A friend that loved me : reconnecting after trauma

I am feeling very emotional right now because tomorrow I am catching up with a friend who hurt me a great deal while trying to help me in the darkest days of my addiction. She saw me at one of my lowest times just prior to getting sober in 1993 and she offered me the support of a friend in AA which I was too shy to take and a very good therapist who I eventually broke from due to my own abandonment issues, reconnecting many years later. He was there for me during the darkest times of my last very painful relationship which lasted from 2007 to 2011 when I had broken contact with nearly everyone but a few members of my family.

I know that this friend actually confronted me about my behaviour but at the time it felt more like an attack than love to my way of thinking, as I look back she didn’t go about it the best way (phoning me at work about it all and saying she may cut me out of her life if I did not change) I was so vulnerable at the time with so much unresolved grief and so much fear of intimacy. Time however and healing is showing me she did the best and everything she did she did out of love and concern. She was kind enough to contact me when Mum died and came to the funeral.

I am just feeling such an outburst of emotion at present. I feel healing is so close, so many of my walls have come down. And it is interesting as transiting Mars moving into Taurus will be sextiling my natal Chiron (planet of wounding and healing in early Pisces in my seventh house of relationships, as it squares my Mars Saturn Moon conjunction) I am feeling a growing sense of self love and esteem with this ingress.

As a young adult and adolescent I carried so many wounds deep down inside that were not my fault. They were the result of ways things played out in my family and my fear of life and success which in some strange way I associated with destruction has impeded me for years. I associated hard work with falling apart as that is what I saw happen with my older sister and my father, and this is why I have chosen a quieter life for myself in recovery over the past 13 years especially. Now I have more of a sense of emerging. As I grow in self acceptance and self forgiveness I naturally feel I can extend that to the world around me.

I had a peaceful outing to the exhibition of the Pre Raphelite masters on here in Canberra at the National Gallery yesterday with my sister. We had lunch in the café before and as I watched her struggle to eat with shaking hands I felt just over come with love and grief. She looked so beautiful when we picked her up from her apartment as another family friend came too. We don’t have a lot to talk of in depth at such an outing and I felt the buried impact of all the trauma that lies in the unconscious between us but still it was good to be together. It was also good to get back to my own little home and my dog Jasper. I sorted through a lot of old photos, journals and astrology info yesterday after I got home and chatted to some school friends about our up coming 40 year reunion later in the year. Wow 40 years on from the year of my smash up and I am sober and alive and in some ways maybe closer to beginning to thrive than merely pull myself though each day just barely surviving.

Words cannot really express the pain of loss I have had to carry in my heart. I know I am not alone in this as so many of us have endured great losses. I know the followers who I love, admire and respect here who are also dealing with grief in the aftermath of death of loved ones, partners or children and my heart goes out to them. I think of the request that the Buddha made of a person struggling with grief to visit the houses of others and he found in time that in most of the houses he visited someone there had undergone suffering or loss. In our externally focused world we do not always speak of these things, we can carry them silently in our bodies and our hearts until one day the swell comes up and we are greeted with a flood. How precious when someone offers us a container for all of this? How precious when someone sees deeper into our soul suffering?

And that is the gift my friend gave me many years ago. But before I got sober it was harder to see my own suffering and diversions, time has changed this, so I am very grateful for the gift of us being able to reconnect tomorrow. Sometimes we separate from friends for a time to undergo our own healing, sometimes the wounds are too deep and we never meet again, but just once in a while along life’s road me we meet again and find ourselves in a new place and then we reach out a hand across the distance and say once again. Welcome friend.. my soul has really missed you. ❤