ego building work is still going on for me.. With a very very strong Neptunian influence in my chart the urge to self sacrifice is often stronger.. I can take in the badness or other feelings others dump in me and then I get used to being erased and will often take on the other’s burden.. . It was hard to fight back with a feeling I had no right to. .One of the friends of my past emotionally abusive partner said to me, at the end of our on again off again 7 year relationship.. “Phil used you like a bar of soap to wash his dirty hands clean.”

But you know what? I can understand his frustration, he wanted an adult partner not a baby who was innundated and crying all the time. He liked the vital alive kick arse part of me but not my vulnerability, that said I needed to weld the two parts and everything that happened and I now see that those 7 years with him was meant to be, leading towards the call for me to become more fully embodied. We both carried hidden aspects of each other’s shadows.

I actually felt like calling Phil today.. Its coming up to so many anniversaries.. the anniversary of Mum dying, of Dad getting operated on and quickly dying after it, of Phil and I separating, of Jonathan and I returning from overseas.. and so its no wonder I still cry and cry.. I need those tears to acknowledge my truth though people are more likely to congratulate you on being strong than in falling into the wound but it TAKES COURAGE TO FALL INTO THE WOUND AND GET YOURSELF BACK OUT AGAIN.. SOME PEOPLE (INCLUDING PHIL) FIND THAT TOO HARD TO DO. So they savage others in the vulnerable place instead of acknowledging it to help the other person get back out of it. and yes WE MUST DO THE WORK BUT NOT WITHOUT HELP OR NECESSARY VALIDATION!!!

I might be someone who helps too much. I just do not know. Having given so much to help Scott I do question all of the time what that was really about, on some levels it seems unhealthy and wrong and then on another it makes sense..

The other issue though has been to do with seeing myself as a victim of my mother and sister in those difficult years after Jonathan left. I was crying today because at one time I savaged my sister via email after she tried to trounce all over me at the coast where I was taking refuge in my unintegrated pain and then I ran off overseas only to have a head injury after which in some way I tried to pin it on her treatment of me, instead of how I responded….. by running…

The last thing I want to do is paint myself as a victim, thus this post to try and work through my part in why my sister is still ill.. Does some of the blame belong to me? I am not sure, this may be me taking on something too much and the purpose of what i write here is not so much to gain an audience as it is to use this in therapy with Kat each week, while possibly opening up the inner processing to others using WordPress in this way. I just am trying to own I may have played a part in it by continuing to blame her and my Mum even as they were innocently trying to help, never able to fully take on board the pain of my CEN history.. that is all.. So here goes.. I will be happy to share this all with Kat tomorrow… and get an outside perspective.

Ghost and a shadow

You will forever be for me

A ghost or a shadow

Hovering by

Always remembered

But never near enough to touch

The longing and memory of you

Will be with me every day

Even though sometimes

Much of the time

These longings and memoies

Will fall into forgetting

Like a heavy stone

That falls into a stream

There may always live inside of me

This ache

At times my heart will break

Open with the sadness

Of all you lacked the capacity to give

And today I realised

That for my heart

There may never be

An absolute healing

But never the less

Day by day I try my very very best

To make my peace

With all of this.

Related :

Where has your spirit gone? – Emerging From The Dark Night (wordpress.com)

The intrinsic connection between grief and love

It seems to me our deepest impulse in terms of the need to be loved underlies so much of our grief.. not only over loving and losing but over never finding that love in the form we needed it when young… We all long to be seen and known, when this doesn’t happen there is a grief that sits under the surface of consciousness and may not be ‘known’ by us for some time.. This ‘hole in the soul’ runs deep and since we first seek that in our family of origin its here where the wounds happen and they need to be addressed in later life if we want to eventually come fully to life in order to live and love as our true selves.

I was thinking a moment ago of the four solutions we resort to that Mark Wolynn talks of when we seek to connect with a parent or source of love in childhood.. one is that we find that source in them and do connect, the second is the parent fails to provide and so we cut off that longing and flow and subvert it.. in another we seek it from a sibling.. this is what I did with my Mum and Dad being unavailable.. it was my older sister who saw me, but she left and then got sick and so that was a double grief for me. Over time I learned to turn within or to substances and in time I lost access to my true feelings over it, it has been these feelings I have had to work with in active sobriety.

I just went and sat down by the lake and finished off a wonderful novel I have been reading but at the end of it my thoughts turned to my sister.. Earlier I read Oscar Cainers daily horoscope for Aquarius that said in an uncertain world its hard to know what to believe or where to turn but that there are five qualities that can sustain us.. : Kindness, Friendship, Generosity, Compassion and Love.. I thought of the nasty inaccurate things my living sister said to me in the year after Jonathan left and how her brutality coming out of emotional ignorance drove me over to the UK where the unprocessed anger and hurt over it lead to a massive head injury.. maybe something about this time that is now erased for her due to all the meds and shock treatment is perculating down inside.. She tried to erase me from the coast house earlier in the year by packing up all of my books and boxes and storing them in the shed.. To her it was probably done out of a desire to help me as I said it was hard to go down there alone to the place I ended up forsaken and abandoned after my husband left. I was so hurt by that back in February but I sucked it up on our trip there.. I just called the removalists and they came to pack it all up. I didn’t have an angry outburst I just cried and cried and cried. I seem to do a lot of crying around my sister when I don’t have anxiety spin outs around her.

Despite all of this I feel for my sister.. lying in bed with the blankets pulled up all around her unable to communicate with visitors… I don’t know what it is going to take to bring her back from the dark side this time.. and despite this I do feel love… but its a confused kind of love.

In the movie 28 Days Sandra Bullock makes friends with her sister who appears to be the more high functioning sibling in the traumatised family.. she recognises that her sister was once a child too in the family system and sought her own role which involved looking down on the ’embarrasing’ active addict who is expressing so much of the family pain…In a similar way my mother always forgave her mother for hitting her as she knew that as an abandoned war widow with no government assistance left to support a young daughter all alone so far from family that her Mum was frustrated.. it was something her best friend’s daughter and I discussed the other day… that generation had to suck it up… and they had to bury so much… trauma and stress just get carried or passed on as epigenetic research by Bruce Lipton and Dr Yehuda demonstrates..

I am a bit off the track writing this right now. It is a processing post… I just thought on the way home of how much, as a young child I longed for my sister’s love but how our family was so geared around externals it was hard to find that… in the end it is something I have had to find for myself as an adult with the help of therapy and my higher power. That said I still grieve for those who left me and could not love me where I was at and this included my ex husband.. He gave me a great gift when he emailed me back in May when he said “I really understand your need for therapy now.” He actively tried to block it along with my Mum but in the end I trusted my path into the dark…

Through it along the way I found the love for myself and even for my wounded family.. how could they give me something they never had, or a sense that I am perfect as I am even with all of my idiosyncrasies? I now see I can only gain that in any authentic way from within and even after years of being almost crippled by a virulent inner critic who was almost demonic at times.. Slowly over time and through much agony I am coming to a deeper understanding of the inner forces that drove me towards addiction and self hatred…I also understand more deeply and have more compassion for the forces that drove that poor inner child of my Mum who had to struggle so hard to be seen and find her own path..

At 14 years of age Mum actively defied a mother who wanted her only to be a domestic servant and found a profession.. She fought to be seen in the fashion industry by top designers.. she was bloody trojan, she just had to be.. I am glad in so many ways for the gifts of strength she bequeathed me as well as the deep deep insecurity… in the end it was for me to make sense of it all and carve my own self out of that inheritance.. today I feel myself becoming stronger while at times more profoundly aware of inner vulnerabilities, fears, weak spots and insecurities…

I am also learning how intimately and intricately longing, grief and love are interconnected along with rage… in the end each of us must work to understand the emotions that drive us as we grapple to find which emotions to express and which are in need of alchemy, each of us has to find ways to contain our wounds and find the healing solution in bearing witness to them for long enough that self love and insight as well as self compassion can arise. Armed with these tools we are less likely to judge others and we become more able to define boundaries as well as see where the impulses to merge or belong create complex challenges for us.

So many tears

I did not think I could contain all the tears that burst out of me today in therapy, its been such a rocky few days, the body pain has been searing since Tuesday and I did not think I could stay on earth with it.. it was truly horrendous. This pain comes up when doubt eclipses love as more longing and togetherness is thwarted, and it contains all the losses I had to keep at bay..

Today in therapy I was back in the hospital ward after the crash in September 1979 and remembering all the nights Mum and Dad came up with meals for me and a small bottle of wine… they didn’t know any other way but to give me that ‘medicine’ for the pain, and I cried over that. Today I felt the love they struggled to show .. but MY GOD thr pain I was in… it had no words at all and today as the dam inside of me burst with all the pain of the pent up smash and emotions I felt I was exploding as I felt the pressure all around my chest crushing me.

Earlier I had been sharing with Kat my therapist about my post on the astrology of the Queen and in particular about her Saturn in Scorpio that became both the Sun and the Moon in her two son’s charts and Kat shared how in the second season of The Crown you see her becoming more and more boxed in with the repression of the formalism of her role and the pressures of ‘duty’ as well as the pressing down of emotion.

I remembered today too, how my sister came to wash my hair after a few weeks as prior to that time, my head was too smashed around. In fact, at our school reunion last year, someone said the moment they saw me in hospital they had to leave the room and throw up. After the crash I wasn’t given a mirror for some weeks.. my sister had to come behind the back of the bed and use a bucket of water to wash my hair.. these acts of kindness I remember now and they break my heart open.

Not sure why all this is emerging right now but it may have to do with twelfth house transits of Sun and Mercury, the sun is due to shift from water to fire soon and that always feels intense for me as that initial 15 degrees of Leo fire are ‘trapped’ in the 12th house. Until these two energies move over the ascendant I can feel like I am being crushed or pressed down, especially as they oppose my Mars Saturn Moon, and lots of images of past things have been flooding through me over the past day or so…

In therapy the grief was also over watching the movie Nights in Rodanthe again yesterday, the scenes in which the lead character waits for her loved one to come home to her from South America only to find he has died broke me apart, and then the scene in which his son hands her a box full of letters and other personal effects of his Dad summoned up memories.. Also at the end of the movie in the midst of her grief on the beach she looks up to see about 5 wild horses running towards her and it was then i remembered that at about this time 14 years ago how my husband handed me a little blue metal box at the airport as he was leaving me with 200 dollars and said to me ‘this is for a horse ride on the beach.’ I know with that simple gesture how much he wanted me to be free but all of my unresolved unfelt grief lay before me then at I hit 10 years of active sobriety.. such a journey of heartbreak into the dark I had to begin from 2004 onwards so dark it almost crushes my heart entirely. It may seem to some strange to say I can still be grieving his loss all this time later, but today again, as that anniversary draws near I feel the both the love and the longing I had for him to say he would stay by my side, n abandon me, and hold my hand while I went through it, but then he had his own grief he had not yet dealt with, so I must forgive, I do forgive.

It is right that I grieve. It is right that I still feel sadness not only for my lost opportunity to live a life in freedom with him overseas but in recognition for the ancestral loss of the father I carried for four subsequent generations… this work I am doing is not only personal, it is collective too. I heard a lovely thing about crying in the movie Little Italy this week in which the grandmother says to her grand daughter Nikki that tears wash the soul clean.. I would never want to deny anyone tears. I also know there is a time to be happy but how would we know happiness without tears and sorrow (the loss of which they speak?) How would we know joy without knowing such agonising depths of pain? So why deny others their legitimate feelings and grief, maybe because so many in our culture fear it.

Tonight I still feel raw, I have a splitting head but its the result of carrying all the pent up emotions that I had to release in therapy today. Just when i think the deep dive is over I hit another wave of remembrance which seems fitting with Mercury passing over the degrees of my Mum’s Pluto in Cancer. Mine has been a life wracked with illness, accidents, addiction, repression, loss and suffering and I am still shedding all of this… I do not dictate this process, God does…. I just have to submit to the cleansing as it happens, allowing the healing waves of emotions to wash over me and bathe me, summoning up all the buried flotsam and jetsum, until they are done with me.

More than ever before

We all need

The comfort of love

Someone’s shoulder to lean on

Just for a while

Even though in the end

As a child

So many of us

Only learned to hide or deny the truth

Turning away

Towards the silence

We all need

Periods of humor and silliness

Within the drama and the pain

We knew

Are integrating

Or working to move

On through

Despair may convince us of lies

Should we choose to live in illusions

For too long

There is a love

That we long for

A place of surrender we need to find

To transform the pain

And a healing baptism

Of flood and fire

We must walk through

To get to the other side

With more of our soul

Awake

Grateful

And alive

Than ever before

shed skins

When the past comes calling

Certainty unwinds

My soul is carried back

To where I lost the threads of self

All tangled up inside

There is a storm of feeling

That I have not fully

Explored

Before

And so the rain of tears begins

It nourishes my skin

All of this feeling

Deep within I discover

A young girl

Who never fully got the chance to live

As herself

And became a person lost

Inside that skin

Seeking the way to kin

Dread

A constant visitor

Should naked truth emerge

And she then become the

Scourge

That order sought

Eradicate

Where to show her true face

Then

Falling into hurting

Again

Only to find deep

Within

The deepest pools of loss

A sense of self that

So desperately wants to live

Now she must find a way

To begin

Too long she wandered there

All alone

So far from comfort

Miles from home

Longing with a longing scarcely felt

Until now

Discovering with the pain of her past

A soul so very desperate

To shed old skins

Vibrating with love

Banished desire and purpose

Hungry for

Her kin

Carrying the dark night

Wow, my eyes are full of tears right now, good tears.. I just got a beautiful comment on a poem I wrote this week that really spoke to me : ’emerging but carrying the weight of the dark night as a valuable treasure..’ That comment was so affirming and it made me realise how much value there is in the dark night journey as well as in honesty…

Last night as I was lying in bed crying over the past and the emotional black hole in my family and someone who messages me from overseas said to me ‘don’t cry, It’s a waste of time.’ I just said this : ‘actually I find supreme value in tears, to me they speak of an emotional truth”. There is also something that analyst and story teller Clarissa Pinkoles Estes talks about in the myth of The Handless Maiden, in that chapter of her book Women Who Run With the Wolves she says “tears soften the soul and keep away the predator.”

Have you ever noticed that there is something calcified and almost demonic about people who cannot cry deeply nor acknowledge you when you do, or even worse, treat you as if there is something wrong with you for having an emotional reaction or crying?” To me, tears come from the soul, in fact I just opened up a book in which I sometime jot down poems to find these written down from somewhere : ‘tears, the soul’s rain shower!’

I do believe that tears come from the soul and from love as well as the hollow pit of utter emptiness from which the soul cries out trying to make its need for love known in it echoing absence as well as bear testament to an emotional truth.. I wish we would mine our tears more to be honest.. I wish there was a literacy around tears, permission to have them.. To me tears act as a release.. A beautiful follower of mine, Mark always says “I feel so much better after a good cry ; snotty nose!” I am not saying that we should all sit around crying all of the time, and there is a time to look for the blessings in things going wrong, emotional pain and challenges or things getting stolen or lost. There is also time to take ourselves by the hand after we have been feeling sad and find ways to lighten up and bring some fun and joy into our lives but we can also find the gifts present in the darker times…

I think of all of the beautiful songs and poems that come out of sadness, heartbreak and sorrow, I also think of those songs that have the power to uplift us spiritually and speak to our soul in the depths.. Listening to the blues or someone like Eva Cassidy helps me to move through sadder feelings or come to terms with things not working out…there is a time just to let the soul ache and release the heartbreak so that we can use it to move on through and power our next phase of the journey…

I am back in a deep dip at the moment to be honest.. This time of year corresponds with a very painful and dark time for me when I fell pregnant and had to have the baby terminated due to a health issue…it also coincided with a break up and a time of betrayal at the hands of the person I was involved with then.. That said I was also bringing darkness on me by drinking too much and taking drugs and it would only be three years later that the final years of my active drinking and drugging would occur… I still had so many years left to work through my pain… I can never not forget that time on a deeply unconscious bodily level as the air turns heavier and darker with the slow approach of winter…I feel the great darkness of the years 1980 to 2011 when I finally moved home and began the necessary inner psychological work to make it conscious.

I have known great darkness and it will always be a part of me.. but as that reader acknowledged my blog must show that I do carry it now more as a gift than a curse….I can not ever live completely on the light side of life. In astrological terms I am far too Plutonian for that with the planet of the Underworld in my first house of soul identity and connected to my Moon Saturn Mars and Chiron. I got sober in 1993 when that configuration was triggered by a Pluto transit.. Mars is hitting it now and will be for the next few weeks…. so in some way I have to go with Underworld pull when its summons me leaving part of myself above ground as an observer, available to throw my soul a life line should I need it to come back up to the light, daylight world should things get too heavy..

Before this time the Underworld used to claim my soul completely. As a Persephone woman I identify with the dark themes of loss, pain, grief and feelings of being overpowered by stronger more willful souls. Yes I know the Underworld.. I just sometimes don’t feel that comfortable with the pull, especially in a world that sees the Underworld sojourner as a bit of a threat or danger… Robert Hand says of first house Pluto people.. people love you deeply or are scared to death of you, seeing you as a threat….its not an easy energy to carry at times, but if we want to manage in life we have to find some kind of way to carry that energy in a positive way.. encouraging others to not feel so strange or exiled or alone if they do too.

It helps me a bit to articulate these energies when they become strong.. It makes me feel less alone at those times I feel pulled on by things that hurt or remind me of the burden of the past… I will be grateful too, for a therapy call this afternoon… dark things and feelings needs to be given air time and I will always be grateful to those willing to listen and extend an open heart and hand when I go through one of my dark phases.

Longing to be seen in unavailable families : some current insighs

I sometimes wonder if you even stop longing for the wrong people to see you.. Growing up in a narcissistically oriented family its a lot like you don’t exist as a real person.. your soul gets negated or killed off so often, but in such a silent and difficult way, as to make you end up doubting your own reality..

When I started studying naturopathic theory in 1991 I came across the double bind theory of schizophrenia developed by Gregory Bateson. In this theory when a child goes to a parent with their emotional perception the parent denies the truth and doesn’t explain their own behaviour (since, I guess, they aren’t even conscious of it themselves.) This sends a younger child a little crazy and begins to fill their head with second guessing and self doubt, they begin to question “were things really as I perceived them to be? Mum seemed angry but she says she isn’t and that if only I left her alone or did not do or say that, she would be okay.” the child may have to develop an inner dialogue to survive, but it is a confusing and unrestful inner dialogue.. One also begins to question everything.

I have done a few posts on the protector – persecutor archetype which lives deep inside the psyche of those of us with childhood wounding, trauma or neglect…Elaine Aron the founder of the concept of the Highly Sensitive Person addresses this archetype and inner force a great deal in one of her books : “The Undervalued Self.”

If we had to protect ourselves from a wounding parent or compensate for an unavailable one in childhood we may also transfer this dynamic onto new relationships.. we get easily triggered and may see things in others from the past, we also have a lot of work to do so that we don’t continue to attract the exact same invalidation, nor internalise it.

We also have to learn to trust our true feelings and perceptions. Not being seen is very crazy making and it can fill you with profound feelings of helplessness and frustration.. Also having your boundaries over run or being placed in a position where its nearly impossible to delineate and express them is even harder.. Its only lately I am seeing how much I have struggled with boundaries, most especially around family members in later life when their behaviour has been hurtful, invalidating and confusing.

Up til now I have kept an open mind with family knowing that we all came out of a lot of emotional neglect but the wash up over my mother’s inheritance and my brother’s assumption of complete paternal control has been triggering me over the past 24 hours.. He is not willing to release even a portion of what Mum left to us and its making me really distressed and upset my equilibrium entirely over that time…So often with my brother I experience that narcissistic individual’s impenetrable wall…. they cant see you, don’t want to see you, have already decided you are less than and only worthy of their contempt or to be erased psychologically or ignored.. they can erase you so easily even when you are in the same room.. my brother has done it to me so many times now and I could not hide from my fury and rage over it last night..where the fuck does he get off controlling my sister’s and my life in this way? I need to vent about it here as I don’t have therapy until Monday.. When I got the news last night a family friend who has worked in the past for he and my father made it plain she agrees he is not being fair.. I think if my sister and I were both men he would not be treating us in this way…

There is nothing at times that triggers me than not being seen or having boundaries over ridden.. It was hard enough in my family as the youngest by a long way having things pushed on me I didn’t like.. I got in trouble with alcohol too as Dad made us drink at a young age thinking that would help us to be responsible drinkers, the problem he didn’t model how to have healthy emotions and boundaries either and so that made alcohol a hiding place not a stress release especially with low confidence and inverted narcissism.

Today I was tempted to turn everything back on myself again… but then I realised what I was doing, taking the blame for something not my fault.. I have managed to stay sober for over 26 years now so that has to be saying something, but my boundaries have not been good.. I got dragged along in things due to lack of insight and protection, I denied and sucked up things I should have said no to, sometimes due to ignorance, at others just I longed to be or to stay connected at all costs, even to those who did not treat me well…..Today some more of my denial broke down as I saw how I can press the emotional truth down and how painful it was to be treated in a state of emotional melt down as if my feelings made no sense. Its been one hell of a painful and damaging conundrum… and I really had to hold and validate my inner child today.. I had two nights of trying to be there again only to not be related too though there are some small signs of progress…

Today I feel in a strange place, the sun is shining but it still feels like the dark old world of the past is lapping around my ankles like a pitch black ocean… I don’t want to go under again and in some way I can feel my feet on the sand.. but I need to continue to be mindful and not blow off my own instincts, gut feelings and true perceptions.. nor tone down my fight response just because I fear being misunderstood or sidelined.

Piercing : family curse

This piercing in my head

Hurts like hell

Especially when you speak of the togetherness

I am barred the way from

Is it my permanent curse

To be exiled

To not be able to find

A way to be welcomed in

Unless I break down the door

And yet something in me falters

Feeling I don’t belong here

While another part feels spun awry

By this feeling

Are we not family

Flesh of the same flesh

With blood ties only severed

By a death

No one ever speaks of

Lingering like a ghost

Upon the eve of Christmas

So I will sit all alone here

Remembering so much

While you drive

Not really knowing the way

Full of anxiety

It would be so easy to reach out a hand to me

But instead I will be here

Crying into my hands

Knowing the one who offered me love

Is now exiled too

Because all along

It was just too impossible

To break the family curse

Have you ever? : reflections on the scapegoat and buried emotional trauma

Have you ever been scapegoated by family members? Have you ever had the finger pointed at you telling you you are the problem? There is a saying I heard in the 12 step rooms many years back… “when you point the finger at someone you have three fingers pointing back the other way towards you” (yes folks try it right now and you will see it is true.)

Many many years ago led by his unconscious and dream images psychiatrist Carl Jung had a dream that showed a psychic inner structure that he came to call the shadow. This shadow he came to believe contained all the characteristics of us we are not on friendly terms with or that our family or culture was no on friendly terms with (ie. there is both a personal and collective shadow).

Some people have a lot of darker emotions hidden in the shadow, fear, sadness, rage or anger and some others of us have a lot of gold in the shadow and we may have been the ones others in family or culture tried to project darker things upon. There is also a concept in family therapy that talks of the concept of the ‘identified patient’. This is the family member who develops an addiction or breaks down in some way or has to have treatment. This is the family member that struggles in the family to be the whole of themselves and express truths or secrets others would prefer remain hidden (eg. emotional or sexual abuse). This is the family member that may be more likely to be led on the individuation pathway, a path of trying to uncover and rediscover the entirety of the soul in them that got loss or buried.

I am mentioning this today as lately I am seeing this process play out in my older sister’s (now deceased) family. And it is interesting that this is happening very close to the anniversary of her death. As I see it in the alcoholic or traumatised family there is a lot of pain but rather than every member carry their portion of the pain, each struggles in their own way and often they will target someone else in the family and tag or dump them with things. They may even exile the person just as in mythology the scapegoat was sent out into the wilderness with the so called ‘sins’ (or wounds) of the collective heaped upon its back.

Alcoholics are most usually likely to be the ‘family scapegoat’. They may struggle with emotions that were not permitted a place in the family and come to think of it in a feeling wounded culture there are feelings such as anger and sadness which are harder to express and which people are more rigidly defended against. These emotions are often not allowed expression and so they get dumped into a kind of collective psychic waste bin that is then passed on from generation to generation. Pain then accumulates and one person gives expression to it most overtly.

People who struggle with shadow projection may find it hard to ‘get their lives together’ in a culture that venerates this. That is not to say that there are no healthy ways to get our lives on track but mostly they should involve us being able to be real and struggle, to fall down sometimes, to make mistakes, to need help and support and just possibly not do as well on financially or externally on some level as others. Does that necessarily mean such people are actually failures? Does this actually mean such people are not worthy of help? Does this actually mean that such people have less value?

Today in therapy Kat and I were discussing how and why this process of scapegoating and shame dumping in family has been affecting me so bodily over the past few days. I got to therapy today in a lot of physically based emotional pain. I pretty much started crying as soon as I got in the car and the cascade of trauma flashbacks then began taking me back to a trauma (which come to think of it now took place around this same time of year in 1990) when I had to spend hours in casualty after driving myself with severe abdominal pain in the middle of the night. Turned out I was pregnant at the time and that the sac containing the tiny embryo had ruptured. I ended up having to have a termination of pregnancy (my fourth) and it coincided with having to leave the group house I was living in and with my them boyfriend lying to his family and pretending I had had an operation for kidney stones.

After the termination he broke things off with me and I got drunk and ended up at his parent’s place crying and yelling, of course they thought I was demented and out of control and they never found out the truth as he broke things off with me again fairly rapidly (after a brief reunion) and in the aftermath the next 2 years saw some of the lowest points of my addiction spanning the years to December 1993 when I finally got sober.

Well today in the car I was back here in St Vincent’s casualty lying alone for hours and hours as they ran tests. I think too this trauma was triggered over the weekend because calls were not returned by family, Scott was AWOL and my nephew then rang telling me I needed not to give help to my other nephew who is struggling financially in the aftermath of his relationship ending. Being left all alone and waiting and missing a therapy appointment which was delayed due to Easter Monday meant that issue of having to wait all alone was retriggered for me and then the shadow projection onto my lovely nephew triggered how I was treated over the next year by a so called ‘friend’ who kept confronting me about my addiction which was nothing less than self medication in the face of ongoing trauma spanning the years 1979 to 1992.

The truth is addicts often say their addiction saved their life. We use the self medication until it no longer keeps working for us. Recovery then involves a huge and long drawn our journey of unpeeling or unravelling down to the true causes of which addiction was only obscuring or a symptom of.

For me the original trauma is about attachment traumas, wounds and emotional neglect vacancies or ‘black holes”. I now know this without a doubt. After years and years of blaming myself (as most emotional neglect survivors do) today in therapy I finally wept for my true self who so often gets beaten up by a self compassion lacking inner critic who is echoed by the outer critic lately being turned on my nephew. Only another addict in recovery may fully understand that fact unless the person had been trained in empathic attunement. Attachment traumas and wounds so often become gravitational force fields for others, in the well known process of so called ‘repetition compulsion’ what we fail to call up to consciousness will repeat until it is addressed or felt and this must happen IN THE BODY. THE CELLS CONTAIN EVERYTHING.. THE MIND CAN BE USED TO MAKE SENSE OF IT WHEN ATTUNED TO THE BODY. JUDGEMENTS WILL NOT SHOW US THE UNDERLYING PSYCHIC REALITY WHICH MUST BE FACED IN TIME AND DEEPLY FELT IN ORDER TO BE RELEASED AND MADE SENSE OF (BROUGHT OUT OF DISSOCIATION INTO ASSOCIATION OR RE-MEMBERING!)

Scapegoating the sufferer is cruel. It is lacking in both insight and empathy. It concentrates on the ugliness of the symptoms while NOT FULLY SEEING OR UNDERSTANDING THE FEELINGS OF PAIN DISTRESS AND UNWORTHINESS WHICH UNDERLIE IT. Scapegoating serves no other purpose but to bolster up the defended ego and keep in place the ignorance of the Scapegoatees. In traumatised and addicted families or families with multi-generational trauma everyone struggles, but the one who struggles a little more with hidden emotions needs support and encouragement. They need to be brought back out of the cold place of exile and embraced in their full humanity but sadly this will be almost impossible unless the Scapegoatees also face what they are blocking, projecting or defending against or finding it hard to open up to or face. Blaming and targeting others in such a way never really ends well and it blocks connected healing and embracing of the actual trauma that sorely needs recognition.