I started this post just over a month ago.. It repeats a lot I have been writing about but revisiting. It also shows how awakening to buried truths takes us time and how recovery is an up and down, positive and negatively valanced process which repeatedly oscillates :
Here in Canberra we have been lucky to have missed out on recent lockdowns that other Australian States experienced this year. But we are back in a 3 week one now and it is honestly triggering me as positive as I try to be. I just found myself in a dark space again this morning with suicidal thoughts. I try to count my blessings…a house, a (usually) safe and peaceful environment some healing connections, funny interesting things to watch on television streaming but I do ache at times for an embodied community.
Writing helps, getting out into the car into a spot in the Sun and going for a stroll helps, but lately how people tried to control me is coming up big time as well as how painful it was to have locked in emotions no one wanted to validate.. (at this point I was still trying hard to come to grips with seeing this problematic issue more realistically and with a greater depth of nuances clarity).
I look at how enmeshed I got with others lives (family members) especially from 2011 onwards and ache from some of the consequences.. breast cancer and battles with depression and buried anger amongst them leading to a massive head trauma and that anger seemed to be bursting out in the weeks leading up to when I wrote this post as transiting Uranus slowed to turn retrograde again.. The pain over longing for what we cannot have can be so difficult at times we try to deny the longing or, alternatively we make ourselves ‘bad’ for feeling it, even expressing anger over it.. that anger has to come out somehow though so we can see what mixed up feelings lie hidden under anger. Therapist Bryn C. Collins writes in his book Emotional Unavailability : Recognising It, Understanding It, and Avoiding It’s Trap that anger is so often a cover up among those of us who got hurt a lot in childhood by a parent’s unavailability and had to seek for deflection strategies..
The cover up emotions under anger are according to Collins (adapted from the work of a man called Jim Keenan) are : sadness, fear, and hurt. Sadness requires for its resolution in childhood for us to be comforted. Fear is asking for a sense of safety and hurt feelings we feel and express in anger or other reactions seek reassurance but when a parent leaves a distressed child alone managing these feelings anger may come to be the default. If we are sad and parents do not comfort us, if we are feeling scared and a parent laughs or torments or shames us even more, if we are feeling hurt and that is not recognised and met with reassurance and containment from a parent then we do not have anywhere to go with those feelings and they become both confusing and overpowering and so we try to displace them. .. Ross Rosenberg’s training on the H.I.T.C.H. program (Healing the Inner Trauma Child) clarifies how a parent in responding or not responding to a child’s distress.. sadness, fear and hurt then sets them up for the trauma of Complex PTSD.
Anyway it is interesting to me that a day before re-editing this post which was in drafts for some weeks inner guidance told me to pick up Bryn C. Collins’s book so I could gain this clarification.. I tried to express all of these feelings with my sister and brother and nephew and that was problematic for especially my nephew. Luckily as time goes on I can keep exploring these issues in my life and in the way relationships go in order to learn more about what anger may cover for me or how unmet needs from childhood may continue to replay in or derail new relationships.
Perhaps this lockdown forces us inwards to make things more combustible and necessary to confront.. The rise of domestic violence during lock down shows when they are not managed well difficult situations result.. Our problematic relationship with emotions may become even more so as we have to deal with the added pressures of lockdown and threat of death posed in these times by Covid 19.
Emerging From The Dark Night 