Black Sheep & The Myth of Normality

As a youngster, I had an innate way to discharge excess energy from rupture, upset, and being unsupported. 

I would roar, shake, dance, keen, get lost somewhere, etc, in an effort to process my emotions.

At a certain point though, these practices became unacceptable. 

My fathers motto was “children should be seen and not heard”. I can’t tell you how many times I heard that growing up. My whole being rejected it. Hated the cruelty and unfairness of it. 

In his own humanity, he just had a very low threshold for outward displays of emotion. He didn’t know how to comfort or cope with my feral side. Which so was clearly at odds with my process. 

So I was punished and shut away when I expressed anything but stoicism to something unpleasant. Something my body couldn’t swallow. 

After years of being shut away in my room for shedding tears, a silent scream began to build. My body curled in on self. And it all got locked inside.

It was as if each unexpressed rupture had put down roots, grew shoots of ghost pipe, and a complex network of multilayered trauma was seeded where I should have been. 

I had been exiled from my body, writhing in physical pain, struggling to paint on a smile each morning.

And at some point, I became aware of a relentless, ongoing, inner, lamentation. 

I was full of rage and unexpressed grief. 

Then it came to me, that it wasn’t the story around what happened, but rather that process of discharging trauma being interrupted, was the thing that created the black hole I felt inside. 

I was separated from my body’s own intelligence around completing a trauma cycle. 

I spent years of searching for its source. 

Perhaps it should have been obvious. But it wasn’t. 

Developmental trauma is almost never strait forward. 

It almost never steps forward when we beckon it with the conscious mind. 

What I’ve learned in my relationship to this persistent lament is that every rupture, every emotion with depth, has a sound and a shape.

I’ve met mythological monsters, creatures that leapt from the pages of our comic books, along my inner sojourn. 

Somewhere along the River Styx, I remembered  how to animate, to give voice and expression, to all of the silent screams, and mythological creatures, inside.

While I love writing, it doesn’t quite do justice to the landscape of psyche.

The concepts resist getting pinned down with words. Words just seem to make what I’m pointing too smaller. More flat and 2 dimensional.

Anyone who has braved the wilderness of soul can attest to what I mean. 

Psyche lives and expresses in a world beyond language.

In a training workshop in my twenties, the leader asking us to create collages that didn’t include words.

It was at that workshop that I first met the creatures that haunted, stalked, and imprisoned me. 

The way back wasn’t so much a process of eradicating the weeds from the garden.

But instead, at first, finding a way to live in the jungle.

This practice of personifying the more than human feelings, that lurked in the dark, helped me connect, relate too, and befriend what grew in the shadows. 

It has been this persistent, uniquely feudal, parenting practice, that domesticated our children’s organic processes that has so many of us stuck as adults.

The myth of normality, the pressure to conform, is killing people. Especially the people in society that are most cut off from their emotions and their feral nature. (Men & Boys) And instead we heap “should” upon “should” upon ourselves. 

In part, is this pattern that perpetuates inter-generational trauma. 

We need to allow our children to lead their own innate processes.

Allow organic cycles to unfold and complete.

Embrace the “black sheep”, trickster gods among us.

We need to do this for our children. And we need to do this now for ourselves.

I’m here to be a disruptor in this myth. 

I incarnated for this work.

All “black sheeps” do to some extent.

The black sheep carries trickster medicine.

Trickster medicine breaks up crystallization & ossification in the mind, body, & systems. 

If one feels entombed by society’s expectations, it’s time to bring our inner trickster archetype online. 

All of this comes up as Venus finally dips below the Horizon, on her sojourn to meet her Trickster Sister Eris in the Underworld. It is a time when love feels distant. And trauma triggers blare their signal, begging to be explored.

Come on a journey with me to the Underworld…

You are going anyways. Might as well not go alone…