Therapy has been thick with activation of past traumas as felt sense lately.. We have been exploring the years 1980 to 1987 which covered many of the multiple traumas I underwent following my accident.. there was Judy’s cerebral bleed, my first attempt at studies which I abandoned to go north in 1981 after everything got so intense with Jude and family.. That year I was floundering, studying hard but drinking and smoking dope a lot too. I got involved with a guy who worked off shore and had an addiction problem.. (this would be a pattern until I got sober.)
I remember Mum and Dad visiting our tiny weatherboard house in Brisbane sometime that year and Dad was perplexed at how simple and stark it was, and Mum perched uncomfortably on one of the old green armchairs.. Dont get me wrong it was tidy but oh so tiny and basic..
The next year in 1982 I wanted to come home but could not tell them both why.. Mark’s drug taking and mine was bothering me.. I also missed my old group of friends and this was the year Dad would not permit me to go back to University and made me do a secretarial course. I was at home for a while before moving out to live with two army guys who were decent and loving, in fact I found a letter from one of them a few months back sandwiched in my book Art Through the Ages. This was also the year I met Jim, my first major boyfriend who ended up hurting me so much and neither Murray not Doug nor my Dad liked him..
Toward the end of 1983 I fell pregnant to Jim at the age of 21 but I was so naive and shocked when it happened which may sound strange but I dodged all sex education talk faking expertise and due to shame. Before I found out we went up north to visit some friends of his and we had an argument one day and I got out of the car very upset and Jim left me on the side of the road and drove off. I had nothing, not even wallet or bag.. Somehow someone lent me the money for the phone and Mum and Dad had to wire me up the money for a train ticket home…it was after this I found out I was pregnant and I would imagine any self respecting person would have ended things then and there but not me..
That first termination of pregnancy was horrible. I had to travel to Sydney, I lied to work taking a sick day on the Friday and we then drove 5 hours to the coast after it to friends of Jim and the three of them left me in the bedroom all alone while they drank and smoked dope.. I remembered today not only the desolation of that but the shock and violence and trauma to the inside of my body and womb of undergoing the curettage. Today I felt the storm of it all through my gut and head along with very vivid images of the nurses and doctor and of the pain and shame and fear and grief and confusion I felt. I was doubled over in Kat’s office today being flooded with wave after wave of recall. All of this happened just a year out of my father’s diagnosis with cancer in October 1984 and prior to that I underwent a second termination to Jim. Mum found out about both by reading my journal too after Dad died and confronted me in the hardest way possible, saying how ashamed she was of me. And shortly after this I left to go overseas… So this is the deeper subtext to how I consented to remain unconscious and just keep repeating self abandonment trauma over and over and over again.
To think that after all of this and after Dad dying I just went off overseas with all of that never felt or processed and got in even more trouble on the first anniversary of Dad dying which I spent in Switzerland in December 1985. I continued to drink for another 8 years and the grief, and sadness, shame and trauma over all of those terminations only really began to be conscious from about 1995 onwards, two years into active sobriety.
Today I understand the resonances.. I worry at times bringing it all up again in therapy.. Kat said to me today “you just had to walk through everything alone”. Earlier she had to come down to the car with me to help me find my phone which got ‘lost’ on the way to therapy earlier. Asking for help for me is very very tough.. I know now I developed a psychological defence of counter dependency very very early on and as a result of all of this.. I did not even manage to share it all in a 5th step ….have had to unpack it all slowly over years of therapy.
Now I see how much I have managed alone… where my defences are, how others like Scott get dumped on and how alone I also left Jonathan at times and how I resist being their for a sister who has tried her best to be a loving sister while often failing just due to all the things she did not know about me that I have only been able to share with her slowly over time I have so much more compassion for both of us.
I did manage to go to see Sue on Saturday after running through all of my resentments and defences with both Scott and my best friend Jules.. Jules said to me “Sue knows that you love her and have reached out as much as you could.” Scott didn’t know of the painful history between us but was still encouraging me to go with the words born of compassion “she needs someone very close.” Yes but what about me my inner child was crying.. why does it always have to be me who is the strong one?
I just tried to visit her again on the way home from therapy.. I actually loved visiting her on Saturday after I overcame my initial resistance. It was easy between us and it was hard to leave her.. I went to have a very late lunch at the cafe we used to go to with my older sister who died afterwards.. I had to wait a while for a table and soothed my impatient self.. I ate too much too late and had a bit of an attack when I got home but i know its due to the grief as well. Mum is no longer alive for us both to go together and I think of how every single time Sue was hospitalised Mum would be there to take her out on Saturday or Sunday…Mum bore so much sadness in her later years.
Today I thought of how on the second last night before she died Mum was trying so hard to stand up while the nurse and i tried to support her, both holding her by each arm….. the words she said were “I’ve got to get going.” Poor dear Mum, such an abandoned child, carrying that legacy of being a small kid so alone with no father or siblings to turn to….struggling her best with that 1920s generation’s strangled Lion’s Roar (Neptune in solar ruled Leo) as well as the deeper generational wound to the abandoned feminine and great mother (Pluto in lunar (moon) ruled Cancer). Mum died on the exact day : December 12 that my ancestors set sail from Cornwall for New Zealand in 1874. Was it the ancestral memory she was hearing when she said those words?
The latest eclipses triggered the Cancer Capricorn polarity and Mum died as transiting Pluto in Capricorn was opposing its natal place.. Judith had Saturn in Cancer as does her third child… they carried the maternal deprivation too… and it killed Jude in the end.. the hypermasculinisation of the 1980s proved too much and in the end her body became like the abandoned baby.. (unable to walk or move alone she was wearing nappies at the end of her life and had to be lifted onto and off the toilet.. so much trapped so deep down inside… )
So whatever trauma I unpack now, and as much as it hurts.. I will bear it and I will WRITE ABOUT IT without consenting to those voices that try to decry me by saying “but that was ALL IN THE PAST!!!” I will continue to write about and share it to help others in order THAT i CAN RELEASE IT AND KNOW DEEP DOWN INSIDE IT WAS NOT “ALL MY OWN FAULT’ OR ALL FOR NOTHING.. JUST THE TOUGH PATH I HAD TO WALK carrying that MOON MARS SATURN CHIRON AND PLUTO complex multi-generational trauma history.
”The problem is that when we don’t care at all what people think and we’re immune to hurt, we’re also ineffective at connecting. Courage is telling our story, not being immune to criticism. Staying vulnerable is a risk we have to take if we want to experience connection.”
”Practicing authenticity can feel like a daunting choice—there’s risk involved in putting your true self out in the world. But I believe there’s even more risk in hiding yourself and your gifts from the world. Our unexpressed ideas, opinions, and contributions don’t just go away.They are likely to fester and eat away at our worthiness.”
Emerging From The Dark Night 