On letting things (old reactions) go.

I have been thinking this afternoon about the concepts of surrender and letting things. fears and feeling and problems space to breathe after reblogging Tiffany’s post on The Antidote to Fear and learning that she will be following that post up with one on surrender.

This brings into my mind the idea of those things that happened to us in the past over which we had no control and are powerless to change.  We all know no matter how hard we try we can never have different parents to the ones we did.  Certain traumas that befell us we had little control over. Certain people who came into our lives may have been attracted because of our past and until we can come to understand that we don’t have a lot of power to change things.  I was also just listening to two more Richard Grannon videos on Borderline Personality and emotion re regulation in which he explains that if we are around people flying off the handle or reacting in dysregulated or extreme ways our nervous systems end up dysregulated as well.   We learn to have reactions to triggering situations which remind us of earlier ones and then some of us lash out as well probably out of anger or fear.  It takes some time to learn to step back and in BPD fear of abandonment is a huge trigger.  If someone doesn’t return a call or turn up on time we can react and it feels insanely life threatening at the time since these events are often stirring up older feelings.  Surrendering to them may seem like the last thing we want to do but my experience is that if we find the courage to face them and feel them, in time they do integrate and we learn more about our past.

When we feel the abandonment trauma we need all of our wits about us to catch the reaction and then pause before we amplify it. This is the time we might ask help from a power greater than ourselves to hold us through and help us to feel the fear instead of flying immediately to a response which may prove to be counter productive in getting us what we really need, loving connection with another person and a way to communicate how we felt in response to certain behaviours.

My own fears of abandonment have been triggered a lot over the past 36 hours after opening up to someone about some things that triggered me with them on Saturday.  It’s taken some time to get my nervous system back into a state of calm.  This afternoon I know I am powerless over when or if I will hear from the person again.  I have just been relaxing, watching the videos as well as one of my old favourites Moon Struck.  I feel a lot calmer now.  I don’t know if the price of connection with this person is currently worth the kind of stress it is provoking for me.  Am I meant to be facing these situations from my past in order to heal the recognise the original traum?.  I don’t want to stay stuck there though so after some time of relaxing and surrender I must also take positive steps for self care tomorrow hopefully when the weather is brighter.   For now its just lovely to be able to hand the situation over and relax.

The Antidote to Fear

An excellent post on working with fear.

unfiltered from the heart

When we bury, push against or deny our fears, we ultimately give them more power. Our fears then unconsciously control us, keeping us from peace. That is, until we choose to face our fears. Our willingness to face our fears is the first step.

Fear is held in place by holding our breaths, and contracting when the emotion reads its head; whether we’re gripping the fear, pushing it away or hiding from it.

But everything exposed by the light becomes visible–and everything that is illuminated becomes a light.

~Ephesians 5:13

You see the antidote to fear is light. When we allow the fears to surface, while breathing and allowing the emotions to move through us, we release our fears. To face our fears means to walk into the very places we have avoided, to open sealed doors and allow the emotion to move into the light. It is then that…

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Identifying and working through emotional flashbacks of Complex PTSD

And now for some light relief!

The midlife journey : finding our soul’s bright star

A post I wrote early on in my blogger journey about the crisis of midlife that I was undergoing and an effort I made to articulate it.

Emerging From The Dark Night

How many of us loose our way in midlife?

Could it be that at this time we feel the tension between the false self we developed to navigate the difficult territory of family and world, in places where our true self was never seen, much less affirmed and the true self within us which so needs to grow, express, flourish and flower for our souls to feel real, vital, alive, energised?

Today I have been crying with resonant tears while reading a chapter in the beautiful book by Jungian psychotherapist, James Hollis, Swamplands of the Soul.  This chapter is titled Grief, Loss and Betrayal. He devotes this chapter to the true story of a therapy patient, Devin who was groomed to be the family caretaker and had entered a marriage and a career in which he became imprisoned due to the fact neither he nor his wife were living from the true…

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Anger brewing

Its a while since I woke up feeling annoyed and pissed off with things.  This is partly response to something that happened last night which is triggering a lot of pain and anger I have at times towards my father.  The complexity of it is added to the fact that underneath the anger is also a huge amount of grief which I realised after I forced Jasper and I on an icy walk by the lake today.   The outside temps have not made it past 8 degrees celcius today but I swear the wind chill factor was in the minus degrees.   We pushed it out and by the time I got back to the car I was crying as I realised I know this anger at both parents is something I have taken into every single relationship and most especially with men and when someone tries to tell me I better not do something it just makes me want to explode.

I was not ‘allowed’ to complete my academic studies by my father back in 1980.  According to him it was a waste of time since I was probably only going to get married.  My drug taking and alcoholism escalated from the time I was forced to do secretarial college in 1982.    The next year was a terrible year as my sister tried to take her life in 1982 and then the following year I was in the most god awful mind numbing job for 2 more years before I met my first proper boyfriend who was never over his last partner whose parents deemed him unsuitable.   I wont go into more details than to say I had two terminations of pregancy to this guy who left me on the side of the road 1,000 miles from home with nothing back in 1984.

I know I am still carrying this pain and there were two more very disastrous relationships that caused me even more harm after that.  I could never articulate what it was the was bugging the hell out of me from within and using alcohol on the top of all of that ended with me in a very bad place before I finally got the will to get sober in 1993 when I met my ex husband.  Ours was a relatively calm relationship for 11 years until again I was told what I was and was not to do in order to be loved.

I’m still seething about it and Mars is slowing right down now.  Its been on 7 degrees Aquarius for some time now and will finally move backwards in about 8 – 9 days very close to inconjunct aspect with my natal Pluto in the first house and I am feeling extra rebellious lately and I know when I get like this its not uncommon to blow relationships sky high so I do have to be careful.

Anyway I have also to be careful not to project old wounds onto new relationships with someone who seems very different and most of the time feels genuinely concerned when he does anything to trigger and upset me.   Yesterday I was playing devils advocate as once again I find myself stuck in a situation I have no power much over or control. This is when I start to get triggered and get all rebellious.  I was very close to booking myself a holiday to New York last night just to get some time out.  I found a deal online for late July because I know when I get this frustrated it can be hard to contain my energy and its better for me if I am doing something constructive with it rather than just letting myself be acted upon or paralysed by outside circumstances. That for me is a recipe for disaster.  This time round I need to take some action and make sure I put myself in a place where I have some say over how things ultimately unfold and over just what is and is not good for me emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

Trauma and silence

Breaking through the deafening silence of trauma is never easy… but the following blog involves some important insights that may help us.

Emerging From The Dark Night

The following is partly verbatim extract from the video of Diane Langberg’s talk on trauma I reblogged earlier, and partly some of my own thoughts interspersed.  We so badly need to speak about our trauma and be understood, heard and validated.  The paradox is that so much of trauma is hard to articulate at first, our body carries a hidden burden that often is so difficult to give form and substance to, but it is so important that we try.

Trauma silences human beings partly because there are no words to really describe what that was a like.  It brings emotional darkness, isolation because you feel like nobody cares or even if they did they wouldn’t understand,  it makes time stand still because we get so lost in what happened we cannot see ahead we have lost hope

Trauma heals through : talking :  tears:  time.

When somebody does not talk when all of that…

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Honouring your fragments

There may be days weeks months or years

When all of hope will seem to be gone

And you will find your self

Knee deep in the broken shards

Of your lost or never fully put together life

 

How easy for me

Who is sitting calmly here

In a world bereft of such pain

To say you are insane

Or lack the will to go on

And how can I say whether or not

You will one day find the way

To arise and resemble again

No my friend

This I cannot do

As my heart is neither privy or wise to

The agony you endure

Nor knows the way to address

Deeper pain and real experiences you may have lost the way to

And yet what I can do

Is speak as the one who spent years inside this place

And found a way back out again

And that is why I say

Please don’t give up

Reach out for help

Do not swallow down your pain

If you must scream it out

Keep seeking for the ones who know and understand

How it hurts to be broken into fragments

And feel you will never be compete or whole again

And please listen when they say

This is may not be the end

Just place of a painful transition

That leads your soul upon

A healing journey

Through which you learn to honour

The truth of you

How are you?

For new followers. We all need to be heard but its not always easy.

Emerging From The Dark Night

Does anyone else out there find it hard to answer this question, so often?   I know for myself sometimes words cannot really express how I truly feel and then things get lost in translation.   I also find it hard when I try to express in answer to that question and then no one answers.  This happened to me yesterday.  A family member that cut me off shortly after my Mum died finally ‘reached out’.  She said in her message that her pain had to be taken care of first before she could reach out to me.  Part of me understood and thought it was probably a healthy thing to do, another part of me was pretty upset about it.  Why not just send a message at the time to say so?  Maybe she didn’t have the words.  I try to keep an open mind.  I cannot know how…

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I want your body

No. I don’t mean this in a purely sexual way.  What I am talking of here is how in this world where so much is getting electronic, ethereal or digital and how our mind creates all kinds of stories and trips is of how the body is often left far behind and we lose touch with the need to just ‘BE’ with another body.  Relating face to face.

Okay maybe a lot of this yearning of mine is currenltly coming to mind as I realise how disconnected I had to be from my own body when trauma hit so as to not feel the full onslaught or of how it was at the tender age of 17 when the prospect of an emboded relationship with a male sparked so much fear lodged in me from a Catholic education which taught me to despise or demonise the female body.  I had my car crash on the back of my first sexual awakening that got aborted and now my therapist believes at 56 I am starting to need to re do my adoloesence as so much got stolen from me then.

Well the man who has shown up in my life is online.  He is signed up with the forces till March and may only possibly be able to get out early due to a medical issues and we have made this connection since mid March 2018 which has just been growing and deepening but the frustration is we cannot meet.  I know my Mars energy is burbling from the basement as Mars goes retrograde for two months on 25 – 26 of June which is the anniversary of my second accident in 2005 on the first annivesary of my husband’s decison to leave me.  Ours was never a deeply sexual relationship.  In many ways we were like brothers and sister or twin souls.  We both lost our Dads in our early 20s and were then left by our partners.  When we met this wound bonded us. But when I went on to do my healing my husband wanted me NOT TO GO THERE and so things broke apart for a reason.  That does not mean I didn’t grieve so deeply the loss of my ex husband and our new life in England, actually its taken all of these past 13 years to come to terms with things and to see ours was never going to be a life time relationship and that this wound was just the repeat theme of three other broken hearts I suffered from 23 to age 29.

Now I am so happy to have another opportunity at love.  I dont want to blow it and luckily I am able to be fully honest with this new friend of mine especially on a day like yesterday when the Mars frustration was reminding me of how it was to be trapped inside a crushed car unable to breathe with pieces of metal inside me and collapsed lung bleeding pleura into surrounding tissue after having been pierced by a broken rib.  And a guy behind me with an oxygen mask I was trying to fight off.  All of that trauam got retriggered following a cranio session back in the UK in June 2005 and I ended up smashed and cut open again waking up after lost time with a paramedic again hovering over me in an ambulance.  Scary shit.  Plus I was 12,000 miles from home all alone.

Love is scary for me.  I know that now but what is scarier is facing a life without the opportunity to experience a fully embodied love in skin.  Today I got a call from my sis asking me for a coffee which was so so great, as some of you know she just got out of hospital after 6 weeks of treatment for anxiety and depression.  We met in the arcade my Mum used to run down alone on those afternoons after school when she had no one, the arcade where my parent’s first business a continental deli was in the 1950s. I made a real effort to get there, cause I know my sis is trying so hard to live again after hospital and all of her grief.  Her husband also left her in 2010 so we know a similar heartache.  We dont talk much of these things but just being with her was good.   There was so much silent history there too, but some of my resentment is fading these days.  I want to grasp every opportunity there is to connect, share time and really live after so many many yaers spent in the wilderness I want to be in a body and relate to others in bodies in a really present way I really want to full embrace life, warts and all knowing my body and psyche has the ability to withstand all of the onslaughts and the courage to summon up and face my deepest fears while answering with love body to body, face to face, eye to eye, heart to heart, soul to soul.