I noticed after the weekend how I allowed myself to get entangled with my abandonment feelings in association to thwarted longing and need in the frustrating and complex relationship with my mother and sister. I wondered after speaking up about how much it hurt whether I really did the right thing or took the best approach. I think what I am now realising is how much pain we can cause ourselves by arguing with realities. I just read a post about how someone self harmed when someone left and then tried to take their life. The person was hurting so much she hurt herself. I have never self harmed in that way (cutting and suicide attempts) but through addiction I self harmed. I have had hurt from others leaving which triggered deep frustration or abandonment wounds make a lot of deep pain lodge or go around deep down inside of me. In arguing with the reality I don’t fully want to feel or accept or allow the pain of into my heart, I make things worse. That said, the struggle and experience of negative consequences is all a part of the learning.
On Sunday when I initially felt let down, the best thing I did was connect with young me and be there for her. I listened to her pain. I remembered the imprints of this kind of longing for connection gone awry along the maternal ancestral line and it all made sense, at least the power of my feelings made sense. When I finally opened up about it later to Mum and she initially got upset I got to see that she carries similar wounds and that in many ways all three of us are trying to make up for wounds in disconnection but being so involved in our own that we don’t have as much to give to more than one other person.
As the youngest I was always at the end of the line. There was limited empathy or attention to my needs and now I cannot find it there. I need to find and meet my needs in some other way or try to meet them myself. Sometimes its not ideal but I do manage. I have therapy to go to. Sadly I don’t have a lot of friends because I have isolated a lot in last years while trying to get help to work through all of my issues.
The last experience with my Mum showed me clearly how I can get entangled or enmeshed by my longing. I also get triggered a lot by my mother and sister so I have to be careful. I don’t need to cut off the longing but I do need to find ways to find my own happiness. I see how from a young age I got forced into a loner pattern that really doesn’t suit a person who from a young age was full of life, loved life and wanted so much to be simply and innocently connected to others. Sadly I was born into a super serious home with a bunch of adults hell bent on their own agendas. I was so lonely and had no where to go after we moved away from by best friends, the next door neighbours. In later life I repeated the pattern of taking myself away because it was all I knew. In some ways the taking myself away was good, if it meant I could go in search of what I wanted and needed, but not when it held inside it a defence against relationship due to the fact I was carrying so much unconscious hurt and thwarted self expression.
Reading James Masteron’s book on the search for the real self is helping me so much to understand my own psychology. I started to write a post on it last night but had a lot of others things I needed to do so didn’t finish it, but what I wrote in that post was how he shares in the book how important the father is in helping a young child to find life and a self outside of the constricting relationship with a mother who often due to her own wounds or psychology keeps thwarting her own child’s separation or individuation task. In my case I think it was more complex in that I am carrying feelings, needs and issues my mother never fully resolved herself and the death of my father at a critical stage and on the back of so much other trauma meant separating became even more complicated. Add to that the fact that my older sister was suffering and I was highly sensitive and still had very complex bonding issues tied up in that relationship and it makes sense to me that even at age 40 I felt I could not move forward with my own life. Did Dad’s death mean in some way that I tried to compensate and therefore am carrying a burden for both my mother and my father?
Saturn transiting the fourth house apparently is associated with personal reckoning with family karma. I have that transit at present and it makes sense to me. Sagittarius on my fourth house shows there was a lot of migration tied up with home and family. Ancestors migrated on the back of losses never fully felt and sought distance, I see that pattern playing out on both my mother and father’s ancestral side. I see how it has played out in my life and my older sister’s life as well as in the lives of some of her children.
Dad left his home in Holland in 1938 and never looked back. We never got to know our Dutch relatives until after he died and I am the only one in the family who has made any attempt to connect with them, a fact which really saddens me. My older brother keeps up a similar distance with his sisters though its changing a bit lately.
In my own life it was my husband who migrated. I felt so sad when he would return from visits to the UK crying that in 1998 we made the decision to move back there, but complex factors intervened that put that migration to death and maybe for a reason as we were again playing out a pattern or theme.
I hope in time to get back to the UK. I am not sure that I feel as strong a pull as I have done in years past, now that I am becoming aware of what I am carrying unconsciously. I think the need I had to come back to Australia from the UK in 2002 was tied up with something my father never resolved. He left his entire family behind and put his goals up as success and financial comfort, he turned a blind eye to the emotional side, he was hard on me when I needed understanding, support and empathy. Then he died. My last memory is that we argued on the night before he was taken back into hospital only to die a few weeks later.
On the back of that I went overseas and deep into addiction. I sought the lost father in all my relationships but I had an unconscious fund of anger towards him that would come out at my partners when I drank. I also chose partners who were emotionally distant or struggled emotionally to value their own and my feelings. Even in my 20s and 30s and 40s I could not make truly conscious choices in relationship due to hidden needs and feelings I have been able to connect to and process in therapy over past years.
Phew! The eclipse on my houses of self and relationship a few weeks ago that activated my natal Neptune Sun square has been powerful and has shed light on so much. Neptune Sun is the absent father, the lost sense of self that that learns to live and give in sacrifice to others, the person who carries the devalued self due to intense sensitivity. It has a strong artistic, creative aspect too, as I remember astrologer Liz Greene saying to me when she read my chart in a CPA lecture that art or creativity of some kind would provide a vessel that I could channel all of this through, and of course astrology has helped me to make more sense of it all.
The eclipse in a few days on my natal Uranus should be interesting. Uranus is that part of us that must find a way to dance to its own unique tune but in such a way as not to totally split off from others and relationship. Still there us is also a time when we have to say “this is me, trying too hard to win your love, hurts me and wastes my time.. the love I seek must be found within truly before it can be given from without”. I have tried to give love so many times to those who have pushed me away. At times I have pushed away love that I felt may tie me down or constrict me.
Ideally in a relationship we accept the power and limits of someone to give as well as our own, we don’t deliberately withhold to hurt others but neither do we give more than we can, we know we have value, we know we can survive alone if we must, but we also know the sweetness that comes when others give to us and we give to others from a place that feels tender, uncomplicated, direct, real and honest with no hidden agenda. If we know we have value equal to others we don’t over try, we don’t over compensate, instead we stay grounded in reality and acceptance, even of those things that hurt and that we know we cannot really ever have the power to change.
