The revelations that came from my nephew on Tuesday night opened up such a can of worms for me yesterday.. I always knew my sister who had the aneurysm struggled to find a place in our family.. She left when she married her husband in 1965 and went to New Zealand which was the land of our ancestors.. Her oldest two sons were born there and then she and her husband returned home to Sydney for a while before moving back to Canberra and trying to compete in the business world along side my other family, and that is when she came unstuck.
My sister’s husband has been blamed for a lot of what went down when she got too much and he abandoned her, first to an asylum and then sent her home with a one way ticket to my parents in 1983. Some of you know she tried to take her life when she found out she may never see her four sons again. Mum and Dad couldn’t let the full pain of that come out and my sister was medicated and eventually Dad died…I went overseas and then when I came back in 1987 there was no place for me at all..I clearly did not fit into the family business system and I saw the consequences of it..
At this stage (1982) my addiction was in full flight as Dad had tried to force me into a career not of my choosing and in those times (the 1980s) I was a not able to rebel to save my life and fight for my true self and needs. After he died Mum effectively emotionally abandoned me all over again when she forced me to travel overseas and then remarried..dark, dark years followed all alone in Sydney and my older sister’s life deteriorated when she got a government flat and involved with another alcoholic with PTSD. I feel sad for my sister she never found AA. In later years, after I found Al Anon as well as AA she asked to go to meetings and I wish I could have helped with that.. but at that stage I was struggling, my marriage had folded and I had got into another abusive relationship and eventually had to move home as I had no home, literally everything had fallen apart.
Today I blame myself less for all of this.. I feel I was so strong to survive and never pick up another drink or a drug. Finding a very good psychodynamically based therapist has been essential and that took quite a lot of misses with other therapists that were not the right fit…now I see my own nephew struggling with bad therapists I feel so blessed I found Kat. I have, through her and this blog and my ongoing recovery and reading and emotional work been able to hold onto my sanity and sobriety and start to get at least a modicum of emotional intelligence.
I identify a lot with the writer Anthony Martino as he works through therapy in his book on emotional neglect, The Inconsequential Child. He was also the youngest in his family and speaks of how in his family the needs of the family came above his own and how, as the youngest child he was neglected on an emotional level and ignored, this is why I get triggered when I am not seen and it makes me mad when people say those who struggle with self harm are just ‘attention seeking’, WTF if you got no attention to your true self and real feeling you would be silently screaming in pain or hurting yourself in some way too. In his book Anthony says the worst loss he suffered in his family was not his father’s death but the loss of the ability to have his own emotions.
Dealing with the breaking up of my Mum’s estate, our family coast house and other inheritance stuff has shown me how little real power I have in our family.. I rolled over on the coast house and my nephews effectively eradicated me from the place I used as my home for 2 years after I left Jonathan.. They moved all my stuff into the garage store room without consulting me and its been agreed I will be paid out my portion of it so they can take it over with the kind of design they want for the place. Fair enough my nephew and his family have been using it and taking care of it, but I do feel angry there was no consultation as to my things and their treatment of me often feels like I am being erased, but as the youngest child this is probably not uncommon.. My other nephew bought it up the other night and said I didn’t fight hard enough but the truth was I felt if I got angry I would be in trouble, so I sucked up the anger and just quietly got the removalists to get my stuff back to my place….I just need to process this today because I have been feeling pain over it and in bed today I felt Mum and Dad’s spirits close with the angels comforting me as I cried over it in the early hours…I tried to bring the subject up with my brother yesterday and he did try to listen. He just said “Deb it might be better this way because then you can use it and it will be less stressful as you wont have responsibility for any of the bills.” Maybe, or maybe it just puts me in the youngest child situation again… in any case I don’t see the benefit of blame in this situation.. I am sure my nephews acted in the best interests of their mother… they were not aware and I was not showing up at that time due to the pain because I was, as usual invisible.. Maybe in the end I have to let go while still allowing myself to have all of my feelings over it.
In fact my AA training and recovery tends to make me want to let this stuff go, to ask myself how important it is. In many ways that place represents a family past that is now gone and its full of painful memories, I just wish I could have made peace with prior to this but maybe, in the end, that was not the way it was meant to work out. Maybe my peace is slowly coming and may take more time.
In truth, like Anthony Martino my own emotional development was arrested in my family.. the accident at 17 and Judith’s aneurysm at 18 had a powerful effect, it fractured so many relationships I am still working to heal…and it left me with some illusions, most primarily that in some way i could, through my own recovery heal the wounds in my family. However what I have realised in the past 24 hours while processing the intense pain of all of my nephew’s revelations was this: that is far too big a task for one small person, and most especially, the youngest.. It is a delusion really and part of my ‘role’ in a system that could not fully birth me.. that ongoing psychological birth now rests upon myself and my therapy.. it does not rest on any outside personIn the end blame will not get me very far, for in holding to it I end up staying trapped as a victim.. the truth is that for a long time I had no power, most especially in my family.. the only power I could really find was to give up the old patterns and ask God and the angels and my recovery process to show me the way to my truest self and how got lost in a family that became so ill and emotionally barren through overstriving and ascribing to false values.. The question of value relates to Venus and Uranus is in Taurus now (ruled by Venus), and is now squaring my Moon and opposing my natal Neptune, this shows that my values ARE at odds with the old family system.. I value relationships, feelings, connection at depth and am not as valuing of things and appearances, financial or economic success at the detriment of more feminine qualities…maybe, in the end, that was why I struggled so much in my family and why I felt the need to sit by my sister in that care home smelling of urine and hold her hand, in what ever intense state of rage or pain she was in, and why I cannot demonise her or her husband or any of their sons as some of my family do, for I see more at depth a much the deeper splits and larger ancestral tone to our collective evolution and this vision as well as the depth of it all is complex, not so easily split into dualities of black and white… To see this vision have had to travel to my own emotional depths of pain, grief, anger and rage along a spiral over many many years.. I have had to, like Innana, travel down to the Underworld to hold the hand and bear witness to the pain of her sister Erishkegal until the Enkies came to save me… I could not save my sister that was not my task, I may not be able to save my nephew from his demons but at the very least I can bear witness his and my own, remind him they have no ultimate power if we bring them up to the light, while bearing witness to the working out of something so profound it is at times nearly impossible to articulate only with words.. At some level I pray this post is understood .. it took a lot of suffering to give birth to the wisdom in it. And as I consider it latter are we not all of us evolving in this together, even as we break apart to attain our own individual understandings.
Emerging From The Dark Night 