Beyond Broken

Self Exploration

Traveling at the speed of… me?

Dear Lord Prayer

Actually my boat is relatively small, even though I was told as a child that I should not be afraid of anything because my mother was afraid of everything.  I felt like an adult from the day I was born.  I honestly believed that some of us are born full grown.  We are the special ones, we know to keep our napkins in our laps, to use big words and how to shadow all the grown ups in our lives to be really helpful.  ‘Mother’s little helper’ was the grandest of praise!  Me along side my mother baking eight kinds of Christmas cookies—all to perfection—until my mother’s ‘back’ gave out and sent her to bed, never to recover. Instead, she would  die eighteen months later.  I never made the connection between her death and her perfectionism until  now.  How driven she was to always ‘look’ so good to the outside world, many times at my expense.  My father and I got used to staying clear of her right before a dinner party when she was entertaining.  A tantrum would ensue with slamming doors and fits of hysteria at one or the other of us. Her little helper was watching, and learning.

Stretching to be as perfect as possible glorified the OCD in our household and I adopted the idea that love equals perfection.  This left me too exhausted to actually be very present to my life or the people around me.

When a feeling of emptiness ensued, I was sure the cure was more perfection and more activity.  When I went to college I chose a major that would please my new step mother.  When my husband and I started a business together, I became the salesperson, never really asking myself, “Do I want to be a salesperson?”  Instead, I flew into the job head first and was renowned for being able to squeeze in the most customer presentations in one day or week.  When or if I had time to even eat on these days was uncertain, but I would make ‘my numbers’ and I thought this would bring me more love from my husband, and approval from the world.

Each of us, especially  those who experience trauma at a young age, find developmental coping strategies.  I have noticed these three tendencies.  These are uncomfortable yet familiar and all push us out of our window of tolerance.

Dan Siegel coined this term “Window of Tolerance”.  The concept suggests that we have an optimal arousal level when we are within the window of tolerance that allows for the ups and downs of emotions experienced by human beings. We may experience hurt, anxiety, pain, and anger that brings us close to the edges of the window of tolerance but generally we are able to utilize strategies to keep us within this window. Similarly we may feel exhausted, sad, or shut down, but we generally are able to shift out of this.

Below is a diagram demonstrating the ebb and flow of an optimally regulated nervous system.

“When we experience adversity through trauma and unmet attachment needs this can drastically disrupt our nervous system. Our senses are heightened and our experiences and reactions are typically intensified and strategies are less readily accessible to us.  Adverse experiences also shrink our window of tolerance meaning we have less capacity to ebb and flow and a greater tendency to become overwhelmed more quickly. Learning how to track and shift our affect can be a powerful tool for promoting regulation and integration throughout the brains, body, and mind”. (From Dan Siegel)

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There is the hyper, over-the-top strategy of dis-regulation which creates over-achievers like me.  These people push themselves beyond their limits so habitually that it feels normal.  There is a constant mantra like a drum beat that says, “you are not enough, you are not ok”.  These people feel that they must do more and more to somehow compensate for this terrible flaw in themselves.  All of these strategies carry deeply held, often unconscious beliefs like, ‘I will miss out on something so important if I don’t go into overdrive’, and, the worst, ‘you will leave me’.  As children we may have felt  we were not really wanted or our parents expected too much of us.  This became my ‘normal’, to always be ahead of  where I actually am.

The second tendency is a habitual hypo, under-energized response.  These people can struggle with depression and lack of interest or follow through in their lives.  They may have a similar mantra going on in their heads of not enough-ness but they have developed a different strategy.  They wanted to stay out of trouble, perhaps from a very critical parent by trying to stay below the radar, to literally disappear.  This would require shutting down their natural energy, holding their breath and making as little movement as possible.  They have decided, “if I stay really still and small, I will be safe.”

The third tendency swings from high to low.  These people burn the candle, so to speak, on both ends.  They go into a frenzy of activity one moment and then a full collapse in another moment.   They vacillate between full on and full off.

Each of these three different strategies needs different things to begin to reclaim their true windows of tolerance.  It is possible and it takes conscious work to override a lifetime of an energetic pattern.  For the hyper person who is always above and beyond their window of tolerance, they need to begin to feel their enough-ness in a regulated state.  They need to slow down, risk the terror that something bad will happen and notice all is well when they are comfortable and operating inside their window of tolerance, their true limitations and energy.  For the hypo person they need to move more and risk getting bigger in their lives.  And also notice that it is safe to do this.  Obviously the third type person needs to do both.

What does it mean to be ‘in’ your window of tolerance?  What does it feel like?  We have all had days where life felt relatively effortless and everything just seemed to flow.  This is what being in your own window of tolerance feels like.  It feels so good and natural.  Like the picture below, you are light on your feet and surrounded by all the colors and joy of life.  Or it can also feel like you are fully feeling your pain and loss and it is moving through you as if by magic as you allow it and stay close to yourself and your own needs.  When you stay connected to your actual energy system and honor it, your window of tolerance naturally expands.  So we cannot push or pull it open or closed but by staying within our own comfort zones we naturally grow and expand.  How perfect is that!

This requires us to face squarely our own limitations and the obstacles that life presents to us.  It no longer is dangerous to be big or small.  We can come into reality and it is safe.

Jon Kabat-Zinn gives us a glimpse of this feeling and encourages us to live more from a place of wholeness at the end of his body scan meditation: “…Feeling complete and whole as we are in touch with our essential completeness a realm in which our limitations are not confining a realm of oneness ,silence, stillness and peace.  Open to things just as they are in each moment and seeing that this attitude and stillness itself is healing and allowing the world to be as it is beyond our personal fears and concern beyond the tendencies of the mind to want things to be a certain way and seeing ourselves complete right now as we are.  Experiencing the fullness of our ability to love and care and experiencing being totally awake right now…”

Truly we all are rather small when it comes to meeting the suffering and adversity that life presents to us.  We can reach out to God for help and/or be Godlike and compassionate to our selves.

Are You A Good Person Who Was In A Bad Situation?

Lifelong feelings of shame and deficiency are typically found to accompany the distress states caused by early trauma.  Children cannot experience themselves as being a good person in a bad situation.  Failure of the holding environment (family) is experienced as failure of the self.  Later thoughts like, ‘there is something wrong with me’, or, ‘I am not worthy or bad’, are built upon early sensations in the body of ‘I feel bad’.  Simply understanding that your shame reflects the environmental failure you experienced rather than who you really are can help shift lifelong patterns of low self esteem, shame and a sense of worthlessness and help you see yourself in a new, more compassionate way.  Paraphrased from Healing Developmental Trauma with Laurence Heller, PHD

 

Have you experienced extreme highs when something good happens to you and extreme lows or deflation when facing something bad or a disappointment?  Do you feel like you are bouncing up and down, dependent on outside forces?  If things are going really well and you are making your goals, do you still have a nagging feeling that you are not enough?  Do you sense an emptiness that does not respond to how much you fill your life or even how happy you seem to be?  Even as your confidence grows, and your accomplishments pile up, do you notice you are afraid that failure could be lurking right around the next corner? Or do you feel that, no matter how successful you are, you are just fooling everyone—playing a charade of a confident, accomplished person; that you’re a fake?

If you can relate to any of these questions, then there may be something helpful for you here.

We are usually not conscious of breathing since it is an involuntary activity of the body. But when we slow down and breathe deliberately there is so much to observe about the breath. Each breath feels differently. One is shallow, one may be deep. There is a world of sensations that accompany each breath.  They usually live in the background of our lives. Our thoughts that speak to us, as words inside, also take on this “involuntary quality”, particularly our less conscious background thoughts. They just become like the air we breathe, and we do not hear them or pay any attention to the power they wield over our lives. Most of the time we are too busy to hear all this back-ground noise.  If we do learn to listen to these thoughts in the background what we will learn is this: there is an inner tyrant inside each of us. It began so early in our lives we may not have even been talking yet.  This is the one who drives us to be perfect and thus avoids the painful recriminations we suffered as children.  It is often not our own voice, but the critical or harsh voice or environment of our family or parents.  This is called introjection: the unconscious adoption of the ideas or attitudes of others.  We all introject the worst admonitions from our families so as to try and protect ourselves from having to endure them again.  “If I say it to myself, then I will never get caught doing [whatever] and have to endure this punishment again.”

The process of unearthing these strong demands and background thoughts does not make them go away, even though we begin to see how irrational, unrealistic and self-defeating they are.  Some part of us knows that you cannot ALWAYS be kind and please everyone, but that rational part does not win out, does not silence the voice of the tyrant.  Beyond the messages that demand perfection are also accompanying beliefs that are mostly unconscious but exert a strong influence on our thinking and actions. But as we follow this process below the surface, we will begin to have more control over this inner struggle and begin to find more inner connections to what is the real good inside of us that is not dictated by outside forces or our inner critic.

The more conscious we become of these buried parts of us, the better we know ourselves.  When the hidden parts become known they have much less power to influence our lives.

The Inner Critic

Since inner critical words are introjected (literally put in us by others), they are actually alien and don’t actually belong to us.  These early messages contradict our present sane beliefs about who we really are.  We can easily see the falseness of them at the intellectual level and replace them with more sane and accurate assessments, but our young belief system keeps us stuck in them. The part of us that knows better, our adult logical self, joined in the developmental process rather late.  The more primitive inner-child part of us already believes firmly in the messages that came from our parents, no matter how offensive or life-effacing they are such as:

    • Don’t show yourself to anyone.
    • Don’t think a man or a women will want you.
    • Don’t let anyone know what you are thinking.
    • Don’t let anyone get too close.
    • Don’t let anyone go too far away.
    • Don’t be enthusiastic about anything.
    • Don’t be quiet.
    • Don’t think you are important.
    • Don’t underestimate yourself.
    • Don’t be arrogant or proud.
    • Don’t be just pretty.
    • Don’t be just smart.
    • Don’t be assertive.
    • You are inadequate, ineffective, weak, failing, doomed – don’t be.

When these “dont’s” are internalized they can become rigid, self-defeating mind sets. These critical voices are so ingrained and insidious because they come from our family.  Our instinct is to trust our families, so it is frightening to contradict or challenge those early injunctive voices of authority.  Our discernment is not yet formed so these messages go unchallenged. (Paraphrased from Shadow Dance—Liberating the Power and Creativity of the Dark Side, by David Richo.)

Observation Skills

Here are some practical ways to get down into the material of our background thoughts.  Those inner voices that control our our inner life.

Observe Yourself.  You will probably be surprised at how many negative judgments you produce during a day.

Study how you react when something unpleasant happens. If you experience a break-up of a relationship, or get fired, or have a nasty falling out with a friend, what thoughts do you have about this?  If you feel bitter and resentful— “I just knew it. This is the way it always turns out. To hell with it!”—you can be sure there is belief at work.  An equally good indication is if you feel self-pity: “This always happens to me. I’m so tired of being disappointed!”  Study this in yourself. Try to get to the root of the negative feeling and define the belief as clearly as possible.

Look at your behavior patterns.  If, for example, you believe that relationships will never work out, you won’t try to give them your best.  You may avoid relationships altogether or be so guarded that they never have a chance to get very deep and eventually die away.  At the other extreme, you may get into a relationship and very soon begin to make yourself disagreeable and pick fights, resulting in the other person leaving you.  What do these behaviors indicate regarding your beliefs about intimate relationships or about yourself?  Are you passive and indifferent?  Impatient and rushed?  Study your day-to-day behavior to see what you can learn about your thoughts and beliefs.

Analyze your fantasies.  Most people cherish one or more fantasies, which they use repetitively to amuse, calm or console themselves.  What are yours?  Do you play scenes in your mind of winning someone’s undying love after undergoing much suffering?  Do you cherish a fantasy of yourself doing something heroic that will gain people’s respect once and for all?  Do you repeatedly play a scene of getting even with someone for hurting or betraying you?  These little stories are based on strong underlying beliefs and assumptions about how the world works. Explore these fantasies and work on putting into words the underlying beliefs that drive them.

Look at your family stories.  Most families have a standard set of seemingly fond stories that they reminisce about and share with new acquaintances: “Yes, Ruth was an ugly little baby, but we were sure glad to get her.”  “Our Jimmy has always been the wild one; he just drove his father and me crazy when he was little.”  “Andy and Liz could never get along—they were like oil and water.”  On one level these may be endearing anecdotes that serve to bond the family.  But they can also be potent indicators of underlying negative currents in the family and in your own personal history that may have been invisible to you when you were a child. What are your family’s favorite stories and statements about itself? How does this relate to you own beliefs about yourself?

Study the times when you feel a deep sense of shame.  It is natural to feel remorseful at times about your flaws and shortcomings.  It’s not unusual to get momentarily annoyed with yourself after doing something that was not conscious or appropriate.  However, if you find yourself going to a place of deep, paralyzing shame about something you’ve said or done, this almost always points toward a belief formed in very young childhood. This feeling of intrinsic badness becomes frozen as a belief that can keep influencing us as adults years later.

After reading carefully some of the examples and concepts above, spend some time listening inside yourself.  See if you catch any words you speak that you have not heard before, because they slip so far into the background of who you are and what it is like to be you.  What are some of the negative, critical, judgmental, and positive, supportive comments that you tell yourself? Spend some time on this and come up with some specific words.

What are images and visuals that accompany the words?  What is the fantasy that frequently plays in your head?

There is no amount of outer accomplishment or outer recognition that touches the critical inner voices.  As we begin to hear these voices out loud and let them be really known to us, we befriend a long, lost part of ourselves.  As we welcome these parts home and hear them clearly, it is like welcoming back an old friend after a long separation.

Shifting Identification and ownership

As we hear more clearly and consciously what we are speaking to ourselves, every minute of every day, we can begin to make choices.  Is this voice really mine or maybe it belongs to one or both of my parents?  We can imagine the tone of this voice and all it’s admonition  as a mass of energy — like the red energetic mass in the photo above.  As we locate and feel this actually energy in our bodies we can gather it up and literally return it where it belongs.  One client did this and both her parents (now deceased) said they were sorry (in her minds eye) something she had never heard  while they were alive.  It was a moment of healing.

We can also find an older and wiser part of ourselves and begin to challenge the validity of these voices.  We can emulate the kind voices of the ones who loved us the best as children.  We can literally say to ourselves, “Oh sweetheart, it is not really true that you are lazy, fat, stupid or [fill in the blank]”.

I sometimes say this out loud for emphasis—if no one is near.

A miracle begins to happen slowly. Our inside voice becomes kind and quiet. We begin to be good friends with ourselves.  We consciously shift our identification from the one who believes these voices and speaks them constantly and unconsciously, to the one who can hold with tenderness and understanding this misguided historic part of ourselves. Then real change begins to happen.

In this shift of identification, we can begin to shift our whole lives. We make the leap from experiencing the effect of our inner lives to being the cause.  Our inner perpetrator finally gets returned to where it belongs and also gets the attention and care it has been screaming for all our lives. Nothing we have done in our outside world has been able to hear this plea.

 

Real But Not True

 

According to Tsoknyi Rinpoche,  a most beloved contemporary Tibetan Buddhist meditation masters, to have an open heart and open mind we must develop a deeper understanding of the patterns that drive our thoughts, feelings and behaviors.  Then we will not so easily surrender to the impulse to blindly follow them.

I happened to be reading his book, Open Heart, Open Mind: Awakening the Power of the Essence Love, as I was crossing the International Dateline around the Bering Straits on my way to Tokyo to teach a class on Images. (The Pathwork terms for false beliefs and conclusions formed in early childhood.)

Tsoknyi Rinpoche continues to say that patterns are hard to change, especially the ones that are embedded in our unconscious or even our pre-verbal nervous systems.   This reminds me of Pathwork Lecture #201, which I am preparing to teach. It talks about the negative force field that images create as they go unexamined. The lectures defines images as a “force field of distorted ideas”.  “… it is like a deeply imprinted motor mechanism set in motion with great energy.  Thus a stronger energy is required to deactivate this motor force and change the negative force field into a positive one.”

After going through the hard work of uncovering your patterns or images, Rinpoche suggests a mantra, which is a time honored method of talking to your thoughts and feelings.  Sometimes called prayer, it is a means of opening up a conversation between the heart and the mind.   His mantra is a simple four word phrase: Real, But Not True.

What I love about this prayer is that it acknowledges the young one in us who came up with this group of distorted ideas and conclusions.  To this young one our conclusion about ourselves, about life, about God are absolutely real.  But as we shine a light on them with our adult consciousness they are also absolutely not true.

To find images we have to look back on our lives, the ways we define ourselves, the pressures that were applied by the people around us and the culture in which we were raised.

In the process of teaching Images in Japan my husband and I find our intertwined images, which are always at work in relationships.  My image:  “If I am sick and suffering then I will get the attention I need.”  This comes from my young one who watched my mother, sick and suffering and sucking all the attention and energy out of our household, leaving none left for me.  It seems so clear to my little one if I can be sick like my mother then all that attention will be mine.  Of course the attention I want the most is from my husband.  His image: “My attention does not matter or will be used by others to manipulate me”  I try desperately to get his attention and he tries desperately to avoid being manipulated by me by withholding it.  And round and round the negative force field we go.

This is a spectacular example of the truism: we teach what we most need to learn!

Sometimes images or patterns help us avoid feelings like being alone and neglected in my case or being invaded and used in my husband’s.  But I also learned while teaching that sometimes images are put in place as a sacrifice to try and save our families.  One student took the blame for everything that ever happened in his family.  He sacrificed his need for fairness and justice.  This was a huge sacrifice. When he realized what he had done he wailed with grief.  We all know how important fairness is to children.

Tara Brach has more to say about Real, but not true. “What this means is that, while thoughts are really happening and there is a real biochemistry that accompanies them, they are only representations in our mind. They are not the experience of this living moment. We can begin to identify and challenge limiting beliefs by starting with the simple question: What am I believing right now? And then: Is this true? Is it possible that this is real but not true? Our beliefs fuel our sense of separateness. Uninvestigated, they are a veil between us and reality; they actually prevent us from seeing truth.”

 

 

 

 

AWAKE

 

“I just realized something important”

My husband and I recently taught a workshop in Vermont about the Spirituality of Relationships—the title of a Pathwork Lecture—but the workshop was really about love.

I was walking in the woods a few days later with nothing particular on my mind and started to think about a woman I know who wanted to become a mother about 10 years ago. She told me she was going to manifest this.  She was older at the time and I was cynical.  By that point I had had many failed attempts at having a child.

I will tell anyone who will listen that not having a child is my biggest disappointment or regret in my life.  As I walked through the woods I began to think about disappointment and regret and my story about it began to turn upside down. A new truth emerged.  My friend had  approached being a mother with a full open heart. My approach was different.  I had conditions.  I had wanted a baby of my own with my husband, Tom. I could feel the constraints I put on my heart.  And therefore I could  feel that I had created different results than my friend whose son is now nine years old.  There was no judgement about the different results I had created and I do not wish for my friend’s life, but my sad story seemed to vanish in the light of the truth of my own creation.

I felt incredibly empowered and knew that something really important had happened that was going to change the dynamics in my family.  I began to feel into the subtle tension I bring to our family gatherings—a vigilant, focused attention on “who is getting how much of what”.  I feel that I must get my share (especially of the grandchildren) given that I did not have children of my own.  The tension contained a demand.  By Friday of the same week our family was assembled for our last birthday party of the summer.

The change was amazing.  I was able able to relax and just be with everyone.  I noticed how much attention I did get, how much joy and love was present in our family without needing anything extra.

This made me think about what the Pathwork teaches us, that cause and effect only seem spread out over time because of our time/space relationship on this plane of existence, and that it is actually immediate in the reality of greater unitive conscious.  Cause and effect collapse into all cause.

In another example this week,  the woman of a couple I work with wanted to unpack what happened to her on a family trip.  One day she was letting in the love of her family, especially the love of her niece, and the next day it felt like she lost it.  Her niece let her in and then shut her out.  She went from blaming and shaming herself to blaming her niece (which is what we do—we go to the hard pain) when we do not want to feel the softer pain.  I asked her to track what she was feeling back to the softer feelings and she was feeling a broken heart.  This creates an apparent dilemma for her as she has a real need to love and it comes for her naturally.  In that moment the time/space continuum collapses again and I realize that needing to love and having our hearts broken are not separate.  They go together.  Her partner says, “we think we will love at one time and then sometime in the future we might get our hearts broken but actually it is all going on at the same time.” “Exactly,” I say, “it is all cause—the future effect is an illusion. She realizes how love and heart break are inseparable.  In this place there is no duality, there is no victim or perpetrator.  The world is truly benign, as the Pathwork Guide promises us, and we are truly mini gods creating all our experiences in every moment.

Stand Your Ground

This summer our 5 year old is venturing out into the ocean but he needs to hold hands for support when the big waves hit.  When the big wave approaches I say to him, “stand your ground, buddy” over and over again. My wish is that he remember this as metaphor for the rest of his life.  As I say it to him over and over again, I am learning to stand my ground.

Boundaries are something that did not exist in many chaotic households, or they were held inconsistently.  And I am finding that many of the people I work with have never experienced healthy, safe, flexible boundaries.  As one person put it recently, “I either shut down completely behind my wall or I am wide open with my heart fully exposed”.  The first approach is not a boundary but a defense and the second approach is a merging which is unhealthy and leads to co-dependency and loss of self.

Brene Brown has done the most beautiful work around boundaries that I have discovered.  It came out of extensive research that she did.  She wanted to know what qualities contributed to the most compassionate people.  She began by interview clergy and other known types of compassionate people.  Her hypothesis was that compassionate people were also spiritual people and that spirituality contributed to compassion.  What she found out was very shocking to her and it might be to you too.  She found that the most compassionate people are the people who have the best boundaries.

She uses the acronym BIG for her boundary discussion.  BIG becomes an amazing question.  Here is how it goes:

What Boundaries do I need so that I can be in my Integrity and be most Generous towards you?

As one friend pointed out, we often try and do GIB, and that doesn’t work.  We often think we should be generous.  Aren’t good people generous?  And then we find we have gotten out of alignment with our integrity and wonder what boundaries we might need or should have put in place and didn’t.

As I have worked with this notion of boundaries and generosity with myself and others I find this miraculous thing happens.  Let’s say there is a conflict with another person.  We are considering having it out with them.  Hashing out what is wrong, all our hurt feelings, etc.  And then we consider maybe a boundary would help.  When we energetically feel a boundary — like a transparent cloth over our hearts or a piece of lucite (letting light in and out but a boundary none the less) — everything changes.  We feel the boundary.  We are inside and the other is outside.  We have a parameter around us, there is a border between us and the other.  In this act of protection  and self designation, we instantly can feel more generous towards the other person.  The grievances or issues seem to vanish as we feel secure and unharmed inside ourselves.

I spoke to a friend about BIG yesterday and as she carefully took in what I was saying she said she felt I was talking about creating order.  Boundaries do create order where otherwise there is the potential for chaos.

Try standing your ground first with a simple boundary based on your own integrity and watch your generosity and true compassion grow.  It is straightforward and easy and works instantly.