Today, Friday the 1st of April 2022, was an off day.
Last night I had a PTSD flashback episode like I haven’t had for ages.
Since having done 2 years of EMDR therapy from 2018 to 2020, my PTSD doesn’t qualify as active any more. I don’t have nightmares, flashbacks, su*icidal ideation or self destructive behavioural patterns as a regular part of my daily life.
I’m okay.
I can make healthy choices for myself and it doesn’t my nervous system into overdrive.
But even EMDR doesn’t mean you’ll never be triggered again, or that you’ll never have new nuances of understanding of why and how your trauma impacted you.
I jokingly tell myself that as an astrologer who uses Internal Family Systems theory to understand myself, I could have seen it coming.
This is an Aries new Moon, that’s conjunct to Chiron.
Let me explain.
Chiron is known as the “wounded healer” in astrology, the place where you can show up for yourself and others because you have experienced that specific wound. Your lunar placement represents your childhood, your inner child and inner emotional world.
My natal moon is in Aries, and that placement is one of the placements I have attributed to my two Exiles. Aries is ruled by Mars, the planet of movement, war, anger.
My Chiron is another placement that is carried by one of my Exiles. Mine is in Libra, the opposite sign to Aries, so it is activated by an opposition to the current transiting Chiron in Aries.
IFS works with a trifecta of Parts, the Manager, the Firefighter and the Exile.
The Exile carries the trauma, the Manager proactively tries to stop them feeling it through controling behaviours and the Firefighter reactively creates distractive behaviours when it’s inevitable.
Once you know which placements in your birth chart make up each of your Parts, you can understand who will be actived when, based on daily occurrences as well as astrological transits.
A conjunction is when two planets pass each other in the same sign, at the same degree and their energies are combined and amplify each other.
So this transit is bringing out my childhood trauma and anger wounds around the se*ual abuse I suffered as a child. My angry, hurt Exile is feeling their feelings. My Chiron is being activated to remind me that I’m here to help others heal through my experience.
I’m meant to be launching my Selves program next week. There are still loads of little details I need to sort out ahead of the launch. I’d planned to get up early today and spend the day using my ADHD hyperfocus / Virgo placements superpowers to get a lot done in a short window of time.
Last night’s episode threw a spanner into the works.
When my Selves clients message me the day of our session, even 10 minutes before, to say that they really just can’t today, I always tell them that that’s ok, and that recognising when they need to give themselves time and space is more valuable than pushing themselves through something they’re not 100% ready for.
It’s about reclaiming your consent and your sovereignty. It’s about unlearning capitalist conditioning about always says hustle harder, even through discomfort.
The Selves program works on the basis of getting all of your parts to work together in a consensual manner ; so if one of them isn’t okay with what’s happening, not only is it not going to work, but we don’t even want to enforce that.
So today, when I got up with my partner as he went to work, had tea and a cigarette with him, I checked in with myself and realised how much my Exiles were still hurting. At 9 am, when he left, I went back to bed. I slept until 2 pm. I ate leftover takeaway in bed then put a coat over my pajamas and went round to my best friend’s house to watch reality TV with her and our dogs. We drank green tea and she waxed her legs, then lay them on my lap so I could get the missed hairs with a pair of tweezers. By 8pm, my partner had joined us, and we opened a bottle of white wine while she cooked us oven roasted salmon and he made mushroom and cream sauce for the pasta. I wrapped myself in a fluffy blanket and ate crisps.
Before, my Manager would have been screaming at me for being so unproductive and useless. My Firefighters would be itching to drink more, to turn it into a binge to shut our Manager up. My Exiles would be feeling scared and guilty for having messed everything up with their feelings.
But this is a New Moon, a time for a fresh start ; for me, in regards to all the themes I’ve mentioned above, and also with it happening in my 3rd house of communication, I’d rather transform it into writing.
I’m at a point where I can show up for others and help them guide themselves through this work – but that doesn’t mean mine is done. I don’t think it ever is. And that’s ok. It doesn’t make me any less capable of being a stellar coach.
In fact, I would personally argue that it makes me a better one for someone who’s gone though, and is still going through something similar.
My coaching is trauma informed because I relate to myself from a trauma informed perspective.
It takes into account the alternative energy cycles of a neurodiverse brain because I do so for myself.
It doesn’t uphold capitalist values of “hustle culture” that guilt you into being convinced that it’s your fault if you’re not successful, because I’ve been in the process of unlearning my internalised capitalist conditioning since 2015.
So I told all of my Selves that this was ok, and part of the process, that we were safe in rest, in taking it easy. Safe in sitting with our feelings of anger and hurt and confusion and disgust. Safe in putting productivity off for another day. And that we were safe to share this story. My 8th house (house of transformation) sun is here in this life to do this. To alchemize pain into something else.
So if you’re having a day where you just need to go back to bed, and you have the privilege of being able to do so, please do. The world can wait for you to be ready to show up.
If you’re interested in finding out more about my Selves program, head over to my Instagram, @daisy.forrest. I’d love to help you meet your Selves.
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