Therapy - and dealing with the past

Good morning, @frouke. I don't know whether to thank you or not for your post about your brother. It sounded like a replay of my life. My brother was 3 years younger and for some reason, quite jealous of me. He was a critical tattle tale. He didn't want the same teachers I had so he wouldn't be compared to me. He was physically abusive when he found out that teenage girls developing breasts were often having growth pain.. He would hide behind a door so he could punch me as I went through the doorway. Or knock me down and then punch me in the breast while I was lying on the floor.

As an adult, he rarely came to family events if I was there. Years went by without contact. Then he died suddenly at a rather early age of 52. And so I live on (81 yrs now) with this life of discord and rejection. I always thought there would be time for resolution and shared lives.

I hope that you will find the therapeutic help you need to find peace and comfort. Then your memories might take a welcome positive turn.

May you have happiness and the causes of happiness.
Chris

I agree somewhat. I have met people in my life who were not intuitively poets. However, they learn the formula, for instance, they learned how to make a sonnet and several of them created some pretty darn good sonnets. Something I have never been able to do and I have been a poet for over 50 years. Same with a Haiku, or other formal forms. But, there are ways that someone who is not one of those "I have a Muse, I am Inspired" can write poetry and also be able to put themselves or what they are thinking or feeling into the formula of a poem and be just as powerful as a poet who lives and breaths poetry as self-expression. I have long thought of my creation of poetry as Blues or Jazz, which I just do with words, but when I am writing a poem, definitely sharing one, I am in a way with heartfelt honesty and passion Sanging my blues.

I want to speak as someone who knows why she treated her brother the way that I did and someone who regrets doing so when we were young and has expressed that regret and apologized and yet have a brother who is still stuck and fails to comprehend our different perspectives growing up. I was my mother's firstborn. I was the only remnant of a marriage that did not work and if not for her sense of responsibility she would not have raised me on any level. She was always before my brother was born the "you just like your father" abusive physically and emotionally kind of mother. She made me afraid that it could take any behavior not to her liking would force me out of the security of our living conditions. Even years later when she remarried I was treated like the fish outside the fishbowl and she blatantly treated my brother, the off-spring of my stepfather better. Even to this day, so many examples of her emotional abandonment, apathy, and hatred of me. I knew at some point she was capable of loving someone because I witnessed her being affectionate and loving to my stepbrother. So I had a tendency to act out. I was at times made to take him with me when I went to the park and when we were very young I would threaten to leave him. The stuff I did was as a result of feeling as if he had the parents I did not have and the love and affection from my mother that I did not have also. I know these are excuses, but back then when young, I did not know how to process how she was treating me. Even as an adult, having known my stepfather since I was four years old, my mother never told me he had died and they had a funeral. She was heard to have said that he treated me better than his own son. As if I had control of how he treated me. He treated me when she was not blocking him from doing so like a daughter. In any case, as I started this off, I have always been willing to talk, listen apologize, and have thought of my brother as my younger brother and I as his older sister. It is about time, growth, maturity, and the willingness to recognize that even where I was emotional, I had a hand in hurting him emotionally and owning it. Yet, the door to communication and reconciliation has always been on his part the door being closed tightly. I am on the other end hoping that before either or both of us meet our maker he forgives me and we can be adult siblings who have grown up and matured past our childhood hurts.

@aissa2 Like you, writing has been a saving grace for me all my life. From a very young age there was always paper and pen near me. Journaling, poetry, observations. I still have all the writings, and continue to write almost everyday. I have also written technical manuals and legal reports, marveling how 26 letters and grammar can be turned and twisted. In the mid-90s I took an Ira Progoff Intensive Journaling Workshop and discovered the power of non-dominant handwriting. Wow!

Being able to address issues in manners that are comfortable to us, when the subject is not comfortable at all, is key to healing and moving beyond that which may hold us back.
Ginger

Totally I agree. Now, I have always since very young marveled at words, their sound, and their etymology. Before I knew of the power of the alphabet even, I used to think of words, still today, I find myself writing words and amazed at not only their meaning, but they fit perfectly into what I am writing and I had not known they would do so beforehand at times. So, I have always loved words, the sound of them, their meaning, and their origins. I took a course once called History of the English Language. It was quite boring, but it was also at the same time overall a course that did not dull my fascination with words, how they are used, and their power. Have you found that even in today's time, you are not swayed by those who are proficient in making speeches because you can sense and know that they are just using words in such as way as to purposely be persuasive? A couple of days ago, I was told the word "chuffed." I have never before that moment heard of the word and yet its synonyms are those we have been using since young and probably often. Believe I would have also been interested in the Progoff Intensive Journaling Workshop, but being that I am lefthanded and only two percent of the population is such, I still revel in my uniqueness too much.

I want to offer you a challenge. You state that you are someone who does not compose poetry. I bet you could write a poem. You love the metaphor of the waves that ebb and flow on the ocean. Now, I want you to visit that image, close your eyes and see it the waves ebbing and flowing, the dance and rhythm of the ocean. Either turbulent or calm with the sun rising or the sun setting. I went through just a few poems and tried to stay away from the ones that were not contemporary in their language. I decided on the one below. Just take a line, or a few words of it and think about the ocean and the ebb and flow and what it does to you or what it makes you feel , now write something. It does not have to be perfect, no such thing as a perfect poem. Squash your internal editor who wants to butt in before it's time and just write freely. Write anything that comes to you and what you are feeling when you think of the ocean and the ebb and flow of it. Enough images? See what happens in the process. Good Luck

Seaside
by Rupert Brooke
Swiftly out from the friendly lilt of the band,
The crowd’s good laughter, the loved eyes of men,
I am drawn nightward; I must turn again
Where, down beyond the low untrodden strand,
There curves and glimmers outward to the unknown
The old unquiet ocean. All the shade
Is rife with magic and movement. I stray alone
Here on the edge of silence, half afraid,

Waiting a sign. In the deep heart of me
The sullen waters swell towards the moon,
And all my tides set seaward.
From inland
Leaps a gay fragment of some mocking tune,
That tinkles and laughs and fades along the sand,
And dies between the seawall and the sea.

Reading through this conversation and posts, brings up the age-old question we can’t really answer as human beings. “Why do some suffer so while others seem to skip through life?” At my age I am beginning to see there are only degrees of suffering but we all do suffer and we never know anyone else’s degree. For me, what I have learned is that only compassion for others matters. Recognizing the hurt and pain a person who hurts others must be living in is important. Some lash out at others; some turn it inward until it shortens their life; and some are truly overcome by evil. The world we live in is not a kind place. It never was and it never will be. I rest in my faith. Bless you for your sufferings. Bless you for sharing and by that helping others. Just bless you.

@aissa2 Carolyn, I am left-handed, also, but right eye dominant. How's that for being mixed up!? There are several things I do right-handed, because when being taught, the teacher was right-handed. Simply telling me, "just do it backwards" never did compute in my mind. Mimic, yes, reverse it when you don't have the concept? Nevermind. Some things I can do both right- or left-handed. A positive is writing while running a calculator.
We southpaws are a special breed, and see the world differently. I need to dig out my Progoff workshop binder and take a look at it again. When I did the non-dominant hand exercise, it was a question/answer page, talking to my father about my struggles at home as a child. It was quite an insight.
Ginger

@baa I truly like this post of yours. It is right on-point. Thank you for taking the time to express your thoughts. I am sure there are many of us here who will be nodding our head in agreement, and see ourselves in your words. We all have a burden, and deal with it in different ways. Compassion and understanding, helping to relieve pain however possible, seems to be my calling.
Ginger

I met in my lifetime several of us Southpaws from earlier eras who were strongly encouraged, for lack of stronger words to not use their left hand for writing. I am thankful that I did not come along during that time. I am the only one in my family who is a southpaw. I am an overwriter. I know that because I only write exclusively with fountain pens and have researched the different ways we write as southpaws with fountain pens. I can not remember if ever I tried to write or do anything with my non-dominant hand on purpose, I may have to see how that feels.