Maybe being exiled from family Christmas celebrations is actually a good thing, if you think about it in the Christmas story, Christ was actually born in a manager which is something spiritual teacher Carolyn Myss sees as a metaphor for the birth of Christ consciousness not being able to take place in the golden places, more inside the humble, simple, stripped back place.
I am feeling peace today even though I am alone. I have never felt more connected to myself and three people reached out to me today. I got a call from my sister and that was lovely, I got a text from someone I dated for a short time this year and then I heard from a distant cousin who was the one who provided all the links to our family generational history back in around 2001 about 8 years after I got sober. Getting that information about my Great Great Grandfather made sense of my sister’s alcoholism and trauma as well as my own. I do believe the family pain is passed down when it is not dealt with. I followed other links to find out about the loss of my Great Great Grandfather’s mother when he was only 12 and by a case of ancestral synchronicity Dad lost his father at the age of 12 too. He got out of Holland just before German occupation and strove all of his life to leave poverty and old sadness behind.
We had a long chat about my brother’s family, my second cousin tried to contact Mum for a long time after she died and a friend of hers knows my brother’s youngest son and wife, but when Julie asked for information about Mum they were immediately suspicious because my mother was ‘worth a lot of money”. I was so fucking outraged by this as Julie loved my mother for herself and it just shows that that side of the family put money as their no one priority, before any kind of emotional connection. It saddened me so much but made sense of how the restricted emotions of that side of the family as well as their exclusion and diminishment of me makes them not people I can relate to at anything beyond the most superficial of levels.
My father worked too hard and sacrificed his ties with his own family and died from the stress which is sad. I had next to no emotional connection to my father as he could never open up to his until he got sick, it was then I held him in my arms as he cried and I felt at depth his buried vulnerability. I watched my brother ploughing into the alcohol on Monday night and felt the tears inside. I thought of how he escapes to a colder climate each year around the anniversary of Dad’s death and sustains skiing injuries by overdoing it. I think of how he also lost the father that he loved deeply but obviously has not been able to grieve together with family. A lot of the conversation today focused on the narcissism in my sister in law who would have nothing to do with my mother before she died and seems to judge myself and all of my sisters as beneath her. and of how she also lost her mother around age 12…. so many ancestral synchronicities. We could say my sister in law is a tough ‘bitch’ or just recognise a young girl who sustained an enormous loss and had to bury the pain under a superior attitude. Al Anon asks us not to gossip or criticise family but to keep a perspective of love open inside our hearts.
All of that side of the family are celebrating only 5 minutes away around the corner as I sit typing this, at peace at home. I am so grateful for my life. I am so grateful for the years of emotional work. It is sad my husband and family did not know how to support me emotionally through my grief work that forms the foundation of recovery from addiction. I remember as I write this but I also remember that I own responsibility as I did not take the tough decision to break away from family at the point where all the buried emotions of my mixed up young life started to emerge around the age of 40. I sometimes wonder if I err on the side of emotional inundation rather than taking action, being able to rely on financial support may have weakened me in a way, although the hard work of reclaiming emotions after sustaining a head injury has meant I have struggled not to be paralysed into inaction at times, slowly it is shifting. My therapist always reminds me I needed that support though in the absence of emotional support or empathy when I was younger.
I don’t want to sit around in self pity or complaining about my life when I know now that what I make of my life in the aftermath really only rests on me and any support I can find from helpful directions. In the end its up to me to take all of this pain along with past lessons learned to create a brighter future for myself. Sometimes we can get so wrapped up in family Christmas pain over disappointed expectations, hopes and dreams that we lose sight of the fact that a New Year beckons to us from just around the corner. Globally we are facing many crises and challenges, I just feel glad that I am facing the new year’s inception with more acceptance and positive feelings in my heart than before and that this year I have been able to process a lot of my pain. 2020 I am sure will be a year of challenges but taking the pain of lessons learned and wisdom gained, I am sure in this coming year I will be open to more positive directions and healthier choices than ever before. At least that is how I will be praying while backing prayers up with action.
Emerging From The Dark Night 