Inner reflections after a break through of emotions and realisations in therapy and wondering.

Yesterday I read a post on a blogger’s despair at the state of the world, just as I was feeling so similarly myself.   I had began to face over the weekend the truth depth of my plight and deep grief which seemed to be able to find no place in the world.  I live at times feeling like such a stranger to other people.  Early, serious or devastating trauma marks our souls in this way.  It removes us and changes our world view irrevocably.  I started to write a post about this deeper schism on Sunday night after hearing an interview with psychiatrist Ian McGilchrist in which he spoke about how many of our former ideas about the brain are now being proved by quantum physics to be wrong such as one side of the brain ruling logic and the other intuition.  The one important thing he said was also just this, that when we suffer trauma, loss or deep depression our perception of the world changes irrevocably.  We are opened to deeper darker realities and at the same time as a result of this process there can be a capacity for a kind of spiritual awakening, a deep awareness of the split or schism that is all around us.

To me this concerns the split between spirit and nature,  between idealist often wounded man who is unconscious of how his deeper animal instinctual and instinctive side suffers in a world fraught with so much loss and early wounding that can permanently mark souls and set them on a negative course of seeking power rather than love.  They seek power and control over all that seems or was powerless in them because the ability to be vulnerable and admit where true power lays is too much for them to bear.

I am sure if we looked deep into the hearts and souls of all leaders who proved to become demonic in just such a way we would find these kind of schisms or wounds which they hide from themselves then setting up power agendas seeking scapegoats to displace their unconscious rage and deep vulnerability and powerlessness onto.  Or they struggle with a primal or original anger over a lack of power that is then displaced rather than fully processed and contained.

To fully see into the depth of suffering and decimation such souls can reach we only need to look to any of the numerous world wars which had caused such wreckage not only to human life but to nature.  The scared battle fields of Europe are now green again but their soil has been drenched not only with blood but with burning and grief.   That pain never really goes away although it appears to have disappeared from the ether. The loss of fathers and brothers lives on in the impact on millions of lives and this is just one war in a later part of our history as humans where conflict and polarisation is so much in the nature of things, perhaps even possibly for the purpose of evolving consciousness?  (I ask!).

It seems to me that silent pain which remains buried can cause us such suffering.   And there at times seems to be so much pain on earth that it seems difficult to know how souls can bear it, of course we act it out, we are human animals who suffer and in our suffering look for solutions.

Yesterday in therapy with Kat I was finally able to cry for myself and to fully recognise the depth of my suffering a plight after 6 years of awful trauma which spanned the years 17 to 23, that was not the end point at all for the reverberation of the multiple traumas I suffered from 17 was intense, a major near death accident which stole from me a sense of agency and safety in the world,  The major illness of my sister that led not only to bodily damage but deep psychic damage and later abandonment, several terminations of pregnancy and involvement in a relationship with someone who could never really love me to due to the unrequited love he carried for an earlier love, then my father’s illness and death.  My own loss of a path to the true self after being forced to abandon my studies to become a secretary and then the inevitable descent into addiction, the final way of making my conscious suffering unconscious for long, long years and then the turning point of recovery at 31 where the hardest work really just began.

In session yesterday I read my previous post on unfreezing from trauma’s affects to Kat, my therapist.  As I sat with Kat I had an image of young me in a frozen ice cube which was the image/metaphor of how trauma left me.  It then morphed into a vision where several ice cube ‘mes’ were in a glass and I poured scotch whiskey over them and I was freed as the scotch whiskey thawed the ice.  That was a powerful metaphor for what happened to me when I drank, the real me could be released and ‘unfreeze’ and I could be my wild primal self, the one I lost access to years ago and yet I also sometimes became something else after the effects of alcohol.  But as a child this is also what I observed my parents do.  Alcohol was the first thing they sought after the end of a long day of striving.

Yesterday I felt the longing for my father emotionally that I expressed in another poem on Sunday night Remove the Barricades as well as the one on unfreezing.  I was remembering how my panic attacks and hunger at 5 pm relates to that being the time that Dad would come home and hardly say one word, just go up the hallway put his wallet in the cupboard and change into his gardening clothes go out into the garden and stay there until scotch time.  I would wait for my Mum inside to come home by 6 and then run around after her trying to be seen.

I felt yesterday the terrible sadness and emptiness of that emotional neglect that was hidden down so deep inside I could not know or feel it at all. I do believe this is how it is for all of us unmirrored children, longing and longing for something so essential to a soul’s true blossoming but when absent so deeply unconscious so as to leave the most painful wound we feel but don’t really fully understand; one that can and does dog many of us to the gates of insanity, illness or death.

Difficult as it was to feel the pain yesterday with Kat in that session I finally felt the tight band around my chest snap as the dam that held back the feelings I have buried over 40 years just flooded out.  I have cried in therapy a lot before and in my silent moments at home as well as with partners and family but never before to this depth.  I honestly felt then that the amount of grief I have had to carry over terrible emotional traumas I have witnessed over long years would be entirely too much and was too much for just one small human body to bear, and sitting with me yesterday, Kat said just that to me. Its a wonder that I survived.

That thought was uppermost in my mind yesterday too.  For I did survive the accident at 17 and the one at 43 when I was on the brink of the unconscious past with all its deeply repressed feelings and wounds bursting forth but only just and my body was the being that suffered and held it all and waited patiently for me to awaken needing me to know and be unfrozen to feel finally the full and massive impact and finally undo the illusion that there was something wrong with me that I in some way caused.

I realised something else more deeply yesterday too, and that is that the traumas that affected me also happened to the rest of my family but they never knew the impact of that full body trauma of being almost crushed to death in a car at 17 on the brink of adulthood like young Persephone out in the field collecting flowers with her mother.  Older members of my family were protected by the family system to a degree but as the youngest I was not and neither was my older sister.  Because my parents decided due to the scarcity and emotional poverty of their own young childhoods to abandon the emotional child in them I had to carry it, not only for them but for my two siblings too.  My older sister came to grief trying to live this parental legacy of overachievement on the material rather than emotional plain and her suffering was the suffering I tended to as best I could in recovery as the only emotionally awake and conscious one (sorry if this sounds like bubris followers, but I believe it to be true!).  The burden of my love for her as well as my quest to know the emotional truth up close rather than half a world away brought me back here at the end of 2001 all around the anniversary of my father’s illness and death.  I realised that yesterday.   I was in the process of trying to make years of unconscious suffering conscious at that point and my husband could not cope with his own feeling lest alone mine and so in the end that marriage was put to death.

In the second relationship 2007 – 2011 I was also not allowed to grieve.  In fact I fully faced over the weekend the impact of the devastating emotional cruelty shown to me in that relationship when his own father became ill and died and that sparked my own deep father wound and grief over the loss of my emotionally absent father who always sought distance. I took all the longing for his love as well as my deep need to be held and cherished into that relationship and perhaps it was not my partner’s place to heal it but an emotionally present partner would have been there and held me while I cried rather than savaging me emotionally and calling me names.  He would not have abandoned me nearly every morning to go surfing or work every single morning even when he didn’t have to sparking up all my own wounds and yet on some level I needed the pain over that relationship to bring to consciousness in me earlier pain that was so deeply buried around my father.

I do feel now that my father did love me but he never gave me what I really needed and so I came to believe I had to bury all need,  or let it come out in surreptitious ways.  I learned to long but to hide that longing under a cover of addiction or people pleasing.  Young sensitive me needed an emotionally demonstrative father but I had a father instead who in many ways was locked up inside his own body with so much unspoken and silent that I felt or intuited but did not have words, so now is it any mystery why I suffer and struggle to be close to others?  And isn’t it a miracle that in some way I can but there is always that fear and so many shadows of doubt there too?

Yes, there are such mysteries in life, deep emotional mysteries we have hidden down deep inside, mysteries that so long for us to uncover them, to become curious of them instead of acting them out.  There are deeper longings and soul aches and feelings of vulnerability and powerlessness that we hide even from ourselves which can drive and drive us all in deeply unconscious ways and drive some to suicide.

There is so much more I could write about here and this post has been in drafts for several days.  It is a bumbling attempt to articulate more stages of my journey as well as realisations into the nature of suffering I see so often around me.  It seems so often the unconscious acting out of a troubled or stress filled past leads so many of us to even deeper stress or trauma.  In my case that was true but it was not the end of my life but a kind of turning point in becoming able to become aware on some level.  If I beat myself up at times for how little I have so called ‘achieved’ in life I need only look to the inner world to see how much I have achieved in my journey of sobriety to become more conscious awake and aware as a soul. And isn’t that worth more that outer acheivements?  I am not sure.   But I will continue to explore and write and think and dream and also grieve at those times when I am not also singing and dancing with joy at the realisation of how much I survived.