I love the feeling of freedom I feel even just getting away from the house my mother forced me to at auction for a few hours alone and just feeling the peace and lightness of being away from the heavy burden of my past and family past. I walked with my cousin yesterday and she was asking me about my sister and I just said I feel sad for her but I have had enough of the family dis-ease. I think of the times I sat by my older sister’s bedside in a home that smelt of piss and shit and held her hand while she screamed or cried, I think of the sense of freedom I felt when Jonathan and I boarded that plane for the UK in April 1999 when we moved back there and the start was tough for sure, the winters in Cambridge were harsh and I got sick three times in one year, but I was tasting a taste of freedom from my family. I had started therapy in August 1999 and had major breakthrough in December of that year when all my unresolved grief and trauma rose to the surface, I had two powerful dreams one where my nose was bleeding non stop into a white sink and another where I was in a shower and blood was all over the place in the dream. I would go through cranio sacral treatment with my therapist a few years later that regressed me to my earlier near death smash up and suffer a fairly bad injury then. An astrologer who deals in trauma said this is a problem with stirring up old trauma and activating the unconscious.
The interesting thing is since I have returned back to my home town this has become literally true for me many times, I battle the profound mix of feelings and trauma that turn to snot and bloody phlegm and piss (sorry to be so graphic but this is what I go through.) I see myself trapped in many ways by so much unfulfilled longing that I have transferred onto people and things outside of myself and I see how my own energy gets tied up with feelings of undue guilt, responsibility and shame.
I am reading a book on not caretaking the BPD or Narcissisic personality carrier at the moment. It shows how people with these illnesses want control and fear it when others don’t enmesh with or agree with them, they find it hard to tolerate natural differences and separation in relationship. We all long for our reality to be validated by its a fine line at times.
In the case of BPD the person carries high level invalidation trauma anyway, they may have been gaslighted a lot or just left alone too much with big feelings they could not manage and they could never really rely on the parent to mirror them back in such a way psychological separation could be contained,tolerated or borne by both parties. In the case of NPD if you don’t agree with the person often they will give you the silent treatment or cut you out of their lives until you cave in or comply, something both my Mum and sister have done to me. This was something coming up in therapy this week as after one confrontation with my Mum and sister a few years ago when the did this my sister ended up having two falls due to her psychiatric meds and the fact the conversation was about separation versus enmeshment as it was playing out. I ended up feeling like the bad guy and the first I heard from Mum was that my sister had fallen and then Mum ended up falling while trying to carry a suitcase down a long flight of stairs from my sister’s apartment to take to her in hospital.
Anyway what I am learning from this book is that in a healthy relationship disagreements and conflict is managed in a clean way and you are able to assert a healthy ‘no’ and you find ways to stick to it if you are pressured. The author explains how often people with BPD or NPD will often not accept that no… they want you to comply and they may accuse you or use other passive aggressive means to invalidate you or bring you back into line if you struggle to express difference or provoke their own abandonment fears. I heard a saying a while ago that in adulthood we cannot be abandoned we can only be left, if we feel a high level of pain or anxiety that often relates back to childhood wounds.
I recalled while reading this of how in my last relationship most of our conflicts were about my need for more time with my ex. He would rather be off for long hours surfing or working something that I now see would trigger all my deep childhood abandonment. At that time I lacked the skills to cope with this and sometimes I would fly into a bit of a rage in privacy and then there may be tears as I tried to ask for more time and he would tell me I would always be the bottom priority in his life, I was to shape myself around him and not vice versa. I put up with this after he gave me silent treatments lasting anywhere from 3 days to 1 or 2 weeks. Maybe looking back I pulled on him a lot but he could never soothe the fear he would just get angry and lash out and cut contact.
I was also discussing with my cousin yesterday I was only allowed certain feelings in that relationship and this is something Margalis Fjelstad discusses in her book. There can be huge no go emotional areas in some relationships and in this one that was what I experienced and I now know my ex never dealt with his own feelings from childhood. I was listening to a video on 7 red flags for dating men last night and the first one mentioned was the kind of relationship a guy has with his mother, in that has he addressed all of his childhood wounding or issues from his Mum and come to a level of insight, peace and forgiveness. What I experienced with my ex was he had fury and rage over abandonment not only toward his mother but towards two of his sisters as well and guess who ended up getting the brunt of that? Me and my sisters.
I see all of this with the gift of hindsight now. I was called names and judged so harshly when the relationship ended in early 2011. It took me some time to stop internalising and believing those things said and just recently I was on the receiving end of something similar here with someone. In the end getting to know ourselves well is the best cure for not allowing shame dumping or shadow projection from others in our life. Narcissists will easily make us a target for their rejected self and will fight for control. I see at times how I can blame others for things that are not always their fault, it may just be that a need of mine is not getting met and when that happens, as an adult it is up to me to find other ways to meet that need in the long run.
Anyway I got out today after receiving a delivery of a tonne of firewood at 9 am. I managed to stack most of it apart from a third of a tonne which is now still in the driveway. I felt pretty lonely and exhauste doing this but energised too, it was a fresh, clear, sunny, zingy morning here today luckily.
I thought of Scott who still cant get here without me sending yet more money. I got the shits about that this morning. He asked me send a photo of Jasper and I because he misses us so much, I sent him a photo of the tonne of firewood and said I am pretty pissed off that the military will not give me support this end due to fucking opsec and persec I am about to pull the pin on it all. An overseas holiday is looking good to me right now. I don’t want to sit by the bedside any more of sick siblings. Sorry if it seems harsh. I sick of being the caring person who is a repository for pain. I’ve had a shit load of my own. That said I realise this may all be a defence against grief and letting myself be in a more surrendered or vulnerable place, or may be not???? Maybe I am just moving out of an unhealthy caretaker role I take on board so as not to have to live my own life and cope with the difficult feelings and fear of being all alone. I am not sure yet.
Today I am really feeling the pressure of Uranus close to exact square with my Moon Aquarius. Its going to go on to square the Sun over the next year or so and that rules our sense of purpose. I am struggling hard to find one that lies outside the pain and trauma of my family’s past. I really want to go and have some fun, dance and play and maybe see New York and Hawaii, two places I have never been. I have these dreams you see I really really want to realise some of them. I don’t want to be the one sitting at home in a place of weeping tied to a vortex that only wants to suck me down into non life!
Emerging From The Dark Night 