If you have to suffer in silence, where can you go.

This is a piece I wrote 5 years ago.. It was interesting to read through it today.. My sister still struggles with emotional expression as we all did in our family.. This post speaks of how so often my empathy and sensitivity means I am the one who so often ends up crying.  :

Mmmmm silence is apparently a recent blogging theme and prior to this I have been reading Unupturnedsoul’s excellent blog on the silent treatment, while having remained silent on blogspace for nearly two weeks.  Mercury has been retrograde and I have been away from cyberspace and dealing with life.

The silent treatment would be an entirely different blog.  I wrote a blog called Let Me Roar earlier in the month, which was essentially about the prohibition against emotional expression that has dogged our family, and has locked up a lot of deep feelings, dumping them into the burial ground of the numbed body.

I met with my mother and sister yesterday.  My sister has been on the rollercoaster of medication via a circuit of so called “professionals” for nearly ten years now.  What struck me was how frozen and leaden the energy of her body was, as her anger got buried, so her life force locked down and the body has lost its supplenesss and flow.

I suffer a profound cocktail of feelings after I see her and feel somehow complicit, though God knows how.  I feel deeply sad too, as if I have been witness to a crime in which the precious human essence of being’s soul has been stolen away or held captive.   Sometimes its too enormous for words. There is a lot of silence in these encounters. Depression is very silent, much is going on inwardly, little being expressed outwardly.

Last week on her 60th birthday I racked my brains for a living gift that may speak of beauty and promise and touch her soul.  It wasn’t rocket science I settled on a bouquet of lilies, tulips and other cottagey flowers.  While we were sitting talking on the day another bouquet arrived from her son and she sad to me.  “I’m so numb, I can’t even cry anymore”.  But tears did fall when the second bouquet arrived.

This is not funny humorous but funny, sad/strange, my Neptune is smack bang on her Saturn.  When I hang up the phone from her or sit near to her and feel into her trapped distress, I am overcome with tears, which just flow out of me like an ocean.

On Monday, after speaking to her on the phone and feeling how down she was that ocean opened up again.   Luckily I was with a very kind and deeply empathetic friend who gave me a hug and just let me cry it all out .  I think I’ll steer clear of the other woman in our group on that day who said I have a lot of work to do on detachment in order not to feel her feelings, as I need a wall to protect me?  WT?????  I am able to feel this and let it flow, without fearing it will undo or destroy me on some level.  When I do I find a peace I would not have found should I have erected defences to protect against the full reality of what is going on. It just doesn’t seem to work for me the other way.

Never mind.  I do understand,  much of the world hardly ever gets Neptunians. I think its a gift to be able to feel, to no longer be numb, to be able to express rather than shut down and take refuge in theories of emotional detachment.  But that’s just my belief, I’m not going to impose it on anyone else, it may not be their path.

Anyway at the moment my tummy isn’t silent, its rumbling and I am torn between a need to express after two weeks of silence and absence from blog space, so am going to post this and then come back and edit it later after I’ve had lunch.

I am so glad that I no longer have to suffer in silence.  I am also grateful that I no longer need to fear those intimations which come to me from deep within my soul when I find the time to sit in silence and rest in the open space of being.  So much can be revealed to me from that deep place if I take time to be centred and quiet enough to listen inwardly on a feeling level.   Maybe there were some benefits of being sent to my room.

I don’t know if I’ve shared this before on here, but part of my story was that I got sent to my room a lot.  My sister and I were also kept in the kitchen while dinner parties were thrown by my parents and we were expected to be as quiet as possible, its little wonder that I lost my voice and became very scared of speaking up.  What went into silence, when the traumas in our family occurred then led me to seek refuge in the little cardboard wine cask kept on top of the refrigerator, more silence, less understanding, little touch, very few words and a deep soul loneliness and sense of displacement, all of which may have served to deepen me on some level.

Oh and then the silent treatment when displeasure was being expressed or the flaring of the nostrils by my mother which indicated a very important rule had been breeched but we were not entirely sure what that was.

Silent anger, then probably became a more deeply embedded rage whose true origin lost its location and meaning.  In the absence of words, expression and understanding became deeply somatised until the time came for the silence to be lifted and the deeper truth exposed.

Interesting, on an astrological note, during this period Neptune was transiting the fourth house confusing the roots of identity and making mayhem with family attachments which dissolved or disappeared.

On a positive note breaking the silence has come in later years but not without many fits and starts.   And I still experience a degree of caution around how what I say will be received based on the past, but these prohibitions are beginning to break their hold as I experience more positive reactions, especially as a blogger.

Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again

Not so much darkness these days… less depressing days because, as silence is broken and feelings released, the seemingly ever present darkness is being dissipated by the dawning of awareness, understanding and love.  As this happens silence no longer holds power, nor needs to imprison truth within impenetrable walls and defences.  With hope and understanding comes light and noise, sound and colour and a softer gaze to replace the frozen disapproval of everything which not measure up to impossible and unreal standards of perfection which are the  profound and powerful silencers of the random, chaos, messiness and reality of being awake, alive and fully embodied on this planet, Earth.