Regrets

I am not a fan of the song My Way, especially the line “regrets, I’ve had a few, but far too few to mention”, lucky for that person to feel that way I guess, maybe they didn’t stuff things up as much as me at times.. That said looking back I know I did all I could at the time with the level of awareness I had and sometimes my regrets don’t take into account other forces and pressures on me from the environment that contributed to certain things happening. At times it was not possible to get the support or understanding I needed and I was not very strong or emotionally aware, with a huge backlog of trauma behind me I had so much to process. Now that I am feeling all the feelings, I am beginning to see just how much. Waves and waves of past memory and feelings of grief long suppressed seem to have been washing over me in past days commensurate with Venus now squaring transiting Pluto and Venus in my 12th house.

And good thing about feeling a sense of shame or guilt for things you did is that it opens your heart to the truth that all humans are ultimately imperfect or flawed in some way (and this is something toxic narcissists can never admit). However the paradox is that we are not put on earth to live up to ideals, only to be real and true, and forces can conspire against us in this in so many ways.

I love the part in the Velveteen Rabbit which talks of how he becomes ‘real’ to his owner and that is fundamentally through being seen and loved and touched a hell of a lot. When I think back to the repressive climate of the 1950s and 60s I think its no wonder my sister and I still struggle so much. Physical affection was rare, we were more likely to be hit than cuddled. With our restrictive Catholic schooling we had to be the ‘good girls’ at a time when men had the power and say so over so much.. I see our brother subtly negating or not getting us both at times and I helplessly try to explain to him but he cannot seem to get it as the oldest boy that everything in the family was geared around.

In family systems theory the first child often carries on the hero role and the second the scapegoat, this certainly resonated in my family, the third is often the lost child and the fourth the mascot, the one with lots of life and energy who sees the whole dynamic and tries to play cute or make things right, which is of course beyond them as these are just roles they say nothing about our deeper truer identities. Breaking free of repressive influences for me is taking a lot of time and its only as I grieve I see things that I could not see before, but I also see how I end up making myself ‘wrong’ a lot of the time for merely being human. And sometimes I also do that to my fellow man.

Lately each time I front up to relate and connect in a real way in life that is a victory for me.. there was a time I was so drowning in regret and a feeling of ‘bad’ or ‘terrified’ me that this was impossible. It was hard to articulate my repressed truth through anything but a scream at times…and my body carries the full weight of all I suffered through and could not articulate, this is being made clearer and clearer to me as I open and shed and process. For this to happen in a good way I also need validation for it and I am lucky to have that with my sister and my therapist and a few close friends as well as my much valued WordPress family..

Words from the AA big book come to me as I finish this post.. they come from what are known as the promises.. “we will learn not to regret the past, nor shut the door on it but see how our experience can help others” And that is why I blog in the end, to hopefully, through sharing my experience, insights, struggles and hope help others to share theirs and feel less alone….

These days I am feeling that whatever feels like a regret is probably a sign we are growing in consciousness, mindfulness, wisdom, insight and love, that we acknowledge our humanity and have the capacity for both self reflection and to take on board our impact upon other humans, no longer just seeing them as extensions of us, rather as separate entities with their own background, blind spots, needs, desires and feelings. To me that is an achievement, to learn, in the words of the poet W H Auden so often quoted by Jungian therapist Marion Woodman “to love our crooked neighbor, with our own crooked heart” For where there ever truer word spoken than these :

To err is human; but to forgive, divine!