Gosh life has been tough since Christmas..after feeling suicidal on Tuesday and navigating so much pain over past hurts then wondering if I am being too self centered seeing it from my perspective and then having even longer conversations with my second cousin at very least I am getting some kind of wider overview of all the carried family trauma.. Then I log onto WordPress and other share about loss and pain, often of fathers I just realize more and more how common and universal is our human experience of impermanence and loss.
Today I was listening to Mark Wolynn reading on core sentences, core complaints and core symptoms of family trauma is passed down and thinking as usual of my sister, of how to be with this, and even of myself and how I took myself so far away.. just like my Great Great Grandfather.. There were also so many separations in the family of marriages and there was a pattern after my GG Granddad of strong women meeting softer and less ambitious men and those marriages going to the wall. I then thought of how much my oldest sister’s husband was blamed for abandoning her back in 1983 and of what a huge impact that had on my own life in terms of relationships.. I just could not trust men at all, but I was also trauma bonded to the family view of them being ‘weak’ or ‘runners’ not fronting up when both of my sister’s hit the wall.
IN the case of my own marriage it was a bit different, same pattern in terms of us moving away but I was getting the therapy then from 1999 onwards after 6 active years of sobriety and so much grief was flooding out, I had not yet grieved my father’s loss 15 years earlier and then all the dreams of blood around the time I got into therapy as well as that dream where my first therapist Wendy Bratherton gave me shelter in her little house and then helped me over the back wall to escape the Nazis.. And the truth is that Dad got out of Holland by the skin of his teeth in 1938 although the German invasion of Holland did not take place until May 1941, by that stage Dad had been in the Dutch East Indies Airforce for 3 years and met and was about to marry Mum.
It was good today for my second cousin to tell me how she experienced my mother’s Mum .. not a nurturing bone in her body and that she remembered the first little house Mum and Dad got where they lived close to Nana while operating the delicatessan.. She said when she visited the first time I was not born yet but that my two sister’s did Scottish dancing with two swords … I then had a memory of this although we did not have Scottish heritage.
I was able to debrief with Julie about how Dad hurt me and then about the terminations of pregnancy that followed that exceptionally painful year when Ron, my brother in law , sent my older sister home with minimum possessions and a one way ticket.. At that point she had four sons and he lied to them and told them she chose to leave, something that was not cleared up until many years later. My sister tried to take her life shortly after that in the first room up from the louvre door that led to the hallway in our 88 Mugga Way house.. That was such a devastating time for all of us and within a year and a half Dad was terminally ill with cancer, died and then I was sent overseas all alone.
And then today thinking of how one of my nephews is and noticing all of the astrological configurations now being triggered by Mars in Sagittarius I had an image of the work I would like to do with laying the astrological wheel out on the floor and doing some psycho drama along the lines of Bert Hellingers’ constellation therapy to process all of this.
I was also interested today to hear again in the portion of Mark Wolynn’s book It Didn’t Start With You how when we cannot understand WHY parents cause us pain and cannot then move through to detachment and forgiveness it is we who remain in prison. He also spoke of how not being able to front up to loved despite the pain will often make members reject those in the family system who struggle.
Maybe the passage of Jupiter through Pisces which began on the 29th of this month will see a new perspective coming about for those of us with significant astrological placements such as Chiron Pluto and other planets placed in the first 10 degrees of the mutable signs, Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces.. Its just a hunch I have.
For me, I realised I have to try and stay in touch with my sister while loving and remaining detached.. It is not an easy thing to do but it can be done, the alternative is to not ever try to contact my sis and show love due to my own fear of the pain, and that just does not sit well at all with my heart at the moment. So much that has happened to her has destabilised her and shut down her ability to fight to the degree that her traumatized body is now stuck in freeze and spasms due to so much over medication is leading to a diagnosis of Parkinsons for which more medication is diagnosed.. That to me just keeps the trauma shut in.
Maybe it is too late for my sister.. I do not know.. I think of the kind things she tried to do more now instead of the painful things.. She probably did those when she was struggling too…. so at the moment I am taking the more adult view of it all. So much that people do can be unconscious.. and so often they do not look at the deeper roots of problems which to my mind is sad, but its also true very few are also willing to think so deeply about these issues.. As Carl Jung once said
Thinking is difficult, that is why most people judge..
Emerging From The Dark Night 