Was my heart really open? Evening reflections

A deep truth is beginning to break through to me tonight, after having exchanged a few emails back and forward with my ex husband it occurs to me, that in many ways while we were married my heart was not really fully open at all. Its really only lately I feel the door to my heart that was closed by my mind and the workings of my inner and outer critic opening.. As I process hurts that the child in me felt, I see the blocks in adults that caused them and then I have compassion, it is almost as if, through shedding those tears I feel the truth of a far deeper reality opening.. At the same time I look around at an (at time increasingly surreal world) seeing how we are now, affected by the fear of a virus that makes us create even more distance while reminding us, with this distance of what the heart, soul and body REALLY LONG FOR AND ALSO WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT.

Benny K of The Written Addiction touched on this need to be touched and relate from an inner level in a post of his I think he shared last Sunday or Monday.. I actually read it while sitting in the car after leaving therapy and having that big breakthrough of grief and longing for my Dad with Kat and then I thought sadly of how I progressively began to isolate from my husband when we came back and at the same time refused to move closer to Mum or go back to the UK to be with his family… He ended up leaving 16 years ago and I went into isolation and had the head injury.

I think about it now and think God must have been working to wake me up.. that brought me back to the site of so much trauma I had to face and cry my way through, it brought me home so I could be with both my older sister and Mum in the final years and then days and nights of their life. That was the right thing, though witnessing the end for both was sad, in time it did reunite me with my older sister’s family for a time.

Today while visiting my sister we spoke of the great emotional distances with our brother’s family, of ruptures that never seem to heal, of tears cried.. my sister spoke about ‘sucking it up’ and that made me feel a kind of frustrated feeling… I come to logger heads with my brother a lot (there is a vast difference in ages : some 17 years). Sometimes I want to shut down or he threatens to walk away or accuses me of being a loose cannon or not listening (my therapist laughs at this one). I accept that I love him but at times I also hate him or feel so hamstrung or frustrated over certain things (and he admits to being blinkered) and then I remember Carl Jung often said the opposite of love is not hate it is indifference…I wish people would remember that when the wounded, brokenhearted or endlessly longing lash out.. as the Course in Miracles says “all attack is really a cry for love”.

Tonight I was so pleased to get that quick response from my ex hubby.. It touched my heart so deeply. It made me realise at times I never really saw as deeply into him as I needed to and that as I got into therapy he also had no help with so much sadness he had also endured in his life.. Life is strange sometimes, looking back we see things we could not see before, and often it seems we have to travel a long way down the road to get a wider vision of our past selves and the selves of others.

Tonight I can be grateful for a tender heart that is opening, even if at times I feel great loneliness, frustration and even regret. I can also know at the time I did the best I could and so did everyone else. As a very good friend of mine in the fellowship used to say to me all of the time :

“If they knew better, they would have done better.”