the bridge to trust

Recently I experienced a betrayal, setting off internal distress I kept contained, facade strong, until the dam broke as I drove home in tears.

Later I realise my body had registered this small incident as a massive breach of trust, and my body instinctively moved away and clamped up.

The sensation of un-safety is felt viscerally, and it does not matter what sets it off, or what or who your body is responding to.

It doesn’t have to make sense to the logical, rational part of your brain for you to experience what you are experiencing.

Trust is in the room when safety is present. Betrayal feels like trust has shattered in a moment.

When there is a lack of safety, distrust creeps in.

This, is what Scorpio energy knows intimately, and can spend a lifetime defending from.

~

In classical astrology, Mars is linked to the watery depth of Scorpio, the part of you that detects the emotional and energetic undercurrents of what is unsaid.

Complex psychological defenses are built to protect what has been harmed, to carefully guard the parts of us that have been betrayed in micro-doses over the years, to put the lid on trust because the Scorpio part of you has learned that it is better to be cornered and sting yourself than to risk being stung.

The intelligent, instinctual part of you that has learned through cumulative breaches of trust that it is better to be armoured than to show your tender underbelly.

It is sacred to let myself trust who I trust for now, to notice how I respond with openness when my body instinctively senses who feels safe to be around, when the bridge to trust opens up towards a different path of relating.

~

I realised this year just how much I have survived, that it serves no one to continue hiding who I am and what I have experienced.

I keep learning to tell the truth in small spurts, like when someone asks how are you and instead of saying up and down I say I cried a lot yesterday and today I feel raw and red.

I keep learning that if I want to be known, I have to stop eluding questions about how I really am in the present tense.

I keep learning to slowly let my defenses down, to receive kind reassurances that my distress has space to be here, and notice when I begin to feel soothed, when a bigger breath arrives, when my body starts to soften.

I am letting Pluto amplify my Mercury instead of turning the dial to mute.

It feels like a year where I’ve let myself cry in front of more people than the last few years combined, to know that I am healing in the moment when I let myself be held in attunement by another human being. when so much of the harm first occurred among kin.

This to me, feels like Scorpionic emotional bravery - to trust my widening window to feel through the thing of the thing, to open into vulnerability when the possibility of being let down, criticised and rejected is always on the menu.

~

After sobbing in the car one warm Wednesday afternoon, my friend and I slipped into the cold Birrarung waters just as lightning striked and it started raining.

We shouted our declarations downstream, feeling cleansed by the ever-flowing river, as two ducklings float past nibbling on algae, looking for snacks.

Grief feels like watering the deepest parts of my heart, even if what emerges after feels tender and crusty, like saltwater drying in the summer sun.

It’s been the emotion most present this year when a practitioner asks: do you have a sense of what emotion is connected to those tears?

My first instinct is usually: I don’t know.

But as I open to the question, the answer that’s been emerging is: this feels like grief.

I grieve for the parts of me that took so long to feel safe opening up to compassionate attention.

I grieve for how long it has taken me to actually be present with the depth of someone else’s grief because I could not yet be present with my own, frozen over still waters.

~

It took me years to name in no uncertain terms that the rage I experienced from my father as a child has imprinted a level of terror of making mistakes, not knowing, being wrong, of not reaching the expectations I demand from myself, of simply expressing myself as me.

It took me years before I decided: I am ready to not just look at what’s here, but to be with what is here.

If it has taken years for emotional harm to accumulate and solidify in my system, it may take time to repair and rebuild the bridge to trust.

And when I choose to cross the bridge, I am taking the risk to trust that I will be met with love again, that vulnerability opens up the door to the kind of honesty and intimacy I am longing for.