I woke in a different place

I woke in a different place today, its hard to describe but a friend yesterday was speaking to me of drawing a circle of ownership around ourselves, knowing what belongs inside and outside of the circle and it made sense to me, for so long things outside of that circle felt like they were my responsibility

It is funny how you get hit with these waves of fresh insight and compassion at times, it happened to me a moment ago preparing my breakfast I saw myself as that young child who entered this world with her own spirit and quest and arrived into a far older family where so much was already carried by each member, with long roots of feelings and energies linking back. As a child how could I really make sense of that but also what curiosity and compassion and sense of wanting to understand it I also had. But in so many ways I was just so alone, I had no one really in my corner at all and fuck all emotional support to grow, flower and blossom.

Kat said to me this week that she feels by the time I was born my parents had no interest in being parents, as it was we had to gear ourselves to the family system.. I don’t know the full hows and whys of it only that I got so lost and my attention diverted and then when all the bodily shocks hurt me from such a young age things must have just felt so deeply lonely and unsafe.. It seems to me there is a lot I need to let go of lately to live as me, to find my own life and path out of this dark history. Finding out all I have about my ancestors recently has made sense of what an emotionally impoverished and long hard quest to survive amidst harsh harsh circumstances my parents came out of.. Immigration and movement away from their lands along as severing of bonds had a huge impact, it seems to me it is the major reason why now, we are not at all close as a family, as hard to stay connected, to keep reaching for understanding, I also know I must at times let go and put the focus back on who i am and what kind of life I now want to build for myself outside of all of that inherited trauma.

I see what we came out, especially on my mother’s side, as a bit of a quagmire recently I also see how her emphasis on looking good and covering over the pain and emotions she did not really know how to relate to affected each of us siblings. That said my older sister did try but it was sad when she did break away only to come back and try to win in the family game of business, that really made her come unstuck and I saw all of that and the way she was sidelined, well it was so so tough to see that.. In fact in 2001 when I decided to come back but then immediately regretted it I now see the twin pulls jostling inside of me .. if you will there was my solar purpose and my lunar purpose, but the later around femininity and mothering was very dark and neglectful in so many ways.. Mum may have taught us to dress nice and look good but when it came to emotions all we lived inside was a ‘storm’ lately i see that as the neurological storm that comes from lack of solid holding, mirroring, attunement and containment. My second sister’s struggles to be ‘held’ in some way and her numerous psychiatric hospitalisations make sense too, in this regard and lately I see how in trying to hold and mother through all of that following Mum’s death in 2017, in many ways I took on a role that was beyond my human capabilities and WAS NOT MY RESPONSIBILITY. I realized yesterday it is only she who can decided to look deeper and that her choices to disconnect remain her choices and maybe valid and deeply necessary right now.

Attaching and bonding has always felt precarious for me and its taken me some years to be able to approach anything like an emotional maturing, so many of my emotions were so confused and so deeply primal and yet I also thank God that I could let them be that, that i could honestly struggle with them, that God gave me the gift of writing about then (lacking as they were in any kind of validation in my family) even as a youngster, sad my Mum invaded my diaries so many times then confronting me with my ‘mistakes’ which were really just my true feelings.

In yesterday’s therapy phone session I also sat crying and cuddling Jasper as Kat and I discussed over and over again how my second sister and mother often had an investment in making me into the ‘bad’ child.. The badness was about my authentic need to be an individual person, not enmeshed in an entangled family situation in which innocent parties were often made into ‘villans’ while the judging persons sat on their lofty perch but even now i see all of that came out of an incomplete understanding as well as a whole heap of shame and messy mixed up narcissistic injuring. To live have true genuine feelings bound in shame becomes an impossible way to live, to have no go areas that will not be tolerated being spoken about or expressed is a damaging way to live. To be the one who will try to stay impartial and not split things into hard edges of black and white when everyone else is polarizing, or shame dumping is not easy either.

Today I am grateful to be alive.. I did managed to stay sane in a family full of a hell of a lot of craziness, psychological splits and split off emotion, but it all makes sense to me now.. neither Mum nor Dad could fully contain, mirror or validate me emotionally and that also is not the work of others in the end, it must be me who comes to know the truth of the particular emotional ‘reality’ I live inside.. to find that and live it is a quest and a challenge for many of us… For me there were so many things I did not get the chance to complete or bring to full term, too many shocks and traumas hit, so often I was sucked back into what my therapist, Kat calls ‘the trauma zone’. She explained yesterday that when we get sucked there is basically impossible for us to see anything much that is real or present at all… all we are seeing instead are our inner movies eclipsing everything. And yet to life, we also must, of necessity, bring our own world view, formed out of past experiences but hopefully one that can also open to embrace new possibilities, new potentialities.. for are we not put here on this magical planet to grow, to expand and to flower, to experience suffering and challenges so go gain in resilience, understanding, empathy and true wisdom? But often that is only possible for us once we come to fully know the nature of those chains and hooks of the past traumatic reality that have the capacity to immobilize or ensnare us. That for so many of us now living out a long sequence of familial epigenetic trauma effects is a major work, possibly the major work of this emerging dark night time of what the Eastern mystics called the Kali Yuga.