How was I emotionally unavailable?

This question is one I woke up troubling over this morning.  I was thinking of the times I have had to step out or pull back from relationship with others.  Often I do this to process something that may be going down with someone else, something that happened in our interaction that didn’t gel or felt icky or difficult or where I felt uncomfortable.  In most cases it is not about abandoning them but about not abandoning myself, but for them it can feel like an abandonment if it triggers their past pain.

I think this is what happened in the end in my last relationship.  I left my partner while travelling to go home to be with my cousin who was visiting from Holland for the first time ever,  I offered for my ex to come and even to pay for him but due to the fact he had a dog we could not get into care anywhere he could not come.  My nephew then visited to see my older sister in care who is now dead.  I delayed the return well past my ex partner’s birthday and this hurt him.  “I want to know,” he said to me “who do you love more or is more important, them or me?”  I was gobsmacked to be put in the dilemma I tried to explain how I loved him and them and didn’t feel it was fair to have to choose.  This may have been wrong.

The phone went dead and then he went AWOL for days, not returning any calls and finally I got the nasty email I mentioned a few posts back saying how hard it was to be with such a screwed up, insecure, flighty person.  I can smile sadly now.  He was the one who took flight and was feeling in secure.  If I could have been softer then I may have seen it but instead I got angry and told him if he really thought such horrible things after all I had tried to give in the relationship he could fuck off.  I was fuming.  The phone call then came breaking it off with me.

I look back now and see how it must have made him feel for me to leave to go others.  It had been a very harsh road trip we were on anyway all geared to his needs and wishes with me along for the ride.  Along the way I got stung badly by sea lice after swimming after being left alone for hours while he went fishing and then left alone at the campsite while he went off fishing again for hours with new friends.  That was a trigger for me of sad fishing/abandonment experiences of my own childhood.

It is good to have a chance to write about these things today.  Its now five years since that email came and I have done a lot of therapy work to work through the deep emotional abandonment pain triggered in me from the break up.  I see that he lacked insight into himself and emotional maturity.  I did not intentionally emotionally abandon him but in some small way I may have.    In the end we just ended triggering each other’s emotional wounds and scars.  I wasn’t to blame in the way he tried to make me feel I was.

As someone with a degree of astrological insight I can track all of this with our mutual astrology.  The moon in a chart represents mothering.  My ex’s moon was very conflicted.  A conjunction with the planet of wounding and healing Chiron in Pisces showed the depth of the emotional separation scars he carried and were intensified by the planet of awakening and separation, Uranus as well as the planet of deep emotional sensitivity, pain and trauma (which take us into the fire and can prove either destructive or liberating) Pluto.

My moon in Aquarius is ruled by Uranus and shows he would be attracted to someone like me.  My moon is conjunct Saturn planet of deprivation, restriction and aloneness and is amped up in a conjunction to Mars which shows the buried frustration of my own childhood.  I have the Chiron Pisces wound in my seventh house of relationships and this indicates someone who often buries their own assertive impulses in order to get on and get love.  Add to this all of my Neptune squares to personal planets from Scorpio and there is a sense of emotional depths of confusion and pain in relationships which slumber there and are both collective and inherited.

Anyway I seem to have digressed.  I see that my Aquarian moon does often pull back.  I can intellectualise my emotions which can be intense and I feel very wary with my Saturn Moon of being fully engaged only to be hurt again.  I can pull back at times from the spontaneous loving child in me indicated by Uranus in Leo ruling my Moon and my Leo ascendant.  Like everyone else on here and in life I am a stumbling, bumbling human being learning lessons, often making mistakes learning to get up dust myself off and open my heart again.  Did I emotionally abandon my ex?   Possibly but maybe there were lessons there for him too, lessons it would have been easier for him to learn if he stopped blaming me totally and chose to look instead upon his own wounded insides with an open heart and eyes of compassion.

And there were deep lessons for me too, that required a lot of introspection and work.  I could not look to him in the end for my fulfilment, it had to come from me.  Only in learning to love and know my own wounds and depths would help me both to heal and become a person with more depth of awareness and consciousness to take into the next relationship.