Sometimes lately I just cry that I spent so much time in isolation in sobriety.. I was sharing yesterday with my therapist that while in isolation at the coast in those hard painful lonely years after my husband left me, I went to an AA meeting at which I met a close friend from my early days of sobriety in Sydney and she told me of a treatment facility where I would have got good support and help to come to terms with my feelings…. Someone else in the fellowship tore that idea down, but I now look back and see it may have been the best thing for me and prevented even more damage in the relationship I got involved in from 2007 to 2010.
That said, things unfold as they do and what is the point in saying this? Just the point that sometimes I did deny the connection I sought but it was of a much deeper kind, the kind most often found by good therapists or those who had a lot of trauma and were undertaking the hard work of recovery.. Ys, past is past and it didn’t happen but I am sure now I pushed people away who were trying to tell me I needed something else, to go back sooner and connect with family… I have Uranus in the first house and this can be a very individualistic go it alone placement. I am a seven planet Aquarian anyway and with Uranus in Leo I am lucky to have that fiery subtone and as my therapist often says to me ‘your anger kept you alive for so long’, but today we talked about how anger and defensiveness can keep softer more vulnerable feelings at bay that are so very important to open up on our healing journey.
These days I feel levels of forgiveness for my parents I never felt before and I see in a way there is nothing to forgive, it was just the working out of evolution and down to a lot of collective and social forces such as the rise of industrialism and imperialism, the neglect of the child and the pursuit of heroic masculine values, instead of deeper feminine nurturing and feeling ones. Reading Mary Trump’s book I see those forces in Fred and in the way Donald Trump’s mother fell to the floor bleeding from a hysterectomy and was a very distant, disengaged mother emotionally.. My father was not as hard as that, but still patriarchal being raised after the First World War in Holland and losing his father at 12 years of age. (its a case of synchronicity that my mother’s grandfather, the one who became an alcoholic also lost his mother at 12 and left his homeland far behind in his late 20s.) My Dad did have a soft side he kept hidden, as the oldest in a father loss family he had to be strong and deny deeper family feelings. All he wanted to do was leave Holland which he did in 1938 at the tender age of 18 after narrowly escaping Nazi occupation. Dad joined the Dutch East Indies Airforce and both he and my mother, along with my older brother and sister lived there for a long time during the unsafe conditions of both Japanese occupation and the Indonesian independence struggle.
In fact over those years Mum and Dad had to sleep with pistols under their pillows at night. It was very dangerous and there was a curfew. I need to remember my older brother lived surrounded by these harsh conditions during his younger years, before being removed to Holland to get help with a condition of rickets that was threatening to leave him with bowed apart legs…Mum, Judy and Gary spent 18 months in Holland without my father in the the late 40s or early 50s and over that time my brother had to share a narrow bed with my Dad’s younger brother, Frank.
Yesterday on the way home from therapy as I drove home along the winding road that borders the lake, I felt my Dad’s spirit around me.. There is so much of my father in my living sister, Sue…They have the same round face shape and softness along with the Dutch brusqueness. I know how deeply my sis loved my Dad and that she was, in many ways, able to bond with him more than I did being 8 years older.. she got to have more of her adult years with him in her life, but the loss of him in 1985 when she was 31 must have been hard and she remained behind after I left for the UK and did the best to support my Mum before she met and married her second husband in 1987.
I cried a bit in therapy today with Kat saying that lately as I feel more defences falling down and more softness opening up along with forgiveness.. I felt so much love for my Dad today and had some softer memories, but this is not to deny how hardline he was with me in times and lacking in insight, a capacity to mirror and empathise. Now that I am finally managing to love my sister I do really feel my wounded heart and soul healing.. I am grateful to Scott who has helped me a lot in this process by understanding when I am angry or hurt and owning his part.. this has never happened for me with a partner before.. other partners always made me feel wrong for being deeply sensitive and emotional.
I am also far better at embracing my emotional self without shame now than I ever was before. I see others shame themselves for being human too and my heart melts in compassion, it seems that at times no one is harder on ourselves than ourselves.. It can be a cultural thing not to show empathy or compassion for yourself at all and Kat and I were saying today how we feel so much especially for sensitive emotional men so crippled by a past of toxic ‘toughen up ” masculinity.. Hopefully things are changing as men learn to embrace their feminine side and as women support them in this.. Calling out a toxic masculine culture is important but we have to blame the forces of society for contributing to this problem.
Today I had a bit of panic, I got out early as I could after a night in which I spent an hour awake between the hours of 4 and 5 fighting an inner ‘storm.’ I didnt have brekkie and Jasper and I went and did a walk in the part before I let him off the lead around the shops by mistake and he ran around barking and attracting the soft attention of passersby including a grandmother and her young grandson.. I expected to ‘get in trouble’ for him being off the lead but his doing so enabled me to let things be lose and also connect with others on a day I could have just spent in isolation at home. I am glad I got out I got into a bit of frenzy cleaning out the car and garage before having a late breakfast… and now I have been able to complete this post I started yesterday.. Inside I am making progress the OCD critic was still on my back today but anyway I just let it have its little rant while doing all I could to keep on top of things.. I long for calm but sometimes it only comes when I sit down to write or connect with others who I love… left on my own I worry a lot and seem to give myself a very hard time.
Emerging From The Dark Night 