Beyond Broken

Wendy’s Blog

“If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it” Richard Rohr

or, “The Doom Loop of Righteous Indignation”

I have been having a lot of encounters with people lately who have very strong opinions about our political and humanitarian situations and global issues threatening our planet.

The thing is, I usually agree with whatever they are saying, since we all typically surround ourselves with those who think like us and agree with our point of view.  But I hate the conversations.  The energy between us feels negative before I have said a word and I begin looking for distractions or ways to change the subject.

As the conversation progresses (mostly one sided) I get more and more desperate to escape. Then, if it is a good day,  I am able to find my curiosity and wonder what pain is driving this negativity.  I look into the eyes of the person talking and they look angry and somewhat vacant.  They are not really connecting with me, they are spewing rhetoric or perhaps well reasoned thoughts. But why the rant?

If I ask, (or they may tell me anyway), they say “We have to take a stand, we have to make a difference.”  And I wonder how more righteous indignation and pain will make a difference in our world.

I listened to an inspiring dialogue yesterday between Russell Brand and Brene Brown.  Their conversation spanned many topics, but inevitable led into politics and planetary concerns.  They discussed how politics can never be separated from spirituality (Brene defines spirituality as love, compassion, kindness and oneness.)  They conclude that since our politics are about humanity they must include these very human qualities.

The Pathwork teaches us about hard and soft pain.  First we feel soft pain, then we cut off from these tender, vulnerable feelings and split into hard pain, kind of a doom loop.  I see it as continuous loopy, angry, orange spirals.  The hard pain keeps us thinking dualistically, saying  “either there is something wrong with me or there is something wrong with you.”  And it is repetitive and can be both addictive and disheartening.

We split from the soft pain because we have trained ourselves not to feel it and it requires the ability to bring together the dichotomy of both positive and negative qualities of the self and others into a cohesive, realistic whole.  Splitting is a common defense mechanism.  Most of us split into black and white thinking or good and bad thinking.  But this is simply a strategy to avoid pain.

The way out of this doom loop is to notice when you are in it and trace your steps back to the soft pain.  The anger and indignation turns to sadness,  the grievances turn to grief.  The magic of this process is that when we feel the soft pain it moves through us and settles us.  We are now in our real selves, in our present moment.  It is a relief and it is both simple and takes a lot of effort to do this over and over again each time we find ourselves hard and unfeeling.

Brene Brown suggests that what we are seeing today in our world is the last stand of “white male power-over” dynamics. She points out that last stands are always ugly.

One of my dear friends has made many trips to Wounded Knee in South Dakota, the site of a massacre of around 300 men, women and children.  It is a pilgrimage for her.  She is quiet about it but just keeps going back to one of the places of pain strongly symbolizing the dominance of “white male power-over” in this country.  She seeks a deepening of her spirituality and she turns to a painful place for this.

What if we made pilgrimages to painful places instead of devotional shrines or aspirational holy ground?  What if the painful place is the holy ground of being human? What if it leads us to know our humanity and that of others, versus pretending that our humanity is uniquely ours but is not granted to others, especially those different from us?

Look at the image at the top of the page closely.  Under the self assured man and women with their fingers pointing are little struggling, suffering, sweaty beings.  When I find myself in the unpleasantly indignant conversations I try to tune into the suffering one under all the bravado and strong opinions. They are often obfuscated by all the noise but I feel them anyway.  It is painful.

 

 

 

“I know I am imperfect, but I make believe I am not”

A collaboration of various authors on the subject of the Idealized Self Image, the damage it does and the promise of recovery  – into our sacred humanness.  Our true nature.  Thank you to all you brave souls who contributed. 

Image Above – The Idealized Self Image as Constructed by Susan G. — variegated cardboard is material she visualized, flimsy and inadequate for supporting all the structures she puts on top.  She adorns it with various ornamentation – random, without coherence.  This is a beautiful portrayal of the idealized self.  Individually each piece representing a belief about life and ourselves, makes sense but the overall construction … well draw your own conclusions!

A Pathwork Lecture says, “As a child, regardless of what your particular circumstances were, you were indoctrinated with admonitions on the importance of being good, holy, perfect.  When you were not, you were often punished in one way or another.  Perhaps the worst punishment was that your parents withdrew their affection from you; they were angry, and you had the impression you were no longer loved.  No wonder “badness” associated itself with punishment and unhappiness, “goodness” with reward and happiness.  Hence to be “good” and “perfect” became an absolute must; it became a question of life or death for you.  Still you knew perfectly well that you were not as good and as perfect as the world seemed to expect you to be.  This truth had to be hidden; it became a guilty secret, and you started to build a false self.” PWL #83

I am working with several people who are doing the sacred work of deconstructing the mask of the Idealized Self that they have constructed over so many years.  The Idealized Self Image is what the Pathwork calls the perfectionist standards that we hold ourselves to and present to the world.  The ISI is made of many images  (beliefs about the world and ourselves that we formed during our sorting and categorizing stage of our brain development.  My four year old grandchild is doing this now.  “I have a penis, Daddy has a penis  – you and Mommy do not have penises”.  The conclusions he will draw about men and women will form a lasting image that will become unconscious because of his young age.  Many images also contain conclusions about cause and effect.  The young one trying to make order and sense out of the world.  If I do this _______ then that ________ will always happen.  We have a myth is our family – if you wear your pajamas inside out it will snow when you wake up the next morning.  Some of our unconscious images can be just as magical or erroneous as this one and make little sense in the light of day of our grown up psyches.

Here is one example.  It begins with her belief  that, “I am  special and therefore inoculated against anything bad happening to me.”  (We can smile at the magical thinking of her little one). “Next, something bad does happen.  Then I decides I better hide and make myself  small.” (This plays out in adulthood with eating disorders and other issues). ” But then I am hungry, and so lonely and so afraid.  If I keep making myself a better (special) person maybe that will help. But then I fail at my expectations and bad things keep happening and I hide and get small again.  The world feels like a very unsafe place.”  This is something that all Idealized Self Images have in common.  The world does not feel safe.

Someone else has a different cascade of images that leads him to loneliness and often severe depression.  Here is how his goes:

“I cannot feel support, If I were to feel support then it would not be enough.  If the support  is not enough then I am alone.  If I am all alone then I am not enough.  If I am not enough then life is hopeless (here is where the depression begins).  “If life is hopeless than I have to try harder.  If I try harder then it is never enough.  I give up any hope of relationship.  Then I am really alone.”  This one is a bit trickier.  His Idealized Self Image rests in not needing support, in being able to do it all by himself. and with an arrogance that he will do it better than anyone anyway.  But it does leave him frightened and alone.  Because deep down inside we do not believe the story of  our ISI’s.  We present it to the world but we know it are false.

In these two cases you can see two tendencies of the ISI  combined:  over-exacting moral standards – impossible to live up – and pride in being invulnerable, aloof, and superior.  The co-existence of these mutually exclusive strategies presents a particular hardship for the psyche.

Another person is very accomplished in her field.  Yet she cannot relax into all her accomplishments because, though they are true and well earned, she also has these over-exacting standards that she knows in her heart of hearts she cannot live up to.  This makes her constantly vigilant that she will be discovered as a fraud – exposed.

“A further and drastic result of this problem is the constantly increasing estrangement from the real self.  The idealized self is a falsity.  It is a rigid, artificially constructed imitation of a live human being.” PWL 83

 It can be hard work to excavate the real self amidst this life long construction project of the false self.   Another person  writes, “Yes, it (the ISI) needs to somehow, at some point, be replaced. Talk about being disoriented!!  Sometimes love just seems so much like the lack of it.  So imperfect.  And yet in its imperfection, stronger, more pure, more meaningful.  Sacredly human.  It feels so scary to trust this imperfection.”

Another person writes:

“My mask of love was so thick and layered with the mask of power and then surrender if all else failed.  I was aware of this for decades before I could find a way out.  These days I am risking it all to live authentically – with my flaws and the truth that I will always be in recovery and wishing to find underneath it all what of the joy, love, giving and effort I launched into life which is actually real. Today I pray – to be real, to feel and sense and speak truth – and to stay close to me.  A me I never sensed, while in the frenzy to flee and function.”

There is so much creativity. hard work and hope in these examples of deep excavation, art work and writing.  I hope you will feel the hope too and join us in embarking on trusting your imperfect, human self.  Staying close to yourself – who you really are – makes the world a much safer place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Attachment Hell

What is Attachment and why is it Hell when things go wrong?

attachment

If you had an ideal childhood where your consistent parents celebrated your uniqueness and each of your achievements as you moved through your developmental stages, then this blog does not apply to you.

“However, most of us had a childhood that was far from this ideal. Our young, vulnerable nervous systems were not protected and regulated by ideal parents. We often felt overwhelmed and alone, and to buffer ourselves from these recurring feelings of overwhelm, we developed survival patterns”, says Steven Kessler in The 5 Personality Patterns.

These survival patterns can stay with us our whole lives and we identify them as ‘us’.  However they are a series of defensive postures that help us regulate energy and events from the outside world. The real ‘us’ of us — our essence — is lost, since it was not activated by attunement when were were young. The good news is we can recover our truest selves, but it takes work.  We have to begin the process of attuning to ourselves, attending to those overwhelmed and lonely parts within.

If your parent or parents were there, but not consistently, you will believe that if you ramp up your nervous system and attention to others, maybe that will make them stay with you longer.  You live a very vigilant, anxious life in a terrible quandary: your need for others is so large, but your capacity to take it in is so small (since it was not there sufficiently when you were young). To heal and find your way back to your real self you will need to practice receiving and containing.  You have what you need now to fill up your system and regulate yourself but you will have to work at it.  You also have to pay special attention to letting in the goodness that comes your way, letting it land in you. You will have to reverse your focus from outward to inward. You will feel whole and settled as if you have finally come home.

A testimony to this work –

“So first, I would say I am healing from my attachment wound.  Part of this process is knowing my vulnerability to the story/feelings of being left, especially in my closest relationships.  When I am getting pulled to the old pattern of relating, I know I need to slow down and hold myself with love and compassion so I don’t abandon me.  This allows me to be intimate with myself and my real needs while creating opportunity for intimacy with the other. I risk asking for what I need.  I am clear about what is a true request versus a whiny demand or manipulation.  If I’m feeling whiny energy, this needs to be held and explored. And surprise to my younger self:  My requests are usually met with a yes!  And when they are not, it allows me to open to other paths to getting my desires met.”  Anonymous

If your parents were not available especially emotionally, you will stop expecting anything from others. You will live life in your own bubble. You will overrate your opinions and views of the world and discredit others. You will not allow yourself to have any needs since they will not be met, but your quandary is that, to do this, you must make yourself numb. This numbness helps you regulate difficult, overwhelming experiences but you will also be numb to joy and much of the pleasure that life offers. To heal you will need to take the risk to slowly step our of your bubble and notice that there is nourishment for you there. You will have to slowly let your body feel again and risk having your needs. You will feel more of everything: love, joy, pain and your old drab life will take on unbelievable colors.

A testimony to this work –

“Understanding my attachment style has allowed me to accept actions and beliefs that I previously thought were an unchangeable part of ‘who I was’. Not accepting them kept these patterns of behavior in place and created a profound sense of isolation and personal failure. As I have grown to accept these patterns as legitimate outcomes of my childhood experiences, new possibilities are opening up to choose differently; choosing connection rather than isolation and hopelessness. I now have a loving partner who both understands me and yet is available for a deep intimacy that I have never previously known. An inner gate has opened and although my old responses and patterns occasionally show themselves, I recognize them for what they are: ghosts that no longer have power to bind me to past vows. I have a real choice now and I choose love more and more often. True and justified hope is now mine. ” Jack Bodger

If your parents, who you needed to love you, also hurt you — well then you are really in trouble.  Your quandary is the belief that love = harm or hurt. This will make it very challenging for you to form healthy lasting relationships as an adult. You will be drawn to the love and repelled by the harm. You are like a magnet turning towards the attraction of love and then flipping over and repelling that connection out of fear. Unfortunately, some of us in this category experienced child abuse in the form of physical and emotional harm. Others of us experienced neglect which creates tremendous hurt in a young child.

This is what happened to one dear little one who was subjected to treatment by heartless immigration tactics, separated from his parents with no warning for 73 days. He experiences this as extreme neglect. His mother is there one moment and then gone the next. His master regulator of all those overwhelming and lonely feelings is suddenly gone. He becomes extremely dis-regulated, and this may last throughout his life. You see this dramatically in the news video of his reunion with his mother. He will repeat this in every relationship for the rest of his life. This clip, from the CBS New “60 Minutes” program, includes commentary from two psychiatrists.

To heal this pattern it will be necessary to begin to de-couple the hurt and harm from the love.  The body needs to experience them as two separate streams of energy and not all muddled together.  (You may also have to do the work of the previous two patterns because you have used all the patterns to cope with so much distress.)

A testimony to this work –

“What shifts when moving from a perspective of enduring or surviving life to a perspective of thriving and moving with life, being in mutuality with life?  When in survival mode, the body feels tense and painful and is always on guard for danger. Emotionally, there is a feeling of needing to protect against hostile outside forces (which could be anything or anyone). Spiritually, there is a sense of hopelessness and despair that anything will ever change and that there is nowhere to turn for help. 

When a sense of thriving is available, everything changes. The body sinks into a grounded calm, with soft belly and easy breath. Emotionally, there is a sense of curiosity about life, which spurs playfulness and vulnerability to anything or anyone that is currently present. Each moment feels like an opportunity to experience the precious gift of life, whatever it brings. Spiritually, there is a joy, an outward facing energy, an embracing energy that enfolds everything and everyone in my sphere.” Ann Rebera

All these patterns or adaptations influence how we see ourselves and the world. They become our reality — not actual life itself.

As you read the testimonies I hope you feel a profound sense that healing is possible for you.  Each of these people are dismantling their patterns and it is working!  This takes time.  It is not a quick fix.  But this can be our healing task in this life time. I hope our three year old friend Emmers finds the help he needs.

YOUNG LOVE

“We sail and we sail together.
The name of our ship is the new beginning
and our sails are a hopeful color.
Filled with the winds of changing times.
We sail and sea around us waves.
And it swells as a great heart beating.
All the storms of night are passing.
How can we sink when we can fly?”

From the cover of my leadership camp’s handbook 1971

“When you are 15, or thereabouts, you love the art you love more passionately than you will ever love art again.  Around that time your sense of taste has only just recently come into being. ….. You have been transformed from a kid… to a young adult with an ‘aesthetic’.”

—From Jonah Weiner Rage Against the Machine, New York Times Magazine

In the summers when I was 16 and 17 I was sent, by scholarship, to a leadership camp in Upstate New York.  By day, we did social action, building a playground for migrant worker children and by night we discussed the deep questions of religion and spirituality.  On weekends we would clean up and dress in all white and sing and dance our hearts out.  This was my art, my aesthetic.  I fell in love.  Looking back 49 years later, I am sure that my fellow campers and what we created together saved my life.

Recently one of my best friends from camp found me on Facebook.  She then posted this picture from 1972 of the two of us sitting on the grass near our beloved pond – my head in her lap.  As I gaze at that photo, I know that is still me.  I love intimate contact, and thrive on the meaningful conversation.  We had many that summer about love, life and God..

I lost touch with everyone from that time in my life. There is not much continuity in my life in general. From studying trauma, I understand now.  Trauma is very isolating.  My mother had died a year earlier when I was 15.  I fully absorbed all the love, belonging and even redemption I could those summers, but I had no idea how to stay connected. I was connected but also alone, floating in a very remote sea of sorrow.  For me the storms did not begin to pass until I was 40.

At 40 I had left my husband and moved 3000 miles away to California.  My aloneness was no longer my internal condition but an external one as well.  Roaming a book store/coffee shop early one morning before my first business appointment – a book jumped off the shelf. It was Motherless Daughters by ­­­­­­­­­­­Hope Edelman. The author had written the book because when she lost her mother she couldn’t find anywhere to turn.   She hoped it would help others to interview girls and women who had lost their mothers.  She found we all share a common trajectory as we try to transverse our lives without our mothers.

I began to grieve and by the time I finished the book and got to the resources list I could not stop crying.  I called the therapist she recommended, barely able to speak, choking out the name of the book. I remember this kind woman saying, “I know, I know”.

She was miraculously close to where I lived, and I saw her for several years.  She would ask me about a feeling, and I would tell her a story.  I still do this sometimes, but slowly I began to unpack what had really happened to me.  The sudden loss of my mother and the betrayal by my father.  An only child alone. It is still a lot to feel.

Back to the summer camp, we were leaders from all over the Mid-Atlantic states.  After camp we began treks to visit each other in beat-up second-hand cars from Wilmington Delaware, to Wilmington, North Carolina.  We scarcely lived between these visits.  We all met in DC and marched in the protest against the Vietnam War.  We were serious kids and we loved each other seriously.  At summer’s end we would form a large circle back out on the lawn and sing “Leaving on a Jet Plane”.  One camper writes all these years later, “I cried for three weeks after that.”

What will I find out about myself as I renew these friendships and we ‘catch up’ after all these years?   Maturity seems to require of us to disavow things we believed and loved in our youth.  It is hard to live in the world for 65 years and be as virtuous as I believed I was at 16.   Yet my passion for love, for deep spiritual quest and for friendship is the same.

Are You Resilient?

What is Resilience?

It has been called the great puzzle of human nature.

Is it something some people have and others do not?  Is it something you can learn?  Some research on resilience talks about genetics and a predisposition towards resilience.  Here are diagrams of a seesaw with a fulcrum to illustrate this.   Your life experiences and genetic predispositions sets this fulcrum to make your seesaw go up or down more easily.  Adverse childhood experiences make moving the fulcrum more challenging.  It can even make resilience out of reach for some people.

However, it is people who have had the most adverse life experiences and somehow have overcome them that inspire us the most.  Who are these people and what did they do?  The answer to these questions can help us understand resilience.

Resilient people possess three characteristics: a staunch acceptance of reality; a deep belief  that life is meaningful; and an uncanny ability to improvise. You can bounce back from hardship with just one or two of these qualities, but you will only be truly resilient with all three.

Viktor Frankl was preoccupied with survivorship/resilience during his dehumanizing, life threatening experiences in concentration camps in Nazi Germany.  He later traced the roots of his resilience to a sense of purpose and the acquisition of meaning.  He then expanded meaning into three dimensions: purpose, mastery and autonomy. He wrote about in his famous book, “Man’s Search For Meaning”.

Other core characteristics of resilient people include the ability to form strong attachments to others and the possession of an inner psychological space that protects them from intrusion or abuse.

“More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person’s level of resilience will determine who succeeds and who fails. That’s true in the cancer ward, it’s true in the Olympics, and it’s true in the boardroom,” says Dean Becker, the president and CEO of Adaptiv Learning Systems, quoting from Diane Coutu in her Harvard Review Article, “How Resilience Works.”

So how can we train ourselves to become more resilient?

Realism versus optimism is key to resilience.  Do I truly understand and accept the reality of my situation?  It’s an important question to ask since we often slip into denial as a coping mechanism when facing difficult life experiences. Can I form meaningful relationships while preserving my own boundaries?  Can I find a greater meaning even in the most wrenching circumstances or trust that it will become clear later?  Can I improvise and dig a tunnel even if I only have a spoon – like one of the famous concentration camp escapes in Nazi Germany?

When I touch into my own sense of resilience I find two different varieties.  One of them I will call the bulldozer.  She will bulldoze her way out of a situation — head down, full steam ahead.  The other one is softer and requires that I slowly sink into myself. What I find there is a kind of confidence and reassurance that I can handle whatever I am facing.  This one I will name Helene, after my grandmother.

My Nanny Helene, as I called her, was the great love of my early life, and she loved me back.  I was her first granddaughter and she adored me.  It is an amazing feeling to be adored and I am sure this contributes to resilience, although I do not find it mentioned in the literature.  My grandmother was a great dreamer and she always seemed to make her dreams come true, whether it was creating a successful restaurant in Washington D.C. or moving in the great social circles of the city.  At a time in the 1950’s when many women spent hours putting on make up, doing their hair and dressing to perfection before leaving the house, my grandmother stuffed her dyed blond hair under a cashmere beret. A hat pin was the last thing she needed to keep the beret on her head while she rushed around the city — a career woman before her time.

She compensated for my grandfather’s dementia and devised constructs, as resilient people do, to make meaning out of suffering.  With only one breast from a mastectomy, she bought her bras from a dismal medical supply shop.  For her resilience was a reflex, a way of facing and understanding the world and building a bridge from a present day hardship to a fuller life in the future.

Resilient people  face reality with determination, make meaning of hardship instead of crying out in despair, and improvise solutions from thin air.  This describes my grandmother.  I inherited some of these qualities from her, along with two of her hat pins.  And here they are.

 

 

Acknowledgement: I drew heavily on the work of Diane Coutu, and her Harvard Review and her article, “How Resilience Works.”