I felt the love

Compassion seems to be growing in my heart lately now that some of my intense anger and rage over my family’s emotional unavailability is settling down. It took my brother a day or so to call me back and the call was initially from a number I did not recognise. I had been deep in the thick of my book on coping with grief just before he called and trying to write a post about it I want to post soon, on how essential tears are to healing.

When I spoke to my brother he told me he works 15 hour days, at first he just said he was working far too much and when I asked how much he just laughed in his stoical way and told me he gets up at 4 am and works through till about 6 pm. To clarify he runs his own business and is a very talented designer and architect never the less I felt sad for him after the call ended as I have when he says other things that reveal his struggle for balance and self care. He asked about my sister and I shared the challenge I have with visiting, I realise lately it is proably the fear of my own grief over everything and feelings of deep powerless that hold me back from visiting and I am sad about that now but I know I can change things now I see what is really motivating my behaviour.

I thought after speaking to my bro how much the demon of emotional neglect and addiction has dogged our family. When my brother was young (and he is 17 years older than me) Mum and Dad really struggled to survive. He was taken over to Indonesia then with my sis at the age of about 4 and Mum and Dad were stationed their during the murderous intensity of the Indonesian’s struggle for independence from Dutch colonisation. Mum and Dad had to sleep with a gun under their pillow and we have photos of my Mum and God Mother at the shooting range learning how to shoot pistols. My brother was then taken to Holland to get treatment for rickets a few years into this deployment of my father’s and he was alone there with Mum and my older sister in a house where no one much spoke English, he shared a bed with my Uncle as they only had a small house and there was not a lot of room in a very small house.

The truth is that my brother now has achieved a heap of material success but he just seems to spend the entire time working and he told me he knows he has tunnel vision. I actually cried after I got off the phone as I thought of some of the anger I had towards him for not helping my sister’s son when he really came cap in hand for some support a few years before his mother and my Mum died. Having them here would have meant more emotional connection, but the distance, disengagement and separation theme has continued to play out. Gary doesn’t seem often to be able to reach beyond his own concerns to support others beyond his immediate family (maybe not his job?), never the less I felt a lot of love for my brother yesterday after getting off the phone. I may be in denial at the moment, who knows. I just know that so often people can be a source of pain to us but then we are powerless over how they are and does this mean that we don’t love them anyway? I just don’t want to have that feeling of anger or resentment anymore, I would rather accept and feel the sadness over longings and needs I have not being met.

I think of the AA saying to accept life on life’s terms. When we argue with conditions we cannot change we make our lives harder, that said there are some things we can change, like our attitude to the said thing or person or situation. The truth is we can cause ourselves to suffer more by the reactions we have to ‘life’s terms’. There are also ways to look for what we need from other sources once we recognise the futility we experience in our family of origin.

I listened to a guided meditation last night by Louise Hay that I have listened to before. I found it very soothing. In it she speaks of the power of thought and of concepts such as self love, she also asks us to imagine our inner child, to look deep into that little one’s eyes and give love, she then encourages us to do the same with the inner children of both our parents. Seeing that our parents were once vulnerable children can make sense of so much. I used the meditation to imagine my brother as a little boy going through all of those terrifying experiences as a youngster, how they shaped and fashioned him and I must say its a relief to be seeing my brother from the vantage point of a far less egocentric perspective, that made my heart soft, pliable and filled it up with love, it also made me sad for the times I lashed out even though I know reactions and feelings were on one level valid reactions, however the situation was far bigger than my brother, I see that now.

I love the focus on gratitude and love that Louise Hay speaks of in her talks and meditations, it surely not denial to say that there is a way to find to be grateful even for the harshest of our experiences if they encourage growth of compassion, empathy and learning deep inside of us. Carl Jung once said that conflicts or problems are never solved on the level on which they are created, only when we attain a more evolved position or perspective on them. This is what I am feeling now. Possibly its part of both Mars and Mercury opposing my Moon Saturn Mars casting a full moon light on my maternal emotional inheritance. There is so much buried grief on my Mum’s side of the family and I don’t know as much about my father’s side but he also lost his father at 12. My brother lost my father when he was 41 years old. He had 17 more years with Dad than I did and they bonded on a far different level. So he has his own grief which he chooses to keep under wraps, and God knows its hard for men to own this at times, but I also know as an accepting person my brother has accepted the death, he brushed it off when I tried to mention the effects shortly before my mother died in 2017 very close to the anniversary of my father’s death in 1985. But this is how grief is dealt (or not dealt) with in our family and I didn’t that chance to be around my home town in order to resolve it after my father died. Was it any accident that when my husband left me 15 years ago I went to live in the house at the coast my Dad built a few years before he died? His ghost lingered there and drew me back, I see that now. I still long for that closeness I didn’t get to share with him in my adult life, never the less I cannot change the past, God decided my father was to die in my early 20s and I was to bear that and so many of us go through this.

My soul is making meaning of all of this now. I often bemoan my choices but I see that life is just what happens and the soul draws us where we need to go to heal and seek the necessary understanding either consciously or unconsciously and often awareness only comes after we experience the outcomes of certain choices. I am still healing from my father’s death and understanding its impact, it’s echoes still reverberate here inside my heart but I feel that lately I am finding peace at the end of a long long road. I am not in as much deep anger, depression anguish and soul pain as I was even just a few short years ago and longer pockets of life and love and hope are opening up for me now and for those I am very very grateful.