A break from therapy

I took a break from therapy this week. It at times gets so tiring going over everything and I am making good progress. Never the less today I had a change to my Monday routine and I am trying to roll with that.. The sun is out and I have had a lot of breathlessness. There are things going on I will not always share in my blog any more.. Today I recalled some words my step father said to me in my 30s.. “You need at times to recognize the value of the unspoken word”. I do believe there is some truth in that..

Re reading Patricia Evans book on control and controlling people who try to define other’s reality made me realize how difficult it was to reach into the inner reality of my living sister’s soul when she was struggling so much after Mum died. My sister keeps her feelings inside and I think it is one of the things that most annoyed her about me when we were young.. I was a naturally exuberant and energetic child and that made her angry at times. The sad thing was that then all of that happy fund side of me had to go into my shadow and could only come out or be ‘permitted’ when I was drunk..

This is the sister who shamed me for “making an exhibition of myself” when I cried a lot at my God father’s funeral and hugged tightly his oldest grandson who was also crying. But if you understood that at that time (9 years of active sobriety) I was only just beginning to process and feel the buried feelings not only over the death of my father at the age of 22 as well as the absence of him emotionally during my childhood it makes sense. There was also a lot of loss over my older sister who was more like a surrogate Mum to me growing up and left when I was only 3 only later to be damaged by an aneurysm when I was 18 years old. Writing this post I feel both sick and angry. As a girl child I could not have the anger as being angry was considered ‘bad’ both in my family and in Catholic school it may lead to a strapping. Also in AA where I later sought refuge before falling foul of other shut down older sober members and feeling I had to get out and get some decent therapy. Re reading a post I wrote back in 2019 today on how narcissism or shut down in a parent makes us ‘collapse’ or freeze our emotions and move into ‘fawn’ to supplicate the abuser makes sense now to me.

The link to that post is here :

https://emergingfromthedarknight.wordpress.com/2019/05/01/trust-yourself-overcoming-the-invalidation-and-collapse-of-narcissistic-parenting/

Perhaps now I can ‘hold’ myself more adequately outside of the therapeutic relationship. Perhaps my emotions are not so confusing and ‘foggy’ as they were (held captive by fear obligation and guilt as well as appeasing or people pleasing). And it made sense to me today too, when I heard an Irish author interviewed on the Book Show on Radio National here and he spoke of how alcoholism in Ireland made many men into abusers at odds with any kind of emotional expression, and of how much they struggle with undifferentiated emotions and burdens of hyper striving and responsiblity.. His book actually deals with alcoholism in a woman and mother, something he feels needs to be spoke about more.

The issue of congealed and jumbled up inexpressible feelings coming out side ways is common to both male and female alcoholics the exception being as a friend once told me, in our society men are not allowed to be sad or fearful and woman should not be angry. When I came to AA in the 1990s the general need was to remain ‘anonymous’ in the media, in print and in films. That has changed a lot in recent years with many recovering authors sharing their own struggles and emotional neglect stories and famous actors such as Bradley Cooper and even singers like Elton John going public with their ordeals. So we are undergoing an awakening with all of this now.

For me I did struggle with some breathlessness today in the absence of therapy I took my coffee to the park so I could breathe through it.. I need to remember I have a loving inner parent and witness now who can help me and will not let me be besieged and shut down either by my own inner critic or the outer critic of others hell bent on shaming me like my sister has done in the past.. In the end now I can see that all comes out of her own issues and is a projection. I now no longer need to be as crippled by those attacks as I know deep in my heart I am a good person (albeit at times an unconscious one), and someone who has had to struggle so valiantly to keep living while having managed to maintain over 28 years of active abstinence and sobriety, not only through God’s grace but by my willingness to be led by something higher wider and deeper and more meaning ful and profound than just my own limited ego defenses.