I struggle at times with over empathizing, maybe it comes down at heart to my own level of emotional neglect and struggles with my own unhealthy narcissism. I will get waves of feeling how it was for my parents to undergo all they did while at times honestly feeling really angry that Mum gave birth to a child she had neither the time to give to or the desire or ability to attune to. This wound has been triggered this week watching later episodes of the dramatization of the novel Little Fire’s Everywhere where the lead character Elena falls pregnant with her fourth child and daughter, Isabelle. Elena made a choice at one point to move from one destiny towards another so that part of the story is different to my Mum’s but she resents falling pregnant and does not really want the child.. Isabelle and her Mum clash, Elena is the daughter of a patriarchially tradition bound Mum (possibly a narcissistic mother ruled by the old system values) who urges her to have the child, her husband also wants this but really Elena cannot mother her daughter Izzy or see her as separate in any way and her anger over it all errupts when Izzy is just a baby with Elena smashing plates un frustrationand then connecting with her past boyfriend who wanted them to follow their careers in journalism and stay in Europe. At that point Elena knows she does not have the courage to make a break for freedom and neither can she betray her family by leaving and abandoning them physically so that abandonment then gets acted out on emotional levels. It is a deeply misaligned relaxationshe has with Izzy and both struggle with issues of anger and longing to be see on Izzy’s part..
Her daughter Izzy turns into an angry rebel and emotional truth seeker who carries so much of the inner knowing of buried things (perhaps even the unconscious awareness of her own unwantedness.. and to mirror this and resonate it to the audience a powerful music track ..Uninvited accompanies those scenes). This episode really triggered me last night, I was literally yelling at the television watching it. But it also showed how anger at our mothers may entrap us prevent a deeper and more compassionate impersonal insight into the vast forces inner and outer they may have been subject to. The same goes for Pearl’s relationship to her own mother Mia in the story a mother who also carries so many emotionally heavily loaded ‘secrets’.
I am glad I chose not to give birth at the times I did..I think it was a responsible realistic choice..That said I know life is not perfect and we are evolving, so many of our parents could not be nurtured they were born in harsh economic conditions and in the midst of patriarchal times when the child was not thought to have intrinsic worth or value and could be subject to anything, many lost parents or wereforced to.or decided to.leave their countries behind.. Even Freud who recognized the power of the unconscious and defenses in particular did not believe or give credence to the wide spread prevalence of child abuse, he covered it over.. and then tried to turn it back on the child with theories.
I felt so sad in phone therapy yesterday but it was a different kind of sadness a more realistic one.. Yes I felt forgiveness for my parents but it does not belie the amount of damage done.. things i could not see before due to going down the addictive pathway now are clearer but that has taken over 25 years of therapy and sobriety (or numbing abstinence) on and off. I feel compassion for my living sister and see the inner split that my therapist speaks of in both her and myself .. I am yet to fully understand the total nature of this split but I think it has something to do with the mask self we put on to survive in a narcissistic or emotionally impoverished family or society, our struggles as women, the many betrayals or negations of our true nature that occur in an effort to win love and attention (especially around our appearance for women.)
The hard work of recovery and uncovery lies in taking off the mask, in feeling deeply into the true self that lays inside of it and got buried and is for many of us who lost so much in not getting to develop as real a long and drawn out process of grief or mourning to release or begin to build stronger foundations inside as well as a deeper more authentic connection with our own buried light, strength and power as well as a grounded acceptance if both our strengths and weaknesses.
So it may be that over many years of inner work we no longer come to see both parents as Gods who needed to be perfect for us to become and live as a real self.. in fact by seeing into and feeling our own wounds we find what theirs were, we have to widen and deepen our lens or view quite considerably to do this… what do some if us do with the level of confusion, insecurity or hurt?
Some of us turn away from the generators and perpetrators of our own emotional abuse or neglect, some of us come to see it is not personal and we feel we cannot abandon that parent cruel as they are at times.. I did a series of posts a few years back on being a child of the self absorbed based on a book I was reading then that I will link to later in this post after I go have lunch.. In it it speaks of how we can stay related without taking on the shit, invalidating, shaming or scapegoating. But in the end we must start taking responses too for our healing and decision making while accepting the damage of poor choices
Sadly the child who carries a lot of potential maybe the one the parents or one parent tries to keep inside a narrow box.. A good friend of mine many years ago described it this way to me.. about my role in my family and my struggles with my Mum. Caia compared me to a Stradivarius violin and my Mum to a -person who was musically tone deaf.. My Dad I think saw more of me but he hid those books on psychology he had got as a study course up the back of one of the cupboards in his study and Mum and I only found them just after he died..
Even writing about him today is painful I am back there as I write at no 88 Mugga Way getting news that he may be fatally ill and in my mind and heart too I see myself crossing the kitchen to hold him as he collapsed in tears with me.. That perhaps was a rare and precious gift for me, a moment of rare vulnerability in the life of a man who lost his father as a result of war (just like my Mum) and survived not only depression and the Second World War but liberation of many POWs that he flew home following the ending of that war. A man who saw so much and lived so much that remained locked down so deeply inside in silence like for so many men of his own generation (1920s) that passed the silence on to their sons (1940s, 50s and possibly 60s too). And my Dad and his unspoken experiences are therefore a big part of me too, as I carried a lot he locked in just as my remaining living sister does..
It interests me that as it stationed to go forward a day ago Pluto is passing over the top of my sister’s North Node conjunction with the planet of collective and interpersonal wounding Chiron that lies at 25 and 22 degrees of Capricorn.. Both of these oppose her South Node in sign of emotions and mothering that lies with Uranus in Cancer for her generation (1950s).. This is almost the reverse of my brother’s nodal set up, born 10 years earlier in 1944 his Nodes North and South are in Cancer and Capricorn. My brother is close to all of his kids but my sister’s relationship is problematic with hers at times. For my sister these influence in terms of the North Node ruled by both Saturn and Capricorn relates to men, fathers and possibly feminine wounding patriarchy… shown more by the opposition to Uranus in Cancer which was transiting the Pluto of both her parents when she was born in the year 1954.
The emotional subtone of those influences is one I explored in a post someone fortuneately ‘liked’ late last week in which I relate it to the novel Revolutionary Road which was written by author Richard Yates set in that period, and was later turned into a movie directed by Sam Mendes and acted in by his wife Kate Winslet in around 2005.. This curiously too was around the time my sister started to really struggle in her life.. That movie deals with the conflict between a husband and wife as they long for more than the rigid roles and jobs of those times at the same time as the female character struggles with issues of mothering (Uranus in Cancer) versus her desire to be more than just a mother. Possibly around this time following the War women became more restless for roles outside mothering and longed for more masculine roles (Capricorn Chiron and South Node) that then in turn affected their own parenting.. But they also carried the inner burden of both parents as they struggled to break out of existing male and female stereotypes. Thus relates to the polarity of Moon/Saturn, mothering/fathering, nurturing/discipline.
After my Dad died I went overseas, Sue stepped when she could to support Mum while running businesses and raising two young sons with her husband who sadly tended to put her down at times.. She also fronted up in later years to support members of his family riven with addiction issues and particularly his father before he died.. My brother in law has a strong Uranian signature in his chart which marks how as the youngest of an alcoholic family he tended to split, abandon and then run.. He did it with his first wife. There was a lot of controversy when he and my sister wanted to marry as when that fact came out they were disallowed from marrying in the church.. Later in life he left my sister at a critical time and she started to go down emotionally.. due to the lack of support, so much of that, for me, as an astrologer makes sense it also echoes other themes of relationships falling apart across several generations.
In the end I think my sister just collapsed back into the South Node in Cancer, running from real feelings, wanted to be held and supported by the psychiatric system.. and maybe it was ‘right’ for her.. Unlike me she did not choose the path of emotional recovery, of feeling her feelings. As much as I used to be shamed for feeling as a child, carrying so much of it as the youngest in such an disturbed family. in later years she has told me how she feels it is a gift that I can cry and that she wishes she could but the drugs stopped that,… it does not mean that the feelings are still not there, in true Plutonian fashion (Pluto rules Scorpio which is the ruler of my sister’s natal Saturn – significator of psychic defenses we assume) they are buried and numbed. It does not mean my sister does not feel deeply but sadly she does not always know how to relate from the level of feeling and with the Cancer influence strong she may find it hard with me as she told me recently she sees me as being so independent I never needed or knew how to rely on anyone which is just not true.rhe needing to part)..
Today I can have empathy but I have to be careful too, knowing that there was another path for my sister to travel. And yet how realistic was it for me rage in that email over the state of things to both my nephew and brother so many weeks ago? I do not know I know I had to do that though, with my level of awareness then. I also know I had to take a hit for doing it.. its just par for the course in these kinds of families… and yes, I do identify with Izzy as she battles with a mother trying to turn her into another shape, trying to deny the full consequences on her daughter too of her own mixed up choices..
In the end we are not a piece of clay that exists to be molded by others or made to fit a certain shape, and yet our life experiences will do this. So surely we must learn to compassion too for the emotional hardness and split off of our familial past, for who among us it not a victim in some ways of our own family ‘fate’ or history, subjected to so many forces we have no control over, or eve insight into until so so so far down the line of our own mixed up pathway of growth? That said some choose not empathy but hardness, defensiveness, power over, control and defendedness or the burying of secrets and that choice they make will in turn have its influence in time too, over those that come under the person’s sphere of influence and so it is having empathy for those who choose to keep hurting and remaining blind, may, in the end perhaps not be the best way to go.
Emerging From The Dark Night 