I had never heard this term before (co-regulation) but learning about it today has unleashed a torrent of grief.. Our nervous systems naturally attune with other nervous systems. We look for signs of safety and welcome and seize up or distance in the face of threat but what about when a parent is shut down? They do not seem to notice you, almost look past you, as if you did not exist.. they walk right past you not stopping to ask how your day was and then you realize no one did that for them.
I am just glad I invited my sister around for a meal tonight.. So many nights when Mum was alive I could have had her around.. I dropped meals off to her but often I did not go over to cook one, it would have been good for us just to be together at times but sometimes after my grief started opening up and pouring out in sobriety she only told me not to go there and I needed to go there.. By the time I found a therapist and the first real opening happened at 6 years of sobriety it was scary and sweet, for her to actually reach out her hand to me and let me know through full eye contact I was not alone in my pain but sadly I tore it up.. I had gone back the next year to visit Mum and was so torn to watch her collapse over her dining room table head in her hands weeping, how ?could i have thought it was a good idea to go to the other side of the world. Who would be there for her and my sister Judith then still alive? (everyone else had moved away by that stage.) I had to come home I just had to. so it burst out of me later in that year, that I must go home but then there was my new life in the UK what of that? So that went into the fire with a lot of hopes and dreams. I guess it needed to.
Maybe its all being stirred up today.. my husband decided to leave me in mid June 2004, he had gone back to the UK for a visit and told me by phone call he wanted to separate, but we had a home and all of his things were here, it was in an isolated part of the coast.. We had a fight on the phone and he agreed to come back for a month or so. On that night I found a dead mouse, I buried in the rose garden by an act of synchronicity when my Dad died in early 1985 I was back with Mum and Dad and we had to catch a mouse and it was painful to do I remember taking its dead body up to the garden at the back and disposing of it..
Its painful to think of the tearing pain that happened for me when he came home and of the day I had to drive him to Sydney (4 August 2004) to get the plane, friends of ours who lived in Sydney were so worried, they wanted me to stay the night but I could not even allow that.. All I knew was how to be alone, I had to be alone.. I look back now to how much loneliness I had, how hard it was to find a place to have my feelings, how scared I was if they came out I would be exiled or shamed, so how much distance I felt I needed from others to be safe.. I think of the next 2 painful years and of the head injury on the first anniversary of all of that.. Really I should not have been so far away but I was and after all as my sister later said “you were the one who chose to go” but she forgot the mean things, that they did she and Mum.. but was I the one pushing away. All I needed was a hug, a caring concern, someone to feel with me but NO THEY WANTED THEIR GRIEF NOT TO BE KNOWN EITHER and so mine had to be denied and they would rather I was exiled and not getting the anger out..The anger came out in a nasty email I sent to my sister.. I got blamed later due to that for causing one of her many nervous breakdowns.
Today when I heard Deb Dana say in her talk on Polyvagal Theory and Trauma that if we cannot co-regulate we have to self regulate.. I think of those many days and nights at the old coast house beseiged by ghosts (during the years following the head injury in 2005) of how I fell back and hit myself really badly on a table on the second anniversary of the crash.. I think of how I saw no one .. all I did was write and write, it was hard to breathe some days, it was hard to eat, I heard voices both destructive and constructive.. I felt the wound my sister and Mum chose to go overseas a month later as if I SHOULD BE ALONE. (in 2004 not 2006). I was so angry I stabbed a cookbook with a knife eight times.. but how could I say it, and how could they hear.
Today after about three calls my brother finally picked up its now up to my nephew to help get my monthly allowance sorted but business will come first, they keep telling me my sister is not up to this or that..i feel so sad at times.. its like I have no voice but I do.. All I can do is pour it out this afternoon.. I’ve been crying deeply over Scott (that no one believes and will help but also angry as I know its not my fault).. I have also been crying over my new connection with Daniel… Scott is still pleading for help with money I have no access to, by some form of divine connection my new friend Daniel is in Iraq where Scott is due to be sent..
I don’t know any more all I feel lately is my father’s distance as well as this deep deep longing I had for someone anyone to notice me and ask me how my day was.. I go into and out of that child state.. I am not in it right now but its painfully here around this triggering time of day leading up to when I was all alone at home after school waiting for Dad at the exact time I crashed my bike and nearly died again from a head injury in 2005.
Now I know it was not my fault I was on the run, no one saw or understood and my family did not even care enough to come over and be with me after I got so hurt.. S”till maybe its the path I had to tread leading into the dark, maybe God chose me for that.. Its just I dont want to stay disconnected any more but relationships still come with such a huge amount of fear ..
All I can do right now after crying and hugging Jasper is let it out there onto the page into my blog. Co-regulation .. we need each other and we need to touch each other in loving, affirming ways, that is all i know now deep deep down in the very depths of my soul. Without this we nearly die.. How fucking dare they shock my sister, how dare we as a family have let that go.. I should have bloody fought.. I have been a fucking coward.
Emerging From The Dark Night 