So often it seems we do not have a full appreciation for all we lived through as trauma survivors. The world may make it hard for us to talk about something that lies outside of their own experience and this is perhaps the fear that was most voiced in the movie Land directed by Robin Wright that I shared about earlier. After suffering an unspeakable loss the lead character in the movie felt that she had no where much to go with the pain and so she retreated to the wild, keeping it all wrapped up inside of her because she could not find a loving community. She was only able to find the words when another person opened up to her and became vulnerable enough to do so.
It seems this theme of vulnerabilty is one that needed to come to a head coming out of the recent Scorpio/Taurus eclipses since the Sun was on the south node. Scorpio energy tends to bury feelings deep until they become feared in both self and others, sadly this is due to our emotionally illiterate culture that often sees only the superficial, not into the depths. To my mind in our modern toxic culture, as Gabor Mate notes, we have become so split off from feelings, shut in, and so in disconnected due to trauma we tend to split off not only from our bodies, but also from wildness, creativity and nature.
At the same time we also seem to be caught up a collective flight fight responses, so much so that with the current rampant disconnected pace it becomes exceedingly difficult to get anyone to stop, inwardly, connect and mindfully breathe or inwardly attune. That said, much IS changing and needs to change.
As Bessel Van Der Kolk notes our body becomes fearful to us in trauma and so we check out or seek to numb the pain instead of seeing and hearing its necessary message.
Lately I notice more and more when I am not in my breath and body and then it is I remember to practice the pause and breathe response. Just being able to tune in to myself in the middle of that flashback on Saturday (Saturn’s day) and the week day of my accident this weekend revealed a lot to me of how and why a happy lively child who was so extroverted became so sad, afflicted, scared numb and confused. Even small moments of noticing I am about to split off again may help me more than I know and tuning into my inner child’s old responses is bearing such helpful fruit. At the same time as grieving deeply for how I put myself to death from 2001 onward, and seeing how emotiinalyt absent and constrictive our family was, I am getting bursts of expansion, hope and elation too. Wow it feels joyous to feel alive in my body. I also woke up laughing a lot today about it all.
Sadly, as I see it, in the past our society made the victim of trauma from wars etc the scapegoat, labelling what they suffered a dusorder insteadof a natural organic totally understandable soul body response. The traumatized, scaoegoated person is used by the system and then sent home hollowed out and abandoned with the stuffing sucked out of them… No one stops to connect, the person becomes isolated, and then the wound in laying unaddressed becomes more heavy than ever. As the old saying goes a burden or problem shared is a burden or problem halved, and so is a trauma or a wound even if it makes the person look ‘ugly’ it’s what they suffered or had to contain that is the real source of shame and grief.
When society makes the trauma survivor to blame for not coping better, or showing a resilience that is most probably beyond them in the absence of containment or help it is being cruel and unkind to the victim and makes them feel even more hopeless.
It was all of this I was experiencing so much yesterday as I raged in my garden.. Truth is that local deluges of rain have made everything grow and go wild and yesterday it all felt a bit too much. but thinking about it later that, in and of itself, the vibrant chaos of the overgrown garden could be seen as a symptom or symbolic representation of trauma, except that the wild and nature vibrated with life not deadness and then I understood my impulse to control it as part of my own embedded OCD family trauma response due to the chaos of mixed up feelings that raged in my great great grandfather all of those years ago and was passed down to my great grandmother Eliza, my Nana, Amy and my Mum.
Sadly on my father’s side I do not know as much of the history but he was always so silent, forbearing and stoic, just like my living sister and those qualities marked him out for cancer which took him from us at the end. Now seeing my brother struggle with cancer I feel so sad for all the ways he shut down too. He shared about the violence of the Christian brothers with me on the weekend and then tried to say it had no affect on him. I just know that is not true. But possibly its impossible for him to embrace himself or either of his sisters in their vulnerability. His entire family seem to only know how to deny, reject or distance, which at heart is just a coping strategy.
Today I can honor myself and other trauma and abuse survivors. I can go easier, I can seek the joy, have compassion for the rages, sense of powerlessness and struggle and most of all I can be grateful for those beginning to speak up about these issues and call out the toxic systems and beliefs or expectations that fuel the misunderstanding and ignorance most especially of many in the medical and psychiatric profession. (See Gabors talk below.)
Emerging From The Dark Night 