I had a very good session with my therapist Kat this morning. She helped me make sense of how hard it has been for me to be seen as myself in my family, I was also able to offload some of the guilt I am feeling about the circumstances surrounding my Mum’s fall that led to her death. It was all so traumatic for us to witness my grand niece mid siezure and the way two past significant traumas in our family… my older sister’s falling after a cerebral bleed and my own accident were retriggered in that event when my nephew panicked and the paramedics were called in and started to interfere with Lyra mid process. My therapist asked me what about it disturbed me so much and I said how they were even in the hospital sedating her and pinning her arms down when she tried to emerge from under whatever they had given her. It was like watching a wild animal who was needing so much to move and live and throw off the trauma, something trauma specialist Peter Levine talks about a lot in his book on trauma Waking The Tiger. I am surprised I stayed in the hospital for as long as I did having to witness all of that and key scenes of it replay over and over in my mind especially at night and in the early hours of the morning.
The guilt I own is only over the fact I pressed my Mum to accept my nephew’s desire to visit but the truth is she didnt feel up to it, so I didnt fully respect her boundary and that is a mistake I regret. I didnt cause her to fall, that was a result of her doing too much the following day and not asking for our help. But then how could she when we had all been a witness to so much trauma on the Monday afternoon? So what I did played a part in my Mum’s fall in putting her under presssure but it came out of a desire for us to be connected and not separate. I cried about it today in therapy and acknowledged how I REALLY feel. I feel a lot looser this afternoon.
The other issue we really spoke a lot about was about how unseen I felt as a young one. All of us have a need to be seen by others as we really are, not to have projected on us their idea of us or their own displaced shadow parts. It is something therapist Andrea Mathews addresses in detail in her book Letting Go of Good, in the chapter entitled Understanding Projection, Introjection and the Good Guy Identity. In that chapter she gives the account of a patient (mythical I think) called Diana and her father Jackson. Diana never gets seen by Jackson in reality, he is always projecting some kind of blame onto her out of the belief he can never be wrong about anything, instead its Diana who is made wrong as she is growing up and, guess what? Later in life Diana becomes a person who attracts people she is always helping who never help her or never give back as much as she does or needs. Its an interesting case as you can imagine Diana ends up carrying a lot of sadness and anger over this which is repressed and she also comes to believe that she is ‘bad’ if she cannot fulfill everyone’s needs later in life.
I cant help but think about my own Mum as I write this. She wasnt like Jackson to me but her own Mum never really saw her and neither did the Nuns at the school where she struggled without a father to protect her in the course of growing up. Mum struggled to do the right thing for all of us in so many ways, I see that now but what we also learned from this was that it wasnt okay for us to have our own needs, wishes and dreams.
And writing this I cannot help but think, if we dont get seen how do we see ourselves realisticially in later life? How do we get out from under the projection or introjection of the good girl or guy persona we may have had to adopt in order to get partially seen or recognised and how sad is it to know later in life that we are not really seen, not even truly by ourselves? And yet we are felt on some unconscious level as the true self never dies just calls to us from the shadows later in life.
On some level when my nephew wanted to come to visit with his daughter it was about his need to connect and be seen and for his daughter to find a connection back to her dead grandmother’s side of the family. The sad fact is that we did get that moment of connection on three visits, but on the final one I could feel my grand nieces desire to be back home with the family she really knew as she pulled on my nephew’s arm just a few hours before she had her siezure that afternoon. He left her sleeping on the lounge after he settled her and went outside to have a cigarette and buy some cups of coffee. What would have happened if at that point he responded as she asked and took her outside with him for a walk? I will never know the answer to that question. Instead a chain of events was set in motion that became like a domino effect. 8 days later my mother, Lyra’s great grandmother was dead.
Its all just so sad and all I can do now is bear testament to what happened. On an astrological note over that time Mercury planet of communications and the nervous system was in retrograde over the exact placement of my dead sisters’ natal Mercury which was hit by Neptune in 1980 when she had her cerebral bleed. My mother’s moon is at that same place. Something deep was being catalysed in terms of family trauma that lay like a coiled up serpent sleeping but also ready to awaken then. My mind and heart struggles to make sense of it all in the painful aftermath and live with the painful truth that often things we do have intense ripple effects, we can never be fully conscious of all that motivates us until we live out the consequences then work to dig deep for truthful answers after necessary times of introspection.
One important truth that comes out of all of this for me is this. In the end its vital we see ourselves and see others too, but how likely is it that we will always be able to fully see and fully know what is ‘true’ most especially if we were never truely validated?
Emerging From The Dark Night 