On being validated (and invalidated) sorry at the end this turns into a rant!

There are some things that people say.. ‘truths’ that are spoken that are not true at all from a deep soul perspective and especially from the perspective of a person with abandonment.. Such as we should not care what others think of us, or that we are being too sensitive or may need to reframe things. To me these kind of ‘truths’ hurt us, as they lead us astray.. And then that other doozie ‘it is all just part of God’s plan’ well I am sorry that is not now what I believe because we humans are put on this planet to make God conscious and to bear witness to a deeper truth about what it means to be a human who struggles, suffers, bears wounds and when we fall try to get back up again just like Jesus.

John Bradshaw speaks in one of his books about the need for mentors when we have a wounded or deprived inner child and also about how the love and life story of Jesus own struggle to be true to himself guides him and often give him strength. So many of us children of trauma did not have emotionally present or available parents and as a child we cannot know this, we may sense so much about our parents but before a certain age we cannot have a conception of the fact of them as wounded, in fact as child we will do everything to make the parent right, seeing them as a God. So those of us wounded and hurt in childhood by neglect or lack of empathy, mirroring, attunement and care DO NEED VALIDATION FOR WHAT HAS SCARRED US… And sadly this is a validation we will not all too often find out there in the daily world or life where in the words of AA speak “we judge our insides by other people’s outsides”, and then there is another tough truth so powerfully articulated in this recent post by Don’t Lose Hope that some of us get far more damage and trauma in our lives, some of us come out of morasses of deep deprivation, neglect, struggle, pain and separation as well as a distance from knowing how it feels to be held tenderly, cherished loved and nourished on a body, soul and spiritual level.

https://sexaddictionpartners.wordpress.com/2021/11/19/some-thoughts-on-suffering/

But it is also my opinion that when our soul or body or being is not cherished somewhere deep inside we do know then we can come to suffer from what shamanic teachers call a form of soul loss. Until this loss is made conscious we cannot call the soul back home and we cannot learn to how to stop all of that toxic self criticism we came to internalize in the absence of adequate mirroring and attunement.

I first heard about that concept of soul loss at about 3 or 4 years into sobriety when I was seeing various healers that worked on both an inner child and shamanic or soul level..At that time I had a lot of powerful visions but I know some of them related back to the trauma my older sister underwent as the most overt carrier of the hidden multi-generational legacy of trauma and neglect.. When Pluto hit my planets it opened up that wound when I had my accident and then she fell to the floor with a cerebral bleed in February 1980 very soon after my 18th birthday.. The following years 1981 to 1985 when my father became ill and died were full of darkness and I went off alone carrying so much to the other side of the world (and not knowing it was : to the land of my ancestors) and then the years 1986 to 1993 when I got sober were also some kind of rough underworld descent where I underwent so much scarring as well as deep years of addiction, wandering, soul loss and emptiness.

Looking back now I see it all and I see the links and ties the bound us ancestrally to Victoria, in Australia, New Zealand (the land of our ancestral migration) and Cornwall in the UK we manifesting in those I or my siblings chose to love or get involved with and where my older sister and I ended up travelling to.

Anyway the validation that I needed in knowing that I what I had carried for the family came at about 10 years into sobriety the awareness that it was not all my fault or just my doing, finally came when after Jonathan left me in 2004 I started to attend Al Anon and Adult Child meetings for families of addiction.. Prior to this it looked like my older sister and I were the ones pulled under by it but now I see how each of us held wounds from both my Mum and my Dad that had deep roots reaching back into their own childhoods and carried trauma.

There can be so much that we carry that lies hidden.. There can be so much of that condition of soul loss or the hole in the soul that makes little sense to us when we do not fully understand how our seemingly affluent and decent families passed on wounds to us.. It was something that a young man in recovery was discussing with multi-generational trauma specialist Mark Wolynn in a video I watched a couple of months back. How when he first got sober he had no idea of how he had been wounded in the family not only by his parents but by a brother too.. Kudos to him in time he was able to take a wider view on it all as his brother had bullied him in similar ways to what I experienced with this second sister whose Saturn in Scorpio sat smack bang on my natal Neptune in that sign in the third house of siblings.

Curiously over the past week transiting Mars has been approaching closer and closer to that stirring up a lot from the underground especially in terms of buried rage, anger and grief. Due to Mum abandoning both of us girls to work I was often left in that sister’s care and sometimes she could be very mean, but then perhaps she was angry too at being left alone.. Mum just ended up repeating her own abandonment on us and Kat my therapist often says to me she feels the rage I sometimes feel was something my Mum carried, passed down to me, or that I absorbed from the collective unconsious.. In fact in about 2000 I remember asking my first therapist Wendy Bratherton if she thought I had borderline personality disorder and she said to me “No Deborah, you are just a very sensitive person who lives very close to the border of the collective unconscious (natal Neptune in Scorpio in the third house of siblings)… I seeped in that emotional underground marinade as a young child, not understanding its complex roots until recently and it took a lot of times of talking over how my Mum’s childhood was with Nana over those later years of sobriety before she died in 2017 that began to give me a clearer insight into how hard she had to fight not to be killed off on some level by Nana too. Mum fought to get herself out of domestic service and to find a trade and was then shamed and got a huge serving of anger from Nana over it.

Mum once told me that her Mum never once told her she loved her and that in later years she was more excited to see my Dad that her. She did not get that holding or love and so she found it hard to give emotionally only by giving to us on practical or financial levels which did not really go anyway close to touching the deeper wounds.

Thinking over how triggered I was yesterday by Jasper being hurt while being groomed I am sure it goes back to this.. In some ways i feel like the neglectful parent.. When I go off to therapy on Monday my cousin’s son takes him into wild bush and he often comes back in a terrible state.. I get so caught up in my journalling and therapy at times I forgot to keep on top of grooming him and so he had to suffer lately.. I hate it that my neglect has hurt my dog but it did, never the less my therapist says I am a good dog Mum.. I am not so sure… at times I feel so deficient due to my own neglect.

I started this post thinking of how much that validation from Don’t Lose Hope and my therapist has been to me over past years, without it I as sure my inner critic would have convinced me to take my life.. .. I had another huge outburst of shame this morning over things lying around the house I need to deal with and have not dealt with, but when I got out to get a coffee and came back home my perspective had changed, once again I was just being too darn hard on myself.. considering all I have had to deal with in past years along with all the money I let go to help someone else its no wonder things slide a bit and really most of the house is fine, its only a bit of dilapidation here and there as well as needing to get rid of some things that have reached their use by date like an old television, and the stuff my sister dumped with me after Mum died and she was clearing out the unit that she bought over for a garage sale and then left it up to me to dispose of..God knows how fucking hard I tried to be there for her after Mum died and how little she was ever capable of giving back even complaining about the times I tried to help or that she owed me some extra money from the estate that was rightfully mine. Its not bloody fair the way I have been treated in the family and the lack of care attention and empathy shown from eldest son and family after they moved back here a couple of years after Mum died..

My sister directly contributed to that final head injury I sustained in 2005 by being so mean as to tell me I was not wanted at her families holiday house.. That is the placed DAD BUILT FOR ALL OF US.. She was not interested at that time in showing an ounce of compassion for my need to grieve and rest.. She came down there trying to whip me into shape and even disposed of somethings that were very precious to me on a soul level like a pot of feathers and some lovely cushions I had bought for the place.. In 2013 she cleared all my stuff out of there and bought it home in a box..

The truth is how I felt NEVER FUCKING MATTERED IN THAT FAMILY. Externals were what counted, not inner feelings, not the soul, not the carried damage.. WELL BY GOD I WILL VALIDATE HOW FUCKING IT TOUGH IT WAS FOR ME NOW..SHE EVEN TRIED TO SAY I BOUGHT THE HEAD INJURY ON MYSELF.. NO ONE CARED TO COME OVER TO THE UK TO BE WITH ME EVEN AND I WAS IN SUCH A TERRIBLE WAY.. TO BE TRUTHFUL I RUE THE DAY I CAME BACK HERE AT TIMES.. ONLY TO BE HURT AGAIN AND RUN RAGGED BY THEM WITH ALL THEIR HEALTH ISSUES.. IT WAS THAT WAY BECAUSE I CARE A GREAT DEAL AND AM COMPASSIONATE.. THAT’S WHAT MADE ME LET IN A GUY WHO HAS BEEN USING ME TO GET OFF A DEPLOYMENT HE SHOULD BE TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR.. I FELT SO ANGRY WITH HIM TODAY I AM SICK OF SUCKING IT UP.. I AM FUCKING SICK TO DEATH OF SUCKING UP OR MOPPING UP OTHERS CRAP…

Anyway its obvious to me after posting and re-reading this that on some level it was me abandoning my inner child over all of that time.. Its probably not my sister’s fault at all, but at no time did she care to look to the emotional side, taking meds seemed to be easier for her than having and experiencing her feelings.. She was willing to be shocked instead of feel.. It really is so sad but its more than obvious to me now there was nothing I could ever do to ‘save’ her.. It was the best thing I ever did in September to finally decided to step away from what the angels so clearly told me in therapy on Thursday was never my fault, never my responsibility to heal.