My schedule is a bit shot to pieces this week as Kat is away for a week, so today I got myself out at the usual time of my 11 am therapy appointment and went to change those tops for my sister after swearing all weekend it’s too much, that said I took time out yesterday. I know it had to get sorted anyway so not much use in putting it off. While out I also got some groceries and had an early lunch when I got home, then went out into the garden, the critic was on the case a bit as there is a bit of mess out there and weeds building up.. bursts of joy too came through with the sight of some random self seeded freesias which appear out of the mortar between my red housing tile brick pathway each spring and some new blooms on the camellia I planted earlier in winter. While doing all of this I noticed that my body started to mimic feelings of anxiety which panic writer Browywn Fox also calls and ‘attack’ she says that rather than resist these we should just notice them and keep walking through the ‘inner storm.” So today I did that, I didn’t let them stop my actions.
My good mate and fellow blogger Alex of Evolution of Self talks about the storm a lot. I know a bit about his childhood abuse and it was his Mum who was the prime offender. In our family it was Mum who ‘stormed’ around and Dad who just laughed or withdrew offering little in the way of support. That is why its important to me to father myself through these ‘attacks’… when they come it feels like I am dying or under extreme threat, and just stopping to write and channel some of this over the past 5 minutes has, I have noticed, totally calmed it down.
I thought in the shower today of my sister’s Sun Mars square and how Dad’s Mars in Sagittarius (which is a fire sign) was tempered down my three inner planets in earth (Virgo). Dad also had a very stressful Venus placement in his chart with it placed in Libra opposite Chiron and square to Pluto. I think my Dad valued the externals in life more than the inner emotional life as he had to work so hard to escape war torn Holland and then never really wanted to back (this all tallies with that Venus placement of his.) He had so little to do with his sisters and I cried buckets on the second visit to meet my aunty Lies in 2000 who is now no longer alive.. She was also actually so kind to me after Jonathan left and went back to the UK and lodged with the family who threw me out after I had the head injury.. I just could not go to Holland at that time and I do regret that now. My brother follows a similar pattern of keeping a lot of distance with his family of origin and he told me he expressly made sure to break from Mum financially after Dad died.. I think that was good in a way but he gets to be safe from the hassles with my sister’s mental health and doesn’t think to check in much.
Thinking about my sister today I thought of how she is so like my Dad. Rather than fight or respond she becomes passive and maybe even at times there is a degree of passive aggressiveness. It felt so weird on the weekend to be the one sitting there crying so much I could not speak while she looked at me calmly and coldly and said “when do you think you are going to be able to go and change that top for me!” I felt like screaming “you aren’t a bloody cripple, go change it yourself!” That said sometimes I like helping.
Anyway I don’t want to keep fostering negative feelings about my family. we have all been affected in different ways and today I read a very good reading on negativity in my Al Anon reader which spoke of how victims of family trauma, emotional neglect or addictive parents and grandparents can sometimes expect negativity in a place where something good may happen so we end up using avoidance.. Avoidance of triggers is not necessarily helpful if it makes us avoid real life, understandable as that is and some may prefer to retreat.
In dealing with victims of trauma specialist Peter Levine takes them back in somatic processing to the event and feelings in the body as well as connected to images of threat that arise and bring fear but he uses pendulation getting them to on a place in the body or an image that is positive and life giving, warm or soft and deepen into that.. He gets them to shift from the frozen place of death, or pathological feeling or non feeling.. There is a wonderful chapter in his book In An Unspoken Voice which details his work with a Holocaust survivor, Alex who loses his son to suicide and falls into a deep and lifeless depression…arrested grief can also stop us moving forward and the best thing to do is often to go TOWARDS the grief in order to feel it, while working skillfully to release and not get stuck. Peter brings him slowly out of his depression by getting him to focus on good feelings in his body that came from happy memories of being a child and flying a kite. Alex’s grief then flows as well but those feelings eventually lead him out of freeze into feelings of joy and vibrant aliveness too.
This is the way Peter works with children too to help them escape from the cycle of ‘freeze’ after traumas such a accidents or orthopedic interventions during which they are immobilised.. in this case he lets them have the anger and the discharge that would have enabled them to break free at the time and NEVER SHAMES THEM FOR ANGER OR GRIEF.. This is why having grief invalidated is so terribly pernicious and dangerous for many of us and it certainly arrested me and my forward growth for many years, my outbursts of anger were rarely understood either. Often too when I went forward with honest pent up expression those around me never understood the intensity of my reactions to events that retriggered old loss and just looked down on me for them, judging, exiling or sidelining me. (and this even included some therapists). That is why I am so glad I finally found a therapist who lets me grieve while encouraging me to come more fully alive, giving myself permission to feel joy and happiness too.. She also helps me so much by validating the part anger plays (when felt and surrendered) in fighting to free our true self.
Thinking about how I was feeling before it occurred to me that often being active and happily engaged in life and living is a huge trigger for me as there was a powerful joy killing energy in our home growing up. Mum would sneer or express her disapproval often with flared nostrils and we learned to watch carefully for this as a sign a storm may be on the way. Hypervigilance is so hard to live with. I read a powerful blog last week from a trauma survivor whose mother used to throw a frying pan at her, she still gets triggered by frying pans, even if they are no longer flying through the air.
Seeing my anxiety as a sign of coming alive helps me to reframe it..and not make of it a negative thing. Feeling good may actually feel dangerous to me as it was so often not tolerated at home.. Being too lively was not good and you got judged or ridiculed for it.. That said going into a storm isn’t much fun for those around us if that is the only way we learned to be in a home where a parent was so often engaged in fight or flight responses.
Sitting still and writing now has calmed me completely and gave me insight to why I felt the way I did just before in cleaning up. I thank God for writing as it is so helpful. Repetitive or boring as it may be for readers to hear me going over and over old ground, the healing process seems to so often require this of us.. It can take time and many rounds of the spiral to get a good handle on why and how we react or feel as we do…staying positive about the process is also helpful…shutting down living only leaves us isolated, alone and riven with symptoms it can be so hard to find the courage to move through and not resist. That said it is understandable the place that so many trauma, neglect and emotional abuse survivors end up.. But until we can find the strength to break free of immobility and powerful inner critic attacks true life and open hearted living will remain forever verbotten or impossible.
Emerging From The Dark Night 