I woke today to find a text with photos of my grandnephews sent to me last night by their Mum and we had a little chat over text about how the oldest son came down with a a very bad flu on arriving home. This was the highly sensitive son of my nephew who I saw as the absorbent one. I commented to my niece in law how much he reminded me of myself at that age, carefully watching everything, absorbing but looking tired and sad. I didn’t say all of that though. I thought of all the underground emotion that accompanied the visit and of how much it would have stirred up for my nephew. Today is also father’s day here in Australia and yesterday Mum finally opened up to me about the pain she and Dad went through when my nephew’s father absconded leaving a trail of debts in his wake which Dad paid but then disappearing and eventually telling the two oldest boys they were on their own and had to fend for themselves.
I thought of how hard my sister was trying to be a part of our family which at that point was 100 percent business focused. Mum and Dad arrived back in Australia from Indonesia following the wash up of World War II with no money at all and had to live with their two small children (my sister the mother of this boy and brother) with my Grandparents. From then on they strove and strove and strove to ‘build a better life’ but in the end that life ended in wreckage. I had my accident, my sister had her stroke and was abandoned at the end by her husband who was probably terrified and in flight from God knows what and then that ended up killing my father, as well as the fact that he smoked and drank a little too much.
Dad was never an alcoholic but alcohol was always used to take the edge off and it supressed the emotions he could not feel from his own generation. As the absorbent one I then became the active alcoholic in response to all the trauma and my older sister also used alcohol to fuel the life of achievement and success that in the end fell apart. And when I think deeply about it I see that all this happened during the 1980’s when that kind of quest for the high life reached a crescendo and materialism began to dominate things far too much, as I see it, a trend which now is causing an even deeper schism for us all collectively.
For the first time yesterday Mum talked to me about what happened and how she felt to see my sister returned to us in such a deprived state when my brother in law sent her home with a one way ticket. She cried about how painful and black it all was and how much she wishes to leave all the hard memories behind. I was crying too at that time about the effects but what I saw when I looked deeper was that my sister in that one tracksuit with an empty bank book in her hand was really a metaphor for something so much more profound and far deeper than just one human life. She was the shadow carrier of what my parent’s were striving so hard to leave behind and as the Sun sign Capricorn her life was a testament to the rocky path of trying to climb a mountain that in so many ways is far too high to climb. She ended up on her knees in the dirt and dust and rubble of a wasteland, drugged to the end of her life for so called bi polar which was probably a reaction to being taken to another country by a husband who actually already had a mistress set up over there. He knew all of this when he took my sister away.
I witnessed all of this come to pass at the age of 20. My own active addiction and quest for love, a flight of epic proportions was well underway in the years to 31 when I finally met my husband and married but none of the inner feelings that drove me were by then in any way conscious for me, it was at age 40 that they began to return, like an emotional Vesuvius pushing apart the tectonic plates of my own psyche and life. It has taken all the work of the past 23 or so years of sobriety to get to grips with the large schism in me that trauma caused over those tender growing developmental years of age 17 to 20 when I saw the broken person my sister had come at the hands of a multi – generational legacy so much larger then her.
In many ways I have been trying to tell this hidden story for the past 13 years. I was thinking so much last night of how the flight back to the UK in 2005 ended in a massive head trauma for me. I was judging myself for running back there in such an unconscious state trying to heal a wound and come to grips with things in a way which left me open to be hurt again. But when I look to all the astrological aspects of that time (Chiron, planet of wounding and healing was smack bang by transit on my natal Mars Saturn Moon conjunction in the sixth house) I see that it was just an awakening and a retriggering of my own deeper resistances and defences, ones I was to a great degree powerless over and didn’t begin with me but had seeds that lay back so many generations in ancestral history (the flight of my gg grandfather from Cornwall, UK following the death of his mother).
What was very much on my mind yesterday after sitting with my Mum and finally crying together while holding hands was how much I inwardly blamed my parents for what happened to my sister all of those years ago. How I took flight out of anger, confusion and more importantly fear, a sheer terror of being consumed by an ancestral monster. But what I also saw was how misguided I was. I was thinking then of some words that the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hann had said in the interview I posted the other day : how most of our suffering arises from wrong perception. He was also saying we need to let people cry out their anger, sadness, fury and grief that arises so that that can be let go and a new perception or healing can come alive.
Most surely I feel my parents worshiped at the wrong alter in the end. The quest for material security ran amok and they didn’t take care of the deeper feminine (and by this I don’t mean women or girls but rather the tender emotional and bodily side of life that must be nurtured for full emotional and spiritual health.) But then as I see it that is the wound that our entire society is suffering so the suffering of me and my family is in no way unique or special… it is really rather ordinary if a tad more extreme in its effects than many others have suffered.
And the effects live on in my life as I use awakened eyes to see the deep schism trauma and thwarted need can bring about in so many lives where hidden tragedy and experiences and all the associated complex feelings lay buried so deep beneath, hidden under a veil of silence, blindness to emotions or forgetting. Or actively hidden under the manic quest ‘to leave it all behind’. But we cannot for the shadow of what we refuse to feel and see is carried in our bodies, in our psyches and in our souls.
And we need all the wisdom, attention, subtlety and mindfulness to sense and feel it and not allow it to drive us mental in the process. For in the end running, denying, defending against the painful truth can only take us so far and we have so many lessons and so much wisdom to learn from turning around and engaging deeply within on both bodily and intellectual levels with our deepest wounds, suffering, pain and trauma. Most truly, trauma is a complex thing that engages and affects us so powerfully. It is a huge something we so badly need to understand and deal with if we are to grow collectively as a species, for so much of our trauma reflects at deeper levels a schism with nature which came about in the industrial age as an attempt to rise above and conquer what really needs to become so much more deeply understood, nurtured, valued and embodied.
Emerging From The Dark Night 