I spent a long time

I spent a long time talking with my sister yesterday afternoon after my therapy session… I feel so much for my sister.. I think it is so sad she has been through so much and now when it would be so lovely if she could take some joy from family (her youngest son and his wife will be having a baby in April) it’s not possible as she told me the meds she are on just keep her so flatlined….

I want to scream and shout about it at times, what we do to good people, that said there was so much for my sister to cope with its no wonder she came unstuck and issues in her own family are complex. When I talk to her now about past things I try to show her what I see, that she was not shown necessary empathy and when she collapsed on that Christmas due to grief and burnout to be roared at and then sent home on a bus with my Mum was just not right. I was not brave enough to go down that Christmas on the anniversary of my father’s death.. It is so sad the way we turn against each other in families when we do not face grief.. If only the emotions could be let out and we could embrace ourselves and each other beyond complex defences and protections but in a feminine feeling wounded culture this rarely happens.. It is just so sad.

That said I feel happier in the lead up to this Christmas than in any other year.. I am willing to spend it alone if family don’t invite me again. I know I can cope alone and I can be okay with it.. Losing my Dad around Christmas and Mum just a few weeks before it in 2017 was tough but I have come to terms with that now although sadness is there I feel them close.. I am glad I could shed every single tear I could for both of them and for myself facing the truth of all I missed out on and how those traumas affected me, as an expression of my love.. on that subject one of my loveliest blogger friends shared some very powerful writing from Dostoevesky in her blog today and this quote from The Brothers Karamazov really spoke to me :

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

This struck me as so profoundly true, so an unfeeling culture becomes a loveless culture where we struggle to truly connect, others become objects to us and when our pain turns us hard and makes us cut off love and vulnerability and grief and other sensitive parts of our soul then we are better off dead, than living the living death of the zombified in hell..

I do not see hell as a far off place but one we live in when we chose to cut ourselves off from complex aspects of our vulnerable humanity.. The use by date is coming up on that way of living as the earth will not sustain it.. nature feels and is receptive and so are we humans naturally designed to be. The ideal heroic egoic ethos of battling through and vanquishing dragons instead of listening to what their fire breathing has to say or treading with hobnail boots over other’s wounds or innate vulnerability or shaming them for it is not working as I see it.