Oceanic

Not sure if I should post this.  Due to therapy session being cancelled today I am all swollen up and this time of year has lots of imprints/memories/flashbacks.  This includes a lot of what I went through as a result of abandonment issues.  I am going to post it but it does run on.  I hope it connects to some of you out there but it might have been better shared in therapy.

Something very tidal and oceanic around me and within me seems to have been affecting me ever since the clock hands hit the time of my birth and in this time following Wednesday’s Lunar Eclipse.  I was born at 7 10 in the evening and I do believe in body memory.   I have been thinking alot about my Mum today, feeling how tidal it was for all of us too, when certain traumas hit pulling solid ground out from under our feet.

The Buddhist nun and teacher Pema Chodron speaks all the time about how impermanence is really the truth of life.  Of how human it is to struggle to get solid ground underneath our feet, but how doing so is really an illusion since life is always in flux.  She also addresses the neurosis that can result when we try to hold on too tight and won’t surrender to ride the tide or let go.  Her books When Things Fall Apart and The Wisdom of No Escape remind us to try and keep our hearts open and not lock down too much in panic or fear when things start to change or move away from us or we feel solid ground falling away.

When grief or losses come which inevitably change the landscape it can feel like we are falling through space and if someone leaves us when we wish they would stay we can flail around and find it hard to let go (especially if this triggers, as it so often does, an earlier abandonment or mother wound).  There are certain relationships I let go of in the past, when the writing was on the wall that the person’s love and attention was pulled elsewhere, but each break up (of which there were six major ones between the ages of 23 and 47) never the less brought helplessness, fear, panic, hurt and sadness in their wake.  And with the last one I didnt let go with good grace, it was so so painful.

After it ended, which took place around this time of year (which is the time of my most earliest trauma of going overseas following my father’s illness and sudden death), I got myself into a desperate frenzy.  My self esteem had been decimated and really as I look back I was really in deep grief when I met him.   I went onto internet dating sites and ended up getting scammed for not a huge amount, but a considerable amount of money.

Going into such a relationship was really not wise, as I did not yet know how to love and care for and protect myself.  I see how much healing I had to do, as I had not made sense of my past.  He was very much invested in blaming me and shaming me, something I took on board, struggling harder to try to be what he wanted.

It makes me so sad now to realise how I gave myself away and that I didn’t have the necessary self respect to love and stand up to this, but that was due to my past history of never being fully contained or mirrored. I also know that if I am honest deep inside I was desperate for the attention, affection and presence that was missing in my childhood and transferred onto this relationship.  Just maybe that was something I had to address and find the source of and reasons for from deep within or in therapy.

When I compare myself to my contemporaries I often feel that I come up short where relationships are concerned and yet some of my closest friends have struggle similarly in relationships, while others have loving partners they can be themselves with.  Never the less it is a source of loss for me and is probably being highlighted now that my Mum has died.  I also don’t really have someone its easy just to ring and say “I am so sad today, can you just be here for me while I cry and share”.  In any case sometimes I feel its asking too much of another person to actually do that.

I know for my Mum too, she kept a lot inside because as a fatherless child with a mother who was not emotionally or even physically present a lot of the time she had to take care of herself well beyond an age of capability.  She one said to me “I learned early on in my life not to cry, as there was no one there to dry my tears.”

Later in 1981 when my older sister’s husband of 16 years  left her after her cerbral haemorrhage I know my sister, by then incapacitated from a stroke and in a wheel chair, would wheel herself outside the cry to the moon, and Mum would drag her in and say “what will the neighbours think?”

My sister once said to my Mum she felt guilty at that point being back home with Mum and Dad, because their happiness and togetherness reminded her of all she had lost.  How alone she must have felt at that point? She tried to take her own life.   It was so hard to witness all of this.  At that time I was very unhappy myself and struggling within, forced to go secretarial college, in 1983 I got the most mind numbing job at the Research School of Biological Sciences doing purchasing which involved going down to the bowels of this building to send off telexes in a little room.  People born after 1980 wont get what a telex was but it was a huge machine that you feed a tape through that had holes punched in it in code.

Anyway it was there I was working when the news came twenty two months later that my father had died under a procedure to insert a tracheoctomy tube in his throat, his heart had given out and he died all alone in the midst of the procedure.   My partner decided to leave me at that point, we were meant to be travelling overseas and he went ahead and met someone else, rang me at 4 am in the morning a few days after my Dad’s funeral to say he no longer loved me, nor wanted me to come overseas.  Discarded my Mum said I had to fight on and go anyway, met him over there by accident, stupidly slept with him again only to be discarded again and accused of being a psycho when I got upset coming back to the room to find him in bed with someone else.

Bluuurrgghh.  Just want to get it out today.  Termination number 3 followed a year later in Switzerland on the first anniversary of Dad’s death. By that stage Mum was super concerned and wanted me home but I was using as much alcohol and dope as I could to keep a lid on everything.  I won’t got into the following years of being in yet another relationship and discarded all the way up in Finland, sent back to England on the boat alone, going on a bender, waking up out of a black out to find I had been (miraculously) cared for and taken in by two guys who found me wandering around out of it in some street in London.

Six more years of drinking followed, six more years of damage.  I am just grateful I found sobriety when I did back in 1993 and there was more trauma to come but not as a result of being ‘out of it’, just as a result of being so dam lost and confused.

Maybe its helpful to write all of this today.  I realise how long its taken to feel like I have anything like solid ground under my feet.  When the pain of all this began to open up in sobriety in therapy during 1999-2001 I ran back home to Oz then back to the UK then back to Oz then back to the UK where I sustained a head injury.  I know that really I should probably have gone into treatment back in 2003, then I would not have been so alone and vulnerable to yet another accident.

It has taken me these 14 years to find a good therapist.  With my mother’s death it is any wonder all this has happened as it did and outplayed in addiction for me?.  I have a growing sense that our searching for relief in a substance such as alcohol is almost like looking for the love, soothing and oceanic comfort of the lost mother we never knew, that generations past never knew either.

I know for a fact it was the loss of my great great grandfather’s mother back in the mid 1860s that drove his addiction and flight from the UK.  I have tracked the mother wound in my Mum’s side of the family across four generations and it has left its marks on my entire family.   In his book It Didnt Start With You, therapist Mark Wolynn promotes powerful evidence that the source wound with our mothers drives so much of so called ‘mental illnesses’ such as bi polar and depression, as well as addiction, mother hunger, longing and the mixed up quest for spirituality which can lead some of us (including Mark himself) down some convoluted and confusing pathways.

I will link to some of my posts about this at the end of this blog.

For today is it any wonder I feel oceanic?  If the recent full moon swelled the oceans inside of our cellular substance with all the tissue salts in our cells which fluctuate in response to things we do, feel and imbibe then its no wonder as the full moon wanes and we head towards a Solar Eclipse in about 11 days time that we may be feeling tidal, emotional, swollen, awash, or oceanic.

For me I an feeling the need to stay as self contained as I can.  Look to my dreams and let my feelings flow.  Its getting manic out there in society.  I just went out to get some lunch and some groceries and was grateful to get back home.   The underground carpark at the grocery store had flooded, cars were going the wrong way down one way lanes.  There was a stench that made me feel nauseated and people were every where cuing at one of the few registers now actually serviced by a human being.  Every time I go out and witness the level of our consumption it worries me.

At least at home I can relax in the peace with my pooch and just feel self contained.  I think its what is needed at the moment.  And then if and when the flood comes,  maybe I just need to trust it and to ride it, using it as a fuel for my poetry and blog and not struggle too hard at this point with trying to get solid ground underneath my feet.