I am recognising when I come unstuck by not being patient enough. One of the key aspects of my anxiety is to immediately anticipate a disaster is about to happen and today I had two incidents of this where calm and patience actually won the day for me but I also saw the other times that my fear and insecurity actually made me lash out. Luckily I was able to share about it all in therapy today and unpack some of the pain of the past week. Then I got home to find I had to update my credit details with my mobile phone provider due to my card being cancelled on Sunday due to an unauthorised transaction. The person helping me asked me to imput my new credit details electronically via my phone key pad and three times the payment was ‘declined.’ I didn’t lose my cool, I just kept sending love and calm to the situation. The lady then gave me the BPay details to pay via that method before laughing and saying ‘hang on a moment, the payment has actually been authorised’. At this point too I just found myself smiling at the cosmic joke and then I thought of something I used to hear all the time in the rooms of AA. It as the prayer “God grant me patience : in a hurry!!”
I have been thinking a lot lately about qualities of resilience, calm, patience and tolerance and seeing things through even when they don’t always work out the way we have planned. Its something I have had a lot of practice with in terms of Scott and I trying to eventually be able to meet. That journey has been one hell of an emotional roller coaster that has had more ups and downs that rocky landscape and just as I wrote those words I called to mind a dream I had exactly 15 years ago just before or after Jonathan, my ex husband left me where I was actually travelling over a deserted rocky landscape and trying to negotiate it all, the dream is perhaps one hell of an apt metaphor for how it feels to go through an intense separation where early feelings and a long history of abandonment is triggered
I am reading a very good book on grief written by a grief counsellor at the moment and this is what she writes about grief and the grieving process.
Death is a great exposer : it forces hidden fault lines and submerged secrets into the open and it reveals to us how crucial those closest to us have been. but those surrounding us don’t necessarily understand the complexity of what has happened or the depth of the injury we carry.
The author, Julia Samuel then goes onto to say it is not so much grief that does us damage as our the things we often do in the wake of grief so that we don’t have to feel the full brunt of it. And it seems to me that successful grieving is not something our culture or friends can often help us with, it is also not something we can deal with all on our own. And that reminds me of the damage I did to myself on the back of that separation by taking myself so very far away but at the same time it fills me with compassion and understanding when I realise my family were not dealing with their own grief either and I instinctively knew that maybe staying close to them was not going to help me get through it.
I feel really blessed that I can cry full tears now. I am getting to the point where my anger as a defence against grief is loosening its hold finally. Whiffs or triggers of abandonment that spark multiple old wounds still have me taking out my sword and shield sometimes. It happened with Scott today and I am so grateful for a loving partner who is able to never shame or blame or judge me for the way I react out of my wounds at times. I am filled appreciation for the gift of a partner who is so unconditionally loving and empathic, that said I have been doing a lot to help him since June last year because in a way he is a mirror for me. Stuck miles away on the other side of the world fighting in a war that terrorists are waging to prevent females from having their right to freedom and education, Scott could not be anything but my truest heart’s twin.
Letting myself lean into love and be vulnerable is something, I see that I have not been particularly good at. I know at times my anger hides so much grief over the early losses that began when I was only one year old. I think too as I write this of the 3 year old girl who watched her sister marry and move far far away and felt so sad without her and longed so much for her to return and bring the light back of a loving gaze I never got from either of my parents who were working so hard to survive. I think of how devastating it was too to pray for her to come home to Canberra and then see her cut down with an aneurysm when my wish came true, (did my small mind in some way associate myself as part of what caused this to happen by wishing so hard for it?) I am not sure but to witness not only that but the way she was abandoned 3 years later was so so painful. I lost contact with her 4 sons who were closer in age to me than my own siblings. All of this explains to me why relationships so often seem to be a kind of mine field for me at times. I have that twin fear of engulfment and abandonment which makes it hard for anyone who wants to get close to me.
I have shared that this week I am finding it easier to articulate my distress. I cried a lot in therapy this afternoon after reading out three of my posts from this week. I felt the rising up of such a sense of shame when I read the post about my two friends who hold down such high level jobs but when I think about it my own level of emotional intelligence and understanding around issues of trauma and empathy in some ways may be just a tad more evolved, I am not sure, simply due to what I have been through in my life. Never the less all those years ago it was hard to be told ‘you are living half a life’ fucks sake I was carrying the residues of two near death traumas and other abandonments that have taken the last 5 years to unpack and make meaning of in therapy.
These days I am just so grateful to be alive even though over the past 5 days suicidal depression has reared its head again, but that is not surprising as Mercury just stationed direct in Cancer which rules the maternal multi-generational legacy of lunar issues we all carry. Unresolved grief and separation lies at the very tangled roots and heart of my Mum’s ancestral story and as far as Dad’s goes I don’t know as much but he also lost his father at the age of 12. I see alcoholism as a coping strategy in the absence of being able to feel and articulate feelings and grief that may have roots laying back generations. I would love to work as an advocate for better understanding of the role it plays in so much mental and emotional illness. I cant help thinking today of my sister all alone in the psychiatric holding bay and of how much grief she also must be carrying. I was wondering today if it is fear of my own grief that at times makes it hard for me to visit her or makes my desire to do so tinged with so much deep ambivalence. I wish I could be a better sister but at times I get tired of being the only one crying. I wish I could cry WITH others some of the time. I do cry sometimes, like the other night I was sharing secrets with my old friend and I found myself crying at different points of the unmasking.
It makes me wonder how many of us bury the truth and put on happy smiles. How do we know what silent grief another person carries? Do we ever stop to think or ask? Its just something I will put out there.
Well what started as a post on patience morphed into something else but maybe there are hidden kernels of truth in that metamorphosis. I would love to start a new blog on grief awareness to assist those who are grieving and need validation. My feeling is that if we don’t collectively allow grief work, war and hostility and violence increase as a result. Its a sad state of affairs and one that needs to be addressed over the next few years when Saturn starts to move forward to meet Pluto in conjunction. War leads to psychic and environmental devastation. Is this really the painful future we desire? Or is there another way? A way to show compassion and depth of understanding towards the powerful psychic forces which under pin much of our grief avoidance behaviour? Just some further questions to ponder.
Emerging From The Dark Night 