Breakthrough - Grief & Safety Issues

It's been an interesting day. Bear with me, this is rather circular and will take a while to explain. According to my Soul Coaching book, this is a "water" week, and the week has a lot to do with the flow of emotions. And as I think I mentioned previously, my bathroom sink was totally clogged, and if you equate that to the flow of water and emotions, that's pretty stagnant, non-moving emotions. Yesterday the sink was fixed, and everything was flowing as it should. I came home from work and decided to do laundry (more water, I just realized - and out of character since I usually do it on weekends). While I'm there, I see my Chi Machine sitting there, which I admittedly haven't used in weeks. So I thought I'd kill time by using it. I'm on the machine and I started thinking about the Grief work I mentioned needing to work on, related to 9/11 issues. I've always been told - and have thought - about the need to purge these emotions, memories, physical toxins, to detox them, to eliminate them. And then I started thinking about the film The Living Matrix (see my previous posts here and here), and in that movie there is a woman who has a brain tumor (with a poor prognosis), and everyone tells her how she needs to purge it and kill it and destroy it, and she realizes that these are such negatives, and instead she embraced the gift of the tumor and what it brought to her life, welcomed it as part of her (she explains it better than I do, obviously), and her tumor went away. I'm lying there, thinking about this, and coughing up a storm - so violently that I'm nearly vomiting and imagining I'll asphyxiate myself on the floor while my husband is not home. I have lung issues from 9/11 and a chronic asthmatic-type cough as a result, so I'm not surprised that it flared on me while doing this work. I was meditating on what gifts 9/11 and my related challenges have brought to me. Expressed my gratitude for them and decided that holding onto this does not serve me anymore, and said it's okay if it goes away. And that I felt it would honor the memories of those who died if I released them and let these issues go on their way. But still, I could not cry about it. One of my alternative practitioners told me I needed to cry. I've done plenty of crying about this (and everything under the sun) over the years, but lately I have not. I finished my Chi Machine meditating, and thought about the advice I'd been given about doing things like watching sad movies to make myself cry. I realized that I knew exactly what I needed to do to cry - to pull out one of my books that I've never been able to read: Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman. I've owned this book 10 years and never got past the first page. That's because the first page is a letter to the author by a woman who lost her mom when she was 13 (mine died 2 months before my 13th birthday); a woman who has mostly male friends (that's true of me until only recently); a woman who is not feminine (check); a woman who was afraid to have children because she didn't know how to be a mom without having a mom (check); and expected she'd die at 39, the age her mom was when she died (same age as my mom when she died, and I expected to die at 39 too - and actually got pneumonia at 39, which is what my mom died from). Other than the fact that the author was 25 and I'm 46, it was my story. How could I get past that? I start reading and get about 10 pages in and I just started sobbing. I haven't cried like that in a long, long time. I was glad my husband wasn't home, so that I could feel uninhibited to do what I needed to do. I was reminiscing about how I never initially cried when my mom died (she died unexpectedly, within 24 hours of her being ill), until they took me to the funeral home and I had a hysterical screaming fit and they had to drag me out kicking and screaming. So here I was, 33 years later, clutching my chest, doubled over and screaming at my mom for abandoning me and leaving me. Screaming at my dad for never letting us process this, not wanting to talk about it or her, and threatening to put us in an orphanage if we didn't behave (because he'd just lost he job and couldn't deal with 4 kids between the ages of 13 and 9 and a dead wife), and who instead thrust me into the mom role - I was 13 years old, coming home from school and raising my brothers and sister, cooking and cleaning. I've spent my life caretaking for others and nobody was ever there for me. I never put the safety issue together with the dead mom issues. I have recurring issues with not feeling safe (exacerbated by 9/11) and realized that my cat (who in a great irony has fear issues as well), when he gets skittish, I hold him and say "mommy will always keep you safe" and when I realized that, I was back to screaming at my mom who didn't keep me safe because she wasn't here. Damn, I had a lot of built-up resentment and anger and tears! I was downstairs processing this for about 2-1/2 hours - which was far more cathartic than the 5 years of therapy I had to deal with this. And I needed to write this all down to get it out and be able to refer back to it, so thanks for bearing with me if you got this far! I don't know where this all leaves me, but it was immensely cleansing and helpful. I'm very grateful for the breakthrough and am curious where this will all lead me.