What happened to trust

I just spoke to my Mum.  I heard the excitement she is feeling about the prospect of my nephew’s visit with his family.  I felt the love and the grief that she holds inside over the difficult and traumatic life of my sister, who died three years ago.   I felt my own fear of being close to them.  That there is so much loss and I would love to be able to pour it out but instead what I have to do is just be there for me and hold it to myself, possibly share it her and with Kat, my therapist.  I know I am in deep grieving for all of my life up to this point.  I feel it as a flood of tears which I am crying now.   I know I have to let the tears out.  I know I have to feel them.  I know that deep down inside somewhere is the part of me that was and is a small child who loved her older sister so very much and missed her and was so confused when a bad man came to take her away.  At least that is how he seemed to me at 3.  In the end he did abandon her after things didn’t work out here cause my sister tried so hard to be successful that she had a stroke.   He sent her back with a one way ticket and disappeared with the four boys who were like my brothers.  They were lost to me at a very painful time and a few years later my father died suddenly. How could I trust in any relationship after that.  Was it any wonder I took such fear into my relationships with men.  They were always clouded by a past loss that I could never fully grieve or know.  And then when after 6 years my addiction was finally arrested and the grief began to come up, I was not able to go forward in the therapy as I needed 3 days a week, my husband thought it was too much.  I felt scared and missed my Mum and was worried for my sister now in a home, so I came home.  I could not leave them when my husband asked me too.  I could not say they were not my first priority when my next partner asked me to choose between him and them!  They were my family. They were my blood.  No one else lived with my sister and absorbed her grief in those years after the abandonment and suicide attempt but my Mum, Dad and me.  Dad died and Mum and I were left alone and then I went away alone, so far away, just as my father died and I drank down those painful things I witnessed and never spoke to a single soul about them for years.

Writing all of this is now taking the tears from me.   But I needed those tears.  How I wish I had been allowed to be sad and grieve for what was lost.  How I wish the discomfort or inadequacy of others had not forced me to ‘put it behind me’, ‘move on’, or ‘shut up!’  How I wish I could have trusted that first therapist and said to my husband “No, I need this.  This is for me.  You must not take it from me!’  But I wasn’t strong enough.

But that is now why I must let it all pour out here.   I cannot afford to stay silent.  I cannot let my inner critic tell me at times that writing about it is self indulgent and bad for me.  I will say this I most absolutely do not want to stay stuck in the past.  What happened to my sister happened years ago but its deeper impact encoded in cells has had repercussions all along the line for me.  And I am still grieving those. But, oh wow, how much I want to live not apart from this painful but because of it.  Because there was just so much life cut down all around me until it felt like I was standing in a war zone of wreckage and death.  It seemed to be all I knew.  But I know there is more at least I hope. Can I trust there is a life for me outside of this, Maybe, but in order to get there I cannot abandon the past that shaped me, traumatic as it has been. I don’t want it to define me but I also need to honour it for what it really was and for its true impact.

(Reading this back I see so clearly how I never got to separate from all of this trauma and from the trauma bond.  I had to come back to Australia to deal with it here for some reason but part of me feels it would have been better to undertake the healing so far away.  To be close, to be apart, it is such a painful dichotomy of my life.  So much is still incomplete and not fully resolved for me but I guess all of this is about the process of getting there, if and when I ever do, if or whether, there is in fact a ‘there’ to get to!  )