My Mother, My Ex-Husband

My friend Sue was in my dream, but the details are lost. Then I was in the same house as my ex-husband, he had just gotten out jail or someplace. I’m not sure whether the place belonged to me or the 30-something y.o. man who was also in the scene, but there was clutter everywhere, and the room was dimly lit. I started to put things away then realized that there was no point. Either we were leaving soon, or my ex-husband was. He got into bed and even though it was a big enough bed for 2, I really did not want to get into the same bed with him. I turned and walked away...

DREAMWORK:

Sue, as my shadow, featured previously in another dream in the same role – the self-immured, aloof, observer. I think of how much effort I put into creating distance between me and other people, how I’m always afraid to lose space, time, focus, opportunity, etc. to others. What should I do with this deep fear of loss, so much the cause of my social anxiety? Again, I come back to the knowing that I HAVE ENOUGH, I will always have enough of all that I need, if I am present to my body and follow its self-management instructions. Carry on with this ‘obsession’ with body-presence, it is good for me.

Although I don’t have memory of reactivity to the noisy drama and tension that must have gone on in my childhood, my mother being a bigger-than-life, louder-than-most, wannabe-matriarch who always had to have the last word, given my vulnerable nature it must have been disturbing at the very least. There would have been no escape of course, and little reprieve since it wouldn’t have been possible to protest against so much fierceness. I must have learned to shut down and shut out the world with my books, or art, or daydreams, to survive the tumult around me. This remains my primary coping mechanism.

It made me cherish solitude and silence, and I try to create oases of peaceful contemplation and quiet bliss whenever I can in my life. But the fear I do not need. How do I heal the breach in my vulnerability from the effects of a shrieking, hysterical and overpowering mother?

Well, the screaming is a way of scaring off any potential enemy for the banshee, a tactic employed by many animals when they feel threatened. A lion roars, a snake hisses, a dog barks. It is passive aggression, a show of retaliative power before having to trot out bigger guns (if you have them) and get actively violent. So it is with my mother.

But I have known this before, and it hasn’t relieved my terror. I remember once, during a trance-inducing demo by a Peruvian shaman, I nearly flipped out with sudden rage and terror as he came closer and closer to me with his chanting and rattling that seemed to pierce my skin. I thought I would jump up and deck him if he came any closer. Afterward, other participants reported a profound and loving bliss they felt during the session, a feeling as if they were back in their mothers’ wombs. I felt in shock for quite some time.

It isn’t that I haven’t been held with tenderness by my mother as a child, I know I have, but there was also the other kind of embrace, the smothering, constrictive, and anger-driven kind that punched holes in the walls of my placidly trusting psyche. An emotional overwhelm repressed into an unconscious trigger. I close my eyes and feel a knot in my solar plexus, where I usually feel fear, but this goes deeper into the body, in the intestines. As I release the knot I can feel the energy radiate, mostly downward, and a few throbbing cramps in the pelvic floor, just left of centre. I hold my belly open, and keep letting it go, until my insides are calm.

I like this intentional holding open and letting go feeling in my body. Perhaps this is a better way for me to ground and connect to the earth, to myself, to my body, than just dropping my awareness down into my belly. I tend to do the touch-and-dash, not staying down long enough to deepen all the way.

SLOOOWWW. DOOOWWNN.

P.S. will check from time to time and see if trigger and fear of loss of personal space are gone.

~~~

My ex-husband, a part of my animus/masculine I am still rejecting. I don’t hate or resent him anymore (or do I?) but I don’t want to be anywhere near him either. What repels me?

He represents an unpleasant time in my past, one that I’m only too eager to put behind me forever. Clearly there is something still needing attention there...

I’ve just recently let my previously condemned masculine out of the jail I thought he deserved, and I have also made a commitment to nurture and take him back in to myself. I am not doing this wholeheartedly, for I cannot find genuine affection for him, if I ever did before. And if it isn’t shame or guilt that prevents me, what is in the way of me accepting this part of me that he embodies?

I see him as somewhat immature and under-developed, like a primitive being, all brawn but no brain. In other words, not as sophisticated and evolved as ‘I’ am. I would be ashamed to admit this is a part of myself. My arrogance can hardly permit such undifferentiated oafishness in my self-image. Okay, so there is a part of me that has been denied growth and shunned like a leper... my instinctual self. The ancient, reptilian drive that is entirely earth-bound, wired for competency and survival in this world. The body-centred drive that knows innately how to do things, fix what’s broken, build according to need, hunt and gather material, with complete self-assurance and body presence. I had forgotten that this was something I relied totally on him for, and once again, poised to throw the baby out with the bath water. It would appear that Judge Judy Baby-Out-With-Bath-Water is very fast with the gavel...

I need to embrace the Neanderthal, the Instinctive Man in me, but something holds me back still... Forgiveness. My marriage to him had felt like a disgrace to myself, because I had done it against my true Self. I had used it as a ticket out of the confines of my family. I need to ask for his forgiveness, soul to soul, and for having judged him so cruelly. I go back into the dream, to the bed where he was sleeping, and I wake him to apololgize for the harm I have done him. He chuckles softly and tells me that he knows all of this already, and he does not blame me for it. It always takes two, doesn’t it? I feel a bit sheepish still, but I think now that we can be friends, soul to soul.