I’m out an about in the glorious sun today and it’s a clear bright morning, scattered autumn leaves lay all around as I walked the path next to the gorgeous small park near my Nanas old house to my new R and B playlist that I linked to via the series Harlem on the black female experience. The music in it has my kind of vibe and even though the show is a bit over the top emotionally and out there with all kinds of issues, its making me realise how repressed my upbringing was especially as a young girl who after all naturally begins to unfold sexually if she has a healthy developmental trajectory.
I didn’t. Growing up in the 60s especially it was all about control and repression in my family and education, to the extent it did two things, on one level it shut me down and made me fear my own natural exhuberant joyful life energy, including my sexual feminine energy. On another, it overwhelmed and flooded me with so much energy and repressed emotions sensed in the field and coming from all directions it felt almost impossible to contain it and of course I was often injured or over whelmed by both parents and became both clumsy and gangly. That led in time to near death at the age of 17 and I’m still grieving an impact I just had to try my best to try to forget.
Lately I have to apply the serenity prayer over and over to the past, after all on one level it has been and gone, getting reactive in the now about what I can’t change only helps me to the point of realising how similar things affect me or get triggered now and finding the courage to change and LET GO of what I can. That said each experience cannot be willed away it becomes a part of us, to deny this is not right but we can find ways to make it less painful over time.
These words make sense to me, if my reaction is hysterical, it’s historical! But to react now (rather than intelligently respond) often just ends up with something getting damaged. I lost out on a lot at the brink of 18, never fully coming back from it.
The truth is, in my family I got less help than anyone else with the exception of finances which is still help but was not always the right kind of help, but now I have to accept everyone did the best they could at that time, knowing what they did and carrying their own issues, protections and repressions. Making sense of all of this can and does take a lifetime. If I am willing to keep an open mind and examine my own defences and protections as well as projections then I can always grow. I do suffer but lately I try by best to turn the day to joy.
Honestly it’s been years since I was up and functioning at 8 am some days having eaten still to be managing my symptoms but able to at least stop, draw a deep breath and even do some hands on tummy breathing with my dog Jasper who seems to be such a container for me as well as a mirror of my alive vibrant inner child who is not shut down by trauma responses and anxious/avoidant patterns. That said he’s super sensitive like me it’s one of the reasons that lately I’ve been grooming him myself rather than having him overwhelmed and hurt by ‘professional’ groomers.
It can be fine balancing act between seeking necessary safety, aloneness and containment carrying all that I do and bravely reaching for life. Prayer helps, grieving helps me deeply acknowledge it all and I no longer hope for perfect understanding, that said to be smashed up at 17 sexually shut down and in terror of my vibrant alive feminine body filled with so much unnecessary shame was super tough.
On the positive side, that i must kerp.emphasising so I expand rather than contract, today I dance when I can and even shed tears unreswrvedly for the one time Dad tried to teach me to waltz on the tender brink of 17 before life smashed me up and derailed my development and 5 and a half years later I lost him too..I do miss him while at another level accepting this was our family fate, no one’s fault, not a conspiracy against me at all, just one of the many given life dished up that I struggled to accept and deal with for over 30 years
Emerging From The Dark Night 