I felt awash with grief earlier on today.. Made some attempts to get the house in order and wash all the bloodstained items of clothing and bedding from the nosebleeds I have been having over the past 4 days… last night I felt like I was exploding and there was a lot of blood, it was as if the entire inside of my body was awash in blood. Apologies if this sounds gruesome but it calls to mind those earliest days of therapy in the UK where I dreamed I was in a perfectly white bathroom and there were bloodstains everywhere.. I am sure the body somatically recalls being a bloody mess somewhere deep inside. It can be like a horror movie some days but if you think about an uncontained baby they are awash in terror without that necessary soothing and I may have been overdoing things over the weekend, my body just seems to be speaking in volumes with all the blood.
Things have calmed down a little today… I got over the townhouse to finish the clean up, got very emotional leaving with the flood of memories concerning my Mum (now passed). I got back to my house and it doesn’t feel overwhelming and ‘wrong’ like it did yesterday, its just the emotional neglect component I so often live out transferred onto the house in some way…it wouldn’t have been right for me to move into that place so I am glad from the support from my sister who encouraged me to sell it. I think I am just feeling depleted and exhausted today…there’s a pain radiating down the inside of my left arm and I have my annual check up with my cancer surgeon tomorrow. I didn’t go for last year’s mammogram, I put it off due to fear…and hatred of invasive scans… so there you go… that is me and my avoidance.
On the positive side sun is streaming in through the dining room window as I write this, Jasper is snoozing contentedly, he gave me a leave pass today so I could go and finish the cleaning of the unit and garden, we will get out later this afternoon as I don’t have any other commitments. I have only been getting infrequent texts from Scott since he is having to use the phone of a colleague now that his went kaput but this seems to be opening up a more loving space between us.. I see the fury I bought to the relationship as well as my mistrust at times and also how I know I am only in formation still, still trying to make it as a person with an inner child who sustained a lot of neglect and damage and then ran over a lot of the feelings I found it difficult to contain and manage as they began to emerge in sobriety. Kat says that my fight kept me alive.
In the novel I am currently reading called The Silent Patient the therapist in it is trying to treat a patient in psychiatric care who killed her husband and will not speak, in the first session she lashes out at him which he sees as a positive sign… We need our fight response to not be completely negated on a deeper emotional level, but in time these fight responses may block the way towards more tender loving feelings and hidden longings to merge and be connected and received while still holding onto the core of ourselves… Therapy and older adult relationships help us to negotiate this struggle.. those of us with traumatic attachment bonds only learn to trust slowly over time, as a result of good enough holding and validation as well as necessary confrontations. And it is well, as to trust too early, the wrong person picked as a result of past abuse does open us up to more damage.
I am interested in the concept of splitting at the moment, it is something I began to discuss with Kat yesterday… at times things become globally bad for me and I lose the way to a more nuanced perspective of things… I see this happening, its a kind of optical revisioning that magnifies and distorts perspective at times, but then my own perceptions were often undermined in childhood and as a sensitive I saw and felt things others may have preferred I did not see or feel or mirror back.. Being so small in such an older emotionally void family it was not easy to make sense of things..It is only now as an adult I am beginning to see and understand how it was for me as a child to have no one much to turn to and so have to turn to non physical things for soothing and containment… Today I can go gently on the young self that seldom got contained and now needs me to be loving, understanding, patient and exercise self compassion as well as discernment. She also needs adult me to show up when being too young she over reacts or tends to get us in hot water…then I need to link back to what is being triggered, so I can, in John Lee’s words ‘grow myself back up’ to right size.
Emerging From The Dark Night 