Going under

I am wrestling the hugest inner sea at the moment.. I could never explain in a blog where I get taken.. To have my therapist doubt the fact any of my family loved me cut me to the core yesterday, but it makes sense as they did not protect or care about me as a precious person who needed that and so I do not know how to do it well myself either.. I turn against myself savagely all of the times… For example, just a moment ago in a reply to a valued followers comment about her children I told her I could not even have children and what a fuck up that makes me.. I clocked the self hate in this but left it in the comment as it is all around me again today..

This is just not fair on me at all. I did the responsible thing at 5 months of early sobriety when the last baby was a possibility or so I thought, and it was not easy to have my feelings in relationship in family EVER.. In fact I read a post the other day I wrote in October 2019 on the back of believing I had been scammed where I reached out to my older sister’s second sons wife and she shared that a while before she died Mum had owned the truth in a letter that as a profoundly sensitive child I needed far more than she could give me and that she then realized the degree to which she had let me down.. But on the last night before she died she was still holding my hand saying she forgave ME!!!

I do not want this hate to live in my soul. I want to remember my parents had deficits but my father valued financial and material things over us or Mum did.. As long as we looked good and kept it together to impress her friends that was what mattered at times. and she was constantly trying to improve me. . Yet still deep down inside I cannot help but feel that she did try her best to give me love but why was it always THINGS.. MONEY.. PROPERTY and why when I tried to have my scream over it did both she and my now living sister demonize me?

As much as I long for family right now Kat said to me yesterday the way I have been treated is insensitive and cruel. I cannot just keep sucking up and not calling it out.. And I am in fury with Scott too.. to have kept up that pressure on me.. A family friend who I can connect to on a real level rang yesterday and she said to me that she believes I am very fragile at the moment and that what he has done is not fair.. the truth is I try to be strong and I am but a times lately the grief, the guilt the unearned shame, the way I turn against myself wants me to take my life and I just find myself dissolving in tears all of the time..

The persecutor was back late last night telling me to end it that my life has no value.. I see this in the cold clear light of day and I all I know to do is to embrace myself in my woundedness, even as I sense an inner strength, lately I seem to be oscillating or swinging wildly between those two polarities (and I do believe Sagittarius rules the maximum split between the dark and light, instinctual and spiritual parts of us, also between the animal and the human!) My inner wise self today urged me to draw heavily on being raw and real in my blog as that and the support of others who were not really loved for their true selves helps me to know I am not just making all of this up as an excuse which is what my inner critic and an unfeeling society would have me believe.. At the same time I lately feel I have to start getting much more grounded in the present.. I am getting so tired of going back into all of the old injuries and trauma and sense of myself as an invaluable fuck up and giving this perspective life!

Even after therapy yesterday afternoon I was so overcome with emotion I had to ring an AA friend.. After I cried a lot and we spoke over the issue of self blame in addicts he said to me “so why all of the tears, why are you not singing and dancing and jumping for joy at being 28 years sober” part of me got that.. I still do not feel safe being happy, joyous and free while still working to bring insight to the huge backlog of ancestral muck I had to rise up out of and yet why consent to allowing myself to be dragged down into?.. This last eclipse at 13 degrees of Sagittarius hit in my fourth house of family roots and the ancestors.. As I shared recently at this time of year 157 years ago the family were getting ready to set sail for New Zealand. So maybe it is just summoning up some ancestral memory in order that I get an even wider perspective on it.

I also was overwhelmed with angst reading in Tony McAleer’s book on recovering from childhood carried trauma The Cure for Hate that a female ancestor of his was beaten to death with a fireside poker by members of the Orange Order in Northern Ireland by Protestants for being Catholic….. This ancestor was the sister of Tony’s father’s father.. So it makes sense of the way Tony in time became an abuser, so chock to the brim with carried trauma and hate due to being bullied himself as a new student boarder after his family moved to Canada to live from Ireland when he was just a boy. This stuff all gets passed on until its true root is acknowledged and light is shone upon that great depth of soul darkness and brutality.. For the soul quest is not just a journey of light, often as Jung noted and a dream of mine showed me, it lead us to a molten pit of hot muck.

How can love be possible in that kind of climate? Its just too horrible to contemplate that someone could be that full of hatred over a religion they could hurt someone to this degree.

It is not fun to read this stuff. At times I wish trauma did not exist.. I wish I did not read all about it, but what is the alternative? I got little reprieve from it last night. Even in the series Nashville last night Rayna the lead character got smashed into on the way home in a police car after being terrorised at knife point by a crazed stalker..

Being engaged with all of this dark history may be down to the strong Pluto influence around right now with Venus very close to Pluto and slowing down to drive its message home.. I really am feelings my own Moon Pluto depths.. This often feels like a heavy isolating darkness resonating in my family of origins.. With no family connections open any more I felt myself to be drowning in it at times and it was there I wrestled for those years 2011 to 2020 witnessing its impact on my mother and two sisters.. These were my role models, the ones I learned from and even when I got sober I was still in many ways looking to them which I now see was not healthy at all.

I must keep remembering that insight into all of this takes time.. And regardless of whether my parents could show love I want to love myself and even them.. Was it their fault that they carried as much as they did? That said as Alice Miller says only an acknowlegment of the pain we carry in our body soul can release us in in time from pain, hurt, fury and rage over it all.. the alternative is to act it out as Tony McAleer and so many others do.. terrorists, abusers, those who choose to spill hatred hurt and vitriol out there on social media.. So let us all PLEASE FIND A WAY TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE HUMAN DEPTHS OF THE BRUTALIZATION BUT TAKE STEPS NOT TO RE-ENACT IT. To pray daily too, to find a way to bear its heat, fire and powerful transformative intensity (Pluto) while not also turning it back in upon ourselves like a loaded weapon.

A storm rolling on through

Nature is in flow

It lets things rise and fall

It is not screaming against its fate

It knows that in time all that exists

Comes to rest or pass

As nothing created lasts for ever

In a similar form

When the sun is out it shines

When rain is about it falls

When the wind is active it blows

And it blows on through

I am waiting on nature

I am listening to nature

I am being with nature

Immersing myself in nature

What more healing thing could there be

Than to witness this intensity of green

Grow deeper with

Each passing storm?

As we feel the healing freshness of rain

Charge the atmosphere with

Living vibrant soulful energy

It was lovely to see the Sun

But is has gone again

This alternation of sun and cloud

With wind and rain

Is just life

Revealing to us the unfolding

Of each living thing

Through its seasons

The present moment is so very special

When the space is cleared by anger and grief

I am relishing in it

Every

Single

Moment

These days

Heartbreaking

I just left therapy but Kat said something so painful a moment ago as I was coming to terms with the crippling and so hurtful and debilitating self blame I get subjected to internally as a result of being emotionally neglected and feeling grief over longing for connection with family

“I wonder if any of them really loved you?”

Love is shown in actions so why did I keep excusing their meanness?

That to.me is so deeply self abandoning and heartbreaking. But maybe ultimately accepting that heart break will free me.

Sadly we can reach for what is empty and toxic, but our hearts should inform us, it is just with no one around to help, hold and champion us in our real self, just how often do we make that the willing sacrifice?

Containers for grief : some reflections

My grief over all of my life and losses feels very close to the surface these past days and since the Solar Eclipse a couple of days ago, and today is the 28th anniversary of my first AA meeting where I managed to find not only sobriety but a very deep spiritual pathway of healing. I was thinking of how trauma despite all of its pain also opens up a pathway to spiritual life as I watched the character Juliet in Nashville struggle in the aftermath of a plane crash that nearly kills her and makes her unable for a time to walk leading her to a church where gospel is sung as she struggles to come to terms not not only with survivor guilt (everyone else died in the crash) but with the desire for healing of her own adult child of an alcoholic wounds she carries..

Since meeting my friends on Friday I notice my energy has shifted.. I have been sleeping through until about 3 am instead of just for an hour and then am awake for 2 hours trying to breath, move, get upright, release my bowels and bladder (without wetting myself.. not always possible) and then adjust my gut and head digestion symptoms with a piece of fruit or tissue salt remedies.. There is a big release going on for me that also feel multi-generatiional as this was the time of year that my ancestors Thomas and Eliza were preparing to set sail in 6 days time with three young children including a 6 month old baby for New Zealand to Cornwall in 1874. It is also only 6 days until my Mum’s death anniversary.. A good friend and I have organised to have lunch that day as she lost her mother first back in 1987 two years after my own father died. Funny that how my Higher Power works connecting me to others with similar losses we can share and find comfort from/with. This is my friend who I shared recently lost her brother to cancer.

I was a bit worried earlier about how i will cope for the three weeks of therapy break which starts on 17 December. I am only with Kat now as I was helped through a Christmas break with another earlier therapist, Rae, in 2015 when she knew it was hard for me to be left unsupported for that length of time over critical anniversaries. A month long break with my UK therapist Wendy Bratherton saw me crash and burn back in 2001 after alot of my unresolved grief burst forward the year before. .I managed to stay sober but I moved back home then and a lot derailed but maybe that too, was all meant to be.

The thought I had was about containers for grief, where I can find this over the next 5 weeks leading up to Dad’s anniversary and over a Christmas where I am now estranged from family. I did think of seeking out or forming a healing group but I thought too a moment ago that even with the sadness over Mum I am so grateful to be alive, it is something Scott says to me all of the time.. “let’s just be grateful for our lives”

We still do not know if they will release him now the JAG team have taken things in hand and all monies have been paid.. For me we have been disappointed many times now since we first hoped to be together in December 2018… That said I think its all been for the best.. I am able to be alone now, with my pain and I also know as worried as he his, if it doesn’t work out I will be okay.. Somehow we managed to stay connected despite all my fears of being scammed and being cut off by a family member over it and arguing with others who just did not believe in him. Its all good. I understand why they reacted like that.

I am so grateful now to have really good friends who have their own deep grief, trauma, and inter-personal struggles and that is a very very precious part of being able to blog here. My 8th anniversary of blogging is 26 December.

What are your grief containers? Please feel free to share what helps you..Mine are :

Loving friends

A higher power

Journalling

Nature

Dancing

Singing

My dog Jasper

Music

TV and movie depictions of the human lived emotional experience

Stories of trauma survivors and those who reach for love, wisdom, healing and understanding

And most of all poetry.

That is where I will leave you today.. Happy Monday lovely WordPress family. Wishing you every shred of peace and support as we make our way through the approach to Christmas and the deeply recollective time of yet another year drawing to a close. ❤

The beauty in you

The beauty in you

Brings tears to my eyes

The loving kind and oh so gracious way

You have about you

Reminds me of the most precious blessings in nature

A soft fall of spring rain

The gentle flutter of butterfly wings

A babbling brook that sings

As it dances its way over stones

I adore it when you say

Your true home is with God

You are a special soul

And one I love dearly and feel so so blessed

To know

And today I just had to celebrate your beauty

In this little poem

And let you know

How deeply I feel

This earth is just a far more precious place

To me

Knowing you are here

You needed me

You needed me

Your aching soul cried out for love

And lonely as I felt at times

There was never a possibility before

Of refusing you

There are memories I wake with now

Of those final nights

As we sat close by

And when I watched them hurting you

You took it all and never once complained

Even tried to shoo me away when I got upset

That was you

And that was me

Always perhaps ‘too sensitive’ to pain

Now you live on within my heart

As a long and tangled chain of memories

The landscape has changed so much in these last few years

And even as I miss you

Another part of me knows that the end came

When it needed to

For we are not the architects of fate

But merely the weary foot soldiers

Who walk this meandering pathway

That leads us

With time

Deeper and deeper

Into loving, understanding

And redemption.

The Dark Side of Soul Mates

Interesting to have an old post bought to mind again.. In this one I was trying to explore how fate may summon up someone we have a lot to learn from in terms of our own shadow, dark side and earlier childhood injuries.

Emerging From The Dark Night

I was just editing some of my recent posts when another blogger’s post about Soul Mates caught my eye.  Not an hour ago I was re reading over my old journals which were fraught with attempts to make sense of an extremely painful relationship in which I was involved for over four years.  In this relationship there were constant battles with emotional expression. I would say my ex was a narcissist.  Certain emotions were taboo, especially grief.  Just expressing my vulnerability may trigger an attack, and so my feelings would bank up and I began to experience a lot of symptoms of repressed anger.

It seems easy to write this now that it has become clear after a few years of therapy, but at the time it was hell on earth.  At that time I was not in therapy, though my ex was telling me all the time that I needed to be since I…

View original post 1,076 more words

When trauma becomes all encompassing

Lately I see how stuck in my traumatized reality and past I can get at times. In fact at critical anniversaries (and my sobriety birthday as a trigger which is tomorrow) I can get eclipsed my memories of all of the family trauma and living alone and not making steps to get off it makes the focus darker at times.. Today I also listened to a show on resentment and gratitude and it spoke of how we so often focus on what is wrong and painful or hurtful.. Certainly we need to pay attention to hurt inside of us and where it comes from and if others hurt us (even out of no mal-intent, another thing I was thinking a lot about today in terms of how often as sensitive we may be hurt or injured without the other person’s intention) we need to find ways to practice self care.. I guess in this way its important to give ourselves that self compassion without resentment towards those hurts becoming all encompassing.

I also worried a lot about this yesterday thinking of my living sister, sometimes old hurts festered and I went along on events it would have been better not to, not taking my own feelings more seriously but when she was unwell I am not sure talking over our traumas may have helped her at all. There were a lot of tears shed today, as there is so much that cannot be changed and in the lead up to Mum’s anniversary its so hard having no contact much anymore with any family at all.. I have noticed that over the past year we have all just become more estranged and calls and messages are returned less frequently.

I noticed yesterday, too, reading about that breakup took me back down into painful memories and last night in the middle of the night I woke at 3am trying to breathe and move my body to get upright and I had a lot of memories comes about that very dark period 1987 to 1990 when I had that termination and finally moved out of the share house with a lot of others who drank and used drugs. It also occurred to me that the street I live in was Cambridge Street and one of my flatmates was named Jonathan. In 1993 I met my husband, Jonathan, got sober and then moved to Cambridge in the UK in 1999.. Maybe it is all coincidence I do not know.. Then this morning in the shower listening to the Sade song Kiss of Life I just felt all this grief and appreciation for having met and married him.. Kat always says I was struggling so much in those years that led to our break up in 2004 but he also went through a lot with me after I got sober and was trying hard to find ways to manage and understand my feelings and my past.. I left him alone in Australia to go back to England for six months in 2002 and that was so tough for him, then I would not make a move forward with him to go back or move closer to our family and I was not seeking therapy so he decided to leave me which I understand now but that then put me into the darkest time of my life really.. A kind of deep dark personal Underworld that I am only lately breaking free of.

Maybe it is a sign of growth that I can see how others were affected by what I went to, and it was hard that they did not know how to help me but then I was not giving myself the best help either and it took until about 2016 to find that and yet even now I wonder and worry how much going into past hurt is going to help me, for I truly do not want to live in an unhappy place when new life is here for the taking.

Possibly this is just a stage.. I could get out of bed and walk around at 3 am. I was awake ages and must have fallen back to sleep about 5 am only to wake at 7 am so sucked down the vortex it took ages to get upright again.

Today I felt a great soul loneliness at first and I have been shedding tears over my Mum and dead sister for a lot of the morning.. I hadn’t gone to the fruit and vegetable markets for a long time and they always remind me of Mum but I did today and I have a lovely interactin with the barrista at one of the delis which lifted my spirits. I got a curry puff to take home for lunch and my other food and I have eaten now.. It is my oldest sister’s second son’s birthday today, I did not manage to get onto him but I had a memory of my sister’s funeral today. At the end of the service as the hearse took her coffin away I remember standing next to him and I watched as one of his tear drops fell onto the bitumen beneath us.. He is a very muscle bound big guy my nephew but was such a sensitive child, closer in age to me than my own siblings growing up.. I do miss him and on days like today I long to speak to him, am really missing family at the moment.

In terms of letting go of trauma and resentment maybe that is a journey for each of us that is very individual. There is no easy way to process hurt that may turn into hatred or resentment, some stay stuck there for years and some are made bitter by it, that is not a path I ever wanted for myself, after all so much that happened was benign neglect even if it meant heaps and heaps of physical injuries and a couple of near death experiences. In the end I am alive and am grateful to be, that really is the most important thing to remember in the lead up to Christmas and Mum and Dad’s death anniversaries.

I was also inspired by the attitude of terrorist attack survivor Gill Hicks when I first heard her share her story on the show Ahn’s Brush With Fame where the artist interviews his subjects while doing a portrait of them.. For those who do not know Gill Hicks lost both legs in the 2005 London tube bombings and has gone on to be an advocate and try to learn what makes people become terrorists.. The following makes interesting listening as I found the link to it on the site I shared with readers yesterday I found on Facebook The Forgiveness Project.

Gill speaks in that interview about her interest in the way she was able to move through to forgiveness.. It is something that it is important for trauma survivors to share as the attitude we take to what happens to us in life has a huge ripple effect on many lives at times.. I will leave you with the link today as I finish editing this post I started yesterday.. I hope other readers gain some inspiration from the sharing from Gill Hicks.

https://www.theforgivenessproject.com/gill-hicks-on-the-healing-power-of-the-arts-and-how-seeking-to-understand-has-aided-her-recovery/?fbclid=IwAR05D7uXplf5QCVky6PyrU2XnsfqnINqLAlEVM885owwkebUnAneSXMPA7g

Good things ; things that feed my heart and soul

Saturdays can have a quiet sadness for me at times. In later years when Mum was alive we would often go out for a meal on Saturday night, now she it gone it can be a time I think of her and I just found two birthday cards she gave me one in the last year 2017 and the other at the start of 2011 when I first moved home. There was a lot of love and kindness in the cards, and it made me see that sometimes grief and loss makes you feel the bad things and forget the good.

Anyway apart from this these things bought me comfort this afternoon.

Pottering around the kitchen tidying up and putting up some new cards and other things to decorate the kitchen walls.

A lovely long Facetime chat with my really beautiful friend, Ivor from Geelong.

Watching the final few episodes of the series After Life. I do admire what Ricky Gervais does in that show highlighting grief and showing how a man struggles with the vulnerability that opens up for him after he loses his wife to cancer.. Like all of his work Gervais manages to be sad and funny at the same time in the series (like all of the best comedians) which is full of many tender moments,

The quiet gentle peace of dusk.. Knowing that soon I will be able to go to bed and rest and wake to a gentle Sunday… Where I live there is no crime or violence, we are very close to nature and I have some very sweet neighbors.. Tonight there will be many people who are homeless and it is an important thing to have a safe and peaceful place I can call home, I do not want to take it for granted.

Music, that has been giving me a lot of joy too.

So where-ever you are I hope you are having a lovely Saturday enjoying the things you are doing and finding time to count all of the blessings that this day bought your way.

Trigger

Things can trigger me..Today it was reading of the callous and casual way someone was broken up with in a novel, it took me back to that painful relationship in 1990 where I got ill when pregnant and decided to have a termination and my then partner (who at 25 was still living at home) withheld that truth from his mother. When I got drunk and made a spectacle of myself showing up there, he broke up with me only to take me back then break up with me a short while later after taking me out for a meal, sleeping with me before it and then dropping me home saying it was over and that I needed psychiatric help..

Anyway I did need therapy and I ran into him when I was sober some years later on a train and he was so drunk and falling over himself.. but just reading this today I started crying..

Lately my life just looks like a random mess with no stability or security.. When I needed help at times I ran not even knowing it was grief and fear and insecurity driving me. Then I can blame those I got involved with, but that belies the part I played in connecting with them in the first place. It is said that in the lead up to and during the 6 week period Venus turns retrograde old karma from relationships can rear up its head and that helps us to see where we need to grow and where we may have stuffed up in the past.. I remember astrologer Melanie Reinhardt saying in a lecture on Venus Pluto I went to in London in 2005 that when this retrograde hits its all about ‘keeping the heart open in hell.’ The hell that rises up may be nothing more than our own past experiences that hurt or continue to cause us grief or shame.. Ideally in time we move on from those and yet does not their complex history continue to leave deep traces upon our soul? Isn’t denying this the worst thing to do?

I imagine my young self these days in various forms at times. I see that wounded young woman, so open and vulnerable and in the words of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, ‘instinct injured’ in fact today I was telling Scott about this how I feel anger at times over how vulnerable I was and how little I could allow myself to need. In fact today I got the insight that often I just denied I needed anyone or anything and so I may have even pushed others away and my anger may also have been about a very very deep seated fear of rejection.

This aspect of my shadow (Venus Pluto revealing my own Moon Pluto wounds) takes work to own I guess so I should be proud I can face it, there is no way of saying I am any kind of worldly success, in fact I seem to have walked for most of my life what theologian Matthew Fox calls the via negative that dark path led into a dark wood and lots of fog and I am only slowly trying to make my way out.

Kat, my therapist, often says she feels the 79 accident made me so dissociated that on some level I split off from my body. I had that come up yesterday at the lunch.. all of those women have partners and a life two of them have children… I can feel shame in such settings but its not deserved.. and its okay, its right to cry with my old self over what she missed out on but I also do not want to put her down.. Surely I am strong to have faced all of this?

So I let myself cry for a while before making the effort to get myself firmly centered back in the present and find the joy or something to cheer me up a little.. I told Scott today these words via text Sometimes I only feel safe, real and complete alone.