I give myself a hard time over therapy a lot lately.. Feeling that pull back to the past, there is no life or forward movement there so why keep going there the critic says? But this may also be a loving part of me wishing for me to move on. Last night I also listened to something on a body work practice that can help us to tune into the pleasant streams of energy which apparently underlie the old traumas. Accessing joy is a far far better thing to do than dwell on a painful past., so just why is that so hard sometimes? Also creative visualization of healing energy that helps us tune into our higher self may help us see it all happened for a reason but should not have to dominate our lives now but isn’t that what tends to happen so much due to our mind’s negative bias?
I’m no fan of toxic positivity, that said if we remain powerless and hopeless due to past trauma how is that helping? If we see ourselves as broken when we just carry scars that won’t ;let us celebrate something called post traumatic growth. This is the idea we gain gifts from working through trauma and one of the most important things lately seem to me to be self championing, not letting the toxic inner critic smash as apart as we try to grow and tear forward growth or events to bring healing light in, to pieces.
I wrote a stream of consciousness piece the other day on my longing to be free of trauma. I didn’t post it. Wounds and old injuries do need to be made conscious but must they completely define us? This is where I hit a wall, in a society where a lot gets denied. But there are new positive choices we can make face the past but determine not to let us limit us, after all that was then and we do move on.
Today I am grateful to see the sun after nearly 2 weeks of rain, the northern part of New South Wales has been under a deluge in those past 10 days or so and today and I heard a musician who.lives up that way today saying the government’s response has been abysmal, people are having to crowd fund rescue missions. At the same time tons of people have been digging deep to help too. Most of all we need help to come through traumatic events and experiences. Reading about what Prince Harry went through in the 2 years after his Mum’s death triggered a lot of pain for me yesterday, I cried and cried. It bought to mind the period after my father died and I went away all alone. I was already in trouble having fallen pregnant twice in the 2 years before his death, I know he was worried about me as well as my older sister and his own financial situation. Real anger came up towards my older brothers family yesterday. The ignore me and seem to put me down which hurts. I was out in the garden furiously cleaning up month of piled up leave and cobwebs screaming yesterday “you are fucking numb!” Not proud of it for who am I to judge? And why should I figure in their world after all they did not go through this. I did. Why seek validation?
Those 8 years between losing Dad and meeting my ex husband and getting sober in 1993 were full of so much trauma.. and my darkest years were 1990 to 1992. I had to get myself to hospital in the middle of the night in late April after the corpus luteum of a pregnancy ruptured my partner would not rouse, I spent hours waiting in a small cubicle in casualty to find out why it was I was in so much pain. I never went back to that group share house after that but my addiction did worsen.
All of this lies behind me but in phone therapy yesterday I had pain shooting through my womb and radiating down my left leg, body memory is there and autumn can be a tough time with melancholy as I remember the absolute aloness if those dark Sydney years. But why let it drag me back.. I am really struggling with my need to go back at the moment.
I must be grateful too, meeting Jonathan in June 1993 pulled me out of that darkness in many ways but at times it still seems to rise up like a big wave along with painful feelings I still have to process. Maybe I won’t fully be ready to move on until I do. I have my fur baby Jasper and moments with him fill my heart with a joy a child could give. Today I need to celebrate that I survived it, while feeling sad at times so much emotional isolation claimed me this is the wilderness pathway Brene Brown speaks of in the video below, we do not find our healing by trying to do or perform as a way to be popular but by trying our hardest to be authentic and vulnerable which involves honoring and speaking about the painful stuff we went through in the past on our particular path of individuation. As she points out when we feel shame over wrong actions (like me swearing about my brother’s family) we can fess up with someone and be honest.. Shame cannot live in the healing light of empathy.
I love the bit in this where Brene says we are the wilderness.. So often when we think we have to become someone else to ‘belong’ we do end up lost.. I went through that with those old school friends when I moved back here at the age of 50 (my Chiron return). From then on till now (10 years) I have been processing painful things about feeling limited, cut off and not belonging but if I take a higher view from the point of view of a more wholistic empowering part of myself perhaps going through all of the dark and tough Saturnian stuff of separation and wilderness experience (through addictions multiple rejections and terminated pregnancies) all of it was necessary to birth more transcendent self as well as to give me insights into the collective and ancestral stuff… That most definately rose up for me when Saturn hit my fourth house cusp and I had moved back here, to be closer to my struggling female family members.. Slowly I seem to be breaking free of the ancestral stuff but not of the alone part.. Maybe because as Brene says this is the necessary price we must pay to stay true to our soul.. This means honoring what happened, as painful as it was was no ‘mistake’or sign of us being bad, but of us transforming and growing so we can finally emerge in a creative way.. bearing testament to the enormity of the particular evolutionary journey our souls set out for us to negotiate.
Emerging From The Dark Night 