I had a coffee with a dear friend yesterday, she was so angry with men after seeing how an elderly friend of hers is being treate by two male sons, they are denying her the right care while having so many properties of their own and my friend is an empath like me and is so so angered by it..
I do not like feeling that hatred towards men but at times what I suffered at the hands of my father makes me very very angry.. It has taken me along time to say it (like the character played by Richard Gere, in the movie Pretty Woman) and yesterday when a lot of mixed feelings were coming up in therapy around my Mum my therapist Kat was saying how challenging it can be to hold the polarity of feelings we go through in healing from neglect and abuse.. On one level I shame myself for those feelings which makes sense reading those chapters in Gabor Mate’s book on emotion invalidation.. John Bradshaw many years ago drew attention to the heavy weight of toxic shame we can carry from childhood. He speaks of feelings being bound in shame. This occurred to this morning reflecting on how buried grief can be in anger and that at times we hear people also apologize for beign sad or crying but as Matt Haig writes in his lovely book The Comfort Book
Crying release stress hormones, Swearing increases pain tolerance. Fury can motivate us into action.
Feel what you feel.
Silence and smiles arent the only way to respond to pain.
Sometimes its good to howl.
He labels the excerpt Wolf and in therapy yesterday I was telling Kat how I had my tarot cards read many years ago while working at a Mind, Body and Spirit festival and the reader said, in response to drawing the card The Moon. “In the depths of your soul you are the howling wolf, but when your mother raised you she wanted a domesticated dog.” That is a very apt description of my Mars Saturn Moon aspect in the sixth house.. Mum carried a lot of buried rage and fight as a child who was hit and hurt and driven by terror.. She had no father protector (my Sun is square to natal Neptune which shows issues of absence and loss around fathers) and she had to keep running for a lot of her life, just like my living sister who crashed and burned out of this pattern around 2003 onwards and most especially following Mum’s death just under 5 years ago.
Thinking about it, it is not men I need to be angry with its the way our culture venerates the heroic empowered egoic masculine and devalues the depths of the intuitive, instinctive and highly emotional feminine. Matt himself now fights for men to be able to cry and be sensitive but sadly men of both my father and brother’s generation were shamed for this and led to feel it was some kind of weakness. Its why when my first husband met me he said (and not in a kind way) my God you are ‘soft’ (like soft in the head) and then abandoned me after my buried grief began to burst out at 6 years of sobriety.. he refused to face the emotions and demonised me and blocked my therapy and I had to fight that tooth and nail and sadly blamed myself even up to this year for his failure.
That said I know he is not ‘at fault’ just limited like so many men who walk out on women when it gets too real. And then there are also the soft, caring, emotional men that struggle for a place and are so evident in some of the gay community.
I need now though to start to grow stronger in my masculine side, as I have embraced the deep dark feminine for many many years having endured my own long and protracted underworld descent from about 2002 onwards.. I have an inclining lately as a young woman my true needs were not seen, I was shamed for being too sensitive and before and after Dad died I got sent out to the wilderness. But then so is every single family scapegoat.. Please read the following post which is one of my most popular if you have not already.
Saturn is very strong in my chart and also in the chart of my friend who was so angry yesterday.. Saturn give us tenacity but is also makes the path forward extremely rocky and lonely at time, the mountain goat ascends to see the view and get a larger picture of collective forces, if he or she does not die or commit suicide in the process.
For woman getting stronger in our Mars or masculine side is huge work. Men fueled on the food of male privilege so rampant in our Western society put us down in so many ways, they see an angry woman as a ‘bitch’ rather than as someone who is fighting to stay alive and not be overpowered or shut down. And when we have not been allowed to mature emotionally through the healthy experience of our young feelings then they often do not always seem to make sense and yet feelings and emotions do not lie and cannot forever stay buried. The body will rebel if we cannot find our own unique form of boundary and healthy narcissism to fight for our right TO BE FULL ALIVE AS WHO WE REALLY ARE as the writing and work of Gabor Mate and others like Alexander Lowen show.
We need to be able to fight but also at times to surrender too, especially to feelings of pain that in seeming to overpower us at times are really just crying out to be integrated, understood, listened to and heard.
Emerging From The Dark Night 