Sadness : reflections on recovery on turning 60

I am 60 today but all I feel is sad. My gut has been in a state and it took effort to get mobile again. Eating came with an attack as if I was going to explode just at the time my older brother tried to call. I am still resentful to be totally honest over his treatment and diminshment of me, that said I have to find a positive healthy way to move on from this as an adult with acceptance while trying to find a voice.. For us in recovery resentment is a poison to our own bodies and soul as well as psyche, when we suffer from a fragile ego, the perpetrators in our lives move forward oblivious, to the damage the leave in us, our true inner self is NEVER SEEN BY THEM they are too stuck inside their own walled fortress and power/projections.

I couldn’t take the call but when I.listen to the message and his voice I soften. It’s so hard bearing this pain much as Mum and I struggled when alive she tried to hear me later in sobriety even while denying some things. On the 4th birthday after her death I do feel sad and even sadder I won’t hear from my other sister though I sent her a lpving message yesterday and got no response yet despite the sadness I have to be ABOVE ALL REALISTIC AS AN ADULT.

Today I must also focus on gratitude. I have friends in my life who really care about me, even the ones too scared by Covid to meet up. My lovely cousin offered to take me for lunch on Sunday and another friend is meeting me at 12.30 and was not scared to do so. That gave me hope.

Those feelings of being defective I posted about earlier were probably always there deep under the surface. I think many oF them came from Mum also a neglected child and she covered them over with a lot of bluster and bravado.. Sometimes when I collapse into the helpless self in therapy I hear myself as her the way she was after trying to deal with her 3 daughter’s different forms of emotional scarring, two of her daughters made attempts on their life. My was a different kind of long slow suicide when caught up in addiction.

As I look back I see the massive hits I took bodily from the age of 3 until the MVA smash up in 1979 repeated in 2005. My experiences lay undigested in parts of my body, soma, psyche and gut along with feelings I found it impossible to differentiate and name and so my boundaries were shot, I over do things and then realize it too late (down to that strong Jupiterian influence with all my Aquarian seventh house planets square to Natal Neptune in the house of siblings). I have two recent wounds that are leaving scars all related to the ancestral Trudge On dynamic of unhealed long term grief, loss, trauma, physical separation, desperation to survive and addiction. I carried that wound (Chiron in Pisces) and so did my oldest sister. My two other siblings have damage. My brother’s made less visible by his supposed ‘success’ in the financial and business/property development worlds but inside the core its empty emotionally that is what I really have seen more and more lately.. In many ways meeting Scott just a short time after Mum died makes sense. My brother will finance me with money to get a new car but not to help be with a person I care about, maybe he ‘shouldn’t’ be asking for help but I do feel attachment to this person its not about him being ‘bad’ either.. Its just all so complex and it makes me cry so so often.. to know you have to pretend with a sibling to be loved out of fear of the power they may wield over you if you do not comply is truly horrendous, at times it makes me want to take my life.

One thing I do know.. The more I allow the sad feelings and write and make sense of them the quicker I can move through them.. I have been both a witness to and container of trauma that is ancestral and also my sister now not talking to me and locked up in aged care witnessed all of that trauma too.. But she cannot get it out of her.. and buying her clothes is not going to help at all. its not about that..

One other things i know. I AM ALIVE TODAY AND PARTLY SANE AND HAVE 28 YEARS OF UNBROKEN SOBRIETY THROUGH THE POWER OF A LOVING GOD WHO ACCEPTS AND LOVES ME UNCONDITIONALLY.. All I need to do to maintain my sobriety on a daily basis is clean house, be as honest as I can in understanding my motivations and actions, and take my troubles and issues and sorrows to him and to my trusted therapist or friends while praying that any negative self will does not end up creating for me yet more isolation, separation and damage.. Lashing out does not help even if the feelings at the base of it are TRUE REAL AND VALUABLE.. in the end the daily world may rather paint me a mixed up trouble maker than just an ordinary human woman given so so much to contend with in her own life and the life of her family of origin.