Opening up is the key to understanding.. blooming through soul cycles.

It is a miracle to watch a flower bud and then slowly grow in size until it slowly unfurls each petal one by one.. The roses in my front garden ony have a few living blooms left right now, thought new buds are forming every day. and dead heading helps the blooming to keep occurring.. such is way of things in ongoing life of our emotional soul phases too, perhaps.

I just read a post on opening up our secrets to others, these may be secret shames we carried, things that came to pass in our lives we were led to feel were ‘wrong’ by powers that be but may have been essential to our spiritual and emotional survival at that time, even if we were running and besieged by so many inner forces.. taking that action was necessary at the time, even if in hindsight we look back and feel it led us down a path we may have preferred not to travel, never the less by travelling upon it we learned lessons, so why judge it all as so deeply ‘negative’ in retrospect?

I thought too, after reading the post how shame cannot live in the light of airing and empathy, a point Brene Brown makes so well Shame and secrets that remain hidden may start to putrify and let off noxious odours psychologically. When exposed to the the light of air and understanding compassion by self or other, the so called ‘putrid’ smell may release… not that we are putrid but those things we fear and feel shame about may lead us to feel sick inside, for there is a powerful saying I first heard in AA many year ago “we are only as sick as our secrets.’

I shared a friend’s 5th step inventory a few months after getting sober in 1993.. it was a gift she gave me because it made we see we all do things to survive dysfunction and emotional neglect and some of my secrets didnt even seem half as dark, though some really were. Many years down the line knowing a lot more I know how affected her own family was by the legacy of multi-generational neglect, trauma and addiction, just like mine and a while ago when my sister became ill again and unable to cope I reached out to her and she shared with me how one of her own sibling suffers emotional dereliction, something she found so difficult to deal with being sober and abstinent herself.

For me I release pain, shame and other effects of neglect when I share about them.. I release my feelings when I can name, express, share and understand them. And sometimes it takes courage to open up, knowing that in a shame based society we may be judged.

As a child I was not always given names for what I struggled with, Mum lashed out a lot, Dad retreated smiling and then no words were spoken by Mum, she thought it was a good idea to give Dad the silent treatment for days and ask us kids to pass the messages back and forward, a very confusing situation.. Then there were the times we we hit or hurt by displaced or flying objects, wow is it any wonder my sister and I went on to develop major perfection and anxiety issues.

Alexithymia is very real in families of emotional neglect.. If you do not know what it means here is a definition.

Alexithymia involves a lack of emotional awareness or, more specifically, difficulty in identifying and describing feelings and in distinguishing feelings from the bodily sensations of emotional arousal.

There have been whole days body symptoms possessed me so entirely I could not name the feeling that went along with it.. Grief manifests in my body as stuck feeling that keeps my tummy or muscles gripped, sore or burning.. Similar with anxiety, trapped life energy and anger I was not allowed to feel or came to fear and feel to be a threat to my livelihood or that of others.. Enthusiasm (which literally means to be filled with the breath of God) also was often curtailed or punished at home or at school :.. “Go to your room and think about it I would be told.” which sent me into a terrible internal spin and then taught me that as soon as I was having a feeling getting away from everyone was the best thing to do.. SO BLOODY WRONG.

These days emotions are not always so hard for me to name but still can be.. it is only recently I have seen how fear of how my grief would be treated if it burst out that led me to confine myself for so many years to an almost perpetual solitude, until I met a man also in fear of his feelings who did battle with me over mine.

Today it feels good to let the petals of those feelings unfold, to know its not a sign of madness to express them… It is good to watch some of them fall on the ground and die.. its important to know too that a the way a feeling is received and viewed by others as either ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, ‘threatening’ or ‘non threatening’ that determines how that seed will be able to be released or germinate. Some deeply buried feelings actually incubate.. I sometimes think that in depression it is almost like the soul in us is on some level trapped in an almost endless winter where true seeds of self have become buried and frozen but may, never the less still contain so much trapped and potential life energy.

I take comfort from the garden in my life.. I find my peace there some days, some days it also sparks my anxiety when falling into a state of disrepair, which brings to mind how often my older sister loved to just keep a vase of dead flowers in her room and feel angry when Mum wanted to throw them away… she spent so much frozen in a dead place in her body that at times I could not help but see those dead flowers as the most profound of metaphors.. Please see how I feel, and don’t try to throw out was has died, for I am still deeply grieving it, even if it makes me seen ugly to you, or so often remains silent.