Its best to reach out from knowing ourselves, rather than as a way to lose ourselves in someone else or even be ‘saved’ by them.. As I look back at a lot of my relationships I understand more that at the time of them I was perhaps not capable of true intimacy as I did not yet know myself and may even have been on the run from significant parts of myself..
People leaving me from the age of 18 makes more sense to me in this context and the heartbreaks now seem necessary rather than being aberrations, things I had to survive and integrate the pain of to understand more of how I got to be narcissistically wounded.
I also see I made it difficult for my husband not being able to actively choose for my own life at that critical point in 2001 when I made the decision to return home due to the suffering both my mother and older sister were undergoing.. I had a sense I had to be here but as soon as we came back to Oz then I wanted to run again.. back to my own life. So things got very messy and what did I really have to give my husband then, most surely not a whole self, rather a self in fragments?
I can go easier on myself now, maybe even easier on my parents too, after all what kind of child hood did they have? So so little of any present available emotional nourishment as well as young lives marked by loss due to wider external circumstances and in my mother’s case so much aloneness due to adult children being on the run from emotionally wounded or traumatized parents. So now, to blame my parents seems a little ‘off’ they did the best they could with what they came out of and they honestly tried in the only way they knew how.. And each one of my siblings carried scars.
Maybe we have to go around the circle of our life years many times covering old territory but on a spiral as we go higher in terms of being able to see further and deeper and wider.. Maybe too our body has to go on that journey too, most certainly our energy or chakra body..
I think it was the renegade Jungian James Hillman who writes that at times he sees our culture as obsessed with ‘rising above’, obsessed with taking flight from, ‘correcting’ or ‘improving’ when really what we need to do is ‘grow down’ to face the suffering head on in a body that will bring us to psychological (soul) birth, to ingest the life lessons that are ancestral so we can embody those lessons and ‘grist’ so to release our soul from their husks into new life patterns and forms (or maybe I made up the last bit!!).
There was a big breaking apart that seemed to happen for the early generation of the 1900’s that saw things splinter and in terms of the ascendancy of masculine heroic egoic forces taking power and control over the feminine more deeply primal irrational bodily and emotionally centered and denigrate them.. It was something I was trying to put into a book form over my own years of breakdown from 2004 to 2009.. too vast to articulate in this post..
This Cancer Moon time does tend to remind me of how much my parents and grandparents and great grandparents generation suffered and of they ways they tried to rise out of the swamp.. that came with so much wounding, wounding that is still working its way out..
Today I am grateful for the luxury of being able to introspect on all of these things due to the hard work of my parents and my brother..I forget that sometimes.. they did not have the time for empathy as they were not shown it, it was for later generations to birth that. I hope we succeed in this task as it is important to honor our ancestor’s journey and to gain insights into the wounds we carried that may have made loving, emotionally honest, healthily interconnected relationships as well as true intimacy difficult. If not, if we just try to keep rising and flying above our own bodies while not truly enabling our inner soul to expand spiritually in more earthly, grounded, centered and integrated ways that honors our inextricable bond and resonances with nature, will we not just continue along an ecological path of ignorance, increasing internal and external emotional distancing that leads to us not to change our destructive ways?
Emerging From The Dark Night 