I watched an episode of the series Canine Intervention on Netflix last night about traumatized and difficult dog behaviour with a trainer who first dog killed another dog when he was very young and so he had to have the dog put down.. he speaks of this painful episode with great feeling, nearly crying and tells how it motivated him to make sure he helped dogs in that situation heal and be able to be socialized. That is what he does in the first episode with a three legged staffy cross called Lady whose owner rescued him after the dog was shot in the leg while owned by his first owner, a homeless man who then died. After coming home with him Lady builds a strong bond of affection and protection, but only with him, biting and wounding three subseqeunt friends that visit.
The trainer Jas makes that point that all aggression in dogs comes out of fear and so it is with humans and when our parents are aggressive with us when we are young due to their own issues how can we learn to trust or feel safe with other humans? What language of emotion do we have at all that is accessible to us. The neo cortex goes offline and the primal reptilian drives kick in.. No soothing present as a child so high states of anxiety and fear as an adult.
I thought a lot about that piece I shared from Augusten Burroughs on self pity and apology yesterday, today.. Yes we must rely on ourselves and we die alone but I also think a lot of what he writes about there comes out of the fact he had no one to rely on as a child and so he was abused and left completely vulnerable. I know now he is in a loving relationship and so much of what he writes about victimhoom makes so much sense but there are complex depths to this issue. I have shared before how mentally unwell and emotionally confused both of his parents were. And its not uncommon for us children of alcoholics and grand children or great great grandchildren of alcoholics to endure a lot of abandonment. Carrying wounds from many generations past its so important that we address and in time become our own loving adult.. But there are still wounds we carry that may lie hidden.
When I first joined AA in December 1993 all I heard was how set apart from the human race most addicts felt. The truth was the were sensitive kids born to shut down parents coming out of the dark ages of emotional abuse and oppression called the Kali Yuga.
If you do not know Kali is the Plutonian Goddess of death and is a force to be respected in life and nature after all as we are all a part of the great round and nature can be harsh and life very unfair as Mr Burroughs writes in that recent excerpt of a book I shared with you yesterday… But we are also born wired for relationship.
Let us get this straight, grief is not self pity but there is a time we must accept that things die, things change and if we want to grow and move forward we need to do this with grace so we do not become endlessly resentful or filled with bitterness or remain a perpetual ‘victim’ but when the neo cortex goes off line we do struggle.
On this note I talked to a very good friend on Wednesday whose husband was friends with my ex husband.. We met in the UK and her partner, Robb worked with me at the Cambridge University Botanic Garden from 1999 to 2001 when I left to come home to Oz. We are born only 4 years apart so it is interesting that we went through so many similar things around the same time.. Our partners left us, we both moved home, me to Oz, Moni to America and then we both nursed family who had been abusive but the truth that Moni revealed to me on Wednesday was that she was also sexually abused by her father and even as she was caring for him in old age he called her a dirty whore..She moved through this to love and care for both parents..I did cry as she said to me.. “I got through all of this by focusing on what I had to be grateful for”, unlike me she does not have siblings so she did not have that extra burden of care for mentally ill siblings but still to lose both parents was tough..
In the end life is hard for so many of us.. The most we can do on any day is front up to face it all in grace.. Unlike me Moni was then able to open her heart fully to new love my own fear and avoidance of relationships lately as well as feelings of not being loved that are just not based on reality is becoming clearer and clearer as Mercury now a week into moving forward finally is beginning to move into exact square with my Uranus in Leo in the first house and will in week or so start to square my natal Chiron in Pisces. And yet there is still such a deep wound in me that does set me apart in so many ways. I feel it more and more lately.. There is a lot of buried aggression that at times I do not know how to handle or utilize in a healthy way for self care.
Last night it was revealed to me this pattern of broken attachments due to loss, the pattern of travelling far away is ancestral and relates to a strong stellium of planets in Libra in the charts of both my Great Great Grandfather Thomas as well as my older sister Judith.. Today the Moon in Libra is traversing those degrees. All of my Aquarian planets related to ruthless independence reside in the Libra ruled 7th house (that is in the collective chart system of the 12 houses). And Jupiter there with Sun Mercury and Venus as well as the South Node shows a magnification of the separation in relationship.. So if I blame myself for withdrawing from about 2002 on wards as Saturn and Pluto faced off maybe I need to go a bit more gently on myself.
I had to acknowledge with Scott and Jackson how much fear I have of trusting.. But I have also had to work so hard to feel that I actually deserve love and a chance of connection. At times I just weep about the solitude I put myself into when these days if I get out and about I truly do feel a part of the human race, even if at times others seem not to be all that emotionally connected.. Who is to say if that is their path? Surely we all have our own deeply personal and individua journey to tread..
Seeing Lady be helped and loved through positive reinforcement to trust and love and no longer feel like she had to bite everyone who came close to her new owner fearing them to be a threat was wonderful, to see the joy on the face of her owner who obviously loved her so much was also so heart warming. But it also made me think a lot about those of us whose first experiences with hurtful adults may have led us to become so hyper vigilant, wary and untrusting… Aggression often comes from fear so why treat the person who displays it as a villian?
We also may often choose to fawn if we have experienced that level of aggression as something damaging in our own lives.. We may have been forced into that position by a parent who would not allow it, or we may have come to fear it seeing how much it hurt us.. We may have had no healthy role models at all for healthy communication of frustration or emotional overwhelm of mixed up feelings our own wounded parents felt when faced with a child displaying needs, feelings or behaviors they had no understanding, skillful apprehension nor mastery of in them selves.. So lacking this we fall into a sense of powerlessness and shame.. And then it all just becomes too bloody hard to relate or know how to relate and so we withdraw into our addictive or self soothing behaviors some of which may not be at all healthy..
That program gave me compassion for our plight. The experience and expression of anger in our society is not something so many have a good handle on.. but it is something we need to understand and most especially how much fear or a sense of frustrated hurt and powerlessness actually lies behind acts of fawn and/or unhealthy aggression. How do we hold that fearful hurting child best, how do we show recognition of it in others who so long ago came to fear that they really did not belong on this earth, or ever found a safe place to land with other human beings?
Emerging From The Dark Night 