Being told we need to focus on the positive can feel invalidating and frankly annoying if we have had or have a lot of trauma and pain and continue to suffer from the lingering and oh so hard to heal effects of trauma, abuse or other stress. Often, however we end up unwittingly creating more problems for ourselves by the way we have reacted out of hurt, suffering and pain. This is why I do believe a serenity practice such as the one I shared in a video post by the Buddhist monk Thick Nhat Hahn a few days ago where we just mindfully embrace our pain is so helpful and important. The last thing we want to be told is that we shouldn’t suffer when we do, but at the same time a lot of suffering comes out of a desire NOT to suffer and fully enter the pain. We set up resistances, we get angry all over again. We tell ourselves things such as how much we hate it all, how unfair it is. And then we have a complete focus on the negative, everything can become globally bad.
I am sharing this partly because yesterday when I posted my post You Are Worthy, shortly after it I got one of those attacks myself. It started with me not being able to find something and my focus quickly shifted to all the negatives including looking at myself in the mirror with no teeth and seeing how much the traumatic events of the past few years seem to have aged me. The truth is there has been so much illness and ongoing trauma for the remaining members of my family here, my mother sister and I in recent years and it has taken its toll. And at times I feel so sad and angry we have been so alone with it. That’s a really painful truth that does not need to be denied. But the truth is when I focus on how difficult it is the steps I need to take to feel better are not as easy to take.
I had whole years following the break down of my last abusive relationship where I struggled to move forward in a state where I spent whole days in a spin or unable to move or take any action to move into positive habits. My soul was literally so crushed and hurting at that point I had almost given up hope. Then family members had injuries, mental health problems or illnesses. I had to watch my older sister have several breakdowns and go on the Russian roulette wheel of medication and the shock treatment. My other sister died a year later and then my second sister was diagnosed with breast cancer toward the end of 2015. I was then diagnosed myself with cancer a few months later and most sadly I got the diagnosis a few days after my 54th birthday.
The one thing I will say about having cancer is that it makes you so very scared. I remember having to focus on my breath and sing a song to myself as I underwent the very painful needle biopsy. The needle went in about 4 times and I was crying and thinking that this was really the final straw that would finally break me. I got through it by singing a Carpenter’s song and then I had the thought : “what ever happens you can face this, you are going to face it” and I did, but the months following were full of anger and rage and feelings of such deep hurt and unfairness. In the past years I had been there for others in all of their struggles and illnesses. Who now was there for me?. My sister went overseas for a wedding a few days after my surgery and Mum hurt herself and was unable to offer me any practical support. Luckily, I had two friends who turned up out of the woodwork and came to stay with me but the truth is after the operation I was grieving for my entire life and every painful choice that had led to here. It was a fine line for me between focusing on the hurt, anger and pain and taking the steps to self care and self soothe.
After I had been so dismissed and put down at the end of the last relationship, also my sense of self value had been obliterated. My ex ended it by calling me names and putting the blame on me, guilting me for my Complex PTS which he could not handle, reacting in rages when ever I showed genuine grief or other feelings. With the benefit of maturity I see it came out of his own old hurt and I could have chosen not to respond but I really let him have it at that point. I would be buggered if I didn’t stand up to some of the nasty things he said to me. And so I did and that ended the relationship.
Getting out from under the feelings that I had failed so badly and reframing the entire experience to see that I was a person with Complex Post Traumatic Stress (no I wont add the word Disorder at the end of that) has helped me no end. For this I have needed to try out about four different therapists until I found this present one and she helps me to see how much I undervalue myself at times and forget the amount of trauma I have had to deal with.
I headed this post focus on the positive because slowly I am beginning to see that this is what helps me most from focusing on all the negative and pains from the past. But I also don’t do myself the disservice of denying my pain. Its taken me some time to learn to do it but now when I am in pain or suffering I actually just sit with myself and let myself feel it and often I try NOT to amp it up with negative things I can tell myself. I am slowly learning to self soothe when I am in distress.
Yesterday I struggled with this and was nasty and mean to myself but I had the ability to make lunch and then get myself out for a walk with Jasper. I also visited my Mum again after I had made sure I did all the things I needed to do to bring sunshine into my day. Much as my Mum has hurt me at times, I am beginning to see that she is just a flawed human being who as an only child struggled a lot and didn’t really know at times how not to be selfish. When my father died it was all about her pain, it seemed to me that she didn’t see mine at all. And I have needed people to see my pain. I feel we all do. At the same time at times she DOES see my pain. It happened on the weekend twice and yesterday she shared how sad she feels to know how much both my sister and I struggle and how much it hurts to know I had to loose my teeth and have this denture. She was also crying about the fact of how when she dies she worries that we will be able to cope. So my Mum is really not a totally selfish person but at times in my mind I see she can and does become all bad to me and then I can forget the good things she has done and all the ways she has tried to be there. What I am seeing lately is how much I actually pushed away in sobriety from support she tried to give due to my own fear of being overpowered and so the very thing that may have helped me was what I resisted and it has taken some time to see it.
I do believe in the power of astrology. Mercury is really the planet that weaves all this perception and insight together. In mythology he moves between the upper and lower/inner and outer worlds in his winged sandles. I see him as a spiral dancer that with our thoughts takes us to heights where we see expansion and hope and then down to depths where were are drowned in suffering and touch our pain. In the past three weeks he has been moving backward or really our earth has in relationship to Mercury. This is akin to being in a train that has stopped and then reverses and we see the scene outside the window moving back to a former point of reference. During Mercury retrograde we may get to see things in a new way or have a chance to alter our perception. Mercury starts to stand still on 28 degrees of Leo over the next 2 days. He is right on my natal Uranus in the first house and if you don’t know Uranus is the planet that revolves in the opposite direction to all the other planets in the universe. In my own case I see that as partly a kind of avoidance to attachments which I feared may weigh me down but also partly a way of turning ones head all around to views different facets of a complex situation and maybe getting a big spun out in the process.
I don’t know if any of this makes sense to readers but I do feel this latest transit is changing my perception on myself and my trauma dependent on all the work I have done up to now. I feel myself in some way breaking the power of its magnetic hold which kept me trapped in a personal underworld I never fully understood the complexity of until now full of anger, pain, feelings of betrayal, disempowerment, neglect and hurt. I am seeing more and more how so much of what happened to me in so many ways was not personal, it was about a far larger stress drama going on around me that in so many ways affected me so deeply. The way my mind made sense of it was to see it in black and white terms either I was to blame and a horrible person or those around me were but the truth was really something far more complex with so many different shades and layers and paradoxes to it was happening. I guess the psychologically minded would see and understand that as a big step forward. I am no longer ‘splitting’ as much.
I see evidence of this kind of polarised splitting all around me in the culture too. Last night I watched a 60 minutes story on a black man in the States who is an obsessive train hijacker. He has a compulsion to get on trains and buses and take them for a ride and the roots of his compulsion lie in early sidelining, isolation and bullying in his life as a young man. I was full of joy when I saw this is what he made of his own suffering, he was so full of light and life with not a ‘bad’ bone in in his body. Of course now he has been diagnosed with aspergers and that label is how they try to make sense of him and he is being punished for it. He has spent years in prison despite the fact he has never hurt anyone with his ‘joy rides’.
In a revealing interview one of the counsellors had this to say about Darius. “in this system if you don’t fit into one of their boxes, they will put you into a box”. Darius in some way was trying to find a creative solution to his past pain and suffering. I could not help but smile. Does the system have to demonise and punish him for it? Perhaps reviewing this post back that is an apt story for Mercury retrograde with a Uranian tinge!
I’m not sure how this all connect to this blog which started out saying to look for the positive but in some way we need creative solutions for the pain that trauma leaves with us. Could it be that our trauma came to alter our world view and deepen our understanding of our complex and mixed up world? That is what I am coming to believe. I also believe that there is so much beauty to be found when we get free of the fixing negative stare of perfectionism which in some way refuses to accept traumas should occur. We need to begin to recognise trauma and its affects as something that can awaken us as humans to new dimensions of being, understanding, empathy and experience. In the end its all in our orientation and way of perceiving. Can we dig deeply enough to find the love and positivity that lies hidden deeply within the pain and suffering of trauma? Love for ourselves and all we have experienced? Love that lies there like a wrapped up package, just waiting for us to open or unwrap it?
Emerging From The Dark Night 