Grieving a reality that was not real : today’s reflections

It was an effort to pull myself into the day today and out of the swirl of emotions, thoughts, questions and confusions that were playing through my mind this morning when I woke at 7 am. I had a rather good day yesterday despite the deep sadness of letting the ‘dream’ of Scott and I go. I made myself completely vulnerable at the AA meeting yesterday and feared judgement though everyone seemed to show compassion. This shows me something about myself, but I am also realising what shaky ground I was standing on following Mum’s death with I first connected online with Scott. Last night in a series of powerful dreams I was trying to help a man who was deeply grieving a loss but in the initial part of the dream I was being hunted by police for daring to encourage people to grieve because one of the officers wanted his grief kept under wraps. It was a fascinating dream and had elements of the traumatic events of the past year or so with the bank featured in it. At one point my accounts were all frozen in the dream.

Today as I think of the person Scott created in my mind (a soft, tender, non retaliatory guy who loves to play guitar and joking around) I miss him so much and yet I know somewhere he isn’t real and now its up to me to make my own happiness. To be honest despite all of the sadness that is a kind of relief on one level and its making me face some tough truths. I realise that I often don’t take the tougher road when I need to because as an empathic dreamer I just go too passive or have expected others to do it for me. And yet when I think of the kind of life I love it is a life somewhat removed but what its removed from is the mechanical ungrounded life that I was also beginning to live in my head a lot of the time. For me I do best when I stay anchored deep inside my inner life and world and I asked for a guidance in meditation today and was told to read a page in my daily reader that talked about the Inner Teacher, the reading said that we all have inside of us this part of us which knows what to do and how we feel, the trick is to tap into it and undo the programmes of society and culture and parenting that lead us so far away from it.

I believe in our society we are constantly bombarded with images of how we ‘should’ be living. There are also ways we ‘should’ be behaving if we want to belong or be loved. I think in the end the journey to find the way forward to our own integrity and wisdom is the most important journey we can take in this life and the truth is that ‘Scott’ led me away from mine, into lying to the bank and getting involved in subterfuge which made me anxious (because I knew it was wrong!!!). I was also reading something by Tian Dayton that said if we are anxious we need to figure out if it is fear or anger. I got angry with ‘Scott’ so often but all I did was lash out instead of assert proper boundaries and take corrective action. In short I got led along a merry garden path to hell. So as sad as I am that its not going to come to pass a part of me is feeling so released and relieved and more ‘real’ and grounded in reality than I was before. I also feel peace not constantly on edge for when that bloody app would ping with a notification. This latest experience had shown me that often we experience sadness when we are duped or fall away from a path that is good or right for us. And its only natural to feel so sad at betrayal.

Today I must confess I fell into a feeling of being so lost. I realised I had looked in the wrong place for the answer ie. towards a relationship. I had hoped to share a loving life with this guy who kept saying all he wanted to do was support me, but in the end it was a lie. I have to support myself and that’s all good, I can do it, after all I am an adult. So all in all as much as I grieve ‘Scott’ what I am really grieving here is the loss of an illusion and it has so many elements of my father’s great distance and emotional unavailability tied into it. But maybe I will carry that archetype for the rest of my life. I just do not know as life has is own plan for me.

Today as long as I can write I can ground. My WordPress ‘family’ and my dog and my therapist are my true and real supports now. I realised lately the relationship with my sister is quiet empty on some levels for me, I have called her three times since she came home and haven’t heard from her. At the moment I am going to wait for her to come to me this time. I continued to support her throughout that last long hospitalisation but I am not going to be the one doing 80 percent of the work any more. When I listen to what my higher power wants for me lately, it truly is to nurture my own life and those loving relationships which actually give something to me, rather than the ones that empty me out or are generated by my lost inner child’s co-dependency. And maybe my sister doesn’t really need me as much as I felt I needed her after Mum died. I tried hard to be close but it only seems to go one way most of the time, and if look honestly into my heart, I am getting tired of it. Many people shared at the AA meeting yesterday that they struggle with family, so I am most definitely not alone.