Why is the love of others so important?

I am really pondering this question today. I think of how love kept me close to family. It stopped me back in 2010 going back to reunite with my partner who was miles away, it kept me closer to my older sister who was not well and last night I watched the movie Beaches and in the central female character played by Barbara Hershey I saw a lot of myself. She had the promise of new life away from her family and was pulled back by her father’s death and in the end she dies. I am sorry if this post is going to seem negative to some readers but sometimes I feel I will not survive my family of origin. I just come away from them crying and very very perplexed. Am I still the small child longing for something else from them they cannot give? Why can’t I just give it up?

I was lucky enough to be invited to family friend’s for lunch yesterday who is on the outside of it all. She was able to give me a perspective on my sister who is still living and when my brother called at 4.30 pm from America I just cried silently. There were no words really for what I was feeling. Now that my mother is dead the family is a different dynamic for me. I am closer to my older sister’s sons than anyone else in the family but I still don’t feel I can be the best aunt to them due to the fact I struggled with my enmeshment so much and am trying to build a life outside of family before being able to give more to the family. I would never want to hurt them but part of me at 56 really now wants her own life but still longs for a closeness with family I cannot seem to manage due to fears. It’s quiet a conundrum I tussle with.

Anyway I am on a two week break from therapy so I am probably struggling a bit in the aftermath from Christmas. I rang my sister today as I got a text on Christmas Eve and I didn’t expect a call and to be honest I actually found it hard to pick the telephone to anyone yesterday. She has a way of showing me in an underhand way I don’t mean much to her and that I am not included and I don’t know how much of this is coming out of my own rejection schema. I just don’t FEEL any love much at times and I am not sure if its there or not. Its very confusing. And it really made me cry today after I had a chat with her.

I am feeling quite lost today. I can find myself again after doing a walk and some writing but I seem to be battling a bit of depression in the aftermath of Christmas today. I actually had thoughts of ending my life again. I was thinking of the best way to do it. I wont do it right now, so please don’t worry I just have some pain over past choices I have made today and I know its my responsibility. In my fantasy I wrote a note telling everyone as much as it would be nice to be more connected if I took my life its not their fault. I just don’t feel much like I fit in wherever I am It could just be post Christmas blues so that is why I am writing about it today. I have lost some peace today but I will have a quiet afternoon this afternoon and try to claim it back. I just feel so excluded from our coast house at the moment and to add some background to the pain around this. When I retreated there at the end of my marriage my sister did a number on me and told me I wasn’t welcome living at ‘her families coast house” WTF my father built it for the entire family? Its fucking painful.

I would love to be by the ocean swimming nothing much is making sense my thoughts are going round and round. Maybe I better just have lunch and go read and relax to get my mind off everything. I will count my blessings. I have enough money to go buy a caravan and use that to go to with Jasper if I can find a site by the ocean. I may feel happier then but it means I will still be alone.

( Post script. : I had some further thoughts after posting this that perhaps when I am in my pain over family it comes from the inner child part of me that still feels sadness over her position in the family. Maybe I need to be dialoguing with this part of myself more often when I feel this way and comfort her and let her know its not the end and that we really are an adult now and don’t really need this love as much as we used to. It seems to me that this negative suicidal space is one I can move into and out of when I start to feel powerless and beat myself up over choices I made from the limited place I was in previously and think ‘this is the end and there is no way out’. These are just thoughts but at times they seem so real and overpowering. However I don’t want to stay stuck in powerless victim which is where I can go sometimes. And in some relationships I am noticing I can become ‘younger’ or feel the other person is stronger. They may have strengths in certain areas but the truth is none of us is totally weak and powerless all of the time.)