Lately, I have been thinking so much about the issues of shame and powerlessness that can hide underneath the many frustrations we both feel and express coming out of a lifetime of confusion and emotional neglect, most especially of what we come to suppress (and struggle to express) from the past through many of our fear laden flashbacks. These feelings of shame are not justified but they are a natural result of our not being allowed to be fully complex and emotionally struggling as young ones. Lately, as my healing goes on there are tears that often just seem to be seeping out of my body, as if what is unconsciously being held is needing to express but since I cannot find the words for the fact that I may be flashbacking into old feelings of grief or powerlessness of a small child, those come out sideways if that makes any kind of sense at all.
At times, as I shared in my last blog journal update, the anger comes out in a very intense way. On Saturday last it was in impatience at Jasper being so slow which made me feel like I was almost replaying the way Nana was with my Mum on that day while feeling so very sad at being so alone. In some way dear Jasper was being made my container for the feelings perhaps so in acting them out I could finally face them and process more of not only my own grief but ancestral grief too.
It’s a deeply complex process working out how and why, when and where certain things what can trigger us with PTSD and C PTSD. My cleaner coming can be a huge trigger for me since growing up we had to keep everything so compulsively clean and tidy. I was sharing with Kat in therapy on Thursday how my closest sister and I would not be allowed to participate if Mum and Dad had guests to dinner, we had to sit quietly behind the sliding door that separated the kitchen and dining room. There were a lot of other ways in which we were shut down and that image appeared to me in a dream last night as near dead horse lying struggling on the path I was walking back to a huge communal house I had left full of younger woman and an older one, seemingly in charge who had in some way rejected me before this leading me to travel away (this dream complex mirrored what happened several times in my life and was replayed from the age of 23 shortly after my Dad died following those six years of difficult trauma where I went off alone, repeating that at the ages of both 42 and 43 when I had the nasty head injury following yet more emotional rejection.) In the dream on Thursday night, I was returning and emotionally embracing the colorful and eclectic woman who lived at the commune.
I noticed this morning my anxiety over the cleaner coming was high level, especially since the agency sent someone new I am not familiar with. As he arrived I felt that sense of anxiety with a stranger in my house and it took a while for my body to settle down.. I carry so many fears into relationships that I will ‘fail’ or seem wanting in some way or meet with some kind of distain or rejection. In the dream last night Mum and I were in a car driving, she was at the steering wheel focus angrily facing intently forward, she had blocked sinuses and a hard expression on her face, this became very noticeable to me in the dream. Often as kids I had to be hypervigilant in our family for when Mum would get a certain expression of raised eyes and flaring nostrils as that signaled an attack of fury, high energy, frustration, hitting, anger or rage could be coming on. On Thursday night I listened to an interview with a writer abused as a child who was also sharing about this kind of intense hypervigilance and on guard feeling that makes those of us with abuse or neglect or shame trauma especially susceptible in later life to mental illnesses and to the freeze and fawn reactions of Complex PTSD.
I do believe, that being individual humans with our own carried inner energies and history, we do respond to each person’s energy in different ways, our body can be ‘reading’ the body of the other, at times without us knowing it. I did not have any words yesterday for the new cleaner as I usually do with other cleaners, partly due to the fact I used that opportunity of having energy cleared up from daily domestic tasks to start getting stuck into psychotherapist James Hillman’s book The Dream and the Underworld after that big dream following and eclipse week in which I felt almost obliterated.
After therapy on Monday (a super out there ‘active’ day), on Tuesday (Mars Day) I was finding it impossible to digest and stand and even stay awake to be honest, as soon as I attempted to eat my body became so fragmented and was spinning on its axis.. So it was a very up and down day with me still coming out of so much pent-up dissociation and disorientation. On Tuesday, I just collapsed into bed around 2 pm, waking very disoriented around 3 pm. After this the anxiety being stirred up in my body was expressing in all kinds of weird burning sensations too due to me taking a magnesium sleep remedy on Sunday night that set my gut and bowel (Scorpio and Virgo) a bit hay wire.
Here in Australia, we are also only three weeks into clocks going forward at the outset of day light savings and it’s been a struggle to readapt. Lately I am trying my best to avoid or ignore clock time and follow the cues of my body which are not the best due to all of the complex bodily abuse and invasion experiences of my younger life, cuts, burns things coming in on me like all of the machinery from the front of the car after that enormous crash in 1979. To be honest mealtimes were all over the place this week as have bed and sleeping and waking times as my body attempts to adapt to the growing light as we move deeper into the last third of spring. This period of September to December is always quite difficult for me as it is littered with many trauma anniversaries.
The issues of frustration, fear, guilt and shame (Mars Saturn Moon) have also been coming up big time for me lately, many thoughts have been occurring to me about how much, as trauma survivors we feel at fault for not being able to function well in the world due to various things that happen to derail our maturing and growing process as young ones. Our emotions remain confused to us and often exceedingly mixed up, raw, undifferentiated or not fully accessible to translation. We may find it difficult to be conscious of how our body manifests various emotions and traumas, since traumas happening to us at a younger age are often not fully conscious to the ego or even mediated in any clear way by it. I addressed this issue in a post shared a while ago.
And with complex PTSD our ego self remains in some ways out of step with the greater wholeness not only of our selves but also of the grater energy dynamic of the family, society and time of evolution in which we were born into as well as all of the contents or complexes it carries represented in Jungian psychology by a Mandala of a greater circle containing circles within circles. Healing to me and in my body often seem to move in the spiral direction of flows and spins and swirls and cycles and this is how life energy moves on our planet, just watch the wind or water going down a plug hole and you will see the powerful forces acting upon us of both gravity and entropy. We can then go on for years perhaps not even being totally aware of the causes, suffering our own internalized criticism, shaming or judgement, or having those projected upon us. In turn, if we feel inwardly ‘shame bound; we may try and turn those feelings around upon others and this is where either we or others may turn punishingly narcissistic, distancing or rejecting and shaming to each other.. I got a handle on some of these issues earlier in the week by listening to two excellent videos one from Richard Grannon (below) and another by Dr Ramani (link to follow when I find it) At around the 21. 15 minute mark of this video Richard talks of the dead child buried inside a person with trauma living almost inside an ‘egg’ energetically.. The death of this child lead to death of the True Self but I would argue and Jungians would too that this child may often appear in dreams as either dead or dark in color, to represent the fact of how deeply it can, in fact, become buried inside of the unconscious.
Lately, too I have been experiencing a lot of frustration, grief, fear pain and distress about being so much on my own or unseen as a child and this feeling of grief may be tied up with feelings of having been almost ‘put to death’ on some level or having a longing for parts of myself that are so very different from and to the ones that my parents and some of society could love, appreciate, validate or accept. I also sure this is also how both of my parents felt growing up at such a precarious time in an evolution of history that oh so often did not see the child as good or worthy or allow the child to be a child. In addition, if loss of parents or their absence due to wider traumas also form a pivotal part of our story then the absence and grief and sense of loss we bury and must integrate over time, can and does tend to run very very deep.
On reflection though I may be making a lot of steps to come alive lately the more I grieve and feel and shift and sort and process all of this. The truth is that I am not as disconnected as I was, mainly due to the fact that when I connect to myself, I gain more insight into dynamics and then have a real self to give.. Some may not like the insights I have but that too is all okay.. And in fact over the past few years I have found and do find safe people out there that I can connect to, so the shame and fear and judgement and attacks upon myself that come up for me are often, and in truth, not really warranted.
Perhaps not feeling the compulsive need to chat or connect with the cleaner yesterday was a good thing, to just allow myself to sit quietly and read as he worked around me not feeling I was being a malingerer for being still and doing something I actually enjoyed. Considering I got 3rd degree burns to my left foot after a cleaning frenzy of Mum’s on a caravanning holiday by stepping down into a scalding bucket of water she had left on the steps close to where I was drawing it’s no wonder that the cleaner coming sparks so much anxiety at times, I feel I want to cancel that week’s service.. It’s just another symptom of avoidant and anxious attachment due to the difficulty I felt feeling safe and being cared for growing up. Mum and Dad were just too busy to spend any time at all playing with us and nurturing us. Plus, I am beginning to understand why, at times, the compulsive need to rush out and about just to feel connected on some days is so intense. What may then happen though is that I find myself over running or over riding my own bodily signals of the need for more rest.
That said there is fear there too, so often, due to the accident I suffered after a therapy session in the afternoon on a Thursday that somehow if I drive to therapy on that day I may die, often due to this I do the session by phone but this week, despite struggling a lot of Tuesday I did somehow manage to physically get myself out to lunch and therapy as well as the library prior to therapy, something I have never managed before in over 6 years of working with Katina. These seemingly small steps of growth for me, are, in fact, huge.
Things are feeling super oceanic, fluid, transitional and nebulous at the moment anyway with Mars now in a square to the planet Neptune and that eclipse on Monday occurring with three planets in the depth watery sign of Scorpio. This eclipse seems to be one that can work on bringing up past issues we may have buried deeply in the unconscious and it is interesting to me that Scorpio is ruled by both Mars and Pluto. Mars is soon to turn retrograde and Pluto began to move forward again in the later degrees of Capricorn about a month ago, both are action planets that deal with strong libido energy and when Mars becomes repressed (Mars = our life force) then we really are in difficulties as far as self expression, agency and externalisation of our personal energy is concerned.
On the Mars Neptune issue, this week, once again, I got the hard word put upon me for more money from someone I recently met, he claimed he was a doctor working at an orphanage with Syrian children and the most amazing thing is that his first name is Thomas, and that is the name of my maternal great great grandfather who comes through so much in my multigenerational body work. Thomas had 16 kids he had to feed and this was a source of great stress. Due to my current limited financial means I just had to ignore the message as I was helping another friend and have been so overstretched financially speaking lately, it was causing me so much anxiety. My online banking was shut down by the bank a couple of months ago so now I have to physically go into a branch to do cash deposits to pay some bills. Waiting in the queue at the bank on Wednesday, I was finding it almost impossible to stand up and was also crying with pent up exhaustion and frustration over this last lot of ‘help’ given to Scott that has taken me down to the wire again, not to mention demands from Jackson who had an accident about a month ago and I was still tying to help with a little money supposedly for food. Luckily on Wednesday, after waiting at the bank for over 10 minutes, a kind man saw I was in distress and went and got me a comfy chair to sit on and brought that over. Later in Big W same thing, as Jackson needed this google play card and I was so overwhelmed I could not stand up again and had to sit on the floor.. A woman asked if I was okay and then she also offered me a chair. I cannot tell you how much those acts of kindness mean to me after a week in which it felt so so alone and so so exhausted from over 5 years of trying to help others who do not even seem to see its too much for me. But that was not the point really, it is me who needs to actually realise when things become too much and find a way to say that No that often seems so impossible for me. I feel sure that the New Moon Solar eclipse on Wednesday is stirring up a lot of old patterns of the past due to neglect and emotional abandonment issues, issues around boundaries, shame, self-criticism, dissolution and failure of self care..
On that note, as the Sun and Venus move closer to my natal Neptune in Scorpio at 13 degrees all of these issues will of course be triggered. We will have a lunar eclipse in about 10 days or so and at that point the Moon will be in the opposing sign of Taurus very close to the North Node and both the Sun and the Moon will be either in conjunction with, opposing or squaring the current Saturn in Aquarius square to Uranus in Taurus. I have heard a lot of talks on the North Node Uranus in Taurus conjunction being about the need for a deep re-evaluation of issues around self worth and self value.. The ability to set healthy boundaries demands that we feel we actually have enough worth and sense of self regard to do so. For those of us conditioned by our harsh neglect history to be empathic co-dependents self care, self love and self championing are often qualities we experience in DEFICIT. Therapist Ross Rosenberg gives the name Self Love Deficit Disorder to the conditioning and impact that leads us neglected emotionally as kids to becoming vulnerable to being played or preyed upon by those more self involved and more geared towards the Narcissistic end of the spectrum.
As my therapist often reminds me we are all placed somewhere on the narcissism empathy spectrum and a healthy sense of self and narcissism is necessary for us to actually even project ourselves outwards and shine (Sun and Mars) in the world and hold boundaries in relationship to negotiate for both intimacy (Venus Neptune) and separation (Mars Saturn). a stronger Moon energy (especially tied up with absorbent and boundary blurred energies watery energies like Neptune) just leaves us open to being sucked into and upon by another person’s needs while often rejecting our own it also leaves us very open to the feelings of others which we may absorb not even knowing for some time how deeply they rubbed off upon us.
Giving and dropping our boundaries is a necessary thing.. We do not have to be the self sufficient resourceful ‘hero’ all of the time..and sometimes we may become anti depedent too, due to the fact parents would not allow us to have or express any kind of need or emotion without shaming them.. That then leaves us in a hostile situation inwardly, battling our own softer side whilst attracting that to us, so the issues are very very complex and cannot always be understood from purely the point of Western ego psychology, Hillman addresses this issue at depth in his book on the dream and it makes super interesting reading.. However to keep giving out of a place of deep emotional abandonment can both hollow and empty us out if we did not ever learn as kids to value our own needs for both space, peace and rest. the ability just to be with ourselves, open too and basking in the love of the natural both within, without and all around us.
Emerging From The Dark Night 