Beginning to let go of the past!

I am beginning to get a new perspective on my life and my past lately. I was crying today in therapy thinking back on and processing the final weeks of my marriage. It was (as it is for nearly everyone who goes through it) one of the most painful times of my life. And it hurt more as my husband was returning to England which is where I had started to feel much more at home than in my native Australia. It would only start to come to light in the next few years that my ancestors were actually from Cornwall and emigrated first to New Zealand in 1874-5. Then my Great Grandmother moved to Australia after my grandmother was born leaving behind most of the family and later my grandmother moved to Canberra leaving behind her own mother. My mother would often be sent back to Victoria for holidays after her own father died and its interesting to follow this pathway of migration as newer members of the family have ended up going back and living in New Zealand, Melbourne and the United Kingdom.

It was heartbreaking for me to leave the UK behind in 2001. I wont go into the details but I had a spin out after my mother had a fall and my older sister was in trouble. I had an intense dream around this time of ascending a spiral staircase and on the staircase a man and woman were ascending while another man and woman were descending. I then experienced a lighting bolt of energy up my spine and in the dream the walls began to close in on me and I was being squeezed within them and could not breathe (which is very Saturnian and was similar to being trapped in the car all crunched up inside with metal shards and pieces of machine going into my body, lung pierced and unable to breathe at 17 very close to my father’s 59th birthday.)

This dream and the decision to return from the UK all occurred around an eclipse season in Cancer/Capricorn in June 2001 which will be repeating later this year. Next thing my husband and I were on our way back to live in Australia and the minute I got back I wanted to leave again and I did leave him alone for 6 months which was hard for him as we bought a place in a remote town on the coast and he was stuck there while I travelled back to the UK for six months to keep pursuing therapy without him.

I cried a lot about this in therapy today. This decision saw the breakdown of my marriage happen for me. After the six months I tried to come back to my husband but could not commit to going back to the UK with him and leaving my sister and my mother so on the two anniversary of me leaving him in 2002 my husband decided to return to live there without me. The day he left me I drove him 4 hours to the airport and just as he was about to go through the boarding gates he handed me a little blue metal tin. Inside it was about 200 dollars and he said to me “I want you to use this for a horse ride on the beach.”

So so sad. I had healing to do. For some reason I could not do it in that relationship and some of you may know I tried to go back to England in 2005 but ended up smashing my head open after serious bike accident and was unable to summon the courage to stay so far from home so I came back to Australia at the end of 2005 which is where I have been since.

The subject of me possibly moving back to the UK came up in therapy today. I don’t know what the future holds. I am trying to put down roots and build a life here but at times its lonely and I question being here in Oz since a lot of the connections I have don’t seem to go as deep as the ones I had at times with my UK friends. But I am trying to look for the good here at the moment. I just feel a little like a fish out of water in Australia at times. The heat gets to me but I know the cold in the UK wont be pleasant either, just maybe there is a way I can begin to spend some time here and some time there. And I am aware that this pattern of going away and separating again may come up just as things are starting to come together for me.

The truth is my relationship with my husband broke. It was painful to feel that sadness today but I am glad I could. I know I cannot change the past and so I have to accept it, letting go of some of the pain for me is not an intellectual exercise or an exercise of will, it is part of a process of grieving which is a kind of shedding, never the less the wound of aborting my life over there will always be with me, a potential that was cut off as many potentials have been for me at times. But another part of me, after processing all of this this afternoon things maybe it was just the way everything was meant to work out. At times I am now questioning the wisdom of going over and over the past again, but maybe part of integrating losses and traumas is that we go over them and feel the feelings until they let us go rather than the other way around.

I know with Uranus and Pluto in the first house of my chart my pattern was often to separate and be forced out on my own. It happened after my father died, early in 1983 and that pattern of taking myself away and pushing away from relationship is quite deeply embedded with me. When I left Australia in 1985 I really was suffering so much trauma already, I had so much pain inside me I had not dealt with, it wasn’t really until some years into sobriety that I started to deal with it and that upset my then husband who thought therapy basically cost too much and was a waste of time.

He and my Mum actually joined forces to try and dissuade me from looking too deeply inside and now I know that a lot of people are actually in some kind of flight from their past or the pain of their inner child. Its something the inner child/somatic therapist and I were discussing today when we met out in nature. All the painful things that happened to me from 1985 until I got sober in 1993 will forever remain a part of my complex history, and wishing to change the past is really, ultimately a waste of time.

I am coming to understand that wishing to change the past only comes when we fail to fully accept, grieve, understand and shed it (as well as forgive ourselves and others!) Those who are not willing to do this themselves will often shame us for it or try to discourage us with sayings like “isn’t it time you put all that behind you?”, or “what is the sense of looking at the past, after all its been and gone?”. What is more problematic, I feel is staying locked in the past or trapped in it. That happens when the pain continues to recycle over and over again on a intellectual level and is not felt and experienced somatically for every single trauma we endure is not just cerebral it is body based and the pain in our cells is stored as vibrational charge that needs to be released, something Michael Brown deals extensively with in his insightful book The Presence Process.

I was also thinking today of how the child in us is solar, it is a life force, it is god given, it is divine but sadly that vulnerable, sensitive, alive, vibrating life force can be damaged and has been damaged by being wounded or split off in our feminine feeling wounded culture. So it is we come to feel shame about who we are and what we feel. Speaking of which there was an excellent programme today on Radio National here in Oz by a therapist specialising in shame….well worth a listen.

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/shame:-the-ups-and-downs/10739510

Feelings of the inner child and true self can become bound in shame and when they do they are difficult for us to experience. If we develop defences they are hidden and can then be projected.

All in all I am just so grateful that for me the inner child can live and I can feel her as well as the grief that occurred as I learned to split off from her. I realised today what a strong connection my ex husband had with his inner child and how blocked my own was a lot of the time. One painful thing he said to me towards the end of our marriage was “you kill my spirit!” wow maybe my own inner child split was at times projected and like a lot of adult children of trauma, addiction and alcoholism I suffered from the ‘too serious’ wound. In our family we rarely laughed at ourselves much and kicked back or just let go without alcohol. It is something I am learning to do now and it is something the therapist talked about as a great healing antidote to shame (learning to use humour and take ourselves less seriously : both Saturn Moon Saturn Mars and Saturn Sun issues ; both my parents had Sun Mercury Saturn conjunctions, both had absent fathers).

When we can allow ourselves to be vulnerable, mess up and get it wrong and laugh we can then become a human amongst other humans, no longer as rigid, blocked, defended or shame based or split off from the joyful, spontaneous, exuberant inner child. As kid I loved to dance and I feel the child like spirit in me bursting forward now when I do. Maybe as I let go more there will be a lot less self shaming, judgement and paralysis, and a LOT MORE DANCING!!!