Infinitely vulnerable : today’s reflections

As babies we are so soft and open and vulnerable, lately as I feel this softening deep inside my own heart as tears flow I am also reminded of all the ways I had to harden or numb in the face of meeting brick walls or an empty absence in my family. As a child I was so often left alone and then also (as I am recently discovering in therapy) as a far younger child in a much older family was overwhelmed by these far bigger people who at first found me a lovely object to be with but later left all alone and discarded me…

That was not something deliberately done to me, after all they were just growing up and getting on with their own lives but the unique thing for me was that as a child I bonded more closely to my sister who was 16 when I was born than my own Mum, so when she left after marrying to move overseas in 1965 when I was only 3 he absence hit me very hard, for she was so full of life and so much less repressed than the rest of my family..

There was a lot going on in the family after 1965 geared around a couple of businesses my older brother was involved in with both Mum and Dad and then in about 1973 my second sister, too was asked to join as a partner in my Mum’s clothing business.. In short attention was never ever on me and my needs, I was just left alone to cope as my Mum was. I was a latch key child, I came home to an empty house every afternoon and had to let myself in with the key from the shed in the garage. When it wasnt there one day in breaking a window in frustration trying to break in I sustained a massive gash on my left wrist which tore it open like a sardine tin and needed 30 stitches, on that day I had to run down to the neighbors and get help to be taken to hospital. This was about the fourth of series injuries which included third degree burns, a fish hook in my toe webbing and a dislocated arm I suffered due to parental carelessness or neglect.. It was a lot for a young body to carry..

In the AA meeting I went to yesterday someone was sharing about the hole in their soul they could only fill with booze, to me that goes to the center of attachment wounding (core emotional loneliness) issues.. It was not until I was sober quite some time about 10 years ago I bought a book called Addiction as Attachment Disorder that this connection was made clearer to me. Before that in AA I was led to believe there was something remarkably different about me, not true, but I was a sensitive child of long term addiction in the multi-generational history that was hidden and only revealed to me after I was sober well over 15 years and had no idea of how to cope.. I am also learning lately that besides being a child of emotionally neglected parents I also had an emotionally immature mother who was the adult grandchild of an alcoholic and had lost her own father due to war injuries when she was only 7 years of age..

It is funny as this year when reading through one of my detailed journals that I kept as soon as I began my first major therapy at 6 years sober in 1999 I came across a letter in which my mother said she was sorry I had gone through so much after my near death at 17 and descent into addiction but really that was all down to me being emotionally immature, as if it was somehow my fault and nothing to do with her.

Its interesting to me too that even as she lay dying in 2018 and I sat with her holding her hand while trying to fend off the nurses brutalizing her that she could not say sorry only that she longed for an overdue apology from me.. In a recent episode of the Stan series Casual one of the characters on it said this :

“we spend our lives longing to hear our parents say sorry, they spend their entire lives longing to hear us say, ‘thank you'”

The truth is the unconsciously wounded so often DO NOT EVEN UNDERSTAND THE WOUNDING THEY CARRY RE-ENACT AND PASS DOWN TO US.. So in the end its up to us to make sense of it and in a way we must be grateful they chose to bring us into the world, or even took those unconscious actions that led to our birth? Really? See this is where the whole thing gets to be very complex and so called new age ideas step in in our confused efforts to make sense of the what, the why the how!.

These days I DO feel gratitude for the ways Mum tried to help me, even as I grieve how woefully ineffective those were at times.. Lately I see I got given a hiding place where I did not have to face a lot of my fears but could instead deflect and defend against them.. I think back now to how my living sister tried to bust me out of the coast house back in 2004 after my ex husband had left and see she was probably trying to me a favor but at that time the ancestral pull of so much had dragged me back there prefigured by a powerful Uranian shot of energy up the spine dream where the walls had been closing in on me as I struggled to connect by phone to my psychological astrology tutor Juliet Sharman Bourke right before I was due to give my first tutorial presentation on the course I started in 2001 in London at the Center for Psychological Astrology..

In the same dream after experiencing the shot of energy in the dream I found myself on a spiral staircase (ancestral DNA helix?) on which a male and female couple were both ascending and descending.. Looking back this could relate to my Great Great Grandparents who came to the New World from the Old in 1874-5 as well as to my parents who crossed back over several time or also to my husband and I would also lived in both places as well as to my own inner masculine and feminine energies (Mars/Sun…. Venus/Moon) that were set to transform and transmute at mid life.. (I was 39 years old at the time of that dream.)

Today I take a different view on so many things as I allow my heart to soften towards some of what I have before seen as my sibling’s and their children’s ‘narcissism’ while understanding even deeper dimensions of my own.. When I get tempted to criticize myself for ‘stuffing up’ or failing I am beginning to question exactly how and why that is then experienced or projected at times, along with my own and others tendencies to judge and polarize that may hide deeper levels of complexity in the tangled webs of interconnection and family relationships.. Who am I to judge? Who are others?

Today I can only say this.. I now live in 2022. I am alive, I am moving, I have eaten, I am prepared to help my sister while taking care of myself. I have been strong enough to help someone overseas everyone tried to convince me was a ‘scammer’ . I have trod that painful path between doubt, and confusion and pain and anger and uncertainty and somehow emerged to both fight and soften on a new day. But lately letting some of that Martian ‘fight’ impulse drown in the softening of more integrative Venus and Neptune energies makes sense for me..

Will I really lose my ‘Self’ if I do not fight? Will dropping some of my walls for a time to embrace a new path help to keep me opening to both new possibilities and potentialities? Will releasing some of my defenses and having compassion for the hidden vulnerabilities that others choose to stay ignorant, arrogant, defended or numb make my anger abate so that it does not harden into a toxic resentment?

The truth is, as a child I was infinitely vulnerable and so was everyone else. But other’s chose to defend, block, judge and numb.. When I consented to chose a path of active sobriety in 1993 I made a decision to try another way… one often fraught with conflict, and yet the truth is that lately the more I understand how completely vulnerable I was and surrender to be made stronger in love the more I grow, the more I expand, the more I feel myself so much more a part of and loved by and able to actively participate in life, instead of constantly seeking ‘refuge and safety’ by hiding away.