Well I made it through another day of unpredictability today… I am thinking this evening of how Buddhist Nun Pema Chodron says we are always wanting to get solid ground under our feet but how so often life does not go according to our plans, then we have things that trigger old stuff and we react.. Today I moved with the flow of the technician coming in and out of the house and at one point not being able to find the cables to connect my NBN….. I also coped with the electricity company telling me I am liable for a bill that is due to someone else’s negligence.. I made it through a bit of a kerfuffle with Scott this afternoon via text all over a silly subject : mobile phone preferences and I made it through the anxiety of abandonment triggers to make my call to Kat at 3 pm in a bit of a state of melt down.. I then made it to the fruit and veggie markets by 4.15 and had a call to an old neighbour, got home unpacked all the food and got dinner ready and walked Jasper around the block, on the way meeting a gorgeous little 10 week old beagle puppy. Phew!! this much would not have been possible for me to do even 6 months ago and miracle of miracles tonight there have been no late afternoon spins.
My complex family history is feeling a bit more manageable tonight.. It helped to talk to my old neighbour who has her own narcissistic sister… it helped to get a reality check over some stuff of how I have been treated in the past… I would never keep a hard heart over past thing that hurt.. there has been enough wounding by family members over the years to last a life time.. I now see its all part of the mix.. we all differ in families and not everyone fits into the system…there is often an order of hierarchy in the family that can be very painful for some… I would give anything to be able to sit with my sister who passed 6 years ago to have a chat about some more things, though I do find often the dead spirits of my family talk to me and give me comfort. I will never know all my sister went through I only know it must have been agony to crash and burn, to be removed from rehabilitation and taken to a foreign country only to find your husband had another woman shacked up there, it must have been agony to contain the pain and its no wonder her psyche fragmented as it did… That said my brother in law was not a very strong man to let another woman exile him from his own sons and not to support them when they needed that help but I am not going to judge him as I know he stood by them as much as he could and I am sure there were reasons why. He tried his best to be a good father and admitted his mistakes before he died.. who knows, my sister may have been difficult to live with, even before she had the haemorraghe.. that said its not easy to be the second child and an intelligent girl born in the 1940s…
I see after events of this week how often I take distance when things become emotionally hard to cope with, when I am being put in the position of the one to make things right I never caused I have to begin to cut myself some slack. Kat said to me today that she feels I was a loving sister to stay so close to my older sister in pain and try to understand her moods.. I made a sacrifice to come back in 2001 and my husband did not make it easy, through all of the comings and goings, the tearings and leavings I was only trying to live as my self in a family so besieged by issues..
It is interesting to me that often in meditation I see my inner child around the age of 6 years with a lion by her side.. My north node and ascendant as well as the planet Uranus, the Awakener and Liberator is in this sign of Leo.. Both my parents born n 1920 and 1924 had Neptune here.. this was a generation whose inner children didn’t get much of a chance to be young and interestingly many of them also have Chiron in Aries which is another fire sign which relates to wounding or challenges with self assertion and individuation…my three siblings all had Pluto in Leo and my sister’s Pluto sits around the same degrees as my Uranus which shows the evolution of repressed positive masculine energy was rumbling to be released with the baby boomer generation in balanced ways, this is often called “the Me generation”.
Having my Lion’s roar has not been easy at times, I have been in trouble for asserting myself or being ‘bad’, that energy was very much killed off in us at Catholic school and its taking me some years to liberate it..
Today Kat made the analogy of me having to fight my way out of a terrible tangle when it comes to my family and even Scott at times… I see at times how my own Mum struggled as a youngster to be seen, heard, valued and recognised.. I am sure my Dad suffered in similar ways, when my brother was running off on an economic level in the early 80s Mum told me Dad did not feel he could put the stops on him.. I think Dad bore the brunt of a lot both with my mother and my brother and he came down hard on me at times and at other times his unavailability made it hard for me to trust men or believe they could see and affirm me and left a legacy of very buried anger and frustration… This can come up for me from time to time but what I am also learning is all around boundaries, particularly in a family where many of us have struggled with addiction and anger issues…
I am glad in some way I could be there to feel the pain of my nephew’s inner child on Monday night.. it just got a bit much when he started to put pressure on me to fill in for the absence of both my sister and her husband, as well as my Mum… I will go up to see all the grand nephews an as well as my grand nieces after Covid 19 restrictions have eased, the truth is, that with the unaddressed addiction issues it was hard for me to do that being at the level of emotional recovery and awareness I was until now… the pressure felt painful and uncomfortable on Monday and 2 and a half hours was too long on the phone, as it later turned out my nephew was under the weather from booze… so its not wonder I had a melt down for most of Tuesday.
Maybe as a person in recovery I do ‘carry the message’, maybe at times God does use my empathy and recovery as a light and as an absorber… like most empaths I have to just be aware of when I am being taken over by others’ unresolved pain or emotions, narcissists love to dump us with it and when we end up feeling less than its a sure sign this is happening.. None of us deserved to carry the psychic pain of others at the expense of our own integrity of being… we should never allow ourselves to be used as dumping grounds, no matter how unconscious the other person is.
Emerging From The Dark Night 