Over the past few months I have become more and more aware of a sense of urgency I carry deep down inside. Some, I guess, would call it anxiety. That feeling that is not fully known but lives in zinging of cells that pulse and almost seem to burst with a precarious electricity that tells of life times that encompassed both desire and threat, the sense that at any moment one could not quite bear the pulsing of life energy so longed damned or dammed that wanted to live but was also on some level terrified to do so.
I wonder a lot about body memory because it happens for me around 5 to 7 in the evening and my birth took place at 7:10 pm. Mum held off going to the hospital as she was in the middle of bottling plum jam to the point that when she arrived I arrived with a rush but at the same time a powerful imprint that is always there for me and accompanies any forward thrust or new beginning is that I question and then try to kill it off. And Mum was trying to hold me back inside. When I told my therapist about this a while back she just raised her eyes and laughed knowing how much Mum can’t be there for me when I so often need her to be.
I try to contain myself at this time of evening. Tonight I haven’t had a spiral attack as I do most days. I had several of them today and they seem to be related to me trying to balance my life energy between activity/creativity and self expression and letting go/rest.
My own mother was left alone as a child at this same time of day. Her mother had to do a cleaning job and so my mother was left alone to get her own dinner. She ached with loneliness. That deep soul loneliness in my Mum is very present lately. I felt it today on the phone when we spoke. I think of her own Mars in Pisces and see how her own desire energy got a bit flooded or dissolved by the influences around her that offered her next to no containment. As a result growing up we lived with her restless intense energy and often outbursts of rage that Dad would just laugh off.. It was a state of high anxiety/hyper alert and how I tried to deal with it was by anticipating her every need so as to defuse any tension while obviously simmering with unconscious resentment not only at her but at Dad who was emotionally absent.
This week reading on borderline psychology in James Masterton’s book on the search for the real self he pointed out that often borderline children have this kind of high intensity mother who has difficulty recognising the true self of the child and allowing him or her to separate together with a father who abdicates responsibility to the mother. He is either often physically or emotionally absent and so cannot help the child with the necessary steps of separation/individuation. In my own life this was the case. My Dad wasn’t ever really there even though he was there. I couldn’t rely on him and when he died on the back of so much earlier trauma I was left alone and then sent away alone.
I never really learned what it was to be in a safe, kind, emotionally supportive relationship and as I have shared I learned to try to manage my anxiety or damaged sense of self by reverting to substances and addictions, not even knowing of my true plight for so many years into sobriety. All of that turning to substances in the absence of human relationship is addressed in James Masterton’s book.
I just wrote prose piece continuing on from this post which I started several nights ago. About how, at this time of day, a ravenous hunger can also descend on me. I am hungry for my own presence and loving attention at that time of day, When I am in my compulsion I reach for food, swallowing down the abandonment depression I feel then. Now I know that the abandonment depression lies at the heart of my reactions at this time of day I am going to go back to Pete Walker’s book on Complex PTSD and read the strategies he talks of to manage it. My inner child needs me to be present with her at this time of day in a loving way to self soothe in more effective ways. I am also aware its a multi-generational imprint I am carrying. My mother was also left alone. I see the times Dad dismissed her frenzies which were signals of her own abandonment depression. He didn’t know what was going on or how to cope so he checked out and laughed it all off. The absent father is a huge part of borderline rage. We also need a healthy available loving inner masculine to set boundaries so we can use self care rather than be sucked into mother hunger playing out unconsciously, this is Mars or Solar energy that can say to the Moon here is a space or place for you to be contained. We need this containment rather than an acting out which just means we replay an earlier wound over and over again unconsciously.
Emerging From The Dark Night 