Grief seems to have a spiral energy for me.. I can get into a fast spiral when grief is at the bottom of things feeling I need to push on alone and sometimes over doing it. I just watched an episode of the series Couples Therapy in which one of the men in a relationship betraying another is having his addiction to alcohol put under the spot light and the therapist is saying how he is using alcohol as a tool to distance from his emotions. In the work between then he shows no empathy or connection much to his partner’s pain, so Scott has to feel all that he does not feel in the betrayal and I am sure it all goes back to earlier attachment traumas that happened to the inner children of both men. Watching it was sad and revealing it triggered the distress inside me that never once in my past two relationships would my partners agree to joint therapy, they both made me wear all of the feelings and blame in the relationship.. I was only responsible for my part not theirs. It was the same in my family.
Today in therapy so much grief flooded out and I grieved so deeply for the loss of Dad and my older sister Jude as well as the tragic way her life played out in the end as well as for my inner child who in a vision I saw cast out into the wilderness of a dark forest where she had to cope alone and could only be helped by the animals.. This calls to mind the Jungian myth used by therapist Robert Johnson about One Two Man in which an abandoned man has to find his healing via the instinctual realm of the animals… it is very powerfully told in Roberts biograpy whose name at present escapes me.
Today I read this old post written near to my accident anniversary in 2016 after my episode with breast cancer.
A lot of grief and anger is coming up that I let them cut into me then and give me that five weeks of radiotherapy. It was not necessary at all in my opinion, as it was so early stage and I have heard that it is now thought these early stage interventions are not the best but I got pressured into it by my sister who was so unwell and had the cancer herself being diagnosed around the time of my father’s cancer diagnosis 31 years earlier. I know now when I feel all of this emotion how much I had to bury it and how hard it was to have it in any relationship and I also know it makes me keep distance from men in my life too in some way, mostly out of fear, though men I talk to about all of that in my own life and have their own grief seem to be a little better at understanding it and attuning to their own. But its not easy to find many men like this for me.
That fear of feeling came up in the conversation with my brother yesterday too.. He said his wife will often not let him go to visit her baby sister who is so unwell with him and how much that is hard but that this last time he did go.. I know my sister in law kept her feelings under wrap. My only niece and her daughter had her own mental health struggles at one point a few years after I got sober and both I and my husband tried to help her but when she poured out vulnerablity, need and emotions with me her Mum got angry and full of distain. It was painful to witness. She would not let her have much to do with my older sister who died either and her older son never once visited her at all in the home over the 12 year period she was there. At the funeral he did not even give me a hug or approach me at all. So so tough.
The fact is I am a deeply emotional person and most humans are but we learn to cover it over and we may attract partners who are the other way and they may at times get a kind of vicarious feed from evoking in us emotions they have set up powerful defenses against. I see a lot of this in the work being showed between 3 separate couples in the Paramount Plus program I am currently watching.
Robert Johnson and many Jungian therapist believe we are a feeling wounded culture, we tend to pathologize those who feel deeply and may even label them ‘crazy’. The words for anger ‘mad’ is also equated with irrationality and looked down upon or was in the past… So it is we leave those feeling deeply and suffering significant trauma very much alone.. Those people carrying the epigentic trauma and being slapped with a diagnosis such as schizophrenia, bi polar or borderline may even be sectioned or were in the past.. I watched a movie yesterday in which a young Indian woman having an episode was being strong armed into an Ambulance.. so often these people are not able to regulate themselves and may need help but often the way that happens in the past could be quite barbaric.
I seem to be very close to tears a lot of the time at the moment.. I think this may be a good thing, the following Virgo New Moon update I listened to last night spoke of how September will be a good time to do therapy and deep emotional work.
For me currently I feel like hibernating, staying close to my soul, nurturing myself with good food and long walks and giving myself some kind of touch therapy as well.. I really feel I need that at the moment as living alone I do not get to see anyone much and am often not even hugged.. its what was so lovely about seeing my sister last week. I noticed during the outing we had quite a lot of public displays of affection at the time and they seemed to come completely from the heart.
I have the image of that man on the Couples Therapy program drinking a beer on pause at the moment.. It reminds me of how much feeling lies buried at the heart of addiction… None of Brendan’s past has been explored at all so far but his partner Scott is the adult child of an alcoholic so its only natural that he attracted Brendan. Our wounds have a way of doing that. They often attract us to those who will trigger our earlier experience of a parent or sibling. I had no partner at any stage in my life who was emotionally connected to themselves nor could connect to me in any real way., I always got blamed when it ended with the bagging me out to their friends and family. And the sad truth is we cannot connect to others if we are on the run from our own feelings
I feel disappointed and amazed to that I thought it was I who owed my ex husband an apology a month ago when all of that pain came up over our separation very close to the 18th anniversary of him leaving me when he approached me again over Instagram.. there was no conversation of any depth that followed for us.. I never really got any kind of sorry from him at all.
What Iam starting to see now is how much I struggled with growing up in an emotionally avoidant family and culture.. and how valiantly I tried to be there for ailing family members in the years after I got sober. . I am glad I could do it but it hurts to be honest so deeply at times, never to be fully acknowledged. In the end being seen deeply mostly happens in my therapy and with one or two close friends.
I am still not sure our culture puts enough value on the power of emotions… We should never feel ashamed for having emotions and naturally intense reactions to deep and hidden traumas or significant abuses or abandoments of the past. After all trauma hurts and leave deep voids and fractures, it may make connecting authentically and deeply with others very difficult. Feelng our feelings is the way we can put some of the fractured pieces back together.
Thank God for good therapists and those who lead the way in showing its okay to feel emotions. Grief. sadness, rage and anger may also be door ways into spiritual awakenings too that may never come in any other way if only we were not such a culture in flight from valuing and validating deep emotions.
Emerging From The Dark Night 