A catch up with old friends sparks some deep reflection

Well after a riding the tide of a disappointment with someone letting me down yesterday I felt blessed to be able to visit a friend who I grew up with last night. There is always the sense that I will be held by this friend even if not fully understood and she has had my back at times when my confusion and anger from the full extent of my traumatic past was surfacing after I returned to my home town about 8 years ago. Never the less after a peaceful evening when we reconnected and shared an old trauma and very upsetting experience I had with one of our other friends woke me at 4 am this morning and I need to unpack it here.

It all happened around the time I decided to have a sinus operation as my mother was trying to force me on the path of seeing a doctor for what I now know were purely emotional symptoms. I ended up having a very painful sinus operation and for those who don’t know massive head trauma has led to issues with my teeth and around this time I had about two painful root canal treatments as well. I really wish at the time I had addressed the issue through diet, movement, acupuncture and therapy but at that stage I had three very painful experiences with different therapists I could not rely on and who didn’t hold their own counter transferences very well.

This operation also occurred shortly after I got Jasper as a puppy which as anyone who has never had a dog before knows is a very intense time, needing to take care of and toilet train them and for someone like me suffering on the back of a head injury with ongoing panic attacks up to 3 or 4 times a day it was often very hard to manage. My sister also tried to take her life 6 months after I got Jasper. I had Jasper for a year at the time I ended up having the surgery just before Christmas, and my family were unable to provide any support. I had Jasper minded for a few nights but when I got out of hospital I took him home but one morning I think he may have picked up on my distress, he came into the bedroom and peed all over my fabric armchair and the carpet and I got very upset with him and must have grabbed him by the collar and flung him outside. I then called the friend I visited last night who is also a dog lover because I was so distressed. She was out of town but she said she would get this other friend and her husband to come over and walk Jasper for me. When they arrived I was in a very very overwhelmed and emotional state, I was crying and I remember my legs went out from under me and I fell to the ground on the grass outside. My friend took Jasper for a while but when she got back she brought him in and then came and sat on my lounge chair and started giving me a lecture on how my anger and emotions were out of control and how it made her very distressed to see the way I reacted to things. Fair enough but at the time I don’t feel she really had half a clue of what I had endured in my life. I remember she started pointing her finger at me and I didn’t get angry with her but I did try to tell her I did not think the way she was treating or judging me was fair. On the back of this I just then found myself excluded from any get togethers at all with this particular friend. I remember logging onto Facebook shortly after this to see that they had all got together for afternoon tea. It really really hurt me but at the same time I don’t do those purely social events really well.

Anyway all of this started spinning around in my head at about 4 am this morning and I found myself feeling so so angry with my friend. We have never had much contact since then, although she did come to my mother’s funeral. But in the bath this morning the key feeling I felt was just this deepest sense of being flawed and full of shame. I can understand how some angry outbursts of mine, have at times frightened her but then it occurred to me maybe she is frightened of her own anger. I also wondered though if it might not be me who is also in the wrong, but the truth was at that time I had come out of a very very emotionally uncaring and abusive relationship and I had still not managed to unpack a lot of the abuse that had been put into me by my ex partner over the previous 4 years. When he decided it was over he basically shame dumped me with the entire fault for everything going wrong despite the ways I tried to revolve around him and constantly meet his ongoing needs and demands, my feelings and needs were rarely considered.

I felt the need to write all of this out today in order to gain some clarity. I am getting a deeper insight to the way my emotions and triggers operate lately. I am seeing how emotionally illiterate I was for so many years. I am seeing it was not ever possible to go to someone and say calmly and rationally, when you did x y or z I felt really shamed and hurt or angry and disappointed. That said was it ever their responsibility to caretake my emotions?

I am slowly finding my words for feelings and learning to express needs and reactions or hurts and frustrations. I managed to do it with my other friend yesterday. I am very glad that at the moment that the Moon at 22 degrees of Cancer is very close to a stationary Mercury in Cancer at 24 degrees of that sign. Mercury represents communication, and Cancer is feeling and mother issues as well as the deep emotional sea. I had a vision yesterday of the wind on the water as I was waiting for my morning coffee and I thought of how the wind can flame the waters of emotions sometimes whipping them into storms.

I believe self compassion is the life raft that we can mount when we find some of these emotional storms brewing up inside of us. When I get a trigger like my friend not turning up while I waited and waited yesterday I feel the ocean rising inside of me as a kind of chemical storm, if at that time I can speak to my inner child about what is ‘brewing’ it does help. I can say to her “if you are feeling scared or distressed, I am here, please tell me about your pain. I will listen to you. I will not turn away.” I don’t have to shame myself or someone else for causing these feelings to rise from deep down inside of me any more and I can also find the way to begin to communicate about how I feel. These are probably all things I should have been taught to do from age 3 or 4 onwards but never was, being raised in a climate of emotional neglect, but then, come to think of it, neither were either of my parents, though Mum was the one engaging in most of the ‘storms’ while Dad just got as far away as he could leaving my sister and I unprotected.

I think my living sister who now is in so much or a psychological mess was the one who tried to be good and do as much as she could to appease Mum while erasing herself and adapting as much as she could. When I see the evolution of the astrology between her and Mum. Mums confused emotional reactions of Mars in Pisces became my Sisters Sun and Venus in Pisces all square to Mars in Sagittarius the exact placement of my father’s Mars.

Anyway more insights are brewing for me at the moment. I see how much getting a dog was about trying to let my inner child have something my parents could not allow me to have, another being to care for and love, but at the time I got Jasper I was struggling myself and sometimes I feel guilty that I could not be a better parent to him. But the truth is over time I have learned not to get angry with Jasper when he does something like pee in the wrong place, he is a lively little dog and he picks up on a lot. I notice if he does pee in my room at times its due to something I am going through myself.

That said its 10.35 am now and all I have managed is a bowl of strawberries and yoghurt. I need to be out and exercising my dog but the warmth of my cosy blanket and the sun streaming in as I type is for me such a healing balm right now. I forgive my friend for trying to lecture me back in 2013, I understand why she was upset at me but I also see she didn’t really know at all what was going on for me. At times when I meet these old school friends I think how much more effective they are in the world, unlike me. They hold down high level jobs as speech writers and I do not work at all now. I have slowly been emerging as a writer through my blog taking the risk to share some of my bumbling attempts at poetry, journaling and self expression (though most of this is grist for the mill of my current therapy). My writing on my blog really sustains my soul as do the deeper connections forged here with like minded souls and hearts.

Maybe I just have been forced to live a more inwardly directed life and maybe all the pain and deep sense of being flawed and filled with shame is not the true reality of me at least that is what I am sensing today. Maybe I can over time lay this overcoat of shame down or divest myself of it. Maybe I am just emerging like my blog says from such a past full of trauma and darkness that has almost swallowed me alive in the Underworld. Only this I know each day brings for me a new opportunity to see past experiences from a new perspective we travel the spiral path way of healing to encompass more fully who we are as a soul engaged on this mysterious pathway of growing, healing, learning and evolving in awareness, wisdom and consciousness.