We had nowhere to go with the pain and the wounds ran deep

Reading Marian Keyes latest novel Again, Rachel is quite triggering for me.. For those who do not know Irish writer, Marian struggled with addiction and got sober around a similar time to me, I came across the book at Target but did not buy it then and got home to hear her interviewed on our Radio National book program about 4 Mondays ago following therapy. T

The lead character Rachel must be based loosely on Marian’s own life and family and in it Rachel is an addiction counseller working in a facility with a smaller amount of sobriety to Marian.. In the piece I just read a client begins to tap into and unload some of her abandonment trauma in group therapy and in the novel Rachel has to shut that down to continue the deeper feeling work one to one.. It moved me a lot as it had to do with a young pregnancy and abuse and abandonment. This same thing happened to me (with the exception my Dad was not abusive but emotionally disengaged) but when Mum found out I was sleeping with that boyfriend I fell pregnant too at the age of 21 a month or so before, she would not talk to me for days so when I found out I was having his baby I could not go to her, she screamed and yelled at me that day and told me she was ashamed of me.

I fell pregnant twice to him and he abandoned me miles from home with the first pregnancy only I did not know I was pregnant at the time, but Dad was very upset he and Mum had to wire me money for a train ticket home as this guy, Jim drove off leaving me with nothing at all. When we got back together Dad must have been really worried as he ended up getting sick the next year having already gone through all of the trauma of me and my older sister nearly dying in 1979 and 1980. Interesting this is all coming up as the Full Moon at 23 degrees in Libra opposing the Sun in Aries had set off my father’s painful Venus in Libra opposite Chiron in Aries square to Pluto in Cancer (Dad was born in 1920.) I just read the following about Chiron in Aries and both Mum and Dad had it and it has to do with wounds of feeling worthless.

If you have Chiron in Aries, it means the core of your pain comes from a feeling of worthlessness. Very often you carry the pressure of being the best you can be.

(People with this placement :

They tend to avoid talking about their pain at all costs, which is why it is quite hard to tap into the healing gifts of Chiron in Aries.

Source : TF20S

Reading this makes me realize that for addicts, just as Gabor Mate says there is no tough love, the abandonments we go through are real and our younger life of trauma often may remain hidden, out acting out behavior becomes problematic for others who end up labelling us as crazy.. but then as Alain de Botton points out, who does not suffer from some kind of wounding or craziness in the emotionally ignorant world.

For me I never got into treatment, I did it all alone apart from attending AA for over 8 years almost daily at first and then three or so times a week, before Jonathan and I went overseas and I started one to one therapy.

I am glad now that my pain and tears are not as great.. I have unpacked a lot of it over the past 23 years since then, but at times I can still get the spins, lately its about someone pulling me in to try and help him and his daughter who is sick.. I cannot afford it and he chose to be away from her after her mother died but I cannot help but think its all magnetic attraction, after all I was sent away so many times and after Dad died I had no one to speak to of anything, it got acted out in drinking and often lashing out with boyfriends which they could never understand and so left me.

Even in sobriety marriage was difficult trying to feel my feelings, which were not seen as acceptable. I have a post to share after this one prompted by Cherie White about how bullies shut down, shame, smear and gaslight targets but in an alexythymic culture its the ones who are sensitive and feel that so often get disparaged.

All I know today is that the abandonment i lived through in my life was intense.. I have not made it up.. I saw the heavy cost in my family too of two sisters being medicated rather than addressing feelings.. Yes, its sad at Easter to have no contact with anyone but in a way it feels safer and better. At least on my own I am free to be a mess and to feel if I need to, but today there have been no tears only a lot of anxiety dancing. Still I am alive even as it draws closer the anniversary of losing Judith my sixteen year older sister. The tears have gone now, what just lives on is the unadulterated recognition of how hard it was for all of us girls to be feeling, vulnerable woman in a deeply feminine wounded world.

Seeing a magical world

As children we were just open to wonder but sadly so much can happen in those early formative years to shut this down and if we had a depressed or anxious parent that would in some way be communicated to us.

As Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us in his book Fear many of our parents knew famines, wars and other kinds of trauma, struggles to survive, loss of parents and siblings and just a host of challenges all of which leave their imprints lodged within our DNA.

Gabor Mate a Canadian oncologist from Hungary who has worked a lot with addicts to stop the demonization of their survival responses shares in some of his talks about how, as a baby, he picked up with all the other babies the distress happening at that time in his world, a world on the brink of war. We absorb all of this as young ones but never give it a second thought.. If someone is diagnosed as BPD or bi polar how many psychiatrists do a family history, checking for the incident of addiction or other losses and treating from there before reaching for the meds? In one of the facilities where my sister was doing time over many months one of the psyche nurses was just as disordered as the patients in terms of early childhood trauma (I knew her from Al Anon but was supposed to keep that ‘a secret’) and it interests me that this nurse was not liked by my sister but really they had so much in common. How sad.

John Bradshaw was one of the first men in recovery to start addressing the impact of childhood, child rearing and toxic shame as well as shame bound emotions in those in recovery.. His many excellent books such as Healing The Shame That Binds You, Homecoming, and Creating Love address what happens to us at every stage of development and how our magical soul filled child is shut down in all kinds of ways.

Now when I get out in the mornings with Jasper, it is so lovely to connect to other adults not as shut down as both of my parents were.. My parents did not have much of a sense of fun when we grew up, I have shared in numerous posts before about the ‘runnning on empty’ syndrome in my family (link below to the work of Jonice Webb on this condition), it was all about work, work, work but in this way I am also beginning to understand the maybe my Dad felt alone living with Mum as she chose to work 9 to 5.30 four days a week, 9 to 9 on Fridays and 9 to 12 on Saturdays.. Maybe on some level Dad enjoyed this. He could get into the garden or play his music without Mum running around in a perfectionistic spin whipping things into a frenzy with her OCD panics all a legacy of being a neglected adult grandchild of an alcoholic.

Critical symptoms of Childhood Emotional Neglect

My Mum’s best friend told me on Wednesday that Mum never visited Dad at the office and when she started showing up there after Dad died my sister in law got the shits she was so ‘needy’ making a comment about how now she needed to learn to stand on her own two feet.. This from a woman whose own mother died when she was only young and learned never to face the pain, but hate all of our family for who we were. I do understand why on some level, when she met my brother in around 1967 at the restaurant and came to live with us Mum was insulted that she kept herself separate from us reading up the back under the tree. I was too young to remember a lot of this and already traumatized by my beloved older sister marrying and then when Mum read her diaries and confronted her about an abortion she ended up making an enemy for life.

What a mixed up family of emotional turmoil deeply buried and submerged I was buried into.

My sister in law was nice to me when young though, she gave me a lot of books and later in life told me to get as far away from my Mum as I could after Jonathan left, the problem being Mum needed support and so did my older sister who by that stage was so damaged from her aneurysm and marriage detonating 3 years later when she tried to take her life.

Today I know all of that pain seeped into me as a child just as it did for Gabor Mate as a baby and that I NO LONGER NEED TO CARRY SADNESS THAT IS NOT MINE.. That said I need to give a voice in my poetry as it says something about the hidden legacy of my ancestors that I give voice to through Neptunian forms such as poetry.

Today I can be around people, slowly risk vulnerability and opening myself and gain joy from that. Earlier Jasper and I ran into a lovely couple in the park we go to whose little dog Harry jumped around and chased him as we conversed.. How super nice to be connected and to have my heart open.

Today I can see a magical universe and I am grateful.. I do not think I ‘chose’ this family, I think it’s just evolution really, this idea of us choosing things, it does not tie in with a lot of epigenetic research.. We are woven from fate and then have the choice to become more conscious but to do that we often have to find the way to negotiate what is hidden in the shadows.

On the brink of the Moon growing larger in reflected light from the Sun (at the moment it is sitting at about 4 degrees of Libra) as it moves towards fullness I can reflect (Moon opposing Sun) on my relationships (Venus and Libra) and how difficult it was for me to emerge as a separate individual (Mars and Sun, Aries and Leo) within them.. And slowly through my therapy, poetry and ancestral unwinding I am. For that I am so so so so so grateful as well as for my sobriety which happened when my planet of wounding and healing Chiron in Pisces as well as first house Pluto in the opposing sign of Virgo was transited.. Despite later injuries that occurred as I repeated the old family pattern of going back and forward to the land of my ancestors and despite any pain and anger I may feel around my family’s distance and disengagement emotionally on some level I can accept it.. The issue of Mum’s ashes did trigger me this week but then our family just choose to disconnect and its not conscious in them at all

And after all, there was a time I too, struggled to open up and so many times I needed a hug but was only told to go away.. So very far away, or else just took myself away due to feeling so very rejected misattunted to or never empathized with at all.. In the end my family are probably just not capable of that, it is up to me as an adult to embrace the inner child and also make sense of what may have happened to my ancestors to make their own beings filled with so much anxiety.. After all it was such a battle for them coming out of a past where so much was lost and where in they were fighting just as hard as they possibly could to survive.

Fragmenting

Lately when I have therapy it feels like I am fragmenting, I get overwhelmed with visions and memories of my older sister around the anniversary of her embolism and then those memories are interspersed with words she said to me.. How she told me there would be a healing to all of this in years to come.. Magical thinking? I remember the painful aftermath of the bleed in the following 5 yeas leading to my father death and how the rippling effects in arresting my early adult development then decimated my marriage. In later years I recall how tough it was sometimes visiting or taking her on outings and needed to push the increasing expanse of her medicated, increasingly disabled and damaged body along in the wheelchair.

Several times the chair fell forward either on the path from her home to the cafe opposite or at the movies. One time we got tipped half way upside down in the elevator going to the movies and I was in such a panic but managed to right it all alone somehow. Often I would meet the maxi taxi on the opposite side of the street then wheel her over to the cinema.

One time she wailed and screamed so much in a movie – A Royal Affair that I wheeled her out so as not to ruin the screening for the other viewers (feeling so so conflicted about it) and this was the movie about a woman whose children were taken from her. When my brother in law returned my sister to Mum and Dad in 1984 like a used up package he lied to the younger ones and led them to believe she had abandoned them. To be honest in recent years her third son has told me of psychotic incidents involving my sister and they were not pretty. My sister could be a demon due to her own trauma and he ensuing medication and other long term affects of brain damage.

Today in therapy I wept and wept while my whole body went into an explosive spiral we had to go about 5 minutes over time which never happens, I had my denture in and out and there were both tears and spasms, lately the emotional constriction we lived within has been revealing itself. There was a tightness to Mum and my second sister a kind of disconnected drivenness that made relaxing impossible. Even now I sometimes fear the price of relaxing or resting may be death. And woebegone if I was happy or full of life or needing something that was most often met with punishment, shut down, isolation or ridicule.

Anyway after therapy today I was so disoriented emotionally I left the car in the shopping centre parking lot with the keys in the ignition after running around madly thinking I’d lost them. What a dunce I felt when the security guy helping me went back to the car with me and we found them. I got myself in such a state crying “there’s no one to help me” and yet they were trying. But today in editing this back I see its the fucking critic on my case am I at fault for valiantly battling on while risking to come alive again even with five missing upper teeth.. This is not on shaming myself.

All of this makes me feel I should be stopping therapy, that it’s making me lose my grounding in the now. This is the way my mind goes endlessly over analysing until a massive groundswell of feeling floods the banks of conscious awareness and yet today editing it back I consider what major work this re-membering and trying to gather together the scattered pieces not only of a remotely intellectualized ‘narrative’ but what that really means and how enormous it is on a bodily as well as energetic level. At one point in therapy after a huge outburst of tears my eyes were blurry and then I was with the angels in my body then telling me that my vision was being cleared and then looking at my therapist thinking DO YOU EVEN HAVE A BLOODY CLUE OF HOW TOUGH THIS IS?

What a relief to get home to Jasper to feel the cool breeze flowing close by, to unpack all my groceries and clean out the fridge, to then rest in the simplicity and the emptying of a gentle trouble free moment not hijacked by past traumatic memory. I need to breathe lately….drowning in past stuff just feels wrong somehow and yet I lived all of these experiences and like it or not my older sister’s soul journey will forever remain intertwined with mine BECAUSE I DEEPLY LOVED HER. This is the cost of loving to feel pain, this is the truth of being an embodied person not trapped in a head trip.

Also I feel things. By my nature I am a sensitive and an empath not a shut down person, I feel the heights and depths and breadths. As tough as it feels at times, as seemingly vast and impossible to contain would I really want to be someone else?

#Never the less there is a time to blow this stuff off when it cripples or fragments me or stops me from embracing the pregnant possibly of a new and clear present moment, but neither can I negate what it is nor how enormously lonely carrying the full weight of it has been at times.

Separating past from present

Past abandonment trauma has a way of poisoning our life from the inside.. When others reach out to us,at times we can be triggered, not feeling seen or validated we may react from deep within that tender and aching wound.. Before we know it the other party has pulled back startled, perhaps gone silent (hopefully has not tried to attack us more but that can sadly happen too.) I had a touch of this yesterday with someone I have connected to over past weeks via Instagram.. He tried to fix me with his comments and then used a word that I actually abhor ‘should’ in a sentence, never mind that that word ignored the validity of what I was feeling and my windows of tolerance and capacity to cope. I did not know how to reply at first so I simply said, I am human and I have read that Joseph Campbell once said if any word would be best to be erased from our human vocabulary it is the word ‘should’ the person replied back that I seemed to be hurt and so I listed for him some of the traumas I witnessed or was subject to since 2004.. that shut him up… and of course I would be lying if I said my fear of abandonment was not triggered but it could not unsettle me enough to say anything more.. I feel proud of this today.. I managed to hold onto myself.

Holding onto our trauma reality and not diminishing or discounting it is not easy with some people who can never have clue about how it feels. That said there is a time to separate past trauma from the present moment in which it can often bleed through for those of us with high level abandonment, emotional neglect or abuse trauma.

By divine happenstance after praying this morning I opened my Tian Dayton reader to this page and meditation.. I hope it resonates for you.

Separating Past from Present

Today I can take care of myself in the present. I can identify feelings as they come up and separate them – those that belong to the past and those that belong to the present. If they belong to the past I will not make them about my life today but will instead understand that something current has triggered them. The enormity of my response it probably not about what is going on right now. If I make it about my present, my life will quickly feel overwhelming and unmanageable. I will seek help from people and situations that are designed to assist me and I will separate what about today from what is about yesterday.

I do not make my present about my past

Deliver thyself as a roe from the hand of the hunter, and as bird from the hand of the fowler.

Proverbs 6:5

Bound

You bound me up inside the straight jacket

Of your own emotional neglect

And insecurities

So tightly that I could no longer

Feel my own lifeblood and breath

Moving through me

And if the spirit of us

All that is most pure, live and real

Resides inside the power of air

That we can ingest

Then in that way you locked me up

Within an airless tower

So far from human life intelligence

Understanding, empathy and love

So now as I walk trying to take back my power

Is it any wonder I cry

Mum I was there for you

By your side every time you were suffering

Holding the hands of you and my sisters

Crying for what was done to all of us

And yet you chose to give that power away

To your oldest son

Who was never there

Always ran

Always had to deny

True passion, depth and feeling

Is it any wonder I wised to die

A short time ago

When it became clear

He would cut me down and try to deny me

Anyway he could

Human warmth

Understanding love and connection

But he is not that strong

For even as his fear locks he and his family up

In a prison

Slowly and painfully I feel the stolen air

Returning to my lungs

With this flood of returning feeling

So powerful it will not longer be denied

This is why we suicide

Or throw our souls on a funeral pire

Just as these old age women

Venerated the cutting masculine force

That severed them from feeling

While weeping all alone in silence

What can we do to make an uprising?

Mothers you were left

Empty and vacant

Even incapable of understanding

The deep wounds your returning husbands bore

Under a heavy cloak of restriction and silence

And so the damage got enacted on us

You tried to cut me to shape

To fit your ideal of what

A ‘nice’ girl could be

But I was not born to the a domesticated servant

I am a woman

With the heart of a lion

And I will not longer consent to this silence

To this hopelessness

To this grief

Even as I and my spiritual siblings weep

Over what is being done to us

In this darkest age

Of growing inner despair

And emotional blindness

A powerful tide is rising

A wild fire is burning

That will not be refused

But this the returning power of

Light and feeling

Passion and fire

Must be used skillfully

To cut our bleeding heart

Of enslaved humanity

Free

My tears speak

There are things I cannot say

I cannot find the words

But in this dusky silence

My tears speak

My body hurts sometimes

With the pressure you placed on me

I also honestly struggle

With so many deep feelings of fear

And thoughts of mistrust

And inadequacy

Maybe it was my incapacity to trust

That led us to this

Terrible precipice

And lately perhaps I am not

So sure

If I really know

How to be happy

It was not my fault

Carrying all of this buried grief

That blocked me for so long

From living an easy

Open hearted life

But I truly do not want to go on this way

You both say the other is lying

All it does is make me feel crazy

Listen

I am sick to the death of crying

Why couldn’t I have waited

Until I stood on more solid internal ground

Before I started reaching for love?

I see now that I jumped the gun

But was it wrong for my heart to long

Only now to find that over these past years

I have grown

Stronger

And deep inside I do trust

That I am adequate

And that I truly do know

How to cope

And to live my life

Even standing alone

Having the power to blossom

And make my peace

With all of these complex problems

And restless

Ghosts

An anchor in the storm

Listening to music often sparks thoughts or memories or associations, this song is one I first heard a few months back, I believe it was featured in a movie. When I listen to it and the desire the singer expresses to have a guide in the storm it makes sense, for if we are left at the mercy of big inner storms, floods of feeling or shock trauma re-actions from PTSD it can be harder on our own..

I remember after my second accident which occurred late in June in 2005 how the hospital connected me with a lovely woman around my own age named Marlene, by a weird case of synchronicity Marlene was Dutch and even from my Dad’s home town. After coming to see me in the hospital after the crash I remember the day she supported me to do my grocery shopping.. Just this simple task was so overwhelming for me, I was in Cambridge lodging with a family, I had no car and I would get flooded all of the time, experiencing nausea, and profound dissociation/dislocation feelings, even getting out of bed was a major achievement.. Those days are behind me but I still get the morning post eating head rushes and I just had one after walking Jasper to the oval and kicking the ball around.. It wasn’t long after lunch but my entire system and chakras were flooded, maybe some of the cold and fresh air played a part.

Marlene and I ended up becoming good friends I still found it hard to draw as close to her as I would have liked, when I went to Glastonbury shortly after the accident due to the family finding my trauma ‘too distressing a reminder’ I think she hoped I would eventually return to Cambridge and we may live together but she did not tell me this until I had booked a return fare home that Christmas, one of the last things we did was attend a beautiful church service with classical music.. Marlene really represented a strong part of my European soul I wish I could have lived then but the pull of family was strong. due to my older sister still being in a need of a lot of support and my Mum as well.

It is easier for me to tolerate being on my own now and I can hold all of these memories close as I am mindful to remember things evolved as they needed to at the time for my soul journey.. I had to come home and go through worse things in order to grow.

To be honest over the past few years in my home town I have managed to build some genuine connections with people related to my family, some relationships have changed and since my sister has been struggling in some way this has brought me closer to some of her friends that her depression often tries to cut her off from… I actually had two calls from people yesterday wanting to know how best to handle the way she is treating them.. I know for myself depression can sometimes lie, it tells us people are not safe who may be (especially if we have anxious attachment) and if we have the huge fear of vulnerability and of feeling unmasked (which my sister seems to have even more of than me) it gets doubly hard.

Sometimes too friends do not know how to be present with someone in the depths and silence of freeze, profound introversion or withdrawal.. The person may actually be comforted by you being there even if they cannot express it if you do not invade them and can simply show them via touch or acceptance a sense of allowing them to be where they are. This is something my family could not give to me when I hit the wall in 2004 and sadly something my sister seemed to get a bit better at after Mum died, for me, if not for herself.

Places of holding and anchoring are important.. Its an interesting thing I was saying in therapy to Kat yesterday that when I visited my sister in that small room close to the nurses station close to dusk on Sunday sitting quietly with her for some time it seemed to me like a womb. She didn’t have the light on at first and she was sitting fully dressed on the bed.. the words that came to me then were ‘unborn; as if she was existing in some kind of womb. I also got the impression when she turned the small upturned light on and looked at the fixtures of the bedside table that we were in some kind of ship cabin..

The night sea journey is a profound symbolic metaphor for a journey of transformation or dissolution and reforming such as my sister seems to be going through at present.. This experience appeared in one of my pre sobriety dreams and has always seemed very significant to me in terms of the journey my soul was set to embark upon then

As I write this I can call to mind the dream I had a long while back of both my sister and I walking the length of Mollymook Beach close to the house my father built shortly before he died and coming upon a beached whale, in the dream my sister looked at me with those pleading eyes of infinite sadness and longing she sometimes turns on me lately and said the words “the whales are such sad creatures.” Jonah travelled in the belly of the whale on his transformative journey, I also think a beached whale may associate to buried feelings of the ancestral history emerging from a deeply submerged collective oceanic state..

These associations and symbols ring true to my soul, they give a sense of meaning to what seems to be transpiring in my sister’s life right now and in my own over the past 19 years of my mid life journey. I need to remember too that sometimes a lot is going on inside the depths of a person when they undergo reversions or deep repressions of feeling (depression). Jung believed we can and do experience many of this kinds of dives inwards, in order to move forward and incorporate hidden parts of our self or shadow.. He underwent many himself.

Much depends on how much meaning we can give to them and if we permit ourselves to ‘mine’ then and open us up, co-operating with egoic dissolution, rather than have them medicated or numbed by the medical model.. who knows what processes the soul is undergoing in its mysterious inner landscape over such long periods.. Depression could be a huge part of the dying out of old forms of the false self in order that a process of individuation and soul reclaiming or re-anchoring or more complete embodiment of split off parts of us can take place within the ego. In other words it often represents our Self with a capital S knocking on the door and throwing a lot up in the air that we thought we were or knew before.

Feeling my true feelings : not easy!

Sometimes it seems to me that feeling my true feelings is impossible without my mind arguing back. There is the running critical commentary in my mind that argues with me about the way I am feeling and telling me I ‘ought to feel another way or uses some kind of philosophy.. This is not always bad as expressing our true feelings with some people may get us in a lot of hot water.. We may be judged. Then it is always a surprise to me when my repressed feelings just burst out sideways like they tend to do every second Wednesday when my gardener David comes..

David gets very focused on the garden, he was a bit mean and abrupt with me last year and I nearly told him not to come back, instead he reduced me to tears as I pleaded with him for help…he took mercy on me then but today he nearly tore my jumper when he was trying to take a branch off me I had pruned and I just said to him “please can you be more gentle with me?” On reflection I do think David’s visit triggers my painful feeling around masculine Mars energy and about my Dad too.. The struggle I seem to have with my living sister who can also be short, sharp tongued and abrupt seems to correlate with her Mars in Sagittarius at 4 degrees and squaring my natal Chiron at 4 Pisces in the 7th house of relationships. However in her chart Mars also squares her own Sun and Venus conjunction in Pisces and often I see her softer feeling side buried.. Mum had Mars in Pisces at 4 degrees.. Dad was often wounding her with his disconnection when she got highly emotional or triggered.

I woke today all twisted around anyway.. I have been listening to videos going to sleep from Louise Hay but I wake up and the phone is on fire next to my body, I know we are told not to sleep with our phones but I love the soothing of Louise’s voice and her focus on loving ourselves and this one I listen too involves also taking the inner children of both parents into our own heart.. for so often our parents inner kids caused us problems growing up…

It also occurred to me in the middle of the night that my brother’s oldest son lost his Grandad (my Dad) at the exact same age that my Dad lost his father.. 12 years of age.. That was also the age his Mum was when her mother died.. and that death marked her for a long long time. I had taken a family friend out yesterday who worked for my father and brother for a long time and when I mentioned wanting to try to improve this distant relationship she just said to me “Deb, be careful, Anthony is very controlling and narcissistic and anything you say will find it back to your brother” Its so tough to fear I will be judged, but his perfectionism/control issue is something I saw one time when we visited my nephew’s place and he talked down to his wife in a bossy way. In a strange stroke of synchronicity when I came back to my home town this house I ended up buying was the one his wife grew up in and at a recent family event my niece in law’s mother asked me if they could come and see it… I have not been prepared to do that before now as I did not feel safe or secure enough but I long to do it as I just love connecting.

I am realising that I have had so much to grieve today as I shed all of those tears trying to cut through a tree branch without a lot of success. I thought of the terminations of pregnancy particularly.. How sad that was.. to never be able to bring a child to term and how hard it was for my husband.. I was not ready… but sometimes it feels I am just cursed to so much aloneness. The battle is going on with Scott too.. I have few doubts he is not genuine now but this money issue is hanging over my head.. Money is a horrible issue because I have not lacked for money but I have lacked for attention, togetherness and most of all TIME.. Scott only has brief windows of contact due to his heavy schedule with training and patrol. We have two hour or hour and a half windows 5 days a week but lately with the morning’s closing in and due to the fact sometimes I am awake for a couple of hours in the middle of the night I am not often awake to talk.. I pushed myself today then got the shits he had to go.. I am never like this usually but I got really really angry about it and later was shouting at people in traffic blocking my way and going at a snail’s pace. WHY DOES EVERYONE ELSE’S SCHEDULE DOMINATE MINE.. WHY IS MY TIMETABLE SO FUCKING UNIMPORTANT.. Could be another wounded ego issue? Or a valid anger.. just not sure at all????

I know enough by now to know that when I react like this its about me not anything happening around me.. I just went down by the lake then and sat under a tree and prayed.. the cursing coming out of me was pretty darn intense and dark…

Buried feelings of grief so often masquerade underneath anger.. That is something I am learning more and more lately… with my Saturn Mars I feel blocked and put upon by the Universe but such an attitude isn’t a good one for me to feel happy and free.. So I try to keep always examining my motives and where my blocked or heavy feelings may be causing current problems or outbursts with the life and people around me.

Stepping away from my trauma

My traumas never leave me..often they arrive in a cascade or avalanche but it may only be body symptoms at other times images. Last night was super intense awake at 2 then 5 I was in the toilet pushing on the walls with my elbows struggling to breathe..then it arrived a memory of the Nuns forcing my Mum to stand in a corner telling her she was stupid and dumb..a bad girl for not completing her homework. Fucks sake did they know she was left alone every afternoon and evening? That she had no father? Brutal mean unfeeling..so unkind.

Same denomination of nuns brutalised my two older sisters to the point my living sister no longer plays piano. She was very good at it but they punished her for wanting to learn a Dean Martin song she wanted to play as a gift for my Dad. These are the hidden things the unspoken things the knives that go in.

Angels reminded me last night that everything my Mum suffered lays in my cells. This morning I heard voices wanting me dead again. I said No you can’t do this I am eating breakfast and going for a walk. I cried for most of the first 20 mins. My sister called to wish me happy birthday. I am 59 today.

Each step I take forward is a victory as a survivor of 5 generations of Complex PTSD. Last night under that trauma cascade I heard the words “no one puts baby in the corner” my mother needed tenderness, holding, patience, love she got hit instead, left alone but she always forgave as she knew what her mother suffered as a war widow with zero government assistance.

I weep for the times my pain was so much I could not always see the deep roots of my Mums. I will no longer let negativity capture me. I want to live in gratitude even amidst all of the pain. I simply must bless it knowing how toxic it was and how much it hurt my Mum. I must give love to the sore hurting places and love my body..as Mum found it so difficult to love mine and her own.

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.