Morning comes every day; the sunrise does not fail, nor the sunset. Give it time. That is all that may be required. Just give it time. Do not try to push the river. The cycles of life present themselves, play themselves out, and make smooth every passage and terrain. Try not to get caught up in your story of the moment. Look, rather, to the Long Story. Therein will be found your peace. The cycles will redeem this moment, if you let them, and even this shall pass.
Neale Donald Walsh
Seek the light within you
Even in the darkness follow the hurting place
And if these demons call to you
Ask then what they want
You can receive the answers
If you open your heart
And trust the truth of wisdom
Inside
Often the outside world
Lies to us
When it teaches us to look else where for love
Never the less
It becomes harder to rest
When we cannot be
And accept
All dimensions of ourselves
But somewhere deep inside of you
Is a place to be free
Where you can breathe
And there is also
An infinite supply of love there
It is your source
Try to remember
Where best to seek
The truth is there is a light
Shinning still
Deep inside of you
So learn to be at peace
With everything you can bear to face
After the storm has passed
Clearing the wreckage
Opening your heart
The pain over my past and what happened to me due to emotional neglect and carrried trauma has been searing today.. I had to keep doing phone therapy as I am not allowed back into the therapist rooms due to not being vaccinated.. That decision is a pro life one due to my own compromised immune health.. Kat did offer to meet me in a park close by but it felt too much today, so we did the session by phone after I drove to my favorite place by the lake.
Reading the letter I wrote to my Dad about all the hurt he caused me made me cry deeply in places.. Kat says I need the rage. so often those of us not allowed to know what happened to us end up ‘forgiving’ too soon or excusing the parent’s damage and then we continue to internalize the ‘bad’ or shame bound self and do not pass that back.
I listened to an installment of Lee Harris’s course on recovering from narcissistic relationships yesterday where he shared about his own journey out. How he cried for 6 months. I know that crying. It is for the abandoned child we learned to turn away from and then get attracted to ‘fix’ in others, a project that is bound to fail. He said we can only recover as we share what happened to us over the course of those kind of relationships and relate them back to our earlier wounding and damage.. So true.
Scott has been making me into his ‘savior’ for so long now, it was a very common hook.. I do all I can to help but when it comes down to not caring for myself first that is when the ‘help’ has to stop. God knows it takes time to turn around this pattern and also to stop shaming and blaming ourselves for what we could not get in childhood that then left us so vulnerable to other wounding relationships. But as adults now we can make a new choice.. A choice for us, for self love, for seeking sanity, serenity, inner security, peace and balance. We can reach within to heal and to the loving higher parent as well.. some call this God or Goddess too, that force is always there for us. it never lets us down, so apart from therapy that is where I am learning to turn now as I try to embrace the anger and rage that will finally free me from other unhealthy psychological enmeshments.
A child will love a parent and long for their love..They will try to make a parent right no matter what they do. Often they will make excuses for abuse or feel they should have done something to prevent it, even if, at that time, there is no way at all that was a realistic option..
The tendency to idealize the parent and make ourselves wrong also comes down to a fact my therapist shared with me today, that it is easier for a child to hate themselves than to hate a parent. As kids we could not survive without our parents and so we have to do all we can to revolve around them.. If we are sensitive too we may also be carrying their more vulnerable side, something they can NEVER REALISE. The following video from The School Of Life shows how a child internalizes that sense of being bad or unlovable in childhood.
Later in life we may attract similarly unloving relationships and struggle to change that person, a fact that is bound to fail and may trap us in ignorance and a great deal of inner pain for many years into adulthood.
A friend just contacted me to let me know her brother is dying, it bought to mind how much people endure in life along with a great deal of sadness. Her brother found recovery many years ago but illness in the form of stomach cancer got a hold of him a couple of years ago and only after that did he being to open up and reveal to her how much he had been struggling in his younger years due to trauma, bullying and carried multi-generational pain and had remained silent about.
I thought of my own buried pain and also of my sisters after receiving her text. I’ve not had the courage to contact anyone about how she is and part of me honestly feels so much guilt over this as well as sadness that she was hard to get close to. But I also had the insight that my perspective was often that of a hurting child in many ways and the truth as I see it now is we all are evolving and we all have some form of damage.. Sadly often in wounded families siblings just turn against one another or hurt each other. We probably all long for parents and siblings who see and know us but then we get what the world gives us and that is all a part of our personal and collective evolution and growth and enduring the pain and trauma may be all about deepening into spirituality in some ways but not a lofty ‘ascending’ manner, more in a descending into the collective dark past we carry in order to infuse it with light (Uranus.) .
I thought of this idea of us descending rather than ascending after listening to a talk that was shared by Michael Sandler with the energy intuitive Lee Harris and aired on You Tube a couple of years ago. I only found my way to it on Friday and in that Lee speaks of his struggles as a young man with eating issues, weight gain and his homosexuality as well as his sensitivity.. Lee went on a spiritual search and he in time started to hear guidance in the form of higher energies speaking to him, the voices were different in nature they came not from a kind of inner self talk that so many of us hear but from another source..This made me cry on Friday as that is what i started to go through when I moved into the coast house in 2005 after Jonathan left. . Before he did I had a shamanic soul retrieval done and in the imagination and soul opening work and pain of intense abandonment that occurred then, I dreamed I was being dragged over a harsh, red stony landscape and the shaman told me he saw me clearly at age 6 being so bored and disconnected in my life.. That was about the time the shades started to come down for me and later I was told in my own meditation that from that age on a negative killing energy had come to live inside of me that wanted me dead or at least only half alive from that time. The truth is that in my family I always felt so alone and on the outside, like so many of us that go on to develop emotional neglect and addiction issues.
It helps to know you are not alone going through these things, Lee also feared he may be schizophrenic but in time he learned to trust his guides and now he helps other to connect to them.. I will leave the link to that video below because in it both men talk of the witch hunters who have come after them and tried to denigrate and shame them for what they do.. Lee’s insight on this issues is that the witch burnings, drownings and aggression against spiritual and natural healers did not really happen all that long ago in human history and and that he feels this kind of vitriolic energy in some of his ‘haters’.
I had done some reading on this issue and was trying to write a book about it from 2005 onwards.. Following the black plague this kind of vitriol was a reaction of fear to all of the death and so scapegoats were sought and so called ‘witches’ or those who saw God or Goddess in nature began to be exiled as human being’s so called ‘spirituality’ began to become more split off, lofty, elevated, masculinized and remote. You can read all about that particular shift into the heroic egoic paradigm that happened in around the 1300’s in the book Return of the Goddess by Jungian Edward Whitmont and also in some of Marion Woodman’s books such as Dancing in the Flames.
The truth is there is no ascent to lofty realms which enables us to abandon and betray or split off from emotional pain carried in the body or epigenetically or to shame and judge our fellows for going through it. There is no so called ‘spiritual bypass’ that can relieve us, not cure just from divine intervention without us being able to walk through, feel, embody and suffer it all like Christ and Buddha.. To believe so is a form of, spiritual materialism or it may be that you ascribe instead to a kind of toxic religiosity that is actually a form of narcissism.
At the moment as Lee claims in his October energy update there is a real separation going on on planet earth between those who want to run from and demonize the ‘dark’ and those of us fully willing to face, embrace, integrate and break through it to the light. Many of us walking this path of endarkening to find the light go through a protracted period of intense soul suffering and depression often known as the Dark Night of the Soul in one form or another. This process may be pathologized in the medical model that does not recognize its evolutionary necessity and that is how often the process may become aberrant or abortive for some people. Stansilav and Christina Grof gave the name ‘spiritual emergence’ to this process.
I now see what I went through at the hands of my father as necessary for the time and person I was born to (parents I mean). It was that way because IT HAD TO BE THAT WAY.. To keep being angry about it would be to miss the point and yet I ALSO NEEDED TO FEEL THOSE FEELINGS FROM MY SOUL AND BE WITH THEM UNTIL THEY BURNED ME THROUGH TO A NEW PERCEPTIVE INSIGHT.. I don’t need to be told by anyone ‘I hope you can let that go in time’ truly if you say that you don’t recognize what this path entails.. with all due respect. We do not need patronizing on this painful path out but mutual support, encouragement, validation and recognition from someone who cares. NO MAN IS AN ISLAND OR CAN HEAL IN ISOLATION… WE ARE RELATIONAL BEINGS.
Today I could not be more grateful for my sobriety.. When I got my friends text I did not know what else to do but send love and prayers and then offer her to make a lunch.. Death is just part of life, illness is part of life, growing in wisdom (if you chose to take it all in) is part of life, feeling is part of being human as is failing, stumbling, making mistakes, sometimes hurting and being hurt If you open your heart to live then you will sometimes suffer and you will often meet conditions so so far from ideal, in the end how we face, endure and deal with those situations is all that matters, as both the light and the dark, the joyful and the painful is just a part of life.. How much love can we bring to self and others in the midst of this painful process and where does our own ego try to subtly and not so subtly split us off from our fellow man or woman in the midst of it?
I know for me, my past pain can keep me from reaching back out to others.. Others do not have to be perfect or even respectful to me for me to still try to offer them love at times, but there will also be a time to walk away as others make it clear they do not mesh with or understand you or may actively try to scapegoat or shame you .. We have words for this in the fellowship ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ and who knows if they were not meant to play that part in our journey so we could become wiser or stronger or even more aware of our human falibility as well as our vulnerability?.. That is okay.. as Lee says this is a time when we are being urged to examine our beliefs and not try to demonize those who may have different beliefs to us.. we can keep an open mind as well as a heart of curiosity and enquiry into how others experience the Universe.. We might even learn something..
So there it is.. Where I am today.. I had a beautiful massage on Friday, it went for 90 minutes and the lady called Glenda came to my home.. It just all flowed and honestly I have had a lot of massage as I trained as an aromatherapist in 1995 after getting sober and working for an essential oil retailer in Sydney.. But this massage was the best.. it was like being washed with warm watery hands and she worked so deeply around my neck and shoulders and the left shoulder is where I carry so much pain due both to the two accidents that massive head trauma and all of the dental work that followed along with the breast cancer and radiotherapy treatment in 2016. I think the angels must have guided me to Glenda.. Anyway yesterday was a rocky day following it as my body integrated a lot following all the insights I had around my relationship with Dad.
Luckily yesterday I managed to get out for a long walk with Jasper and to the retail center for the first time in ages to get groceries.. It feels like I am emerging from my own dark night experience more and more..and my feeling is that so many others are too.. I am also connecting with others heart to heart and soul to soul more..
If you do not have the time to listen to all of the chat shared below towards the end Lee does a meditation on moving into our hearts. I found that lovely.. I have ordered his book this week.. I love listening to others on the same journey and l love sharing what I find for truly are we not all in this together?
I shed tears listening to Lee Harris’s October energy update this morning where he spoke of how sensitives struggle but that right now many of us are emerging from our chrysalis.
Last night after two days of facing all that pain over my Dad and the dark wilderness years of Pluto in the early 80s so much came up about other painful relationships with the men I then attracted. My military house mates were lovely to me in those years adopting me, trying to get me to see I was over working. I was doing full time during the day and 3 nights a weekend and Friday at the theatre restaurant to save for a trip overseas but it was the old work till you drop or collapse emotional family neglect pattern I had been inculcated with and then the drinking from after work on Fridays and Saturdays til the early hours. Such a rough lifestyle
The first two terminations of 1983 and 4 were a secret, Dad was getting sicker (did he some how know deep inside) he didn’t like Jim my boyfriend after all he drove off on me leaving me with no money 1200 miles from home when I fell pregnant the first time though we did not yet know.
There were strong echoes of Jim’s personality in my last partner too. I haven’t visited his Facebook page for a few years now and my head hurt doing it last night. He was so tough on me, and his youngest son but knowing the severe alcoholism in his background along with abuse and emotional neglect it makes sense. We both had damage but at that stage I was at least sober for 13 years even if I had no clue of the narcissistic wounding that underlay that symptom. I am sure we were attracted at thst time for a very good reason.
Rereading Anne Wilson Schaefs book When Society Becomes An Addict is enlightening. On a plane ride to a conference she meets a man who is a therapist who tells her in every case of depression he treats he finds alcoholism or addiction in the person’s family background. Makes sense.
Wilson Schaef out lines symptoms of the Addictive White Male system in that book contrasting it with the Emerging Feminine Living In Process system. It makes so much sense all that she writes about the Medical Model shutting down feeling and that many therapists also can’t bear a person’s deep process work..not being comfortable with anger and rage.
I thank God I’ve been able to scream that out lately. To finally get it out of my body… my teeth are nearly shot due to me sucking it back in over the past 16 years. I don’t have to hurt anyone innocent with it but that lion’s roar needs a voice. And I truly thank those here who support me in this process. I owe you a big thank you for that and a debt of gratitude.
Dad I need to say these things to you.. I know you did the best but you hurt me you put me in a straight jacket, you forced me into a box that was not the right size for me, not only that it restricted me, it cut off life, or as my therapist said today, it cut me in two pieces.. Day after day in that small room typing in triplicate being subjected to the boring routine of shorthand cycling with typing, it was killing it was numbing to my soul and that was the year (1983) when I really started to act out with alcohol and drugs, for fucks sake I had nearly died a few years before and I had no help coming out of that as if it was my fault I made two changes.. seeking to find my way in the midst of so much family trauma..
When I took myself away in the year after Judy’s bleed it was an attempt to come alive but I rapidly found myself out of my depth, I asked you to let me go back to my teaching degree, to college, to my best friends, to life but you would not listen.. And then you actually handed my soul to the devil on a platter when you made me take that job at the restaurant where I was subjected to abuse, even if, at that time, I had no name for it.
You left me unprotected.. It makes me angry and when I started modelling you could not validate the beauty in me only were distressed I had a made up face, of course my appearance was not the be all and end all but did you need to shame me? Could you not have told me I was beautiful?
Dad I loved you and I longed for your love but you could not seem to see me ir sense what I really needed. Believe me I honestly do forgive it but WHAT YOU DID IN THOSE YEARS 1978 TO 1983 really really hurt me.. it was like being put in a straight jacket and it made me angry but until very recently I could NOT EVEN KNOW I WAS ANGRY AND WHY..
It helps me to write this. I need to acknowledge these feelings. I need not to fear my anger anymore and mistakenly believe that it will cut me off from the righr people loving and accepting me.. I know that not everyone will shame me as others did for having become an addict.. It was my one way of trying to stay alive.
I’ve cried so many tears for my adolescent self (for all of my lost inner child selves). I am watching so many movies lately about the pain of adolescence, that time when we are so vulnerable and in need of guidance, but still rebelling is a necessary thing.. if we do not get to negotiate that hurdle then at midlife it re-appears as other earlier aborted or damaged developmental stages do..
For now I need to have my adolescence, yes even at the age of 59 IT ISNT TOO LATE I MAY NOT BE ABLE TO RE WRITE MY PAST BUT I CAN PICK UP TORN OR LOST THREADS. .. Its okay for me to do that. Its okay for me to make a mess. To not clean up after myself.. To have piles of books lying around. To drop my clothes on the floor before bed and not pick them up until later. To make mistakes. To learn by trial and error. There are so many things that are not a threat of punishment or death but that still feel like them at times when I am in ‘flashback’.
Dear Dad, I am sorry but not all of this OCD stuff is down to you, you struggled with it too. But Dad you should have protected us from Mum, you should not just have walked away but you did. In the end the ‘shoulds’ are not helpful either. In the end things went down as they did and had really difficult consequences.. Thank God I can own that now.. It was not my fault I struggled Dad I struggled so much, I lost teeth and relationships and many things and yet none of it was truly my fault.. But now it is my responsibility how things pan out from here.
Dad I love you, I loved you, I longed for your love but Dad YOU REALLY REALLY HURT ME.
Dad this probably was not deliberate, Maybe after you died you tried to help me.. Maybe even now you are watching on and loving me. That is a good thought at least and ine that comforts me. I don’t want this hurt to block new opportunities especially relating to men, so I speak it out, to free my heart and body from the distortion and constriction of the straight jacket
The talks and teachings of Alain de Botton and the School of Life in reminding us of the role fear may play in turning us into ‘monsters’ make a lot of sense.. I just came across these words :
I’ve lived in fear most of my life. The more scared I became the more I tried to control. Fear reared its ugly head in the belief that I wasn’t good enough or smart enough, to have joyful, trusting, and intimate relationships. Instead of allowing myself to connect with others, I would often avoid them. … (often) my choice to isolate hinders me from the opportunity to build healthy relationships. .. new ways of relating to the world (happen) as I let go of my fear.
Fear in making us control may also hinder us in other ways.. Even our anger at times may come out of a fear and then make us react in ways that drive love away, but sadly others may not see the fear or pain and anger over past experiences that underlies that difficult behavior. Often these feelings have a base in earlier relationships where what we needed was not seen or attuned too.. That pain may then be enacted in other relationships, I am thinking about this especially in relation to a child parent relationship. The parent sees things in the child that they may not have been able to live (a part of their shadow) and then shame the child, but the roots of the ‘hot potato’ of fear and shame lie much further back..
So we must explore the places where we feel fear or shame and explore the ways we may try to control that which is not ever meant to be under our control. And the ways in which we adapt through fear and in so doing lose access to the truth of who we are.. This is not an easy journey for many of us with narcissistic wounding but our fear and shame or attempts to control when honestly faced and their roots understood will help us on the journey.
I will be changed by you
By all of these harsh experiences
I endured
That live here deep inside
Hidden
Under the cover
Of silence and sorrow
If I share my feelings of rage
Who is going to understand
I speak the reality of an emotional pain
That is true for me
You held all of the power
When I was young
And even when I had already been bought undone
By so so much trauma
When I needed you to see and hear me
When I needed your support you dismissed my need
As I was told to toe line and
To be and do what you thought was right
And by God it makes me angry now
But then I realize after all of the rage is spent
Really you were just
Blind
And oh so ignorant
So is it fair that I continue
To suffer inside myself
For what you did?
If I speak it out
Perhaps I will be judged
So then I think
Better to hold it all inside
Under the continuing cover of silence
For the truth is you changed me
In many ways
Cutting off potentials and realities
Forcing me to adapt
Into a twisted shape
While struggling hard to remain
Myself
Unscarred by toxic shame
True to my heart
So now I will not look outside of myself
And I will begin to trust my feelings more
As I try to find a way not to let
All of this wounding
Destroy the new good things
I am building into my present life
And yet
Still
That hurt and sorrow
Will be there
So on the difficult days when I cry
Shedding all of these quiet tears
In silence
I will give the pain up to God
To have and hold
And help me find a way to
Live and trust and open
And keep my wounded heart
Loving
I will carry you
Inside me
Even with all of the pain
Difficult memories will at times
Besiege me
There will be no way to run from them
And so it is I chose to open the door
Perhaps this earthly life is just a time
When our spirits are incapable of seeing
The wounds they do
The damage they bring
And so
After we pass over
Do we get to review and in some way try
To make amends
Through the living?
I do not know
For the ways of life are truly strange
Stranger than fiction
They say
So even as I feel this hurt
Another part of me knows
It was not ever intentionally meant
And yet is still
A painful fiery brand
That seared me
But then you too carried
So very much
I loved you
And also did not love so many of the things you did
And yet, I loved you
What is love?
An extension beyond our own suffering
To feel into the heart and soul and being of another?
Perhaps
Perhaps
Perhaps
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and life was a poem
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