A New Year of working through my trauma

Yesterday was a day full of pain. It was one of those shocker days when I felt I was going to explode with the pain or have an aneurysm. I don’t really know what was going on but when my cousin and her son turned up to take Jasper out I just was overcome with tears and later in such agony over recent events with my sister, the bank and Scott. I had the sense I have been sitting on a lot and have two weeks break from therapy.The intense spirals and contractions and burst didn’t abate until just after midnight. I actually got into bed at about 10.30 but then all those weird symptoms of being swollen up started and didn’t abate until I lay in bed crying and clutching my stomach. It passed and I managed to sleep until 6 am and awoke to peace and gentle birdsong.

But lately I have been drawn to listening back to the Elton John song below :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V7xn6wCHKs

It was playing on the 8 track when we had am almost fatal accident on an oily stretch of road on a very large mountain that needs to be traversed on the way to our coast house. This was when my Dad was still alive back in around 1978 or so and we had gone back to Canberra for a day trip but coming back we hit some oil on the road as Dad was trying to overtake another car and ended up doing a complete 180 degree turn veering very close to the precipice on the side of the road and swinging back to crash into the more elevated side of the mountain.

Then it was I found myself in a trauma cascade of abandonment memories. This is a very painful time of year for me anyway but I know getting pulled back into the memories of all the times I was left by lovers or of that painful time my Dad died and I was told my partner no longer loved me a few days later is not pleasant at all. I just felt the pain pulsing in my heart and I just cried and there were memories also of how hard I have been on myself when I was just coming back here to try and deal with everything in 2001 and my marriage ended up breaking down and then of coming back in 2010 and my partner feeling abandoned about it even though I offered him to come back for a little while too around Christmas, circumstances just were against us. We could not get anyone to mind his dog Sally and then my nephew visited around my older sister’s (now dead) birthday so I held off going back and even longer and then got messages all twisted up, because emails that were sent didn’t arrive and messages go confused to the point my ex and I had a huge argument and everything fell apart.

I need to write about this at the moment because before Christmas the payment I sent to help Scott got stopped by the bank, they froze my account and the agent’s account it was going to and now there is the possibility of sending more money but I am just freezing over it. He isn’t putting any pressure on me. He told me on New Year’s Eve not to help any more if I am not comfortable but I just feel history repeating again. AND ITS SO PAINFUL. ITS BRINGING UP THE WOUND AROUND MY FATHER’S LOSS. I remember after that accident just climbing into bed with my father on the next day and crying and holding him, its one of only two times we cuddled the other was when he told me he had cancer in October 1984 just before he died in January 1985 and I went overseas with all that trauma unaddressed.

And following that I met up with my ex overseas and he ended up betraying me again with another woman and then I had the termination of pregnancy to one night stand on the first anniversary of Dad’s death over in Switzerland then four more broken relationships. I know all of this trauma is in my past. I am getting to the point where I am a witness to it and it doesn’t end up possessing me completely but at times the grief is just HUGE.

Luckily I have my sweet little dog Jasper and I come out to the sofa where he sits in the mornings and just cuddle him and cry as I feel the depth of this wound in my heart which feels almost too enormous to contemplate or contain sometimes. Dogs are great in this way as they don’t say anything at all. They just let you be where you are (at least before jumping off the couch to go wait to be fed. 🙂 ).

Well we managed a lovely walk by the lake even though I was feeling so exhausted this morning and then we lay under a willow tree and watched the dancing branches as the sun above peeked its rays through the canopy, hip to hip we were after Jasper returned to me after running off to chase some birds and have a dip in the lake. We went to get our morning coffee and came home and now I am writing about it.

I am grateful for this medium. Maybe on the brink of the New Year there is a kind of transition. I wrote a post a while back about how January relates to the God Janus who faces both ways. On the brink of the New Year we look back to what has gone before to assess or feel the full brunt of it. We also look forward to the future and in the present moment we can embrace both ways of looking while feeling the impact and yet NOT ALLOWING OURSELVES TO BE TOTALLY POSSESSED. I hope this makes some kind of sense to readers but its what I really noticed today.

I am making sense of my past, I have processed it over so many years now so maybe this year I will be freer of it than in past years even though I just sent a message to Scott a while ago to say I think my past pain may prevent us connecting. And as I write this I realise it is actually one of my biggest fears because in the last relationship which ended 8 years ago he was always upset whenever I was sad about the past and I got read the riot act so many times over it. If I got angry he would just walk out, if he got angry and I stayed and showed empathy it bought us closer (but he could never do that for me.) There never was a comforting embrace, a caring shoulder which would have helped me to let go of it, just lectures. Instead I was just beaten up over it all over again.

Anyway I know now my ex hadn’t fully dealt with impact of his own father’s alcoholism. He was drawn to me because I was in recovery but used to not get how that was and what it really required. So we were not meant to be really thought the pain of it breaking was huge.

Being alone for the past 8 years has been necessary. I would love not to be as alone as I am now but the truth is maybe last year involved a sorting our process whereby I could see who I can share at depth with and is real and who I just have to stay on the surface with and my need to limit contact with due to their lack of empathy or toxicity. Its all a work in progress far from over. I am still (in the words of my therapist, Kat) trying to find my sea legs in the wild ocean of tumult that has been my past and familial inheritance.