Bursting out of my skin

I have felt like I am bursting out of my skin today. I have been having very strange nights where I awake about 4 am and I am fighting again to breathe, I am practicing doing very long exhalations at this time as I read a post on the vagus nerve which is associated with the fear flight fight response and often I find if I use a calming breath it shifts things, it was recommended to help release the hold of the anxiety/fear fight flight to make the exhalation twice as long as the inhalation and I often find I am holding in my breath.

This may sound weird but I had a huge outburst of rage towards that family friend who has put me down so much in therapy on Monday but I felt the rage really hurting my body and then I felt so scared, what if by getting angry my cancer comes back? I said to Kat my therapist it didn’t feel that good to get that angry, the person concerned shuts her own emoitons down, so of course she is going to scapegoat me for being ‘too emotional’. She has done it time after time and even when Mum was alive she agreed how hard and shut down emotionally this friend of hers could be. Mum was always a softy inwardly but she was an angry anxious perfectionistic person a lot of the time and didn’t know how to express her own emotions very well, though she often exploded.

Luckily Dad knew how to sidestep her compulsive attacks but that left me with no role model of how to manage conflict and anger either. So I tend to stuff and stuff my feelings and then blow. And that tends to alienate some people so of course I get to fear my anger often and feel bad for having it, something that was reinforced in our family and in my Catholic conditioning

In my relationship with Scott due to the dynamic going on I have blown off quite a lot but he always understands and apologises as he knows he has been the cause of it, asking me to get him out of a situation he got himself into and on some level he is a mirror for me because he is similarly stuck on a deployment he signed up for thinking it would be 9 months and has now extended into possibly 24. He has power to leave if he can pay his contract out but his own account was frozen shortly before we met which means until he can get himself back to the States personally they will not unfreeze it.

Anyway once again I feel ‘trapped’ in a situation which is someone else’s problem and that is why I told him yesterday I am at the end of this help. It keeps getting blocked in part so its to me like a Universal stop sign for me. All of this came to a head under the full moon lunar eclipse highlighting Moon and Saturn and I have those two planets in conjunction in my chart which is blocked emotional energy from generations back. Perhaps the reason I am feeling explosive right now and frustrated is that transiting Mars in Leo which fights for self definition is opposing all my Aquarian planets and square to my natal Neptune in Scorpio at 13 degrees. If I feel I am drowning and cannot breathe lately too its because its still in the 12th house. My therapist however feels I am birthing at the moment which would be par for the course as Mars moves closer to the Ascendant.

As I said I have been waking about 4 am and doing this push pull, fight breathing before settling back to sleep but last night I had the most powerful emotional dream I woke up from crying and with spasms deep inside my gut. In it my brother was breaking free to feelings he had kept under wraps for over 30 years over the guilt of pressure he was putting Dad under in the years before he died in 1985, he was crying and then the dream shifted to my second oldest nephew of my sister. He must have been about 4 or 5 in the dream and I was trying to encourage him to let go of the rigid hold over his emotions that had been conditioned into him. I was holding him close to my tummy and trying to help him both to express and contain his emotions. I woke from the dream about 8 am with shock trauma and the most almighty pressure at the base of my skull which is the traumatic release point for the brain, close the brain stem and as I said I was crying a lot.

Phew its good to get this onto the page. I could not walk Jasper earlier today. It took me a few hours to shower, wash my hair and eat breakfast while trying to breathe and then I took myself to the shops because when I am like this I need to be around people for a while. I am glad to be home now but I feel like my head is about to blow off. Uranus is very close to exact square with my natal Moon right now, and I just long for freedom, open space and a liberation from the suffocating confinement of everyone else’s trauma and demands that I help them. I carry my own needs and I am flat out taking care of my own life. Due to high empathy too, often it is hard to know what is mine and what is someone else’s feelings and responsibility.

My body has been through so much but the shock trauma at times is extremely terrifying to manage. Editing this back though James Masterson does write that breaking through to the true self when we have been conditioned to think self impulses are wrong or selfish does fill us with a fear of being put to death anxiety. Freedom may be so precious and so feared at the same time. I don’t know how to analyse it and maybe doing so isn’t that helpful. I just have to keep moving while also being able to be still at times and keep working not to be pulled into old pattern. I find after I go out I start to cry a lot on the return journey home, things open up when I go out in a way they don’t if I just stay confined in my shell at home all of the time. Walking and grounding in nature also helps me a lot.