I can see, know, understand and most of all live!!

Often growing up my intelligence was mocked..my love of reading was disparaged, luckily as a youngest my sister in law saw how much I loved reading and would often buy me books, I remember one Christmas she gave me a collection of Jane Austen novels.. My father never wanted to support my dream of studying arts or returning to teaching after those dark years of trauma when I floundered, People have said to me I should not have been as dominated by his will or opinion, I do not think they truly understood what it was like growing up in the late 1960s and early 70s as a young woman.. I did argue with my father but I often lacked the strength, conviction and resources to go against him..

Championing myself has not been an easy thing, standing up to a family invested in seeing me as wrong due to my trauma, to a family unwilling to support me when I opened up about my struggle after getting sober and then separating from my partner was so hard, by that stage I had already buried so many feelings of grief but the deepest grief of all that I suffered was really about the loss of belief in, love of and connection to the inner beauty and wisdom of my true self.

Being told I had defects of character when I actually suffered from profound development arrests and attachment woundings that were multi-generational after getting into sobriety in AA at age 31 in 1993 was also damaging on some level.. That is why I ended up seeking therapy after 6 years of active participation and service in AA. Sadly therapy in the end saw my head injury trauma repeat in 2005 on the brink of freedom, this was, at an emotional level like being hit over the head again by a killing forces that seemed to be screaming at me following the end of my marriage “I WILL NOT ALLOW YOU TO LIVE. YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO BE FREE.. DON’T YOU DARE RISK WANTING WHAT YOU WANT, NEEDING WHAT YOU NEED, FEELING WHAT YOU FEE, LIKING WHAT YOU LIKE, PERCEIVING WHAT YOU PERCEIVE” this force was internalised but I see it all around me in my family and in the culture to be honest. And its really only in these later years of therapy after cycling and recycling through the loop of the issue that I am beginning to rise above it… My breath does not suck me in quite as much as it used to even 6 months ago.. due to this force completely paralysing me from about 2005 onwards.

I take great comfort these days from finding my trust and peace in God/True Spiritual Self/Higher Power.. This force lives deep inside me and knows what is true and real… it does not have to be affected by voices of shame which I now choose to see as the voice of Satan.. This satanic force wants to cut off life, and joy and hope and freedom and a sense of possibility… it doubts.. it is full of fear.. it does not trust.. its lies can be so convincing and yet it does not speak the truth but its truth can feel so real at times..

I was lucky a few years back to come across a very powerful book on the development of consciousness written by a Jungian analyst Edward Whitmont, in it he explained how this judgmental shaming force began to gain precedence when our God became a sky God rather than a force of life and wisdom and alive spirit implicitly present and resonant within nature. He along with other Jungian writers has explained too what a huge affect the occurrence of a far larger pandemic happening in the time of Shakespeare caused.. the Black Plague or Black Death ended up killing half of the world’s population, it struck fear and terror into the hearts of humans and it made the yoke of religion and religious anti life/feminine/chaos edicts of fear even more profound and psychotic in some cases… evidenced by the outbreak of the Witch hunts and persecution as well as demonisation of woman practicing so called Pagan magical arts.. This fear of the death/life/death cycle also began to be transferred onto other ‘scapegoats’ .. the elderly, the so called ‘mentally ill’ and most especially women whose moods and feelings began to be associated with irrationality, an irrationality that needed to be brought under the control of men and masculine forces of power. Hysteria at one point being associated to the fact we women had wombs that needed to be ripped out at menopause.. a terrible fate that befell my mother as well as two older sisters and started all of my second sister’s struggles with emotions and moods of high and low precipiated by a surgical procedure that brought its own dose of ungrieved for transition…

I often thought when reading about all of this at the time how my eldest sister ended up the family scapegoat.. It was the one sibling of my three elder siblings who was most full of feminine life and light that ended up being struck down, medicated, restrained, controlled, judged, reigned in and then stripped of power in both overt and covert ways.. I have seen similar things happen to my second sister who still has not really found her way back to the vital true self I have seen her trying to find life and power in the world and escape from the hyper-critical controlling inner forces of self abnegation and shame while taking on board a ‘mentally ill’ diagnosis to the point she made an attempt on her life….

Lately I take comfort from the knowledge that God always loved me as I was, that even when ‘alone’ I am not really alone. I take comfort from the fact that so much of the shame dumped on me for ‘struggling’ due to Complex Trauma was in no way ever warranted or deserved.. I see that even my quests for life that looked like ‘madness’ were not… and it was, in the end, I who had to see and believe it. It was I who had to cast off the judgment of others, it was I who had to see that feeling and grieving and trying to come alive were not signs of madness but of wisdom seeking growth and life through accepting the struggle of loss associated with the earthly Saturnian experience.. It was also I who had to find my way home to all of the love, all of the life, all of the light, all of the power that God gave me as a young person, that sadly I allowed to be stripped from me in coming to believe the lie of ‘not good enough’.

Like Glennon Doyle I feel now I am a life and love and light warrior.. I have to sidestep the people who only want to hurt me, dismiss me, ignore me, invalidated me, shame me, or judge me.. I have to ignore the beliefs of those who do not see me as I am, as everyone is : a special child of God who is also not only special but just deeply human too, someone capable of being hurt but also of becoming large enough to hold it all and so transform that pain into something both useful as well as life enhancing, rather than life stripping.

For the most part, life feels good today.. I know I am not alone.. I listen all the time lately to positive Bible messages, passages that tell me I can choose to rest in peace, in hope, in serenity, and that most of all THAT I NEED NOT FEAR… FOR ALWAYS AND EVER GOD AND GODDESS HOLDS ME TENDERLY IN THE PALM OF HIS/HER HAND, KEEPS ME SAFE, VALUES ME, LOVES ME, NURTURES ME, PROTECTS ME, WISHES FOR ME ALL GOOD THINGS AND WILL ALWAYS ALWAYS BE CLOSE TO ME IF I CHOOSE TO BELIEVE AND BE A WITNESS FOR THAT POWER OF LOVE THAT IS IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS THE FORCE OF BOTH CREATION AND DESTRUCTION THAT GIVES LIFE TO AND EVOLVES FORM..WHILE ALWAYS REMAINING AT ITS DEEPEST HIDDEN UNSEEN CORE (AT LEAST BY THE OUTER – NOT INNER HUMAN EYE) INDESTRUCTIBLE!