Killing forces in the culture that put the soul and tender feminine to death.

I was thinking about how hard it can be for men to be allowed to cry in this culture at times. Australia traditionally has been a very macho culture and this tough denigrating quality is one of the things that used to cut me to ribbons growing up. I really feared the boys with their taunts and jibes and I just wish I was strong enough then to have revelled in my tall willowy body form. I was called matchstick legs and the boys shouted out other obscenities laughing at me from the school bus. That had the effect of making my tall stature slump even more. If I could only disappear maybe I would be safe. If I could put myself to death then no one else could. Now I can laugh about it but then it made me feel that certainly I was ‘all wrong’ and would never fit in or find a boyfriend.

These are things I see now. In my first pre therapy interview back in 1999 the overseer of the Jungian therapists in Cambridge spoke of child/soul murder when I told her just some of my story. I put 6 babies to death over the course of 10 years from the age of 21 Its a source of sadness for me, its not something I merrily and blithely can just fob off and in fact during all the active years of my addiction I hid the truth until I began therapy and working through the 12 steps.

I have shared before how at a certain point of my healing I wrote letters to each baby I aborted naming them and working through where I was at that time and the reasons why I did not feel capable of being a mother to those little ones. I still had to give birth to my true self and somewhere I knew that but the shame and guilt I carried was enormous. When I got into AA I heard even worse stories though about ending unplanned pregnancies!

There is often talk of self forgiveness but how to forgive ourselves for the fact that many of us are born into families and a culture that does not see us or facilitate us to be our true selves? How to exist and express ourselves in a culture the tells men it is a sign of weakness to cry or show vulnerability? And yes, I know the culture is changing, it has to change : as a current ad on tele here in Australia says “Don’t Stay Silent Because Silence Is Deadly”.

That said in silence we meet the core of our soul and truth of what happened to us or how we really feel (at least at a deeply unconscious level). We sense how parts of us were put to death (a truth hidden deep in the pits of suicidal depression). We get to see how we keep this going on, when we are too scared or shameful to speak about it and unravel the traumas and how we internalised certain blockages or self denigrations.

I heard an interview with an advocate for men’s mental health, a former sports star on radio yesterday about all of this. He said how he only began to heal from suicidal depression and crippling anxiety as he found his truth and his voice and began to reach out to others. In the interview he explained the reasons for his own silence.

Sadly I feel too many of us though still blame or silence ourselves for wounds that were far outside our own control. True it is our responsibility to heal and take those steps for self care, but we need to find the courage and the permission to fight the killing forces within and around us that would rather we hid behind defences or fear speaking a full truth that may be too confronting for many to own or face.

Speaking the truth about what happened to us, recognising that at the time it happened we were vulnerable takes courage, many would rather not admit this and so take refuge in ideas of self blame. Self responsibility means we own the full way we were put to death and then keep this going on years and years later after the killing forces seem to have dissolved or retreated so very far from view and find ways to be more loving and kind to the tender feminine soul is us (women and men) so it plays a more consciously active part in our lives.