I have just been reading up on the despair that can revisit later in life those of us who have experienced earlier losses or no foundation of consistent love beneath us in youth.. We may bury the despair over all of this deeply unconscious pain, and then when a later trigger comes along, there we are smack bang in the past facing it all. In the book Healing Through the Dark Emotions : The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair the author Miriam Greenspan makes the point that being able to come to a sense of meaning about it all is what may save us, but this also involves opening up to resolve and feel earlier pain.
Also, often it can be the people around us that give us meaning.. that said its important to know that we are beloved and wanted always deep inside of us, but if those who loved us choose to leave or even worse misunderstand our heart and split off it can be very painful and a deeply anxious place to live inside. It requires so much inner work then to save us from being drowned in the ocean of despair and helplessness that can visit us.
I am experiencing some of that today.. I had a bond with someone and they feel I have betrayed it, I never betrayed the bond, I opened my heart to someone else and the other person believes I have now given my heart to them? Truly is one heart so small? Is there not enough love in the world and in a heart to go around? Really truly I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.
I knew so much despair when my ex walked out on me 16 years ago. We gave up a new start in England to come home and realised pretty quickly it was not going to end well. I tried to go back and left my husband for a while, came back and could not come to grips with leaving my mother and sister in a home so in the end my marriage broke.. It was the most deeply painful time of my life and I did fall into despair.. When I tried to go back to the UK in 2005 I had the crash as you know.. and I could not make it out of the paralysis and dissociation that followed.
Each morning I battle an invisible force that wants to keep me pinned and when the new supports I am leaning on tear away I experience anxiety, much as I am trying now to build that foundation deep within myself.. Over the past few days though I have pushed myself to be ‘up and out’ to be engaged and grounded.. But I know with the slowing of Mercury in the sign of emotions, family and memories over the next 4 days it will be a time when the past comes calling.We are also heading into the dark of the moon prior to a New Moon Solar eclipse in a short while…
Lots from the past can emerge at this time held as memories as we had the Full Moon Lunar Eclipse a week or so ago, according to Dane Rudhyar astrologer this kind of eclipse brings up a past we have to clear prior to experiencing a new beginning. Today I went out with my sister and it was good to be out for a while but soon I wanted to be home. When the subject of our coast house came up I found myself crying as she and her son have taken it over and that is where I ended up after Jonathan left and later after I came back and sustained the head injury I lived there in some kind of psychic limbo only making occasional contact with my old therapist in Sydney and later getting involved with a man who had heaps of anger issues and long term addiction issues.
I did not take action to get myself out of there when I could, to rely on family only seemed too scary and my older sister was alive then and had been beaten up by her current partner after he convinced her to leave the first care home my mother worked to find for her.
Now I look back and see how powerless I felt. I did not have the support of therapy as I have now and now that I tried to make a bond with another man who is misreading me and not trusting me and trying to control me it is awakening a lot of anxiety again.. I am not very good with setting boundaries, I love the person and don’t want to lose them but neither can I afford to give myself away at this point.
Today I know the best ways I can to ground in my anxiety are to sit and write it out. To take positive action to clean up my house, not in an OCD way but purely to make it more manageable and I can congratulate myself that this weekend I was able to spend some time with family even if so often they make me feel so invisible especially when it come to the coast house which they are now taking over. I see as the youngest how I did not have much power, they moved all my stuff out of there without asking when I didn’t go down for a few years because I had been through so much abuse there with my last partner. Today I recognise what I am powerless to change, sometimes a family system is too much to fight, you get stuck in a role and cant get out unless you leave the family. That is what is coming to me now, today. That maybe I must step out, leave the coast house behind and take steps to move forward in my own life. Its up to me and I must do it NOW I AM AN ADULT AND NO LONGER A LITTLE CHILD.
Emerging From The Dark Night 