Before I left therapy my insurance company sent me a text warning of serious hail predicted for my suburb. I took myself off to town for lunch under cover of the big centre car park for safety and had a bird’s eyes view as the wild storm hit. People gathered as if diverted by spectacle of epic proportions and a huge amount of rain and hail fell in only a short space of time. I have just arrived home after driving through streets littered with leaf litter of pieces torn from trees by the hail and puddles the side of ponds, as well as seeing mounds of hail sitting by the side of the road. My place is a bit of wreck, the bedroom door had blown open and the carpet got saturated but is all good…… I just am blown away by the sheer power of nature at times.
I broke through into such an agonising depth of pain and aloneness in therapy today. I read my blog and parts of Alan Cummings autobiography in which he speaks of the close relationship with his grandmother as well as how he first discovered the joy and pleasure of masturbation, lying under some trees in a wooded glen not far from home but looked up after he had completed the job to see one of the farm hands watching from afar. Kudos to him, in that chapter he shares how on seeing man watching from afar, he felt a wave of shame flow through him, until he realised what he was doing was not shameful at all but totally natural and he made a decision then and there not to take on shame.
I had read this chapter before but when I read it out aloud to Kat in therapy earlier I burst into tears. So much is coming up for me now about the repression in my family and Catholic education, a core down body realisation of how natural life force and ‘wild’ in us was pressed out of us or we were taught pleasure or our bodies were ‘bad’, ‘sinful’ or wrong when nothing is further from the truth. Writing this right now I am thinking of the nature God ‘Pan’ (related to Capricorn where Pluto and Saturn now are placed) who rules both panic and pandemonium. When this natural force is repressed what happens to it, when our life force is squashed or made to be associated with being ‘bad’, ‘sinful’ or ‘wrong’, how much do we suffer? Is nature now fighting back at how far we have condoned oppression and repression of nature and the feminine?
There is pain in repression, there is pain in having our authentic self cut off and as I write this the concept of Eckahrt Tolle’s pain body comes to mind as I feel the ache around my upper facial bones where the tooth was taken and feel the pain radiating down my left arm. The left side is associated with the feminine, flow and nature. Today as I bent forward in therapy feeling the agonising pain of how it felt to be left all alone for so long as well as the absence of even a loving, nurturing grandparent, I then felt that someone had taken my left arm was twisted it behind my back. I felt them saying that would keep hurting me if I tried to live or be myself. I then felt a wave of fury and screamed for them to get off. It all happened very quickly and Kat didn’t bat an eyelid but I shared how once this reaction came up in a body work session and the therapist could not handle it and told me I was welcome to leave.
Kat always helps me to see how what I feel makes perfect sense and reminds me that anger is the final protest of the True Self. Its not a sin to be angry or in pain or to feel pain for things that hurt or suppress us but often those who protest are not heard or validated. They are made to feel bad or wrong for it, then many of us internalise this sense of shame or being bad or wrong. We then erase our selves in order to try to win a counterfeit love. I applaud Alan Cummings for not shaming himself for his natural ‘pleasure’ impulse, I applaud him for having the courage to confront the father (who it turns out was not really his father) many years later for the abuse he put Alan through. His ‘father’ of course tried to blame Alan because he was the result of an affair his own mother had after putting up with years of betrayal by her husband. I love what Alan writes in the acknowledgement section of his book Not My Father’s Son….
the scariest thing about abuse of any shape or form, is, in my opinion, not the abuse itself but that if it continues it can begin to feel commonplace and eventually acceptable. Writing this book and knowing it will be discussed around the world is some way insurance for me that my story will never be thought of as commonplace, never acceptable, and for that I thank my publishers and everyone involved with making it happen from the bottom of my heart.
The saddest thing to my mind is that abuse or neglect sets us up to believe we are not WORTH MORE OR BETTER. There is a phrase used in the book Leaving My Father’s House, which tells the story of three of therapist Marion Woodman’s clients concerning the archetypal dimensions of a fairy tale in which a young woman comes to work in the kitchen of a King, dressed in clothing of soot and ash (metaphorical expressions of her sense of shame and deficiency) : “I am only fit to have boots thrown at my head.” she cries. It takes a long time in the kitchen learning to make bread shop for her to find and fashion her own dresses of silver and gold which finally bring her the attention of the King. The King in this fairy tale that Marion uses as a back drop to the healing journey’s of her three patients represents not an external figure, rather he represents that inner force of kingliness or positive narcissism that we all need and is so often robbed from us in childhood, when abuse, devaluing, neglect or abandonment of our selves or our true emotions comes to exert its powerful ‘spell’, ‘trance’ or hold over our psyches due to parental or societal devaluation or rejection.
In childhood it is the power of our No that tells us of who we are, that helps us define the valuable and necessary boundaries of our soul, it is the power of our protest that enables us to say when something goes against our natural ‘law’. As I sat today after eating my lunch and watched to my left the storm play out in all of its majesty and fury, while to my right the entranced faces of a gathering crowd looked on in awe, I could not help but feel it as the protest of ‘Mother Nature’ crying out in that cathedral of materialism, the Westfield shopping centre. “I have natural boundaries and much inner power.. It is important that you TRULY KNOW WHO IS IN CHARGE HERE!!!” I heard her say. It made me feel so alive watching that storm. I most certainly was listening as I remembered the inner storm I experienced today in therapy, recognising is as the cry of my true nature trying to finally tell me the truth of the pain of what I endured and lived growing up, where and as I did. Was it just a case of synchronicity, today’s storm or am I just a cell in a far larger body of cells which encompasses everything, both internal and external. I believe it to be so!
Emerging From The Dark Night 