Crawling back from Confrontation

by Margo Wolfe

Many women are now going through confrontation. If you are part of the Sisterhood of Avalon or picked up a copy of Avalon Within and are following through, you understand the implications of this part of life. Confrontation is an emotional, sometimes physical manifestation of seeing shadow, a Jungian concept of facing the dark part of who you are and recognizing it as part of you.

Confrontation can be painful. Truly painful.

It is sometimes painful, heart-wrenching realizations that come to you while standing in the shower, or worse, while standing in traffic. She comes and looks at you with a hard, cold stare and you cannot turn away. It could be something that you been fleeing from or something that you are just beginning to realize. In any case, she is there. And she is facing you.

This year I thought my confrontation was about one thing and it morphed into something else. This is not unusual. Often I don’t recognize my own issues until they are a blinding light in the rain. I think it’s just a streetlight, but it’s really an oncoming truck. Or something else. The fact that I need to rely on people more often was not a new confrontation issue with me, but I thought this year that would be my work since I had a series of physical mishaps that landed me on crutches for several months. I was wrong. The temporary physical disability was just a means to an end, Ceridwen’s way of forcing me to look at something that was hidden so deep inside of me that I was stunned….just stunned when it finally came out. In heavy traffic, in the rain, on the way home from a fast-food joint.

Not everything personal epiphany is a blog post, but that stunning realization made me think beyond the “what” and ask the question “why”. Why was I feeling like that and for so very long? Nothing. Nothing came to mind and my analytical-self went berserk. What do you mean I don’t know why I feel that way? Now, I’m no psychoanalyst, but I play one on T.V. and this lack of answer was not acceptable.

This is where I get to the point of this editorial. Crawling out of confrontation. It’s great when you have a realization. Really. They are often painful, so painful in fact that it feels like pouring acid in an open wound. It is particularly painful when you live where I live…depressed economy, miserable cold, snow everywhere and where there isn’t snow, ugly, bare dankness. But that still isn’t the point. The point is we still have to crawl back from that place and figure out, maybe not the “why” but the “how”. How do I accept it, even if I don’t understand it and how do I get beyond this part of me that probably isn’t going to go away any time soon. Honestly. Just because you realize something about yourself isn’t going to make it magically disappear. It doesn’t work like that, no matter how many spells, prayer candles, offerings to Goddess, or incantations you do. You just have to find a way to crawl back to Self …..and that’s what I’m doing now. Breaking one finger nail at a time.