I acted as a child : and some thoughts on the Dark Night of the Soul.

Maybe my loving inner adult may be able to grow now that I am so clearly seeing the way my wounded and deprived child acted to cause us both so many problems since Mum died.. Lately I have to admit a lot of my actions came out of naivety and arrested childhood development as well as profound feelings of loss stemming back to a young age… but just possibly it all needed to unfold as it did..

I think possibly too that lately, in grieving how alone my Mum also felt growing up, I am finally coming to more compassion and insight.. As an Aquarian I am starting to see that I am far too perfectionistic of both self and others.. at times and then I can get caught up in idealistic dreams that only cause me pain by fostering them.

The sadness at losing Dad at 23 and how hard it was to not have him support my educational dreams is very close the surface too, at the moment.. I think of the dream before I got sober where he came to me destitute that may symbolically and psychologically be about my own under developed inner masculine (Mars and Solar force.) but it most certainly is also profoundly about complex money issues and survival issues across many generations.

As a sensitive child with Sun square to Neptune (like Carl Jung) I did pick up on the suffering in the family and it became my own. astrologer Liz Greene picked up on this is a seminar on Neptune back in 2001.. Indeed over years and after sobriety the burden of feeling all of those sad feelings fell to me. I needed to share them to externalize them (and thank God for this blog in helping me to do that) along with therapy/sharing with soul friends. Sometimes after my marriage began to break down Mum and I would hold hands and cry for what we lost from 1985 onwards.. I must stay glad I was with her for those final years even if it meant suffering a horrible sinus operation, leg wound and breast cancer.. I could not always the feelings out around her and my older sister but even visits to the psyche ward following Mum;s death did bring up some of that grief, (possibly not only my own.) No matter how hard I begged my sister to get better psychological help that was doomed to fail too but I also drew back at times due to that fear of being overwhelmed. Listening to a very good program on the menopause and depression issues I think she also had a dark night triggered after her womb was taken in 2003 and her hormones went haywire.. I am glad I got acupuncture at that point to stem my own bleeding.

Now there are some family I need to see, I long for them.. the head injury of 2005 came on the back of running away, a few months before I boarded the plane back to the UK in April of that year my older sister’s second son visited with his wife and two boys and they wanted me to go north but at that stage their father was still alive and my family blamed him for abandoning my sister after her aneurysm and it felt too much like a betrayal to visit.

We got to connect a little when my older sister finally died and then my mother three years later in 2017 though there was a great distance everyone still kept up then possibly out of fear of vulnerability… But at the moment I long to be with my older sister’s second son and his younger boys.. It is a real soul need in me at present.

I never got to make that family with Jonathan. Sadly I aborted our first child. I was not ready and I do not blame myself. My family now is Jasper and a growing group of blogger and soul friends who see and love my depth and stay close to accept me as I am. Really I do have so much to be grateful for. God knows families define and we may be defined by so much we do not fully know or understand from the past or by wounds our own inner critic (or other’s other critics) keeps us from fully experiencing, feeling and grieving through.

John Bradshaw claims we can suffer those wounds at about 5 different stages of childhood development.. This rings true.. and each wound may affect our ability to birth and manifest as our true self or soul in the world until we face them and process them.. This process is one that may be often kicked of at critical outer planet transits of Uranus, Neptune, Chiron and Pluto that accompany midlife.. Uranus awakens the unhealed pain to be felt.. if we deny the deeper psycholgical resonances of this process or medicate it away we miss a golden opportunity to grow as a soul through what mystics and depth psychologists such as Thomas Moore call The Dark Night of the Soul. Weathering these planetary storms with grace may mean we have to bury our ghosts in order to come to new life, most certainly we must face what haunts us fully feeling it through.. The Neptune to Neptune square may bring a lot of loss up or a feeling of deluge depending upon our multigenerational configuration..The Chiron return at 50 may take us into our deepest wound and make us face our buried achilles heel..

The alternative may be to turn away and lose the path back to light that naturally wished to open up deep inside of us as we progressively start to move through the later stages of the profound passageway of the second half of life. As Carl Jung famously said “until the age of 40 we are all just doing research.”