Necessary calm

Mondays get intense for me often, knowing I have therapy at 11 that Simon comes to walk Jasper, often our only human to human relative connection in a week, if I do not go to the hospital to see my sister and that I must be out the door by 10.30 tends to give me head rushes and sometimes a panic attack if I had other stresses or only slept fitfully the night before.. Still we managed it today and when Simon arrived things calmed down a little.

Sharing about my sister’s near psychotic state yesterday in therapy was very emotional, at one point I heard a voice in my head saying “you were only a little child in that family and so powerless over a lot that went down”, I also recalled how my sister was treated harshly when hurt and even made my parents angry for having an injury that occurred when my Mum pushed her into a cupboard and she fractured both wrists, they told her she was making it up. My father was often big on denying a hurt, we had to hold on to go to the loo for long periods in the car, I was tickled to the point that it overstimulated and caused me pain and nothing I could do could make him stop, then I had my arm pulled out of socket, got third degree burns on a camping holiday when Mum left a boiling hot bucket of water on the caravan stairs and endured a lot of other injuries. It occurred to me in therapy today that a lot of this pent up stuff is still buried in my sister’s body (as well as my own) and Kat made the point they do not know how to be with her and soothe her without reaching to meds in the facility where she currently is. This gives our bodies the message that it’s distress is not able to be shared or heard or made sense of. The whole thing just makes me so feel so very very sad for my sister. Kat did say she thought I coped very well with my sister in that state and was impressed I actually got her out of freeze and moving for a little while at least.. Its not much but it was something.

I was tempted to go and visit my sister again on the way home, but to be honest I had things I needed to do in town and I have the responsibility of watering her plants and collecting mail from two post boxes, to be honest by the time I got home I was pretty dam frazzled only to find birds have been shitting berries all over the back deck.. Never mind, I let that one go to the keeper until later on when my body and calmed down after I unpacked the car and I did a bit of cleaning up later.

Luckily I am now enjoying the late afternoon calm.. I have to keep being aware of my limits around my sister much as I am scared and want to go and advocate for her to the doctor, to be totally honest it feels too much for me right now…I’ve been blocked again from helping Scott as well by my bank and that was another source of distress over the weekend but I had to set boundaries there too, as much as he is upset it was never up to me to fix his problems.. I am getting to the end of wanting to help to be honest..

I am also aware I want to reach for healthier relationships.. I will be there for my sister when I can, its just at the moment I must take care of myself, seeing her in such a disturbed and toxic state was distressing and I have a feeling it may have been triggered by her son’s visit on Saturday as the nurse said she had been doing fine earlier in the day, at the moment they have moved her closer to the nurses station as she was way down the dark side and back end of the facility for the past two and a half months.

I just feel the need to be in my own space at the moment.. I feel like shutting a lot of the negative parts of the world out..I know they exist but to be honest I am so tired of it…. surely God did not create us to be living in such bondage and misery, in fact the AA expression ‘bondage of self’ was on my mind today as well after listening to an Eckhardt Tolle talk on the suffering of ego… Our own minds can become our own punishment at times when they obsess and fixate on what is so called ‘imperfect’, ‘not working’, or ‘not good enough’, we can also begin to turn others into villains in a story we write out of our own biases.. I see that happen in my life more and more lately.. Most people are fairly unconscious of what they do, they do not go about deliberately trying to hurt, sabotage or stuff up our lives, that said we have to be savvy too, to the agendas of others who may want to pull on energy we do not have to give.. Thomas Moore devotes a large part of his book Dark Nights of the Soul to this issue.

It is not a bad thing to need to self protect from the selfish or unconscious egoic agendas of others.. boundaries are what keep us safer and more comfortable, they stop the frazzling that can come for so many of us who were neglected in childhood and carry on unhealthy patterns of over-extension in our personal relationships.. Learning when we feel things are ‘too much to cope with’ is very valid and important necessary information, our own anxiety may be a sign we are taking on too much and need to pull back our energy a little bit and practice our own self care.