I wrote this post on Saturday with additions later this week.
I was listening to a talk by Lorna Byrne earlier on the way to the bookshop and supermarket on how our guardian angels often whisper to us and try to direct us towards people who will help us or with whom we can form a connection, today they were working when I ran into a very good friend of my sister on my way back into the supermarket to get a bottle of milk I forgot to get.. It was so nice to see this person and his partner and to be able to share about my sister as I had not seen them since her last hospitalization.. it was obvious to me how much they care about her and had been concerned. Once again my sister told them not to visit when really I know she loves a visit.. just to be able to feel free to express how tough it has been for me lately meant so much and to hear their care for my sister and that they have similar concerns about my nephew, it made me realize once again how tough isolation can be and how much we do need each other.. And though they cared they were also trying to encourage me to keep up a positive outlook..
This got me to thinking how much grief can take us down into our own personal underworld. Lately I notice in the way I am relating to Scott part of me rejects the here and now possibly out of fear.. Part of me feels safest alone at times, as though no one would get it or understand when recent events have been clearly showing me that this has just not been the case at all. And it also occurs to me that this deep old painful family sadness does at time exert such a powerful hold. It can make reaching out tough..
Having a bodily available meaningful anchor in the present is invaluable for our healing as with early abandonment trauma due to lack of containment we are actually missing that wiring in our system and so we learn to dissociate and also to avoid contact which can, when it is warm, help us to embody our pain and also to release it.
I remember strongly having my first such breakthrough around the 6th anniversary of my sobriety.. I was in therapy in the UK at the time and I had a shiatsu treatment and on a rainy day I remember cycling to my therapist’s office and ascending the stairs to her attic room as a wave rose up and I will never forget, she looked me deep in the eyes and reached out a hand to me which made me cry even harder.. I cannot explain it, but when she touched me it made my pain real and God I know now how dissociated we can come from pain and on how many wild goose chases we can be sent looking to touch base with and release it again.
It is said in trauma we abandon the body as it becomes too painful and as I look around the degree to which we can get trapped in technology and lose touch with out natural sense of grounding in the body and with the earth leads to all kinds of difficulties… Trauma may make us escape the body but often to move the body and enter it means feelings can actually release instead of remaining frozen.. I experienced this late in 2019 when I got news a good friend had died suddenly walking and touching ground with the earth really allowed me a full emotional release.
Those of us with early attachment trauma and stored up vibrational charge of bodily abuse need an anchor to help us hold, embody and release.. it may be hard to find this person..so much of love can be communicated by presence and touch, it was something that Jeff Foster was touching on in the video I shared a couple of days ago on depression and divine suicide.. Often our deepest pains and wounds and traumas go silent.. We carry them until they are triggered and then the grief emerges like an ocean.. in healing trauma it may take time for the re membering to occur, what this means is that traumatic memories exist as fragments often seemingly dissolved below the layer of consciousness and only when we embark upon the healing pathway do we give them permission to rise and the releasing we may need to do may also be ancestral. Slowly as we allow all of the disparate traumas to emerge we can embrace a narrative that is cohesive in some way if we allow each part its time of individual expression.
I was reading up again this week in Mark Wolynn’s book on multigenerational trauma about core sentences, these are beliefs or fears we may carry that extend far back ancestral, such as the fear of being abandoned, betrayed or ending up alone, you can read the link to that post here..
I thought of this in my own life, this fear of ending up alone just like my great great grandfather, it happened in small way with my oldest sister who died and got cut off from most of the family apart from my Mum, me and my other sister, it seems to be manifesting too as a theme in my other sister’s life that I have shared about here.. This is why now I try extra hard to embrace my sister and spend as much time with her as I can.. Cutting off just keeps perpetuating the old ancestral stuff, when what is really needed is to anchor, embody and connect.
Emerging From The Dark Night 