Work on boundaries and reflections on over sharing.

The latest struggles in my life show I have work to do on my boundaries. I find it hard when boundaries are set to understand at times and that setting of limits may hit a wound. If so, then that wound is mine to own. I wonder at times if I am too open and overshare things because in sobriety I learned perhaps it was better to be vulnerable. I spent a great deal of my life pretending I wasn’t as vulnerable as I was and then other times over protection or fear may have limited my courage. I allowed the pain to keep me trapped too at times.

Its interesting to me how different people react differently to hurt and pain, some accept it in as a lesson to learn something and guilt and sadness can serve this purpose. Sometimes we do things in ignorance and with no bad intention but then apparently what I am also learning is that narcissists and other sociopaths actually DO KNOW what they are doing. They know how to hone in on the vulnerable person’s flaws and vulnerabilities, they gather information by being overly nice or love bombing only to withdraw that kind of support further down the track and start to undermine you in the vulnerable places. I remember early on in my last dysfunctional relationship my ex saying he ‘would only fuck you up because you are too vulnerable.’ Every soft or weaker spot in me was seen to be a sign of something wrong with me, something I needed to change to be more loveable and acceptable to him.

What I have since learned is that your good friends accept you unconditionally, they may lovingly confront you on something but even then there is a possibility of boundary violation. In the world its up to each of us to learn about who we are, what our strengths and weaknesses are and where our fundamental wounds lie, because its through our wounds and weaknesses we can become vulnerable but we can also learn from the wound.

In the astrological domain this lesson is related to the planet Chiron, or the wounded healer function in us. At the moment collectively speaking Chiron is place in the masculine ruled sign of Aries, ruled in turn by the planet Mars, planet of self assertion and aggression. We each have a Mars placement in our chart, part of a collective inheritance of how these issues were handled in our family of origin and along the ancestral line.

My own Mars is both weakened and forced inwards by the planet Saturn of boundaries, shame, hard work and limits. My Mars is also aspected by Chiron in Pisces and Pluto in Virgo and is associated to a very emotionally driven Moon. So emotions I experienced at home were super intense in relation to my mother and her responses and I was often wounded by them. Dad on the other hand just stayed right out of it, never stepping in when Mum was being out of order only sticking up for me behind my back but not in the way that helped Mum to enter my reality well. Its something my Mum owned up to with one of my niece in laws a few years before I died.

When I look at my two living siblings I see that they also struggle with boundary issues. My brother is in a stronger position because he had a lot of Dad’s time, attention and love in his life. Dad and he were in business together and to be honest my Dad struggled in setting boundaries with my brother too. It may have contributed to his death in part along with all the other traumas that befell both me and my older sister.

Today I need to be less hard on myself for what I have been blamed for over the past week. I struggle every day to set good boundaries, to eat on time, to sleep, to get exercise, to manage my life, to reach out for relationships, to share my experience here. I hope in my blog I provide something of use for others. When I go out into society I see how driven it all is and then when I come home to the peace of my house I realise I am not doing as bad as I think and have made some healthy choices. I don’t think the criticism levelled at my by my nephew was all true.

I can take criticism these days and I am open to learning but harsh criticism does tend to unravel me. Its probably the reason I have had such intense bodily pain and nose bleeds this week. My nephew was hard on his own father who ended up dying of cancer 9 years ago. I think we need to be aware of shaming and blaming others. Setting boundaries is fine but using harsh words can really hurt and reacting only based on minimum facts is not fair either and can leave the person unfairly judged in so much psychic pain which is hard to deal with and may even end up killing them if it is internalised. I feel fear right now as I don’t want to get ill again. If I don’t set good boundaries its more than likely that I will so there is still so much work to be done on this issue for me.