my friend Deb and I had a wild windswept walk by the lake today in the minus something chill wind factor.. we sat in the car talking for a while as rain lashed the window pane and I held her dog Bobby as he shook from the Parkinson’s he suffers, attempting to calm, Jasper was having a cuddle with Deb.. The subject of grief came up and Deb agreed with me in our culture we are often told to deny it..to the point that a while back a push was being made to have it included in the DSM as an illness if it goes on too long?
Surely grief is complex and multi layered, not fitting into a one system or process with set or linear stages. God knows if you express any kind of extreme emotion in our emotionally wounded culture, sooner or later you may find yourself in some kind of trouble or slapped with a diagnosis. This goes not only for grief but anger at having one’s true self and feelings repressed or invalidated.
Anger can be profound cover for grief and then there is the anger or grief we unconsciously feel for the death or failure to birth of this true or real self we had to put under wraps to survive hostility or lack of mirroring…I remember about a year ago when I was crying in therapy hitting my buried grief, my therapist saying to me “Deborah, these are the precious tears for the true self.”
I sometimes think I am crying not only my own tears but my mother’s, father’s siblings and great great grandfather’s too… Thomas came through again last night after I had another powerful breakthrough of opening my heart to Scott and love saying how much he had suffered from the leaving of England with all the grief over his dead mother and his distance from some of his siblings. His pain and struggle got acted out in anger and addiction and I will never know all he went through.. I see his struggle to survive being played out by my older sister and her husband back in the 80s and 90s and see how each of her four boys carried a portion of that complex maternal inheritance, while my older brother obviously carries more of my father’s ancestral lineage stuff, as well as Mum’s struggle to be seen and express creatively.
When I take this longer range view then my own struggles have meaning.. I can understand how complex emotions and family issues can be carried and play out across generations.. I can understand this time of having to introvert in order to find connections with our selves and others from another more inwardly tuned perspective opening up levels of insight or compassion that might not be available if we did not also have to struggle, and face challenges.. And I can also be grateful for the gift of life even when it is hard at times…and I can allow myself to have my emotions and know they make sense even when they seem so deep profound and complex and I might not know where they are coming from.
I went along to the accountant meeting at 1 pm.. It was a strange drive there with my sister.. as times it is as if there is no one there inside her, or the self that she is is buried so far deep down its hard to relate to.. we parked and climbed the stairs to the modern office and the accountant greeted us with great warmth.. I liked him a lot, he was soft personable and kind but as soon as he got my brother on the speakerphone I started crying, not with any noise just slow tears falling down.. he noticed but didn’t say much, I broke eye contact as the complex ramification of theentangled legacy was explained I just feel my heart sinking. There is never going to be a time I have authority over the money Mum left to us, as she designed it in such a way my brother will always have to approve everything. My heart kind of broke during the entire meeting.. Was this Mum’s idea just to protect us because of what Judy went through.. Will there never be a time I can be free? The meeting didn’t take long.. to be honest I arrived home in shell shock about an hour ago and immediately called a friend I can be real with and burst into floods of tears.. . He asked me if my brother ever listens to what I want..I had collapsed in the meeting and said it was all going over my head and so he said it would take time for me to get used to it, but what if the tears were not of sadness but of anger and frustration that I will always be beholden to men? The truth is Scott and the US military now hold 80 percent of my savings which will only be released when another amount is paid.. I have enough to last me for two years if I live frugally and I can always move out, rent and put my house on the market.. Really as I type all of this out now I don’t want to play the victim card.. I have to take control of my emotions and try to turn them around to good.. there has to be some way to get free of all of this and find happiness outside of all of the tears…to be honest right now I am so perplexed.. exactly who am I outside of all of this family trauma and enmeshment.. have I ever worked clearly and diligently to extricate myself? At the moment the grief has subsided leaving something else in its wake.. a desire for freedom, to live on my own terms. But maybe freedom is being won through the hard process of struggling through, being with, and processing all of the associated emotions.. Years ago my sister in law warned me to get away, to try to break free but at the time I longed so badly for the family in which it seemed like I never was seen or existed… but surely I exist to myself and to some…I have no answers this afternoon, just a lot of emotions, frustration and questions.. but somewhere deep inside I feel part of me that is part of the matrix and part of me that is also pure spirit witnessing the entire trajectory of the past 19 years…and further back… this blog probably is a bit of a mish mash but I will post it… the dust will settle in time. I had the courage to go today and be real… for that I am grateful.
Emerging From The Dark Night 