Container

I always sensed I was some kind of container for the collective.. I guess the Shaman too is the one who travels into the darkness to find the lost soul that left the suffering body of the victim who endured terrors or abuse so impossible to name or for others to believe.. I was worried about my nephew last night when he said he wanted to go to South American to take some hallucinogenic in order to be purged of his ‘demons’ and painful memories and find his higher self.. I know how vulnerable the psyche is and how long trauma, neglect and abuse can take to unpack, after years of therapy I honestly do not believe there are any quick fixes for trauma or abuse and often we have to unravel it all over a very long period of time, because if you think about it, especially early trauma is so deep rooted and does affect the way we order, view and experience ‘reality.’

The psyche of a young child needs containment with the psyches of the parents, when something splits apart, as it did for my sister in 1978 to 1980 it affects the children who are youngest.. for some reason her third son seems to suffer more than the youngest who has anxiety and anger issues but seems not to be as dogged by the darkness. I was trying to tell my nephew he needs to share about this stuff, he has never found the right kind of therapist.. this kind of deep work needs someone with good credentials well versed in both the personal and collective psyche. Just hearing about those dark years in New Zealand I could not help but think how ancestral stuff pulled my sister back there after her aneurysm and how the multi-generational addiction/trauma/unresolved grief and attachment issues manifested painfully in her own and her son’s lives, as well as in mine.

I actually was brave enough to call my brother this morning to talk some of this stuff over, when my brother in law abandoned the two older boys they came back to Australia but they were carrying so much damage from the wicked step mother (who did horrible things to them and they were not protected by their father) and the school system.. My brother and other sister took each boy of my sister’s two older boys in but they acted out and were getting drunk and setting fire to properties my father and brother were building..I was not aware of a lot of this stuff because I was away in another state for some of it and was protected from the rest of it. In the end the stress of all of this and of other money worries made my father ill and he died of cancer 2 years after my brother in law finally abandoned my sister sending her home with a one way ticket and taking the four boys from her.

It seems Judy’s death anniversary yesterday has stirred some of this stuff up so painfully last night and today. I called my nephew earlier and he was a bit out of it, oblivious to the affect on me and told me he has not been taking care of himself, getting back into bad habits and hitting the booze.. If I knew he had been drinking last night I probably might not have wanted to talk to him but its a quandry for me, he needs to get this stuff out somehow. As a long time sober person I know the impact of unresolved trauma being buried, indeed it takes years in recovery to unpack severe early trauma, there are no quick fixes.. There is a saying some of you may know in the rooms of recovery which says ‘we are only as sick as our secrets’, in fact today after I posted my earlier piece my nephew asked me not to tell anyone about it and I had already written the earlier post, so once again I am in that painful situation of now knowing what to do, but my allegiance is so often to truth…

My body has been in a very difficult place today.. I felt like my cells were literally seeped in it all earlier on.. I just managed to eat a lunch but my digestion is all over the place at the moment… I think of how it would have been healthier for me to have shut the door on even knowing about a lot of this dark stuff a long time ago, to choose a life lived in the healing light of separated consciousness and love, but this is my family stuff, its just I hate feeling it pull me down again when I have been working so hard to be free over the past year or so. Am probably raving on right now as writing settles me on some level….I booked an extra phone session with Kat for this afternoon. I really needed that support, so I will go attend to some practicalities that bring me into the present moment right now…that is a good antidote for getting stuck inside my head and thoughts about all of the past trauma.

Post Script.. It iss so hard to shake that image of a young boy pleading about abuse going down and wanting to be taken from a sick schooling system only to be told it would all go away and he needed to be strong, or even worse, to have written to his father about it and not ever even get a reply.. that just breaks my heart entirely in two.