Living in a state of shock

I awoke this morning to the shock of seeing my stripped back garden but in a less torn about place than yesterday.   My therapist kindly called me back yesterday afternoon and we figured out I need to put a stop to this woman’s intense energy.   I was completely overwhelmed by her as an ‘authority’ and I just ceeded to her and she didn’t give me any time to digest or mull over the recommendations she made.  This is a very familiar situation to me and with Mercury retrograde in the sign of self assertion, Aries this last ‘lesson’ has important things to teach me.  But it has also made me realise that the past is never really the past when you have suffered the degree of intense traumas I have and most particularly those that ripped my body to shreds in the way my two accidents did.

As I gain perspective I see how really they were just giving symbolic expression to how my Mum’s energy often overwhelmed my young body forcing changes on me I didn’t like and it may seem not a big thing but when I saw the plants all cut back with no foliage this morning I remembered how she forced me to have my long hair cut dead short when I was about six.  It really traumatised me and was another case of me having no power, just one of many really that followed over years.   And I could not for years do anything but submit to other changes forced on me by another’s values while the anger grew inside.

I learned over years to present the face the world expected of me or to accept what they or it wanted to project upon me when really the true me was strangling inside and trying to express how it felt in this strange world in which I often felt on the outside.  But even then I realise my own mother also felt very much on the outside too at times.   Add to that emotional sensitivity with no awareness that might be a ‘good’ thing rather than a bad thing and what is the result?  Well I firmly believe it happens to so many of us in this society, we come to believe we dont have the true value when we are just ‘over reacting’ or being ‘too sensitive’ when really we need to honour our sensitivities as gifts.

I also realised this morning after a night of my body going through the intense push pull high pressure snaps and long expansive ah ha relaxations that really all my life I have existed in a state of shock from which I have been trying to unwind.  I believe my mother’s young body and life too had no resting place,  with no’holding’ or ground of a loving nurturing family to contain her for those vital younger years of her life and so she developed a form of obessive compulsion to acheive and improve and perfect.  At the age of 17 she met my dad who was on the run from Nazi occupation in his homeland and only just got out by the skin of his teeth and then went through the high trauma of War as well as being part of the colonising force that the Indonesian resistance was working to free their country from in the Dutch East Indies during the early 1950s.  Both of them were living in Indonesia with my two older siblings under a state of threat and violence for over 3 years.  They then returned home with little and had to build a life from out of nothing using only their own resource, a strong work ethic.

These kind of powerful forces can run underground in families and we as descendants absorb them.  I know when my older sister crashed and burned it was about a masculine heroic force collapsing or reaching a point where her own feminine body said ENOUGH and so she had her cerebral bleed and I had my accident which was such a profound metaphor of the tender feminine crushed by the machine.   Alcoholism followed for me and so much further trauma for a sister who was medicated for most of her life and never allowed to really cathart when her husband betrayed and abandoned her during her most critical time of trauma.  I saw all that and learned how unsafe relationships were, is it any wonder I drank too much and lashed out in fear in all my later relationships until i got sober and then was on the run to find a place to address my inner wounds?   Its taken a lot of years of sobriety to unravel this and many further traumas as the sad truth is that trauma often draws more trauma to us.

I just had a comment on my blog saying how sorry they were about my losses and they  hope I find peace, and for me it is not only loss but also trauma’s ongoing affects I deal with and it takes a lot of processing to work through them.  When processed we do understand their affects and compassion and awareness, and yes, in time, forgiveness grows as a result of feeling ALL the feelings some of which are intense and seem extreme to others but are never the less all signs of the outworking of that process.  So yes in time  a certain perspective and freedom is achieved but true peace?  Well yes on one level but on another not for they will always have been critical events that affected our lives and some losses can never be fully compensated for.  But thank you for your comment and kind wishs

I have honestly struggled with acceptance as so many trauma surivivors do : Acceptance that these terrible traumatic events had lasting affects, acceptance that my sister’s tortured body could not have been loved and healed and treated in softer kinder more encompassing ways than with the dulling knife edge blunting of meds but its hard to feel peaceful about two lives (those of my sister and mother) that ended in such a traumatic way, never the less I do feel peace on more days now.

On other days occurences like the events of yesterday will trigger my trauma and my shock again and then my entire nervous system comes alive as I feel the full brunt of what an awakened life is in a body where so much that happened was outside of my control.    I know my plants will grown again and I know in the world people have much bigger problems than this but what yesterday has taught me is to be more mindful of what I open myself to and say ‘yes’ to.   It’s a huge challenge for all of us living in this increasingly violent world that is so shredding to the inner feminine and nature in so many ways.

The impact of that kind of violence to the feminine (and here I dont mean  to women but to the feminine in men and nature too) runs deep and can often be unconscious because in many ways patriarchial society and the outpassing Neptunian age has dulled our senses, as my therapist said on Monday our modern society is one that encourages people to be numb and to lack any kind of deeper emotional awareness.    The planet is trying to show us we are out of order in so many ways.  More than that this morning I cannot say but I do now realise even more deeply the state of shock I have been emerging from for over 30 years now and each day brings a new lesson as well as ongoing opportunities to awaken in consciousness.