Sometimes we fail to front up but maybe we forget a lot was being asked of us too. I was also thinking about being accused of ‘self pity’ which used to happen often in some 12 step groups I was a part of but its a fine line shaming someone for the grief of Complex trauma as we never truly know what they endured or suffered to make them the way they are.
I can acknowledge when I fail someone but sometimes I set myself up to look like that by taking on things maybe I would rather not be doing and then at times I can hold it together for some time with fronting up but I get weary towards the end especially in an emotionally distant family.
I am lucky in so many ways as I have made very real connections in our family over the years of sobriety, even as I have felt it necessary to keep a distance.. One person I am very grateful to is my oldest sister (now deceased) second son’s wife. She doesn’t keep in touch all of the time but when she does we can talk of so many things.. She saw how it all was with my older sister in the later years when she was so physically and emotionally damaged as a result of multi-generational neglect and she also knew my sister’s first husband who ended up abandoning her in 1983 and caused me and my family so much angst through this. My mother never forgave him and sometimes passed the hurt down to his sons and we argued over it a couple of times, as I felt they needed more support and that was given to my next sister’s sons (or at least the oldest one) but not so much to Judy’s boys… I felt it was wrong.. but there you go…this is the way in families when someone gets blamed..
My brother in law was possibly a little weak and quite emotionally shut down too. He had an affair before abandoning my sister but I guess he was doing all he could to survive in the aftermath of her aneurysm in 1980. My sister was also a bit of a dynamo and not easy to live with carrying all that pent up thwarted drive of immigrant survival ambition. It was also not easy for either of my two older siblings being babies born during World War Two when Dad was absent and then being taken as youngsters to Indonesia at a time very fraught with a dangerous independence struggle. Dad nearly lost his life one day at gun point after being held up in the airplane hangar by a Japanese soldier but narrowly escaped with his life and while there Mum and Dad had to sleep with pistols under their beds and Mum and her best friend Jo (who later became my Godmother) had to learn to shoot them.
Anyway Laura called me yesterday (my niece in law) and we had a long chat. I told her of my latest realisations of how it was to grow up as a much younger child in a family that was nearly completely formed and all geared to Dad’s make a million project of escaping the destitution of his own past.. Same for my Mum who had lost her own father due to War injuries at the age of only 7. By the time I came along business ruled and even for my sister 8 years older who struggles now Mum was often absent working at the first family business a European smallgoods delicatessen, the first of its kind in our small town of Canberra. Often she was left to care for me and I think its only natural she resented that and sometimes passed down the anger to me.
In a family geared around business, working diligently, putting emotions under wraps, with a great anxiety over fear of survival that lay at its heart it was not often easy to gain comfort. When I hear of physical and harsh emotional violence other fellow bloggers underwent mine seems far less. Dad was not a violent man, but peaceful, however due to this he often could not stand up to Mum’s rages, laughed them off, he left my sister Sue and I alone in them and if we acted out didn’t really step up to help us with that… This sister who now struggles with thwarted life energy, depression and anxiety pretty much just sucked it up.. she didn’t argue or protest or fight back… Same in her marriage if her husband put her down, criticised, shamed, disparaged or mocked her she would just bite her tongue.. and that used to upset Mum and she never forgave him, especially after he finally left my sister in around 2007 or 8
I need to remember all of this if I get down on myself for letting one plant die. I didn’t start all of this trauma and I had to find a way to try and swim the best way I could in the midst of it. In 1982 when the shit hit the fan when Dad blocked me returning to study teaching and forced me to secretarial college, a wound that I only realised the true impact of over the past 2 or 3 years in therapy things got tougher for me addiction wise.. Getting sober around this time of year in early December 1993 was only the start for me of a very complex journey to understand the hidden forces around me in my family and society that arrested my own emotional development…
Today I need to congratulate myself for what I can do, I need to own my defects too, I don’t find it easy to engage out there in a superficial externally geared world, I find myself in the soul through my inner exploration, poetry, time in nature, reading of others struggles, learning all I can about recovery from the twisted legacy of multi-generational trauma that occupies the work of such excellent therapists such as Mark Wolynn, Tian Dayton and others. And today I need not to see myself as a failure, even if by worldly standards I may be seen as one. Coming out of what I have and being able to remain relatively sane and addiction free apart from a daily cup or two of weak coffee or the occasional sugar craving has been a victory…
I watched part of a program on addiction on SBS television here in Australia last night and it said that only 40 percent of people who to into rehab or achieve a first sobriety actually maintain it. As we say in AA a lot of the time we with 1 or 5 or 10 or 30 years sobriety are the living miracles and we have work to do. Today I know i do have a purpose.. It is to be honest. It is to share my journey. It is to share about shame and where I feel I fall down and it is to be open to the truth of love that so often becomes obliterated when we loose the way to the deeper complexities of carried trauma which dog our society at present..
Today is 11/11 and apparently it is an important ‘portal’. I remember the piece of writing I did called Destruction 11/11 in 2006 when I went into almost permanent isolation at Dad’s coast house following the head injury of 2005. It is now lost in the hard drive of an old computer that went kaput but i hope to retrieve in one day. I do know the forces that want to put love and hope, care and connection, joy and peace, empathy and compassion to death in our society are very powerful ones, not only in our society but within our own heads. Often we are only encouraged to see people in black and white terms, as either guilty or innocent when the truth far more full of paradox and complexity as well as hidden nuances.. And we all make choices to survive…
Today so much of my ability to get up and live depends upon my attitude.. I can look at all the losses of which there have been so many and lose hope, or I can look for the lessons I learned and the wisdom I gained even at those times when I fear I failed to full engage, step and love because myriad fears or other parts of my darker shadow side helds me too relentlessly it their grip. At such times I get down on both knees and pray to God and the Angels to be shown the way back to open heartedness and love as well the dynamic trio of the heart of recover H.O.W. Honesty, Open mindedness, Willingness… as I pray for the courage to look for the new seeds that lay scattered amongst all of the broken wreckage and multiple pieces of carried trauma and shattered lives.
Emerging From The Dark Night 