A post I wrote some time ago. To clear out my drafts folder prior to the eclipse is a task I have set myself over the next few days:
I awoke today and looked out at the ravage that Friday’s storm had wrought but today skies are showing some blue and the storm out there mirrored the intensity of what blew up with my brother’s visit yesterday. My body feels all mixed around and I tried to call my therapist and then hung up, I cant go into the reasons here but at the one time I really needed to get her support she is at a fucking conference and I wasnt abusive when I tried to tell her that clients should come before this kind of formality she didnt like it and got all parental on me. I just hung up because she was on the hop and under enough stress anyway and the way she responded to me cut me like a knife. I was very anxious and all my abandonment fear and terror made my heart beat so fast but I just focused on my breath and tried my best to self soothe.
Its a bit of a contradiction or paradox to try to write a post in words about how so much of our conflicts and pain lay beyond words, buried so deep in our body, rising like a storm or a tide or a surge through us, are they the energy of our spirit and soul trying to make itself known?
I dont have any answers today. What happened with my brother yesterday threw me and I saw how everything for him is judged in terms of finances. Emotions are a compliaction, he didnt like it when I got very vocal with my opinions and was trying to put me in my place. I didn’t buckle under but he did shame me to an extent when he tried to say I was being abusive for raising my voice. He sees things in a very different way to me and he is entitled. As a very very wealthy guy he has the ability to help others but sadly he just keeps his multi million dollar empire amongst his family. I dont know when enough money will be enough for him and I dont understand that tight fistedness but its his right. I have spoken my mind. End of story.
What I did see after yesterday was is how much I care for my family and want them to be okay but sometimes it comes at the expense of my own boundaries and life. I am feeling great sadness for my Mum at the moment in the deeply lonely life she leads. It must be like this for a lot of people but then when I think about it she does have some other small support outside of my sister and I. One of the things I bought up with my brother yesterday is how my sister and I try to support Mum but he keeps a great distance with only two or three visits a year, Mum is never invited to his big family Christmases. His wife hates my Mum and that will never change. He has even more limited contact with all of us because of this. So much of it is out of my hands and I can do nothing. And maybe I just need to focus on my own life. But until my mother dies I will be there to the best of my ability. I know the cost of cutting off love energy that wants to move forward but may be resisted is huge, after reading Mark Wolynn’s book on inheritied family trauma in which he explores he damaging impact of unresolved emotional disconnects.
Today I need to pull my energy back into my own life. I need to spend quiet time with my dog Jasper out in the fresh air. I cried a lot this morning with those deep letting go tears which came out of feeling the entire and painful impact of 55 years of living all the deep sadness around my older sister who had such a broken and traumatic life ending up isolated from part of our family due to their lack of deep empathy and compassion. My sister was such a kind person and never ever bore any restentment towards the ones who sidelined her.
One lovely thing that did come out of yesterday was that I deepened a connection which has been forming lately with my sister’s second son’s wife. I was able to talk everything through with her about the way my brother let her and my nephew down. She was very philosophical about it. Maybe in the end my brother did the right thing. I dont really believe that, what I see is that my brother is unconsciously living out my father’s emotioanl disconnect pattern with his own family. It occured to me this morning that my Dad had three sisters and he had three daughters. He disconnected from his sisters who grieved that disconnection, only in the later years of her life did my aunt open up to me about this. I see that pattern playing out with my brother and his older son who keeps a distance from us. But who knows maybe my brother is keeping up a healthy separation for his own good. He is building his own empire with his family, an intact family dynasty that no one else can penetrate. He told me yesterday he realised he is blinkered in his view and narrow in his focus. My niece in law said she thought it was a good thing I had confronted my brother. That it may make him think about some things. There were chinks of honesty that opened between us yesterday and he revealed some things I think he keeps hidden in his soul.
Anyway today I awoke very conscious of my Mum’s pain at being sent away at 14. I discovered this week that my grandmother sent my Mum into domestic service at that age for a year. I had thought that my Mum rebelled and got a tailoring job after only a few weeks or so, but she revealed on Wednesday that Nana sent her to live with a family only a few miles away and Mum had to clean and take care of the baby and was being paid only a very small wage, she was there for over a year (although could not remember the exact length of time). Mum was desperately sad in that job and in time she got herself an apprenticeship with a tailor, but when she told my grandmother she hit the roof and screamed and yelled at my Mum “who do you think you are to disappoint the Oliphant’s like that?” I was sharing in my therapy this week I often hear that kind of voice in my psyche but only connected to where it came from after Mum told me this last week.
However the thing that really brought me undone this morning was how I was sent overseas after my father died. I realised Mum had done the same thing but in a different way (and then she remarried like my Nana and there was no space for me to come back home). I was trying to bind back again to family in later years when my husband and I went to live overseas when I was 6 years sober and I felt the need to come back at the time of year my father got sick and died. I was trying to understand at a conscious level that deeper abandonment wound which actually has even more ancestral repeats that go back at least 3 generations.
Anyway all of this occuring to cells in our bodies can make me feel at times as though I am in a washing machine, or whirlpool inside an ocean gigantic at time . I feel the tides spiral up and down my spine in ways I could never explain in words and its only on Friday when I typed out the story of Gretchen who was suicidal at 39 and wanting to kill herself due to an unconscous legacy of family trauma concerned with the holocaust that I associated the coiling and uncoiling my system goes through with what Mark Wolynn witnessed happend to Gretchen as she unravelled the deep grief she was carrying along the maternal ancestral line. I know I carry my Mum’s body in my body, separation is a kind of myth in some way and yet a process I can assist on an energetic level when I allow my soul to speak about this old carried pain in a way that is beyond words. I am a bit skeptical about talk therapy lately and part of me wants to end it. I feel the talk talk talk is not necessarily the feeling that is needed to free us from enmeshments and psychic entanglements which can last generations. I make more progress when I do the exercises and speak the healing scentences he gives in his book because then I feel my soul speak to me in a language far beyond words. I feel a rightness, a reconciliation and a homecoming that can never be found in any therapy office or place outside the sacred temple of my body and soul.
Emerging From The Dark Night 