Sorrow and vulnerability and trauma

My heart just feels so full of sorrow today.  I am glad I made the effort to get out and walk Jasper.  I have committed to take my sister out at 2 pm and its a big thing maybe too much for me today a day when I am struggling with a host of confused emotions, and abandonment fears.   If I am honest I would prefer to stay home on one level but another part longs to bond, but today I have been reading all about traumatic bonding and when we have pain it can bond us to those who hurt us.

I know the hurts from my sister from the past were not deliberate on her part.  I know she has tried to be loving to me and be there for me at times and I see how at times I pushed her away as I did not really know how to relate to her.  to be honest she became an authority figure for me because at the age of 13 I started to work under her part time at her and Mum’s clothing boutique.  I was always more open, perhaps naïve, a bit of a rebel.  At one point I got pulled off the sale table because I was trying to give merchandise away.  From a young age I identified with the under dog, maybe because I was that in the family.  The one teased, laughed at, poked fun at, accused of being the ’tissue’ or ‘drama’ queen because I was sensitive and cried a lot as well as loving singing, acting and dancing.  At the shop I was always being given the hard stare if I got too familiar with customers or joked and talked too much with the other staff and I am aware these may be selective memories.  That kind of judgemental stare from my sister went on at other incidents.  I was told I was being too dramatic and making an exhibition of myself when I was overcome with grief at my Godfather’s funeral and hugged his grandson who was also very very sad.  That hurt!!!

At one point my sister also asked my Mum to choose between the two of us who was her favourite, this at a time my marriage had ended and I was seeking refuge in the holiday home my father built in the years before his death.  We ended up having an almighty clash as she came down and took over things perhaps trying to help and then accused me of being selfish as a youngster.  Maybe it was true.  Maybe I was too in my ‘self’ then, a self I grew out of in later years of addiction and tried to cover over with an act.  Mum told us she preferred my sister and her son in law’s company to mine because I ‘was sad all the time’.  At this point I had been sober only 11 years and my buried grief had only really begun to open up during the past few years and I had aborted several therapy attempts as the trauma bonding/enmeshment with my other sister and Mum was so strong.

Anyway I don’t want to hang on to these painful memories with my sis or hold resentment, and the purpose of sharing this is not to get sympathy only to say we struggled to be close and are very different individuals.  As the one remaining sibling here in our home town I feel a responsibility to my sister, I just wish she would not so passively give over her energy to psychiatrists and drugs, but that said I was reading a chapter in the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck that said it is more emotionally healthy to feel we don’t have all the answers or know what is right, best to keep an attitude of openness and humility in our lives and so I am trying to support my sister with this pathway she has chosen even though it goes against a lot of what I believe to be true about finding alternative ways to support damaged neurochemistry from trauma apart from drugs alone.

I need to keep in mind all my Al Anon guidance though when I visit.  My sister a few years ago tried to accuse me of ‘causing’ one of her breakdowns when I got angry that she had forced Mum to chose between us and used a swear word then sent a nasty email.  Maybe I did play a part, but did I ask Mum to choose.  I always just accepted that Mum loved each of us differently and felt my Mum in later years felt freer to open up to me about her emotions even though she would fight me tooth and nail about this and would say I was ‘the only one in the family with a  problem’.  In later years she also said ‘of all my children you are the one I am most proud of because you chose sobriety’, she admitted my brother was a workaholic and knew my surviving sister was not choosing a healthy pathway to deal with her mental and emotional issues.  We talked a lot about this in the final months before her death.

I had a shocker of a night last night. I slept from 12 to 3.30 then woke up startled.  Got back to sleep by breathing as best I could while my entire body jerked around.  Woke again just after 7 am so deep in the trauma zone it was super intense I lay there with a mini world war going on in my body and heart and mind.  So I should be proud that I managed to make it out for a walk by 11 am because two years ago I would not have made it out of the trauma zone till maybe 3 pm or 4.

My therapist just called me while writing this and I was able to read back to her some of the nearly 100 text messages I sent to Scott over the past 20 hours.  She told me I have been in my abandonment trauma very deeply and must practice self care.  I told Scott last night I cannot go on this way and need us to just be friends.  Its too much for me not knowing whether or not he is real and it is hurting him enough to now want to send all the money back to prove he is real so that he does not lose me.  I will probably not hear from him for a while because the weekends are terrible over there.  Or else he is a scammer and doing to this to keep me hooked.  In any case I need to get off the hook.

I need to go eat now because I need to be at my sister’s hospital in an hour and 20 minutes and it’s a long drive.  I need my lunch.  My heart is racing but I will pray to my higher power and loving wise self to hold me through.  I cried so much reading the text messages I sent to Scott, I heard the desperation of a frighten little girl who so often feels herself to be so lost, confused, fearful, sad, distrustful and alone.  But its better if I own this vulnerable self than try to pretend.  My therapist reminds me its not the whole of me but when it gets triggered it is overpowering.  I just wrote this about how being in that multigenerational abandonment space feels and I will end the blog with it.

Things are dark and ominous

Breathing is impossible

All around is destruction

I have no energy

This will be the death of me

Im being crushed (Saturday is the day I was crushed in the car at 17 and nearly died)

Ground to dust

Erased

Returned to nothing

This will be the death of me

 

(My God trauma lives inside you for the rest of your life.  Do we every really get over it???)