Since our upsetting encounter with the dog police, Jasper and I have changed our walk route several days a week with is helping me to reframe that trauma in a more positive light. We now park near a little beach on the lake and do a walk partly along the path then mostly detouring into the scrub following rough, unpaved pathways littered with pebbles and rocks which follow the cliffs, Jasper just loves it. We are also encountering the odd lone walker with dogs or just a guy on a break from his work having time out for a bite to eat or a cold drink.
On part of the walk is a sweet bench sitting atop a headland in full sunlight with an open view of the lakc and on a day like to day when the sun is shining sending dancing sparkles of light off from the water it truly is a spiritual and exhilarating experience to sit there. I was thinking too as I sat down to write this of Susan Andersons’ work with the abandonment trauma that so many of us go through when a relationship ends, how that then sparks all our other earlier childhood wounds, traumas and griefs from past times in our lives. This issue of dealing constructively with abandonment feelings is also something Christine Hassler addresses with one of the clients she worked with who experienced the early abandonment pattern and pain from a rejecting father in each new relationship. As Christine got her client to work through her grief she no longer had as desperate a need to be in relationship which was really being driven by her inner abandonment wounds of her little girl from long years past.
In Susan Anderson’s book on abandonment she goes through the stages many people encounter as they work through similar issues of abandonment to which she gives the acronym S.W.I.R.L = Shattering, Withdrawal, Internalising, Rage and Lifting. You can learn more about the various stages by taking a look at her website or reading her book, The Journey From Abandonment to Healing.
My point today in writing this was to write from that perspective we begin to gain as we work through the earlier stages to experience the stage of ‘lifting’, becoming able to see again open vistas extending out before us. There is the chance that once we become deeply intimate with the wounds in our own heart and soul they no longer need to run our lives as unconsciously, but this also means we have to work with and find ways to both hold, express and release our pain rather than just recycle it over and over and over again in what Freud once called ‘the repetition compulsion’.
In her book on expectations, therapist and author Christine Hassler talks of how many of us do not learn to ride the waves of our emotions and so we end up getting stuck in or dragged down by them time and time again.. a process she calls recycling. She uses the analogy of surfing which I think is a brilliant metaphor of the process. Her take is that when we practice self compassion we have the safety cord at our disposal at every stage to climb back on board our metaphorical surfboard where we can experience acceptance and a touch of stability and freedom from overwhelm of self criticism so strong in childhood abandonment trauma survivors. When we witness the emotions, relate them back to earlier experiences and release them we gain insight and a degree of freedom depending on how willing we are to then let go Of course we can always choose to hold on and keep getting rolled under, dumped or beached.
I am was so grateful on my walk today with Jasper to feel that sense of lifting. That I could make a choice to go to a different part of my environment where I am able to taste the sweetness of freedom of joy with my dog without fear of censure from forces that wanted to leash him up and keep him under control. The look of sheer joy as he returned to where I was sitting on the bench after running off to greet a woman in the distance with two poodles on leads made my heart jump with joy. After they walked off he ran back to me and jumped up on the bench to sit beside me in the sun looking just so darn happy. These are the moments of lifting when I feel the closest and deepest connection to my true Self.
At such moments it is just as two alone apart from the odd random encounter but deep in my soul I no longer feel that horrendous heartbreaking sense of aloneness, abandonment and spiritual emptiness that dogged me for so many years and I now know was carried ancestral abandonment trauma. I think of the terrible years of the dark night that reached a critical level of intensity when my ex husband Jonathan walked out on me just under 15 years ago on the 4th of August.
It is interesting to me that my birthday is the 4th of February so the Sun was at that time opposing my natal Sun straddling the 7th house cusp of relationships. Jonathan’s Mars was in Leo too and opposed many of my Aquarian planets (and I am sure the transiting Sun was conjunct it on the day he flew back to his homeland in the UK). I never got to leave my family behind and embrace a separate life with him. My destiny lay in coming home to make sense of my carried trauma.
I now know without a doubt that every single thing that happened was meant to. I just realised last week that I actually met Jonathan on my great, great grandmother, Eliza Jane’s birthday, the 6th of June. He was English just like her, he ended up emigrating just like her and eventually returning, we went back together and then the entire ancestral dynamic was activated, echoes within echoes, mirrors within mirrors. Today I look down upon the entire journey from a far higher perspective, knowing this deep soul journey of mine is SO VERY FAR FROM OVER. I await the next chapters with hope and a sense of new possibilities, and yet I can also not deny the pain I sometimes feel in seeing how much my entire family has struggled under the collective weight of trauma repeating.
Last night I watched a powerful You Tube video by Gabor Mate which I will share in my next post and in it he speaks about how many cancer survivors and sufferers struggle with boundaries, self care and authenticity, as a doctor who worked for a long time in palliative care he was well placed to understand the hidden histories of his patient, in another video I watched he also speaks of his own carried ancestral trauma from the Second World War as a Hungarian Jew whose parents just narrowly survived that war. He spoke of how all the babies born around the same time as he cried so much when all the trauma was going down of Hungary being occupied.
Last night when I woke up at 3 am after watching this I could not help but think of my father who never much raised his voice and put up with a lot of Mum’s whirlwinds but was the one who ended up with stomach cancer. I remember Mum telling me he could not bear to put the stops on my brother at a time he was running the business they both owned too far forward financially, my father ended up bearing the brunt and emotional stress of that as well as so many of the other traumas that befell our family from my accident in 1979 to his death in 1985. And I saw so deeply at 3 am how neither of my parents was to blame for what happened to me, they we doing all they could to survive in the aftermath of war and family death and I also understood the roots of both my older sister’s cancer, as well as my own.
I must say I cry a lot sometimes still, even though at times my soul experiences this ‘lifting’, the gift I do have is a view of the trajectory along the inter generational line of stress and trauma. I am working at the moment to contain all of this knowledge and heartbreak within my being as my sister finds herself nearly mid way through her 6 week course of radiation therapy. I will continue to visit her as I did on Sunday. I didn’t cry as much this time after I left her, I know now what is happening to her is not my fault and I don’t have the power to heal it, all I can do is bear witness and be there. I was grateful to understand more after watching Mate’s two videos. My soul still aches for my sis, as the ‘good’ one so much of it I cannot put into words, but at these times when I feel that sense of lifting I have at least for some moments a reprieve from the loss and abandonment trauma that seems to have dogged all of us, so far and so very long the inter generational line.
Emerging From The Dark Night 