Thank God for therapy : (my body remembers more than I consciously remember!)

I had today’s therapy session by phone because I was exhausted today… I had big swings when the cleaner came, I had body memory of my foot being burned in the bucket of scalding water caught up in the middle of a panic attack after moving outside with Jasper as he vacuumed the place and he trauma cascade/swirl started up as he got ready to mop the floors. As he was filling the bucket close to us and I was back in the caravan when I got the third degree burns that day due to Mum’s OCD neglect frenzy. His coming I then realised causes me anxiety (and I did not cancel it as I wanted to do but faced up this time even though my body went through hell until and even after he left, as it does each time the cleaner comes fortnightly. ) Before this I did not even know I was caught up in flashbacks around it.

Growing up as the youngest with three older siblings we had to live in a house with not a single thing out of place and often my second sister and I had to eat behind a door in the kitchen if there were guests, as children in those days (1960s) were to be seen and not heard.. It was seen as a sign of being over dramatic if you needed attention (for fucks sake a child needs things from parents) but Mum and Dad never got that holding, mirroring or tenderness so how could they give it to us kids?

I was triggered to cry over this when hearing therapist Pamela Stevenson being interviewed about comedian, husband Billy Connolly’s childhood trauma of never being held or kissed tenderly until his first kiss which to him was like ‘a bird landing on his cheek.’ Connolly was sexually abused and also abused by teachers for not being able to do things he could not do due to developmental trauma.. What a brutal childhood!

When I heard astrologer Pam Gregory talking about the upcoming Mars Saturn conjunction at 19 degrees of Aquarius on Wednesday right smack bang on my Sun Venus Mercury Jupiter South Node stellium in the 7th house of relationships and she mentioned the military energy of this aspect as : ‘pushing oneself beyond limits’ that rang true as I have the Mars Saturn conjunction in my chart with my Moon at 1 and 3 and 6 degrees of Aquarius. This signifies how it was for Mum, she had to work hard, could not relax, did not cuddle, found caring for and spending time with us in free play impossible and so growing up it was all about work work work, trying to be as perfect and controlled as possible and enduring long parental absences and lack of attention due to emotional neglect.

The truth is had a very painful tough and lonely childhood, possibly not as brutal as Connolly’s though. I am not making this stuff up. Kat agreed today its not easy to work through the defenses around this which include having to fight or take flight. How else can we survive? But the sad thing is that then we end up all alone, anxious and avoidant too, or alternatively attracting hard arsed or narcissistic partners or those with mirror traumas to our own but having taken the defensive survival approach them from a different end of the Complex PTSD empathy/narcissism spectrum.

I am aware that at the moment as the Sun Mercury Chiron and the Moon move through the first 12 degrees of Aries over my progressed Venus in the 8th house which is about shadow stuff not only in me but in my family that three painful anniversaries are looming leading up to the New Moon in Aries in 8 hours and then Full Moon in the sign of Libra in two weeks just prior to Easter. The sign of Libra was so pivotal in my older sister’s chart (born 2 January 1946) and around the time of her aneurysm this was being triggered..

The first trauma is the death of my older sister, Judith; the second : that critical anniversary of my painful fourth termination of pregnancy in 1990; and the third is the getting together with my last partner who was quite emotionally abusive and was the adult youngest child in a large family of an abusive alcoholic father.. We actually went out for a meal on the 31st of March 2007 and I slept with him too soon, collapsing my boundaries only to fall and hit my head in the middle of the night.. this was symbolic of how in the course of our 4 year long on again, off again relationship, he would come to hit me over the head for being ‘too vulnerable, sensitive and emotional’.. But the thing I am now realizing is that he was vulnerable too and he could own his assertive Mars energy, not like me who feared mine dramatically. We both represented shadows of each other.

I am grateful today to have the foot injury over a week behind me.. Managing walking on it and to sleep has been a huge challenge but I do think something got triggered that day about the house, garden, perfectionism fears and the avoidance of my Dad as he used to retreat into the garden all of the time after he came home, never spending time with me until the first drink was poured after Mum arrived home from her clothing boutiques.. Growing up no one was there to relate to me emotionally at all and so I never learned to relate to myself or others.. I retreated into my intellect (south node in Aquarius) and away from my heart (north node in Leo) but recovery began to change all of that and as my heart finally started to open up I got cruelly dumped by two more men… Toxic masculinity sucks.. I had to suck it up.

I am not going to blame those men though. They were wounded too. But I blamed myself for far too long coming out of both relationships. When they told me there was something deeply flawed in me, part of me sadly believed it.. But I can no longer believe that, I was an innocent child and still am as is everyone else, its just some people refuse to make friends with that inner child and then project it and dump shame on it.. I do not have to do that any more and I do not have to suck it up either. when the truth is that over the past 28 years of active sobriety I am working so so hard to heal well over 5 generations of inherited family trauma.