I wrote this post last week. I seem to be slowly reclaiming my energy after the flu struck me down just over two weeks ago. This latest illness has shown me how stringent I need to be with self care.
I have been in deep in so much trauma over the past week. The flu I had reminded me of how body symptoms of pain have never been far from me for more than a few hours over the past years, since I returned here to my home town. Most days I am fighting them from the moment I get up until well into the early hours of morning and today I have become aware that there is a lot I do to keep the patterns operating. The most stressful things are these : In an ongoing preoccupation to get some attention from my Mum I keep reaching out only to feel I get hurt. The one good thing was that while I have been sick she really stepped up to the mark and made a serious effort to get over here and give my some assistance. I know that deep inside my soul for many years has been a buried a longing and grief over all I needed from her which she could not provide. I have finally accepted it will never come in the way I needed in the past. I need to make my peace with it and allow myself to know that now I can take care of myself and that it is not her job, longing for it or trying to pursue it any more is doomed.
Its taken me some time today but today I have really let go. I have tried to keep a balance between pottering around my house and taking care of things that needed it in the absence of feeling well. I lost so much blood over the past week from ongoing nose bleeds and this afternoon one of the clean up tasks was to get the blood off what I could including the walls of the toilet. I know it sounds gruesome but it was as if a war or stabling had gone on in my home over the past few days. I was reminded of a nightmare I had when I first started therapy back in 1999. In it I was standing in a while bathroom and blood was running everywhere, it was a kind of prophesy dream. When I wrote in a prose piece last when and then I bled it was actually true, I have been bleeding and bleeding, which was my body telling me, Deb I am in so much pain and stress SOMETHING HAS TO CHANGE. What is changing is I have made a pact today to not allow any stress into my life. If it looks like something might be too stressful for me I will say no.
I stood by after my sister’s suicide attempt in 2013 and didn’t set that boundary. It might sound callous to say I feel I should have kept my distance but my sister recovered in time all due to her own efforts I don’t feel anything I did or any of the stress I went though over it helped me at all, it just made me sicker. It was only just 13 months later and my other sister died in a very sad way after being emotionally abandoned for years. Again I said ‘yes’ to her sons being here even thought they drank and smoked compulsively over the 5 days leading up to and on the night of funeral came home blotto and woke me up, when I was trying to grieve my sister they were putting shit down their throats so they didn’t have to fucking feel it. I fucking sucked that up too. I would not do that today.
I have been in such pain in my body because I have not been saying no. When one of my nephews left after the funeral he did apologise to me. He said “I am sorry Deb we really did violate the beautiful sanctuary you have here!”, so he knew! I wanted to provide a refuge for them which I did but having all the pain around and not being able to share in the midst of it honestly, well it was hard.
Anyway it is all in the past now. Those years of trauma back here wont come again. Hopefully my sister’s spirit is a peace now. I need to let her go I need my own life. My other sister is doing as well as she can, she has given me some support while I have been ill in terms of practical needs but there isn’t an emotional sharing that occurs between us that much, the peace I will find had to come from deep down inside my soul. I no longer want to be that lost wounded wandering one driven half crazy and out of her head as I was in all the lost wilderness years that I wrote of in a poem the other day.
There is a deep part of me that has known its own personal underworld of hell that for so many years has lived on then gone dormant or got buried into the deep unconscious only to rise its serpent head again at the onset of triggers/anniversaries. As I contemplate the trajectory of the past week or so leading into the current severe infectious illness I see that it summoned up the time which extends from mid September to Dec 24 which was the period I spent in hospital when I was 17. Dad’s final journey into hospital took place on 24 Dec too and he was dead by 8 January so pretty much from mid September onward in most years I am in the land of triggers.
Sobriety date for me is Dec 6 so I find also that my entire addiction history seems to awaken around this time of year as it also comes close to the date of my wedding anniversary on Oct 16. All these critical events and traumas may seem long gone but they live on in the psyche even many years later because in mid life we are engaged in deep process of unburying and grieving those old ghosts which need to be honoured. The path I have travelled in sobriety has been agony and that is not exaggeration. What I have endured would have broken a lot of people if they didn’t learn to set boundaries. Boundary setting I now know without a doubt is essential to self care. We cannot have emotional containment and integrity without it. We need to be able to own pain and know without a doubt where it comes from. What things trigger our pain and leave us feeling unsafe, what things make us feel safe, nurtured and cared for. My experience is that few people in ordinary life would have a clue of what I have endured in my life, they have been happy to judge me for PTSD and Complex PTSD symptoms. I need to be around those who understand the living impact of these in my life, not those who blame, shame, invalidate or don’t understand. It is imperative to my health, emotional life and recovery.
Emerging From The Dark Night 