How I survived!

Sometimes I do not know how I have stayed alive and healthy emotionally (relatively speaking). I Feel grateful for the spark of spirit and life that always made me seek for truth for a long time. I feel on Saturday mornings the shock trauma of my near death encounter on the brink of adulthood. I was only 17 when I smashed up about 8.40 am on a Saturday wrapping my Nana’s car around a telegraph pole one spring morning in mid September 1979. That was the start of the multiple traumas that would befall my family, my sister’s cerebral bleed 6 months later, her descent into a kind of ‘psychosis’ her removal to New Zealand, eventual abandonment and return to us, a hollowed out shell who tried to take her life. And then the sad sad coming of my father’s stomach cancer as he tried to hold all of the stress of that as well as his own attempts to make a secure financial future for us.

It has taken years of sobriety to unpack all of my multiple traumas. The rejection of my True Self and my loss inside a career chosen for me that I did not know I was struggling to break out of and rebelling unconsciously about over the all the years until 31 when I finally got sober and married. Even now I am only becoming aware of the roots of what I carried. I am aware of the perfectionism which drives me, of the fear underneath and the desperate struggle of my Nana and mother to live in the depression. I was flooded with memories of my mum this morning. I saw her dressed in all her finery when I would sometimes pick her up to drive her to her majohng group in a big stately club that overlooked the humble area that used to be called West Lake where her and my grandfather and Nana settled before his death when they moved to Canberra in the early 1920s. They were far from family and their move was the last in the ancestral line of forward immigrations from Cornwall to New Zealand to Victoria and then to Canberra.

I remembered today my mothers hands as I held then on the final nights before her death. I remembered the things she told me about her mother who she loved but never once told my Mum she was loved. I think of the love my Mum showed and also the many times she failed to turn up. I think of my sister now facing a long round of radiotherapy for breast cancer and of the losses she too has seen and most of all I think of how we so often are narcissistic without meaning to be. We want something essential from others they may not be able to give due to their own difficulties. I long to hear from my sister’s son to be invited but it is I who must reach out. He is working and busy and he has a young family. He is doing his best. I am grateful for my growing relationship of intimacy with my dead older sister’s son who has just separated from his wife and is trying so hard to front up and individuate. I feel the love that I had for my sister carried on and expressed to him so very very deeply, almost as if he was my own son and it was lovely to hear from him yesterday that he finally has a job.

The truth is we have all survived and I know the roots of trauma in our family go way back. I just bought Geoff Dyer’s book on the First World War and my grandfather is very much on my mind this morning. I met my cousin yesterday and we were speaking of how both our fathers also lost their father due to this War. Dad kept distance from Uncle Frank and his family and pursued success and wealth, I have rebonded with my cousin now and her son walks Jasper for me on Mondays, we are slowly weaving back threads that got separated.

Writing all of this I feel shivers on my skin. I am alive. Traumas cascade was so REAL this morning but I was TRULY FEELING IT AS BOTH FEELING AND MEMORIES NOT JUST BODY SYMPTOMS. I was crying for Dad after I bid goodbye to Scott before he had to leave for patrol at 11 pm his time as I saw images of him in hospital in his final days. Losing my father at 23 was SO TRAUMATIC COMING ON THE BACK OF EVERYTHING ELSE. I was so alone after he died on the other side of the world like a lost satellite seeking something, little knowing I was closer then to ancestral threads in both the UK and Holland. This I know I am a carrier, I am a meaning bringer, I am the one who has been asked to make sense of this all and I am the one who must now choose life after so so many years of feeling dead, of losing hope, of losing love, of witnessing connections tear or break due to lack of empathy or understanding. Slowly after years and years of working to make the unconscious conscious I am now truly sensing that each and every single thing that has happened to me as well as all my struggle not to shame and self blame has been meant to be. AND AT THE SAME TIME I AM SO GRATEFUL FOR LIFE WHILE KNOWING I WILL ALWAYS CARRY SUCH SADNESS AND PAIN TOO.

I know pain is not to be ‘gotten over’, it needs to be borne and integrarted as best we can. True trauma happens when this integration process is not allowe. Pain and loss is part of what makes us, us, it is not the whole of us though, our spirit is our wholeness, it is the capacity to integrate and bear it.

So often we project and expect a perfect story or trajectory. If mistakes or pains or errors or loss comes we see it as a sign of something ‘wrong’ but what if it is just life? What if life is not meant to fit our mistaken ideas, ideals and mythologies? In the opening pages of his book Dyer talks of the Scott’s botched mission to the Antartic, he speaks of how Scott mythologised the ‘failure’ making it seem like a noble heroic sacrifice, he then draws parallels to the First World War. But what if the truth goes deeper, what about if all this carnage was just mean to be, part of mans misguided heroic will and desire to possess and conquer gone psychotic in some way. Are later generations then not also bearing the impact of this pivotal psychotic time in history and trying to find sense and change this mistaken heroic ideal? That to be strong and conquer is the ultimate in mental health. to not be vulnerable or show confusion or lostness or uncertainty or ‘weakness’ is truly heroic? What if we have got it the wrong way up?

The impact of World War One was horrendous. It scarred an entire generation leaving many father less or with damaged fathers and the roots of that trauma as well as all other war traumas trickle down, but we can make meaning of the carnage, we can understand what tendrils led us to here and we can come into some kind of meaningful relationship with pain. We cannot just reject it out of hand. We must if we can work to make our peace with our pain, trauma, human blindness or ignorance and work to find the best way possible to integrate it so we can find a way to live a more loving self realised consciously awakened present.