Defective

I felt so undone latee today.. I got to the base of my fear of anger in therapy today.. Its almost I fear that if I genuinely protest how I really feel I will be obliterated or exiled.. There will be no way back from it.. This, Kat tells me, is down to being the youngest in a family who could never see or respond to the real me and in which I was so often overpowered. At the end of our session I really felt that young small part of myself that feels so defective..it felt like it was all I am.

Kat advised to stay with the feelings, she reminded me this small young part of me is not the whole of me.. just one part. She reminds me of the intelligent, strong, brave recovering woman who has survived so much.. And it is true. We who get sober go to the depths of hell and aloneness as youngsters and even more living that painful wound of emotional abandonment out in the world through ongoing tough experiences..

My dear friend ‘Alex’ and I share about this all of the time.. His own Dad turned a blind eye towards the abuse and left him at the mercy of his mother.. Dad walked away too from me and turned his back.. He did not front up for me. I never felt I could turn to my parents at all and that was also a problem, if only I could have admitted I needed help or been able to advocate instead of consent to my own obliteration. The sense I had today is af my parents had wrapped a tight bandage around my chest and this is what I feel so often restricting and confining me.

I read Kat the poem New Moon that I wrote in the early hours of Tuesday (Mars day) morning. There were tears shed on the lines about Mum holding my hand, in 2001 on that painful visit home I knew she felt deep inside of her the dark place I had gone to and as much as she never owned her own part and dumped the blame on my emotional immaturity that was not the truth. How could she give me what she did not have and she could never protest her own abuse at the hands of a disconnected and sometimes violent mother or the Nuns’ who never payed her true self any mind.

In that poem I cried too about the lines where I imagined my Dad and I dancing and seeing each other.. He did not see me, it must have hurt when I was all smashed up, he gave me the book Anna Karenina that starts with the words “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Ours was not a happy family at all it never has been. That is emotional truth.. The world does not seem to want to know the truth and often labels the abuse carrier who tries to speak of it a ‘villian’ but to pretend we do not carry pain and then fawn that is not courage at all, its cowardice even if we lack that strength due to the holocausted child part never being able to grow, express, be fully and emerge.

Emergence only takes time.. Moving away from dysfunctional family only takes time.. I stayed too close too often but then I needed to understand them too… my family so in a way it was good to come back When Saturn crossed the IC or the fourth house cusp a lot of the pain came up and my sister died around that time too, interesting as I have Sagittarius on the fourth house cusp and her Mercury fell there in Sagittarius and when Neptune crossed this in the 80s she had her bleed which was a massive crisis foretold to her by an astrologer who studied the up coming aspects.

Whether or not others approve of astrology or not I just see it working out in my life and in archetypal patterns and so I do trust it and I also know the reclamation of buried power, the setting of boundaries and the saying of an authoritative ‘No’ to what we intrinsically feel to be death dealing in our relationships or pervasive social and cultural influences is spot on for now as Mars moves towards Pluto and the places where Venus then Mercury hit it over the past 6 weeks or so.

Recognising today at core how defective and weak I so often feel is not easy.. Collapsing into the painful vulnerability of a small child in a family never shown real attunment, noticing and connection may feel like embracing core powerlessness but on another level it shows strength.. A friend once said this to me

To appear strong is to hide behind a rickety scaffolding of denial, but to be vulnerable is to be invicible’.

It was the child who was so vulnerable but also the child who most need’s our inner adults affirmation, allowing, championing and unconditional love, it needs this to grow and for us to be truly congruent with self, strong and deeply rooted at an authentic (as opposed to inauthentic) tap root..

The painful truth is I was so so abandoned, hurt, left alone, dismissed, forgotten or ignored in my family of origin that I learned only to do that to my real self. Those patterns and that hurting does not have to live on or be the modus operandi by which I go forward from now on though.. My pain makes this clear and is an acknowledgement of truth. From now on I have to get stronger each and every day in fully supporting myself and my real values and authentic needs from a slowly growing more emergent ‘adult’ part.. Just a bit sad I am only finally getting there at the age of 60! The defeating inner critic still tries each day to get a stranglehold so I have to be eternally vigilant.