What happens to the love?

As humans we depend on being loved and noticed and cared for. One of the saddest things is to hear someone who is self harming being accused of attention seeking as if they were not already in enough pain and also, while not totally understanding the origins of their deep pain, still seeking to express it and have that pain addressed only then to be blamed.

Hearing Mark Wolynn read from hisbook again it strikes me all of the ways we learn to defend against that need to be loved or otherwise remain captured by the potency of that desire to attain and give affection, connection and attention, but why not? Often we become willing to do anything but if that impulse is also drive by fear then we can lose self esteem and a sense of self value.

I was thinking about this after hearing Oprah Winfrey share about being whipped as a child in an interview she gave with the co author of a new book published last year Dr Perry on childhood developmental trauma and of the impact that had on turning her into a people pleaser, someone scared of being whipped all over again as an adult should she dare to be real and disagree. I could really identify with this after all as Complex PTSD therapist Pete Walker says the inner and outer critics come to override us due to childhood trauma and as Alice Miller points out, only a parent who was humiliated in this way as a child would feel capable of enacting that on a young one and being so shut down they do not even register the suffering. For many in that generation (born out of the post WW1 and depression years) obedience was everything but as Winfrey says despite being told so it did not feel like love.

Maybe in some ways overt beatings are not as bad as just being ignored or left unseen and so suffering hidden wounds.. This may be due to parents being too busy or due to them having been neglected, addicted or depressed, for me as a child my mother endured a hysterectomy at the age of 39 when I was about three.. I was just reading this week about the death of Sinead O’Connor’s son and in the article it was mentioned she had a complete breakdown after a similar procedure and I was interested to note that in her chart Sinead has Venus in square to Natal Pluto opposite Chiron and that at the time of the suicide of her son Mars and Neptune were hitting those placements and in square themselves in the skys.

In regards to the hysterectomy though at this time I clearly remember a nightmare I had where Mum turned into an evil witch, at that time she later told me she fell into a depression, Dad did not know how to cope and she also would rage and storm and go into OCD cleaning frenzies.. something I have shared about a lot in my blog and I carry as an absolute terror of being chaotic, shambolic or ‘messy’. And for my living sister this extreme form of tight control has been stultifying on an emotional and living level and landed her in a complete shut down for many months now and off and on interspersed with bursts of busy (some would say ‘manic’ – but I choose not to use that word) activity.

I am including the interview about Dr Perry’s book What Happened To You at the end of this post.. it explores why people act as they do and what we can do not to judge or criticize but instead seek to understand. This is something that forms a theme for a lot of my blog about the long term affects of emotional neglect and carried trauma in families..

I have not read the book but I have studied a lot of developmental psychology on brain wiring as a result of being unsupported in the necessary ways developmentally… A very good book I shared from called Healing Developmental Trauma helped me to understand how I, in time, turned into someone who had to learn to gravitate around the needs of others while denying my own and I will include those links later.

The point that struck me so deeply today, now that I am opening more and more to keep trusting in Scott and not let fears or others toxic judgements keep us apart out of fear is that the desire to connect and love is primal and it just seems that so often in our society it gets misunderstood.. We look at what people do or have or own and say things like “He or she had ‘everything’ why did they take their life?” or cheat on a partner or commit a murder or some other from of abuse, but the point is that there is always a reason for these things and often it relates back to feeling so undervalued and worthless due to mistreatment (as Oprah shares in the video.)

Yes, human behavior is complex but there are also laws and patterns and archetypal aspects to all of this and the more we can educate ourselves about them the more we can begin to look upon other humans with a lens of love as opposed to one of misunderstanding, superficial judgement and fear.

And on an astrological note how great to have this video come up on my You Tube feed last night as Mercury stationed retrograde in the sign of all my personal planets Aquarius as it also squared its ruler Uranus in Taurus by aspect.. This Mercury retrograde begins also in conjunction to transiting Saturn, just and as the Venus retrograde began in square to natal Pluto, showing that collectively we find ourselves in a climate which is ripe for gaining awareness and enlightenment (Uranus) into deep psychological themes and patterns with deep rooted origins (Pluto.)