With Mercury about to turn direct I am reading some very powerful quotes on the issue of perspective and I have also been meditating on the issues of expectations and resentment. Maybe it becomes easier to embrace and love an imperfect universe full of other imperfect beings after we do the work to own our own shadows. Once we see and accept the flaws, faults or weaknesses we seem to have as well as the strengths and learn to operate out of self love and compassion, perhaps it becomes easier to extend the same love and compassion to others. Only then, perhaps do we become able to contain narcissistic wounds and injuries in such a way that we don’t act them out but instead operate with an awareness of them. We become more attuned to REALITY, more able to cope with disappointment and frustration and at the same time more able to lovingly identify our true needs and wants and work to fulfil them from both within and without.
In my own life its my brother who has forced me most upon the above journey. Today he called to see if I wanted to go see my sister in the hospital, I actually went to see her yesterday but I relish the opportunity to spend time with my brother (thought dreading it at times too 🙂 ) because he does not operate on the kind of emotionally engaged level I would so often hope for, he gets all wrapped up in his work and then its a matter of having to fit into a very small window of the agenda that he makes available to me, it can be frustrating but I appreciate that he does try to connect on some level.
I forgive him because I feel in his heart that he does care, its just he doesn’t find emotions very comfortable and around this time last year we had number of intense clashes over values and needs and he ended up threatening to leave my house because I raised my voice and got quiet passionate and heated. He actually told me I was “a loose cannon” and made me feel that I was a bit crazy to be honest, but then if you knew his entire family you would realise they are all emotionally shut down and struggle within a starchy formality and a lot of it is down to his wife too who likes to keep a tight lid on emotions which she sees as highly ‘irrational’ yeah way to go that’s emotions for you honey!!!
Anyway I now alter my expectations around my brother. I now know how he is and I could choose to cut off all contact with him but that would make me sad, so I compromise (within limits.) I am aware that how he acts is a trigger as it touches off my own father wound of not being seen, nurtured, fostered or allowed to or supported to follow my chosen path of career and study many years ago which amongst other things left me with inner hunger and set me on a path of addiction.
Today I am choosing to keep love in my heart for my brother. He actually said to me “you probably don’t want to go to the hospital again if you went yesterday”, well I actually really enjoyed the visit with my sister yesterday and I told my brother I am happy to take him as we get so few opportunities to be together as a family.
Another part of me longs to be going to such a visit with a member of my ‘tribe’ but I don’t have that kind of association with many people here in my home town which is why my blogger friends mean the world to me. I can share about anything here and many of you just get it. Many of you are empaths like me so you understand and you know how challenging family relationships can be.
I am making conscious choice to keep love in my heart for family. I can be with them and allow them to be where they are at and not have to not be where I am at. That to me is emotional and psychological separation. I don’t have to cut off the longings that are there to be truly seen and truly known. I can recognised that when they are frustrated it does cause me pain but such pain is bearable as an adult. I can hold and comfort the longing of that emotional child side that wants to be loved and loving and connected to EVERY ONE AND EVERY THING and know its an impossible dream from the surface level of personality and ego where all kinds of defences come into play. I can take an attitude of gratitude toward the fact that today I am able to see and know all of this more consciously. Hating it would only divide me and separate me from love, I realise I can not like something and still be open to extend love. Maybe its naïve, I don’t know but I am trying to see a bigger picture beyond the one my ego paints at times.
I know my pain over family and I can hold my child self through it. I can choose to set boundaries but also choose to collapse them too. I am not fighting as hard and as defended and angry as I was this time last year but I also know such anger had value and meaning and purpose for feeling and integrating it was all part of my complex individuation journey. (After posting and reading this back I feel that perhaps some of that anger I expressed to him last year was actually grief about so many things that had gone down and that I was powerless over. Maybe expressing anger led me to believe I had more power in a situation I was to a large degree powerless over – the past circumstances of my wounded emotionally fraught family! Maybe today I am recognising more what I was powerless over to change but which now I can choose to have a different relationship with – the grief over the losses cannot be healed really as it isn’t a pathology but a valid reaction to all the complex challenges, emotional vacancies and difficulties. )
In closing I would like to share the following powerful thoughts from therapist Tian Dayton.
Today I love myself for having reached this distance. Life is not easy, none of us escapes pain. In my understanding of this and my willingness to embrace and live with pain, I have not missed the joy, the beauty, the poetry of the moment. Life for me has been a rich experience because I have not asked it to be what it is not. I am proud that I have wrangled with life, that I have not tried to make it all fit into a neat and antiseptic little package that looks good but is dry to the taste. For today I am not afraid because I am not hiding from myself. I have not avoided my worst depths – what more is there to frighten me? I take comfort that I have looked as far as I can see. I am not a stranger to myself.
Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight;
Sigh,, heart, again in the dew of morn.
W B Yeats
Emerging From The Dark Night 