There are wounds that we have and bear often not even fully conscious, it was something preoccupying me as I read some material on Pete Walker’s website again last night about the fight and flight responses to trauma. Often I identify as a fawn type but there can be a blend of styles or reactions we use to perceived or sensed trigger ‘threats’ of abandonment and reading his article over I could see how using the flight and fight response for me often came out of fear of feeling my own and others abandonment wounds, injuries and hurt.
Thinking of how my ex partner reacted it made more sense to me of the depths of his own soft intensely vulnerable wound and place of hurting covered over with so much anger and pain too. It’s why he would go ballistic in the vicinity of triggers. At times his anger kept him from me, maybe it kept him ‘safe’ and at times after he lashed out and I gave him enough space to ‘be’ he would open up to me and talk to me of abuse he saw his alcoholic Dad enacting upon his mother. Unlike him he hurt me more with his words and judgments and lack of empathy, not with his fists. But maybe my own emotions threatened him.
Sad now to think of it, and how we ended neither of us able to break through each other’s pain to truly love and embrace each other as a part of each other’s shadow, both carrying some kind of mirrored wounding. It seems to me there are some wounds of our own only we can bind up in love and choose over time, with a greater degree of self awareness, to stop re-enacting on wounded parties or stop consenting to absorb the intense heat or shame of for others.
Perhaps all of this is coming up so intensely today as Mars in Scorpio continues to hit me and my nodal axis across Aquarius and Leo, as the Moon goes into my first house with Leo on the cusp and Uranus there. Thankfully over past days we have had the lift into fiery Sagittarian energy with the Sun and Mercury now having cleared the later degrees of Scorpio to be placed there.. A solar eclipse is due in this sign on the 3rd and 4th of December.
Placed in early Sag both planets start hitting my own Chiron Pluto wound by square which affects the early 1960s generation and I was feeling that today running over in my head how, at the end of 2019 someone caused a rift with Scott and I, and arked up all of my trust issues in trying to claim he was not genuine.. Why she did this now is beyond me, but it makes me angry, still I have that natural fear of abandonment and betrayal due to there having been so much of it in my own family.
Also I need at the moment to hear stories of recovery from others owning their wounds, not just displacing them. The wounded child attracts us to others for a reason, to work through the compulsion to repeat so that we can grown in awareness, it is not so much a ‘healing’ of past patterns that needs to happen, as it is about gaining a perspective on and distance from them in time. This is something that came up in a reading I did on the Sixth Step earlier in the week which involves letting go of so called ‘defects of character’ or unhelpful coping strategies that occur out of early attachment troubles. Even if we didn’t cause the wounds we carry, we still, as adults, have the responsibility of taking care of these wounds in a healthy non destructive way and making the difficult choice to move through then with compassion, insight, empathy and love, something a deep narcissistic bent makes very difficult.
Doubt, and fear and shame can be some of the most destructive poisons of all in toxic narcissism. There is the issue too of others who are envious of us. These people may, at times, sow doubts and to be honest this has happened to me too many times now not to be aware which is why it is most of all so important for us to surround ourselves with balanced encouragement as well as those whose agenda does not involve destructive elements. If we have too much of a Pollyanna approach to life around the issue of other’s dark side, how much their own unhealed wounds can cause them to pursue hurtful destructive even vindictive paths we will not be able to be savvy enough to deal with this.
Parents can over protect us too at times, discouraging us from risk, perhaps due to their own anxieties and not allowing us to know the full spectrum of good and ill that can exist in persons.. My own father encouraged me in my early 20s to take a job with a boss who was abusive and that was not something I could have spoken to my father about, by that stage he was so emotionally distant anyway and trying to deal with all of the other family trauma
I look back now to how naive I have been at times and shudder.. Scott warned me about this woman back in 2019 but I trusted her instead of him and this prevented us being together for 2 more years.. I woke today with the memory of how my body was affected when she actively blocked some help I was trying to give, only later did she share that she had done this out of concern for me, a concern that may have been displaced I do not know..
Anyway I do not want to lose track in this blog.. It is just that today I see how little I got to develop strong internal muscles and instincts for self protection and how at times, the depth of my grief wound kept me running, fighting or ‘flighting’ but Kat always tells me that my anger and reactions kept me alive and from dying.
I had therapy on the phone yesterday and midway through reading emotional stuff about my Dad I had to put down the phone and run to the toilet, Kat waited for me and eventually I got some of the ‘shit’ out, but it was not shit just repressed feeling a hell of a lot of wounding and buried in the body feeling that I have been working over past years and months to become more fully conscious of. This healing and awareness of feelings takes place in our bodies, and in our cells it cannot just be a ‘head trip’ birthed through intellectual understanding alone. Never the less we do need our mind to makes sense of the feelings and to help us navigate all of the complex twistings and turnings our particular emotional recovery can take.
Emerging From The Dark Night 