There is something to be said for someone who will not admit a wrong.. they don’t get the chance to reconnect with themselves and others, nor learn something and grow : to show humility. (That is to recognize they are just human and not knowing everything at the time or having blind spots or developmental deficits fudged up somehow.) I guess this is why recognizing our own wrong and part in things, as well as our defects of character or emotional and maturation arrests, in terms of admitting and trying to make amends, while also offering both mercy and forgiveness (both to self and others) is such a huge part of the 12 step recovery process.
The Big Book highlights that the more we stay stuck in resentment or a state of non forgiveness the more likely it will be that we drink again or undertake some kind of other behavior that ends up being destructive either to ourselves or to someone else… Case in point was for me yesterday ending up smashing the front glass panel of my oven.. I did it in a fit of frustration, overwhelm and anger and it may have been better to take the anger and frustration and helplessness out on something else.. That said emotional energy needs to be externalized and I know my cancer most certainly came from bottling up a lot of feelings i was not allowed to have around the period my feelings started to open up in sobriety then had to be blocked or shut down due to host of other outer forces. These days I just see that emotional sea I was carrying of parental and multi-generational residues as having been so torrential it was, at times, seemingly impossible for me to stay afloat or have a hope in hell of finding dry land in the midst of it.
I was just reading a post on another site questioning the cause for humans being so violent. Case in point Boko Haram.. the text I woke up to yesterday from Scott said ‘they go on killing just like animals’… that said I do not know what animal (apart from a mixed up human possessed by the devil or feasting on some other idealized justification) just kills out of such an overwhelming contempt and hatred that they erase the being, homes and humanity of other human beings. Who knows if trying to contain that energy and stress Scott is going through wasn’t being ‘held’ by me in some way as an empath and coming out sideways yesterday. This situation with him going on has taken me to breaking point so many times over the past year and that glass oven door shattered as the Moon moved closer and closer to Uranus in Taurus yesterday. Or else it is a powerful matrix of my subconscious bringing me to this encounter with him and his situation out of ‘fate’ or resonant, mirror attraction.
Some of us know what it is like to be on the receiving end of violence and aggression from others. We may have been subjected to it at the hands of parents or siblings.. I just read in his book Like Streams To The Ocean : Notes on Ego, Love and the Things That Make Us Who We Are, by American writer Jedidiah Jenkins an account of how he mercilessly bullied his younger brother for years.. There was actually no motive for him to do it but meanness as he says that his younger brother was never anything but loving to him, despite this he abused the brother both physically and emotionally and in later life even when he knew the right thing to do was apologize for his behavior the apology stuck in his throat. Reading this called to mind how my living sister also bullied me for a lot of years, or stone walled me emotionally, taking me to task in the final years of my addiction treated me and how begrudging her own apologies have been. That said she was doing the best with what she knew at the time.
These days I try to see how it was for my sister to be part of that family we were involved in. . The bullying had a huge impact on me in terms of trust and security issues that last until this day, but I also see that she must not have been getting her needs me either to treat me this way.. Jedidiah actually says that his brother went on to have a happy life, he must have been far more secure in his self concept than I ever managed to be. It was both confusing and difficult turning up to the rooms of AA and blaming myself for the way I used alcohol to numb those feelings for many many years or act out in other ways out of unrecognised unmet needs from childhood.
I cried in so many early AA meetings feeling the suffering of co – addicts that in time I just felt I had to leave ‘the rooms’ and pursue one on one therapy, something neither my husband or mother supported and yet there was always a young side of me that felt the need to cling back and still looks for mirrors in the world who are also suffering (or somehow similarly emotionally, spiritually or physically bogged down and stuck). I take stuff on I need to just walk away from and somehow end up getting enmeshed in their drama. If they co-opt me as a ‘savior’ and it goes belly up often I end up getting the blame for it and in a way it is my fault in the first place for signing up to be put through that for some kind of mixed up, deeply hidden, emotional pay off.
Saturn and Uranus do tend to confront us with harsh realities and both are hitting all of my Neptune inner planet squares right now.. For myself I am beginning to see how I kept myself ‘stuck’ for years. Maybe a lot of the time I also hoped for some kind of ‘rescue’, I am not entirely sure…so many things can be obscured from us growing up in families affected by the long arm of addiction, trauma and other unresolved grief/maturation issues.
There is a saying from AA.. “resentment marks the place where I still consider myself to be a victim”. I may also sign up to be victimized which is a bit of a cop out but also probably the way an old pattern has to keep working out in order to become more conscious for any human being.. In the end I just believe every single thing is, in some way, given to us to grow. For me I am still attempting to mature emotionally and spiritually… I use whatever tools and examples I can find along the way and do firmly believe a loving force that wants me to grow and learn will present me with just the right challenges and lessons for that to happen in my life.. I just have to be open, in Joyce Meyer’s words to the will of God ( for me representing a spirit in life forward force of growth in love) in my life instead of just my own limited self will.. sometimes it is not clear exactly what the lesson is, but if I Keep An Open Mind and pray to be brought ‘into alignment’ I do believe that, in time, answers do come and a path opens up, in the midst of all of that bloody Neptunian fog and confusion.
It won’t matter in ten years” is untrue. It all matters. It just won’t feel like it feels now. For some, it’ll transform from panic into gratitude, from scarcity into strength. But this doesn’t happen to everyone. Some people build themselves on their pain. It defines them. Perhaps the pain is so big that it should. But for most of us, the felt transgressions of growing older and bumping into other people are an invitation to growth. It all matters how we frame it.
Jedidiah Jenkins
