Trigger

Things can trigger me..Today it was reading of the callous and casual way someone was broken up with in a novel, it took me back to that painful relationship in 1990 where I got ill when pregnant and decided to have a termination and my then partner (who at 25 was still living at home) withheld that truth from his mother. When I got drunk and made a spectacle of myself showing up there, he broke up with me only to take me back then break up with me a short while later after taking me out for a meal, sleeping with me before it and then dropping me home saying it was over and that I needed psychiatric help..

Anyway I did need therapy and I ran into him when I was sober some years later on a train and he was so drunk and falling over himself.. but just reading this today I started crying..

Lately my life just looks like a random mess with no stability or security.. When I needed help at times I ran not even knowing it was grief and fear and insecurity driving me. Then I can blame those I got involved with, but that belies the part I played in connecting with them in the first place. It is said that in the lead up to and during the 6 week period Venus turns retrograde old karma from relationships can rear up its head and that helps us to see where we need to grow and where we may have stuffed up in the past.. I remember astrologer Melanie Reinhardt saying in a lecture on Venus Pluto I went to in London in 2005 that when this retrograde hits its all about ‘keeping the heart open in hell.’ The hell that rises up may be nothing more than our own past experiences that hurt or continue to cause us grief or shame.. Ideally in time we move on from those and yet does not their complex history continue to leave deep traces upon our soul? Isn’t denying this the worst thing to do?

I imagine my young self these days in various forms at times. I see that wounded young woman, so open and vulnerable and in the words of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, ‘instinct injured’ in fact today I was telling Scott about this how I feel anger at times over how vulnerable I was and how little I could allow myself to need. In fact today I got the insight that often I just denied I needed anyone or anything and so I may have even pushed others away and my anger may also have been about a very very deep seated fear of rejection.

This aspect of my shadow (Venus Pluto revealing my own Moon Pluto wounds) takes work to own I guess so I should be proud I can face it, there is no way of saying I am any kind of worldly success, in fact I seem to have walked for most of my life what theologian Matthew Fox calls the via negative that dark path led into a dark wood and lots of fog and I am only slowly trying to make my way out.

Kat, my therapist, often says she feels the 79 accident made me so dissociated that on some level I split off from my body. I had that come up yesterday at the lunch.. all of those women have partners and a life two of them have children… I can feel shame in such settings but its not deserved.. and its okay, its right to cry with my old self over what she missed out on but I also do not want to put her down.. Surely I am strong to have faced all of this?

So I let myself cry for a while before making the effort to get myself firmly centered back in the present and find the joy or something to cheer me up a little.. I told Scott today these words via text Sometimes I only feel safe, real and complete alone.