Our struggles to be truly known,express and with intimacy

Just listening to the most interesting interview on the ABC Radio National Arts program with the author of a book that has been written on isolation, loneliness, art, intimacy and the struggle to express, be and connect. Please take a listen if these subjects interest you. Parts of it blew my mind as so often no attempt is made to engage with the inner life of the artist.. it is a subject that Alice Miller addresses in many of her books on childhood abuse such as For Your Own Good, and The Truth Will Set You Free. It was a gift to hear an interview of such depth on the way home from our wild windswept nature walk today as I struggled after an intense night of being awake between 3.30 and 5.30 am.

Yesterday I found myself swept between different interpretations of my past.. I made the effort to call my sister in hospital on the phone as I have felt the need to keep a distance over the past week or so, since the last painful visit on which she told me it was my fault that she was struggling with a haircut she didn’t like due to a comment I made a while back. It felt awful to to know I had said it and influenced her, was the first thing, the second was that I noticed during and after the call with the way I struggle in our relationship with such mixed feelings surrounding us..

At times she is the kind sister who listens and is full of empathy and emotionally available, at other times she is the nasty or mean sister looking down her nose at people who are not dressed right. At other times she is the lost sister trapped in a wilderness where all paths out seem to have vapourised. Before calling her yesterday Karyl McBride’s book on narcissistic mothers arrived via post.. I had borrowed it from the library a a while back and it was resonating so much I ended up ordering a copy.. During the call I even mentioned it to my sister, at the same time as I shared with her the information that my brother believes she cannot manage the inheritance we have been left. (probably was a dumb thing to share this with her in her current mixed up state, on reflection.. )

It upset me when I spoke to him on Saturday to hear him say this and think how in the past she had been painted as ‘manic’ in her spending by my Mum and to think of how the same thing has been done to both my older sister who died as well as my brother’s only daughter.. Many years ago I saw the struggle of my niece to be seen by self involved parents caught up in their own agenda and with having a mother who allowed her daughter’s abuse at the hands of a foreign exchange student who stayed with them to be written off with the back hander as ‘something you just have to get used dealing with in your life as a woman!’ I saw the way she was medicated when she rebelled against the career they also tried to force her into many years ago and how coldly her mother viewed our emotional attempts to connect at her 21st a few month later back in 1996.

My family is so complex. It is riven with issues of narcissism but then when I try to label myself and other family members in any way sometimes I see I reduce us to something smaller and less multi dimensional that we are… . I found this morning reading chapters of Dr McBride’s book I went into a negative inflation.. it had felt hard to eat as I woke for those 2 hours earlier today feeling so congested from emotional eating I did last night on the back of so many mixed feelings of grief, fear and sadness swirling around yesterday afternoon.. The gardener was due for a long awaited visit at 10.30 am and I had to get Jasper out.. What I noticed was that as soon as I got into my body things started to feel clearer.. My negative inflation receded as I felt the joy of being alive in my body and out in the elements of nature, walking I could breathe the air, I was no longer so stuck and confined within my theories and ideas and efforts to make so much sense of our mixed up entangled family history and earlier I had broken down and prayed for help which always helps me in a way and today I recognised how much nature helps me as a holding mechanism, also how essential walking it to moving emotions through my body and preventing traumatic freeze/arrest/paralysis/fear blocking.

On the walk I thought of how detached from living and life I slowly became from 2001 onwards as I deepened my journey into ‘sobriety’ yes I was sober but I had not grieved the full spectrum of such a traumatic past. Pursuing therapy in the UK in 1999 began the deep dive both into my personal and the collective unconscious.. I had many dreams in the prior years, prefiguring this move.. In one my husband and I were walking through blood strewn green English fields littered with the corpses of cows..now I could sense that as a psychic symobolisation of the mother loss grief, my Great Great Grandfather fled from when he and his wife Eliza Jane set said for New Zealand so many years before in 1874. I had other dreams containing lots of blood spewed on white walls in my early days of therapy as well as one in which while being pursued my Nazis a woman (resembling my first Jungian therapist Wendy Bratherton) opened the door to a sweet little cottage with a courtyard and gave me safe passage to escape… I think while typing this too of my father who left Holland only a short time before the Nazi invasion and of how he never wanted to return, while Mum, Judy and Gary (my two older siblings) were sent to live there for 18 months without Dad following the end of the war so that my brother’s condition of rickets could get medical help he would not have been able to receive in the Dutch East Indies where the four of them were based from 1946 – 1949. To me that Nazi force dovetails with the killing energy of narcissism that reacting in shame wants to kill off any trace of vulnerability in us.. it also relates to the inner critic who will often try to tears us to peaces for seeking emotional health, awareness and freedom.

Today I felt a kind of guilt for talking about the money/inheritance issues with my brother on Saturday but it gave me an insight into seeing how he is pathologising my sister while at the same time understanding so little of her condition.. I also realised the more passive, collapsed and paralysed she remains while seeking caretaking/rescuing for the roots of narcissist injury the more she is going to be seen in this way by a family who lack the capacity to look deeper and understand how her entangled relationship with my Mum’s unaddressed self esteem and emotional neglect issues is playing out across generations.

Karyl McBride talks in her book about hidden dependency and co-dependency as issues which affect so many daughters of mothers who could not validate their true selves, nor give them the nurture they needed. If we do not get this in early life then it seems we are often doomed to keep looking for it, many years into adulthood and even into old age. McBride’s book is peppered with examples of how the wounds play out for lots of women in each chapter of her book Will I Ever Be Good Enough : Healing the Daugther’s of Narcissistic Mothers (and my apologies to male readers here as you may also be victims of this kind of parenting but often the son can be favored over the daughters in such a family and often two daughters will react differently to the neglect and difficulty with having their true selves validated and effectively mirrored.)

Untangling the twisted web of my own lack of nurture and placement in a family of emotional neglect as the youngest of four siblings who at the age of 31 sought recovery for addiction is such a huge task, I would say it is one of almost Herculean proportions.. In AA I was told I had ‘defects of character’, some people in the rooms also tried to say they believed that they had been ‘born alcoholic’, that is not something I can totally agree with but I do know that if we have alcoholism in our long term multi-generational history we are likely to carry cellular effects, as this has been shown through the epigenetic work of people like Doctor Bruce Lipton. I do think learning to drink or use substances to escape pain is somewhat of a socialised behavior, as well as one that is often socially endorsed as a way of not dealing with stress and other emotional issues. It is also a common solution those of us who end up as family scapegoats seek as a consequence of having aspects of our true self buried or killed off in childhood for often the shut down or shame based parent may not be able to cope with our primal nature and desire to be fully and authentically alive in a human body, longing and needing as we do, something Alexnder Lowen deals with in his wonderful book on narcissism ; Narcissism : The Denial of the True Self.

Today it felt good to feel so alive on that nature walk with Jasper… We got home with 5 minutes to spare before David our gardener turned up. I had mixed him around a few weeks ago due to having the tire blow out and putting the car in for repairs, I forgot the appointment and he turned up to find me not at home, part of me feared he would say he would never do my garden again.. Listening to that program earlier on the arts, intimacy and loneliness it was mentioned how powerful a fear such as a fear of rejection could be and was in the lives of some artists like Andy Warhol. As so many of us know the roots of such fears often seem to lie in childhood but who knows if they don’t reach back even further.. I will never know what year it was that my great great grandmother Eliza decided to walk out on my G G Grandad Thomas, I only know at that point they had given birth to 18 children, two of whom died in infancy.

I do know that my great grandmother left New Zealand to get away, she ended up in Victoria where she ran a fish and chip shop and then a pub… my nana (my Mum’s mother) then left Victoria sometime in the 1920s for Canberra with my grandfather who died sometime in 1931 when my Mum was only 7.. Mum and Nana were all alone here, in a very small place, far from family.. Mum struggled to survive and get herself a job defying her own mother at the age of 14 and leaving the live in domestic service job Nana found for her..

In later years, when I was in my early teens both my Mum and surviving sister started a clothing retail business in which they worked for over 18 years… fashion lay at the heart of my family and was something I was drawn into from the age of 13 when I went to work in one of the shops on Saturdays, it was driving to work 4 years later at the age of 17 in the shop they then had in a nearby shopping center that I nearly lost my life at the age of 17. I do not think I ever went back to work in the shop after this.. Sometime in my early 20s when I was struggling in all the aftermath of the traumatic fall out of my accident, my sister Judith’s aneurysm and Dad’s death I went to my sister and then brother in law who also got involved in the business and asked to be a part of it.. that request was denied and so it was in the end I ended up down in Sydney where my alcoholism progressed to terrible lonely depths until I finally met my husband and was loved enough to want to get real and pursue sobriety and later therapy.

I am not sure why this is all pouring out today… maybe an effort to make sense of and be seen and relate in a family so often geared towards business and the outer world. I only know I never knew how to validate myself, know myself, nurture myself, understand myself, feel that self had a right to live or could find a path out into the world. I never developed a sense of basic trust and safety, in its place were only a myriad of fears, buried or inherited insecurities and defenses. I got shredded in the car at age 17 and that traumatic injury replayed at 43 years of age as I tried to separate out again from my damaged family of origin.. only to be pulled back again to the scene of the crime at age 44.

At times I feel its only my blog that actually gives me a sense of meaning, expression and purpose in any real way, as well as the validating real relationships that I find here and sometimes lately in the outside world as well. And OF COURSE THERAPY AND JASPER WHO ARE MY LIFE LINES TO A REAL EMBODIED TRUE LIFE OF SELF LIVED IN A VULNERABLE AND YET SOMETIMES STRONG HUMAN BODY.

Today I know at times it all feels so helpless and hopeless. I wonder why certain relationships fall away and I try to make sense of the way I so often struggle in seeking a path forward while looking back and continuing to stay bonded to relationships which often seem to give so little. I know at times I can cast myself or others in a kind of role that does not seem to fit either of us… and yet I also see my ability to negate my own forward progress by getting a bit trapped in illusions..

Hopefully through writing today I have managed to make some kind of sense of what Mars retrograde is trying to tell me.. Hard as it is to keep the distance with my sister I know at times its what I have to do and yet I also cannot cut off connection either, as she is always in my heart.. but she just never reaches back.. I know it is beyond her..its just I REALLY WANT TO BE ALIVE… AND IN THAT HOSPITAL EVERYTHING IS FROZEN.. JUST LIKE MY SISTER.. and I carry fire, like Promethus.. and often carrying fire has got me into hot water and yet I have to keep carrying it in order to thaw what wants to freeze or fix me in place, yes some would love to see me silenced and chained to the rock as he ended up in mythology.

Last night I did some tidying up.. I cleaned out my astrology books and found a series of lectures by Liz Greene entitled Uranus : The Art of Stealing Fire , (Uranus as an energy is often associated with the energy of Prometheus by Green and other astrologers. I then thought of how Uranus has been opposing my sister’s Saturn in Scorpio at 8 degrees for the past 18 months or so…and of my powerful Uranian signature (7 planets in Aquarius with their ruler Uranus placed in the first house in Leo at 29 degrees).

I watched the movie Revolutionary Road on Monday for the second time.. If you don’t know the movie directed by Kate Winslet’s husband Sam Mendes, with her in a leading role, is based on a best selling novel by Richard Yates set in 1955 one year after the year of my sister’s birth… The book was written by Yates in the 1960’s which interests me as I am a 60’s baby and I believe the movies was made sometime in 2005. The themes addressed there of emotions hidden under longing and repression (Saturn in Scorpio themes as it was placed her in 19955) and the schism between what the soul longs for and the restrictions the repressed society of that time dictated are powerful and it’s resonances to my sister’s life as well as my own was not lost on me.

In that movie a woman struggles and in the end (spoiler alert) she does not make it, the forces around her and battling within only conspire to leave her tragically destroyed.. I truly hope for more for my sister and I. In my sister’s case the outcome is very much out of my hands.. I just long for the feminine to not be as enslaved by deadening patriarchal edits. Narcissism may look like a demon at times but the longing to be fully awake and alive I believe never leaves us, it just can so often be killed off by repressive forces..

I feel at times the full breadth of this archetypal conflict is impossible for me to fully articulate and I feel sure others, somewhere, writing and fighting it to make sense of it all manage to do so far far better than me.. And yet I keep fronting up to the written page on any day making some kind of faltering attempt to voice my ideas, progressions and insights in a way that I hope at least resonates in some way with other readers.. for my belief is, we need each other’s struggle and insight to make sense of our own.. And we also need the fire stealers, the light bringers to show us there is a way forward even when so much that is false and confining within and around us tries to bring us unstuck or keep us in prison!!