Mercury and Venus are travelling together at present and today both are at 6 degrees Sagittarius which rules teaching and education and this pairing is square to my Chiron Pluto opposition that also links to the repression pain of Mars Saturn Moon. Saturn has to do with fathers and authority and the true pain of how my father made me shred my authenticity is with me full force today triggered by these two men pulling on me for help or money. I literally feel like getting a gun today and blowing someone’s brains out (don’t worry I would not do it,) but its best I stop putting the gun to my own head over and over by using devaluation and criticism of myself and its interesting that my first therapist said she felt that me using alcohol was like hitting myself over the head with a bottle, for so long it was no possible for me to truly feel how much of a victim I really was a child or as an adolescent, how alone I was left, how ignored.
In 1982, when Dad forbade me from further teaching studies and forced me into business school it killed me on one level. Today I realised how much it killed off in me and how it made me more isolated too from friends.. I had already undergone the near death experience only 3 years before, and also witnessed a lot of my sister’s collapse, although in 1982 she had still not been as cruelly abandoned as she was.. That happened in 1983, the year after I completed secretarial college. Those were not the times when you defied your father (at least with my fawn collapse or freeze pattern I lacked the ego strength) so I fucking sucked it up for the year and then got stuck in that career. I was not even conscious of the deep wounding of it until today. I was a bright, intelligent, extroverted person before he did that and in the next few years I not only became an addict but started to date one and he also devalued me and I did not see really see until today how for all of those years I was full of rage, disappointment, frustration and fear.. Using drugs and alcohol meant I could not experience those feelings safely without shame and even in AA they were often seen as a source of shame. Feeling bound in shame become very difficult to face and to heal the shame we have to take the risk of sharing with safe others. That rage is with me today (Venus and Mercury squaring my first house Pluto and Black Moon Lilith in Virgo)..
This next bit is a bit of a rant (no apologies, I need to STOP apologizing) What gives men the fucking power to decide a woman’s fate, to rail it over their daughters, to look down on them, to kill them off? It’s been happening for centuries and it is just fucking ignorance, blindness and fear, I believe. Today I am allowing myself to feel the force of that anger with my Dad while also knowing he knew no better. At the same time, another part of me is truly am grieving for all of those lost years.
Men will use us woman as their shock absorbers, they just do it.. I remember the dating coach Brian Nox saying a man is like a wild racehorse and he will run all over a woman if she does not stay strong in her boundaries.. I let this happen so many times and and seeing lately it is why I fell down and either hit my head or just fell about 3 o 4 times with my last partner. I collapsed a boundary when my primal gut instinct told me he was damaged and could do damage to me.. He even warned me of it the start saying I was too vulnerable. Of course he could never own his vulnerability it was always my fault. I cannot tell you the number of times I got read the riot act for having feelings and even for sticking up for his younger son who his father hurt shamelessly at times. He would even call me a winger if I dared to protest about it, or I was made wrong in other ways.. I am not saying by any means I was perfect as I had so much damage by that point and was not owning my own power at all, at times and I am sure that is why it was such an important relationship, but it was never a relationship the could last with the way our own wounds used to trigger each other all of the time. I also lacked empathy with him at times.. It was not all his fault or mine. I justs needed to become far stronger in positive healthy ego strength.
I listened to an interesting talk by Lee Harris the other night on how our inner critic is not the problem. He makes the point that we absorb the inner critic when young and use it to keep ourselves safe.. If the critic can shred and silence us and so stop us trying we never take the risk of confronting our worst fears or get to move beyond them. And I see this tendency in me well as well as my need to make excuses at times. That said sometimes when boundaries are blurry or someone is trying to force their will on me I do have to find a way to duck and weave, just for self preservation. Often e procrastinate due to the fear of the inner critic and refuse to take full responsibility in our lives and step up, taking positive action. The fear of loss does motivate a lot of our human actions and it can keep our lives very very small and limited at times. Owning our own wounds and defensive strategies does take some time.
I’ve moved through the anger with my Dad now.. All of those painful feelings and experiences go under the list of ‘things I cannot change’ in my life.. All I can change now is how I relate to them and what positive use I make of the pain. Lately its very easy for me to get overloaded and at times like that I have to remind myself to slow down and take a step back from it all.
I’m grateful for the platform to vent here. I do it for myself really. I am glad for those who stay true to their wounds and do not minimize the damage done because when we do that we sacrifice our authenticity and do not get to shed or grow. That said there is a time that re-feeling the wound over and over and over again can become counter productive. We cannot use our vulnerability or sensitivity as an excuse to escape as a recent talk I watched on You Tube makes the point that those of us wounded through our vulnerability in childhood have a lot to give the world once we commit to healing. The gifts we have come through our capacity to be both open and sensitive/
Our wounds do leave scars, scars which Gabor Mate reminds us can become numb to pain. My experience of the bad scar on my legs from my MVA is that it did over time start to have some feeling in it, a kind of tingling or vibration trying to make itself known through the numbness. These mornings lately I wake up with my legs moving fast making running movements as my neck pivots around my spine. I follow the energy to let it play out as I dance around the room, this is all PTSD releasing work. I am not as stuck in freeze as I was
Trauma specialist Peter Levine reminds us we need to shake off the trauma in some way as we work to both experience and release it.. Pendulating in and out, spinning and making rowing movements all of these help me.. The anger, the passing hopelessness the drowned the fire is there in the charge but so is the grief, as the character of Prince Phillip notes in a recent episode of The Crown the griefs we carry never really leave us, in time they just become more familiar and bearable. So it is that anger and rage and grief keep spiralling through me as I continue to travel the spiral pathway of my own healing. Maybe joy is growing too at times but then I get a glimpse of the prison I consigned myself to for so long in trauma and its hard not to feel sad, but as AA reminds us the result of our growing in awareness should most certainly be the feeling of experiencing, in time joy, happiness and freedom. Trauma so sadly often robs us of all of that.
Emerging From The Dark Night 