Facing darkness

I find myself staring down the barrel of collective darkness so often. I know that I have lived through some very dark experiences, things that marked me out from an early age and removed me from ordinary life, near death at 17 took me down into a place where I was literally crushed in a car with pieces of shrapnel lodged in both legs. Witnessing a sister taken down and then abandoned after being in psychosis trying to take her life 3 years later. I was thinking about it today as I felt the burn of mustard gas inside my chest and this may seem weird to some of you, but my grandfather was gassed during the First World War and he died when my mother was only 7, in 1931.

I was watching season 3 of Mister Selfridge yesterday afternoon and it explores in some story lines the pain and trauma of soldiers who returned from the conflict carrying huge scars and chronic PTSD and it shows how trauma bleeds through into the waking life of Henri LeClair and makes him lash out at everyone. This season explores how difficult it was for the returning soldiers to articulate the sheer horror of what they witnessed as well as escape lives of extreme destitution and poverty. True its only a fictional representation but got me to thinking of how my own carried trauma affected me. I remember screaming at one body therapist when she tried to work with me to unpack the trauma of my two near death experiences back in 2013 and her failure to contain me and show empathy spelt the end of that therapy and two more botched attempts before I finally found my way to my current therapist, Kat in 2016.

I found myself crying in therapy today over the plight of those returned soldiers though, knowing my grandfather was one and I felt the burning in my chest when I was speaking of what is going on for my nephew too whose trauma is coming to the surface with Mercury retrograde backing on to his Saturn in Cancer. I also faced the sadness over the weekend with seeing the state a friend of mine seemed to be in. I know what happened between us just triggered my own deep wounds but it had resonances for what befell my sister who died as well. Her family have treated her without empathy and I am worried but all the help I offered her was not accepted which is fair enough, may be she will be okay but she was saying things to me that just didn’t seem like they came from an connected or empowered place. I hate it to see when people get drug ‘fucked’ pardon the expression but I need to call a spade a spade. Kat and I were discussing today what numbing culture we live in and how ignored the inner child and carried ancestral trauma has been up until now. I see the voracious hunger of materialism as having emerged out of those terrible years of wounding and deprivation that spanned the end of the 19th to the middle years of the 20th Century. We now are surrounded by more so called ‘affluence’ materially speaking that ever before but the prevalence of anxiety, depression and other carried trauma is rife and its anticedents only recently seem to be emerging in to awareness.

I was stressed over the weekend too, as the bank contacted me again yesterday to tell me someone had fraudulently used my credit card in Paris over the past 48 hours and had I called my sister to ask to take her out at 10.30 but by the time she got back to me 3 hours later and I had to spend an hour dealing with that, it just got too late and I was pretty tired from doing a long walk with Jasper. Did my sister manage to show one thread of empathy for me? No she just seemed to be pissed off about it. It could be me reading things into it, it was probably disappointment for her that I could not get there but sometimes I do get resentful as I have had just as much trauma in some ways but I still get up and try to live and take responsibility for my own life. I am sorry if this seems harsh. I wrote a post about it yesterday in which I vented but I took it down, thinking it may be better to address how I was feeling in therapy.

My sister just seems so far down the ‘rabbit hole’ right now and really as I see it is a case of drug addiction and this may lose me followers but I DO NOT SEE DRUGS AS A LONG TERM CURE FOR WHAT AILS US COLLECTIVELY AND PERSONALLY RIGHT NOW. That said some assistance to help with regulation of neurochemistry may be most definitely necessary but IN CONJUNCTION WITH EXPLORATIVE AND NATURAL APPROACHES AS WELL AS UNDERSTANDING THE ROLE OF GENETICS AND EPIGENETICS, ESPECIALLY IN FAMILES AFFECTED BY AN ANCESTRAL HISTORY OF ALCOHOLISM.

Alcohol was the way many returning from war self medicated in the absence of other forms of therapy or even understanding and in a sense such understanding has needed to evolve as the result of these things playing out because as humans we learn via our evolutionary trajectory. I see the work many of us, including my self are doing to so called ‘recover’ as part of this though I am beginning to believe the word recover may not be the best one. Sure as we explore inwardly and begin to explore our reactions and conditioning influences and triggers we do cover old territory as do the painful work of bring our trauma, feelings, thinking and defences to awareness as well as our wounds but in a way we are also trying to build and bring about something new as we do this work. Lots emerges as I see it out of the individual processes of those of us who do it and share about it in order to find common threads of understanding for anything we suffer as humans is inherently shared and collective and archetypal as well as personal. This is why I personally find great wisdom in the archetypal symbolism of the psyche ; astrology. It is something I want to work on developing an even deeper understanding as I explore how certain influences have played out in my own life and in the lives of family members.

I seem to be destined like the Shamans of old to travel down into the personal and collective darkness on a regular basis in my life. An astrologer told me after my second smash up in 2005 that my first near death trauma opened me to a deeper spiritual side of life, it removed me from the mainstream and from my peers and set me out, over time on a more inwardly focused pathway of exploration. At times I have shamed and judged myself for that, as all trauma sufferers do and at others people have seen my necessary introversion and pathological but I know now it was and is not.

One of the saddest things watching how Henri’s trauma plays out in the third season of Mr Selfridge rests in the way he blames himself following the end of the war. He suffers survivor guilt because he could not save his men, how I resonated with that. I feel the same about not being able to save either of my sisters, but I now realise it was never my fault. All I can do is ‘help’ where and if I can to shed light on things as I see them from my own individual perspective on the way collective things play out, if it resonates for some well and good

There are those out there going through something similar and still blaming themselves which is one of the key symptoms of carried emotional neglect. When I ran into my friend at the markets on Saturday afternoon she bought up how neither of her parents could really support her emotionally, she now has kids who have been downright dismissive and abusive as a result, I see her as having tried to caretake others her entire life and now she is the one who needs help, I do hope she gets it but I felt sad for her as she told me that when she went to see a doctor back in Perth he told her that often children try to badger their parents into going onto antidepressants or other drugs and then before long they end up getting diagnosed with alzheimers. I have seen that play out in my Godfather’s life and it bloody well horrified me. People were all too happy to label him so they could then medicate and control him, there was bugger all asked about his childhood history and yes he was in a lot of anger and a lot of grief. In the end he died with it all locked up inside of him after a stroke.

I wish that we would wake the hell up. Our elderly have truths they carry and need to unpack but a fast paced entirely externally focussed generation of emotional illiterates will not be able to actually turn around or stay still long enough to often ask ‘what the hell did you suffer, endure, bury or have to carry in your younger life? what happened to you? and what was the context of your ancestral life? These to me are all necessary questions for until we understand what the hell darkness we are coming out of we are never going to able to truly find the light of wisdom, of healing, of deeper compassion and of understanding. These are the healing balms our fractured world is most in need of right now. And I discovered this truth in therapy today this is my mission to bring light to my own trauma in order to help others and to open myself too, to the shared understandings of others who suffer and are trying to fight for their true voice, expression and experience. We have a New Moon in Leo on Thursday the 1st of August at 1:15 pm Australian time. Leo fights for the truth. It brings the solar light of hope, truth, courage, self expression and power. Lets hope we see the New Moon of Leo on Thursday find more and more of us grounding within our true self and soul power to make of this work a far far more loving, empathic and compassionate place while knowing we have the right to our grounded lion’s roar.

Leo asks us to remember our true essence, our heart light and dare to let it shine out into the world as Leo is ruled by the Sun. we each have a divine spark of the sun within our hearts so if dare face our fears to follow our hearts we add our light to the globe to help others transcend their fears.

https://themoonwoman.com/astro-forecast/