Have been taken down to the deepest place of vulnerability and grief over the past few days.. Having this experience on the back of more confusion I understand what I have covered over for most of my life, so maybe, in a society that hides behind so many defences, it actually is a sign of strength to be able to embrace my wounded vulnerable self in this place along with the profound mix of complex feelings I had to deal with over Easter.
Just got back from my therapy session by phone which I choose to do via Bluetooth in the car by the lake. I was actually silent for the first five minutes. Easter broke open realisations of my place in the family system of narcissism and emotional disconnection so so powerfully.. I was riven with anxiety and sadness when my sister arrived for lunch half an hour late yesterday, she had been to see her son, the one who I got the photo of Dad done for his 40th only not to have my calls returned when I let him know it was ready over 3 weeks ago.. I am not going to be self centred about this, for sure he has a lot going on in the wake of Covid 19 and wIth his family but his failure to acknowledged me does hurt and I am very confused as to how or even whether to acknowledge his only daughter’s 10th birthday tomorrow.. its almost like I have to beg for them to see me and make me feel like I exist.. but I love that little girl even if we have only even been able to meet and play together a very few times, and he asked me not to write about them around my birthday in February so writing this may mean I am excommunicated again.
My therapist’s take is that my family fear me because I talk about and want to address feelings.. In a feeling wounded culture feelings are seen as some kind of weakness, and I listened to part of a very interesting programme on Christ and the crucifixion on Good Friday that argued the Christ story provided a necessary counterpoint to the Roman Mars lead civilisation of fed on ideas of power and control being seen as strengths, this tallies with the masculine, heroic egoic level of consciousness that began to solidify and more particularly as we came out of another time of global pandemic, The Black Plague…
Anyway I have digressed.. Empaths out there are used to be sidelined and often our empathy comes out of woundedness or seeing into the heart of the unfeelingness that can drive this world. I have a lovely little book I picked up at my local bookshop a year ago by a Korean Buddhist writer called Love for Imperfect Things : How To Accept Yourself in a World Striving for Perfection and today I read the following lines from it.
Something as simple as holding someone’s hand
can go a long way toward easing the person’s pain.
The more we hurt, the more we need
the love and support of our family.
But sadly, holding someone’s hand and connecting more deeply to their insides through this deeply emotional non verbal way is now the kind of thing that is being outlawed, along with children’s swings in the local park.
I doubt that side of the family would ever reach out to me of their own accord.. I am just not on their radar, and it hurts, so my painful dilemma is this? Do I try to connect and risk being hurt more, or do I just remove my self centred feelings from out of the equation in order to be connected? Kat, my therapist, feels the child in me will do anything to be connected but maybe what this part of me most needs is me to connect to her. To be honest I don’t know the answer.. I am going to wrap up my gift for Sienna and try to find some way to get it to her, even if I only put it in the letterbox… Family is important to me…
I don’t often know what to do in my family, and maybe its more honest to say this than to hide behind words of bravado I use as defences in order to appear strong. I know I burst into tears a lot around them… I remember being holed up in the bathroom when attending my older brother’s youngest son’s wedding with my ex husband back in 2003. He made the decision to leave me shortly after that as he hated my family and thought they were soulless… he must have seen the narcissism cause the next morning when he woke up he told me that death had stood at the end of his bed the night before.. A year later he left me… and he needed too. I had such a long way to go being pulled back in by all that lay unreconciled inside of me from the previous 41 years of my life… The dream of June 2001 that involved a jolt of electric energy up my spine and then shifted to me being squeezed back by moving walls as I tried to move forward into my independent individual life showed me that family karma and the family system would prove too strong a force over the next 17 years or so. I suffered the second head injury a year later as I struggled to get out of it all, but I could not run.. I had to come back to Australia to face my past..
I am reminded today what a powerful force family is for good and ill in our lives… I am reminded that none of us get out of here alive and not all of us get to individuate from within the family matrix.. old echoes and imprints can drive us towards complex connections and separations, seemingly all orchestrated by the Self… last night the bank called me again to tell me I have been involved in yet another scam… it was a shock and made me cry to the core of myself.. I let myself be pulled in by someone’s lies, again after struggling so hard to get away.. How could I have been so stupid……….But then after getting in to bed early and crying it all through while not letting the inner critic ravage my inner child who is so desperate to be connected…. I remembered I have been through all of this before and while part of me is weak and vulnerable, another part is strong, in fact finding the strength to embrace this vulnerable child self may in fact prove to me my redemption.. As usual keep watching this space.
Emerging From The Dark Night 