The pain of the unseen or the projected upon

I found myself holding my body with the electric charge of pent up feeling very tenderly as I did the breakfast dishes this morning. I had a tough weekend with facing deeper emotions hidden under my attempts to forge some kind of connection with my sister in recovery at the moment from cancer and with Easter close and the 5th anniversary of my older sister’s death there is obviously a lot of emotion around. I found myself breaking into pieces in therapy yesterday as I explored the painful feeling of being unresponded to by my brother when I put my heart and soul on the line to him a few weeks ago. I am not as angry with him any more I just feel so let down and sad about it. I think he thinks he is trying to help me by not giving me any help with Scott, he is a so called ‘self made man’ so helping anyone but his own son and daughter (and even she has to beg for help) doesn’t seem to figure for him.

The situation has now changed but very few people are prepared to believe my solider is real. I found myself fending off questions from the Fraud team yesterday as they hammered me asking if I was still in touch with my contact overseas. I won’t go into all the details here but sometimes I feel I am just fighting for my life in a world that doesn’t see me. That said I know the Bank is trying to prevent further loss of funds which is not my intention anyway.. to give much more. But the deeper issue it is triggering is the belief that no matter what I really desire I cannot have it, will have no help to get it, will not be seen or believed or taken seriously.

This came to a head back in adolescence when Dad forced me to go to secretarial college and would not support my return to teaching and reconnecting with my friends after I ran off north due to the stress of family trauma. Around that time my addiction kicked in big time. Eventually I got employment in a position so contrary to my own personal beliefs in a political party after I returned from travelling and working overseas for two and a half years after my father died. At that point I had undergone so many traumas : near death in a vehicle collision at the age of 17, followed by three months in hospital, six months later watching my sister under go an aneurysm and hover near death in a coma only to then be abandoned after going psychotic and being involuntarily committed while taken over seas by her husband who had another woman shacked up over in New Zealand. She was then returned home with a one way ticket and tried to take her life. Death of my father occurred four year later from cancer under an emergency tracheoctomy, three terminations of pregnancy and a relationship with an addict who was never in love with me but still in love with his ex girlfriend.

I moved away from my home town after returning from overseas in 1987 two and a half years after my father’s death where I got the secretarial job. Luckily my god parents took me in for a time (my mother remarried quickly on the rebound of Dad’s loss, something she lived to regret) and my God father was the one person who really saw me, disliked my family intensely to the point in later years he cut off contact with my mother all together. He is the one person who also saw how deeply wounded my own brother is emotionally

.Anyway I wont go into all the ins and outs of it. I ended up with severe addiction problems which I arrested in 1993 after marrying my ex husband but his family didn’t like the fact I didn’t drink and was in recovery, apparently I was ‘no fun’ and ‘a bit strange’. I felt my husband did not really see me a lot of the time either and would not really support me to undergo the therapy I needed to deal with 20 years of PTSD and unresolved grief. I did try to pursue therapy overseas but this eventually came unstuck due to fear I guess of being all alone so far from home and facing all of this so far from the scene of earlier traumas.

Easter tends to bring a lot of this stuff up at the moment as well as the difficult situation of one of my dead sister’s sons who is undergoing his own struggle to be real and be seen and get off meds and I am trying to do what I can to support him in that quest. It is probably no coincidence and he and his partner are separating all around the anniversary of his mother’s death. He was only 3 years old and watching from behind the curtain in New Zealand on the morning his father drove his mother in the car to the airport for a supposed holiday in Australia she would never return from.

I can still see my shattered sister sitting in the wheelchair at Mum and Dad’s house wearing her one blue tracksuit and holding a battered suitcase being told by Dad that her husband had sent her home with no return fare and had absconded with the woman he was having an affair with. And I remember the suicide attempt. My sister lying on the floor in the bottom room along the hall near the dark louvre doors with a photograph of her four boys laying on her chest. That was in 1983, my first year out of secretarial college. I had no one to tell about all of this, my body which is shaking now and convulsing with tears had to contain it. As it contained the shock trauma of those two secret terminations I had in that year and the next to a man who never loved me and would only abandon me as soon as he heard my father had died at the beginning of 1985.

I told no one for years and years, just carried it silently but the bottle was always there to soothe the pain, to shut it down. Back in Sydney in 1987 – 1990 I struggled with my addiction and more terminations, more broken relationships and more broken hearts. I tried to find a career more suited to me, first breaking away from secretarial in 1990 to study naturopathy and then astrology and aromatherapy. I eventually landed a job as a manager in an alternative gift, aromatherapy and flower essences and book shop a year or so later and then explored my love of astrology in which I sought for answers to all the trauma that had befallen me. However it was addiction recovery in 1993 which would begin to open the lid on everything for me and it would take about 6 years of sobriety for the buried memories and emotions to start to thaw as all I had endured began to rise and then it was on THE FIGHT OF MY LIFE TO BE FREE AND FIND THE TRUTH AGAINST THOSE WHO WANTED ME TO STAY NUMB!!! OR SHUT IT ALL DOWN!!! OR GET OVER IT!!!! OR BLAME SOMEONE ELSE!!!

I have heard it said that trauma causes fractures in our reality which we attempt to repair by telling the narrative and unearthing the feelings which is an organic work in process that cannot be purely driven by self will. An unfolding and uncoiling process starts with the willingness to face what has been hidden and open up our secrets and heal our unearned shame. It takes time and many trips around the wheel of the trauma year to explore the trajectory of a life that got so spun off or shattered that its fragments ended up reverberating so very very far and wide.

Writing me for me provides containment of a kind outside of therapy. Poetry helps me to explore feelings but the body is the container of it all and it holds it all deep within each cell and muscle and tissue : the shock, the grief, the anger, the assault, the hunger, the fear, the ongoing, the terror, the confusion, the frustration, the bone crushing annihilation of never feeling truly seen or contained or affirmed as well as the struggle to survive amidst the horrible consequences of having some other stronger person’s will and desires and projections and agendas for you forced onto you. As well as the defences they put into place to stop or mock you FROM JUST BEING YOURSELF AND CRYING OUT YOUR TRUTH!!

I FELT TRUELY DEMENTED AT THE BANK YESTERDAY AS THIS FRAUD LADY HAMMERED ME WITH HER TRUTH WHICH WAS ONLY PROJECTED ASSUMPTIONS AND FEAR. STOP CONTACT WITH THIS SCAMMER YOU CANNOT BE TRUSTED WITH YOUR OWN FUNDS.. DOUBTING MY FUCKING NEPHEW IS MY NEPHEW AND BLOCKING ANY HELP FOR ME TO GIVE REALLY REALLY ANGERED ME.. ITS MY FUCKING MONEY. But Mars finally cleared the square with natal Pluto a day ago which shows the current climate for me is pretty darn intense and guaranteed to be stirring up long buried emotions, triggers and imprints.

PHEW A RELEIF JUST TO GET THAT OUT. Another wiser part of me looks on and just thinks I do have a habit of assuming other people’s burdens as well. Sadly I connected with a guy whose account also got frozen by online scamming and is in a position where he needs help to get out of a deployment situation which he only signed up to for 9 months but is now being extended. But is any of this even the point? Truth is I can survive without Scott in my life here but I would just love to meet this person who offered me a real connection and really saw me and cared when so many others did not. But its not the be all and end all at this point. I do these days have the power to be here for myself and not be annihilated any more. It just cripples me when trigger situations come up echoing these themes and sparking long buried frustrations. I will get through this though. I will survive it. But sadly at times the power is not with me over certain things and then it is I just have to accept that others have their own agendas too. Maybe I am not meant to be helping these powerless others? I just don’t know the answer but sure as hell I will keep fighting and stay open to questioning questing and wondering about it all and blogging out my current insights. But part of me cannot give up helping if I can. For surely my sobriety is worth nothing if it doesn’t make me able to front up and fight the good fight to give the love and care and resources others who are also fighting for release from oppression, projection or repression.