The child inside the adult : morning reflections 19th April

A post I recently reposted on Syvlia and Nickolas Plath containing a letter the poet Ted Hughes wrote to his son in America before he committed suicide was moving to read once again, especially the portions of it that touched upon the inner child which lives in side of us and contains the essence of us.. The letter showed the father had not a clue of what his son was struggling within in that time before history repeated itself and Plath took his own life. Thoughts about his letter and the tragedy of the loss, came to me again this morning after running into my brother’s two grand daughters and their Mum ‘just by chance’ after hearing a message to go to that place yesterday when therapy was cancelled due to the public holiday..

It was so good to see the girls who are becoming young women, they live only around corner but I have only met with them about 6 or so times in their lives, its just the way our family was and I had lived before coming back here to my home town far away for most of the 26 years I was gone before returning in 2011. Seeing them was triggering though, they both have highly successful study careers in medicine.. which considering the illnesses in our family is interesting but see my Dad died in 1985 so they never knew him and my brother they also do not really know, that is a sad fact that occurred to me thinking it all through after my bath this morning.

After seeing them I rang my brother just to say hi, its not ever easy.. I try to love from my heart these days I feel so unseen in our family, like who I was deep on the inside did not matter to them at all.. It hurt me a lot in the past.. Attempts to get closer to his only daughter derailed when Jonathan and I moved away in 1999 and when I tried to reconnect it really was so tough as we started to get close from 1997 onwards but when we left I feel she felt abandoned.. After all we saw her struggle to be herself in a very emotionally neglectful family, but at that time my own understanding of it all was deeply limited.

I noticed yesterday that my happiness plummeted from what it had been on the Good Friday, Saturday and Easter Sunday… I came home after all of this feeling such a discombobulated mess. And perhaps it was the inner critic savaging me again, saying I am nothing and have achieved nothing when in fact i have lived through so much and even when hurt I try to keep an open mind to those who hurt me. I do not know if this comes from my AA background that taught me to see those who hurt me as being spiritually misaligned or unwell and it gets me into trouble. This morning I got a comment that distressed me from someone on whose blog I tried to vouch for how her partner may be struggling with her PTSD due to his own buried emotions and not reacting well for that reason. Reading the reply distressed me and did make me cry.

Anyway back to the inner child.. Today I am not only childish in my approach to life, I know this world is often not a kind place, kind people do exist but we are born into systems and even family systems so often not kind to us.. Some are not in that situation but I was.. I was deeply hurt bodily in my family by their neglect. Their dismissive comments often made me feel that my feelings were an aberration and made no sense, but as a sensitive I picked up a lot and I still do, the very last thing I need to be continuing to do is to keep devaluing that Self.

In his letter Ted Hughes spoke about how things from childhood are always with us, even if we do not remember them, they color and affect us unconsciously. Nick Plath was only one year old when his mother took her life by gassing herself, as I mentioned in that post she had the children in another room and put towels under the doors so the gas would not affect them. Nick obviously could not consciously remember that event but knowing how pivotal these early experiences are, and that our young bodies are enclosed within it and containing it all and that is has deep effects that did live inside of him until he bought it into consciousness and then did the same, brings meaning to it all.. How could his father have known how much he was struggling and yet something in that letter profoundly touched upon it.

Where am I going with this post? I need to remember that as ‘adult’ as I now appear the things from childhood are never very far from me.. I thought after seeing my grand nieces how proud my Dad would have been of them.. Look at all he lived through escaping Holland, fighting in a war, repatriating prisoners of war after it, facing the brutal Indonesian struggle for independence, meeting and marrying my Mum, deciding to settle in Australia far from his home and family in Holland and then struggling to find work as his qualifications were not recognized here and Europeans at that time were largely recognized as ‘aliens’. Then setting up a construction business after the designer of our house went bust with my brother and becoming phenomenally financially ‘successful.’

But there was a shadow legacy to that on the feminine side.. Two daughters with terrible trauma from accidents and illnesses due to over doing it and lack of containment.. another daughter severely disabled by mental health issues to this day she cannot seem to break free of and then me, the younger container of it all who had to go off alone and work it through. And then me, a 60 year old woman still living deeply captured inside of her own family trauma and childhood.

But still despite this shame I can feel, should I be putting myself down? Why expect to even be seen or known in a world that only values achievements inside the ‘system.’

Often I feel so much is badly broken in the system, so much abuse happens due to a lack of feeling for and about let alone struggling to understand the deeper roots of psychic suffering in order to birth wisdom.

With Mars now in the very deep watery collective energy of Pisces (2 degrees of the sign as I write this) maybe it is no surprise my body arked up again yesterday after trying to process all of this and I felt like once again I was being both annihilated as well as drowning again. Its a shit load of trauma and loss to be coming out of and not many places to go to speak of it apart from my therapy and my blog. Deeper soul friendship seem thin on the ground at the moment and yet often I am absent to the ones who may be more than likely to get it.

This morning I honestly shed a tear for the small boy that my older brother was.. Lately I feel his softness and his goodness despite the ways I felt not seen. In the end it wasn’t his job. Am I wrong for excusing him, am I wrong for trying to point out to another trauma survivor that her partner too might struggle not knowing how to help her and perhaps being hurtful and dismissive at times? I do not know.. Are there absolutes of wrong and right and how often do we justify them in order to preserve our own ‘feelings’ and point of view?

In AA we are told to keep an open mind.. I will also keep an open heart.. I do know how to care for and about myself better these days than I did in the past and slowly I am learning to contain my painful feelings but some days I will flood the bathroom or break something from the tension of having to hold in all of the feelings I had to repress both in my family and society. And other days they will just flow out of me, in tears, in dance, in joy, in anger, in celebration and at those times I will know keep inside my soul a most essential part of me is slowly and persistently refusing to be shamed, buried, exiled or to die is working slowly through embracing the suffering and old burdens struggling to shed them and emerge, by bringing the unconscious deeply buried family legacy to awareness.