I M Perfect lady

Category: Books

  • Loving What Is…

    We would rather be ruined than changed;
    We would rather die in our dread
    Than climb the cross of the moment
    And let our illusions die.
    ~W.H. Auden

     

    What is so unreal is that we believe we can stop change that it is up to us to keep things the same, and it is viewed worthy if we remain unchanged.

     

    Not only unchanged, but that if you change it is somehow seen as bad, wrong or that you succumbed to a new circumstance, instead of standing hard against change.

     

    I have come to see that change happens often and mostly for my benefit, and the more I get used to letting go of rigid beliefs about my life and how it is supposed to flow, I am much more relaxed and willing to bend with the next thing that changes.

     

    Our bodies change, the days change, the seasons change, our roles change, our attitudes change, our energies change, our feelings change, our world simply doesn’t stop changing.

     

    I think we can accept change as long as it goes according to our vision of our futures, but as soon as it changes and creates a kink in our plans, we then stand strong against that change.

     

    Standing against change feels stronger, yet it is actually a weakened state.  The strongest is to surrender and accept with grace whatever is happening, for it is happening.

     

    Accepting what is, as Byron Katie says…is really loving what is, and if you are not accepting it, you are fighting with reality and you only lose, but 100% of the time.

     

    I think we think we are good at navigating the changes in our lives, until the unthinkable happens, when we are forced to look upon something that certainly goes against our dreams, or our plans, and then see how you accept change?

     

    I have found that it is in accepting the most difficult things that we truly see ourselves; see where we truly are, how we are and how we are really living.

     

    Are we living in reality or in a dream about reality?

    Are we flowing with the Universe and living in a love hate relationship with it?

     

    Loving the Universe when our plans are going according to plan, and despising that same God, when things fall through?

     

    It has taken lots of disappointments, lots of changes, and lots of moments of utter disbelief to finally see the gifts in all the changes that have happened in my life.

     

    I was forced to look for gifts among the piles of changes and in doing so always found the thread that lead me to understanding the change.

     

    In seeing a bigger picture or seeing that which I failed to acknowledge, it was my perspective of change that was needed.

     

    Instead of sitting in the land of ‘expecting no change’, I now live knowing all life changes…I am comfortable with change, and if not, I know that it is my mind that has to be changed, not reality.

     

    Reality changes whether we agree or disagree…it is up to you how long it takes.

     

    I have found the quicker I change my mind, the more peaceful I am.

     

    Byron Katie says there are three little words that cause suffering…should, could and would.

     

    And there are three words that bring peace, Loving what is…

     

  • Take Care Of You!

    “If you had to take care of yourself, as you take care of others, what would you do for yourself?”  This question was asked on Oprah’s Soul Series on Sirius Radio as she spoke with Geneen Roth.

     

    The woman they were talking to had no idea what she could do to spoil herself, what would make her feel good, what one thing would make her happy, it had been so long since she took the time for self.

     

    Time for self doesn’t have to be long or expensive, but it has to be something that excites your insides, makes your belly smile, bring a tickle to your being.

     

    After 50 years of taking care of others, while my inner tank ran dry, I am learning that in order to give to others, I have to give to myself first.

     

    Doing yoga each day is a way to serve my body and soul, reconnecting me to the Universe and to my breath.  It feels so good to do this for myself, for no one benefits more than I in yoga.

     

    Taking the time and spending more on whole foods, real food, and learning how to eat better, again…no one benefits more than I when I eat better.

     

    The more conscious I am in how I treat myself, the more ways I find treat me!

     

    What I love the most is that deep within me I feel deserving of serving myself, of treating myself, of loving myself of taking the time to love myself enough!

     

    There was a small book, called “When I love myself enough”…and in it had ways in which you can do this.

     

    I would love to hear how you love yourself enough?

     

    What is so sad is that the many who don’t take the time, need it the most, it is a cycle that needs to be broken by you. 

     

    Do one thing each day to take care of you!

  • Serves Me!

    In Waking, by Matthew Sanford, he writes again about his experience with yoga.

     

    “Maha mudra is a strange pose.  In yogic lore, if a yogi practices it enough, he or she can eat anything, even something poisonous. Regardless, it has a magical feel to it.  Seated on the floor, one leg is straight in front of you.  The other leg is bent at the knee, with the sole of the foot pressed against your inner thigh of the opposite leg.  One reaches down, hooks the big toe of outstretched leg with the thumbs and forefingers of both hands, lowers the chin toward the chest, inhales, and tightens the abdomen, pulling it back toward the spine and up toward the diaphragm.”

     

    “As I move into this pose, something clicks or snaps into place or becomes manifest. I experience a new ding.  I suddenly feel a tangible sense of my whole body – inside and out, paralyzed and unparalyzed.  I am stunned.”

     

    “Jo, this feels different, something is different.  I can feel where the pose goes, the unity between the actions.  I can feel it actually moving.” I gasp. “The abdomen hits back and up, and the straight leg thigh pushes into the floor…right?”

     

    “Yes.” She says, breaking a smile.

    “Then the…energy” – I struggle for words – “moves out through the heel.”

     

    “Well actually, the physical actions is to hit down with the thigh and stretch out through the heel,” she says, her tone informative. “….as the spine and chest life in opposition.” I chirp in.  My mind is racing.  How am I feeling this?  How is this possible?  I am perplexed, but the moment is mine.  My entire body is working in concert.  It has been a long time – some thirteen years.  My lost body and my potential body have joined in this pose.  My past, my present and my future are touching.  Although I am choking with grief, I am also an excitable boy.  I have worked so hard to make it back to this moment.”

     

    Jo and I do not say much.  It is too big, too fresh, and not to be spoiled.  Silence – the lamp’s light, the darkness outside the window, our reflections in the class, my creaking house.  My world has changed its shape tonight.  A new level of me is coming alive.  I am overwhelmed with the feeling that my body has been waiting for me to stop neglecting it, waiting for me to quiet down and listen.  My heart is breaking. I feel grateful.” 

                        Matthew

     

    My heart is breaking and I am grateful is exactly the correct sentiment.  To sit in awe of all the neglect and how the body still worked to serve me, given what I have fed it and how I moved it.

     

    I have done lots of yoga this year, working to help my body process all the stressful situations it has endured, and giving it flexibility and strength to move easier.

     

    My mind, my body and my soul are all being greatly helped in yoga each day.

     

    What a great vehicle we get to ride around in!

     

    I too am heartbroken and grateful, many times a day as I witness how it lives and breathes and serves me!

     

     

     

     

  • As I Yoga Along

    “A monk sits cross-legged in the middle of the road, meditating on existence.  A powerful insight consumes him: He and the Universe are One.  He intuits further that the Universe, being One, would never harm him itself.  And as long as he stays connected, he too will never come to harm.  During this timeless thought, he feels the ground shaking.  He looks up and sees an elephant walking down the very same road on which he sits.  He smiles inwardly and continues to meditate.  As the animal draws closer, he opens his eyes again.  A man is standing on the back of the elephant, waving his arms and yelling, “Get out of the road! Get out of the road!”  Completely confident in his realization, he returns to his meditation.  The elephant squashes him.  As he lies there hemorrhaging to death, he calls out, “How did this happen? I don’t understand.”  His Zen master comes out of the ditch, walks over to him, and says, “Didn’t you hear IT tell you to get out of the road?”

                    Zen parable

     

    More from the book Waking, by Matthew Sanford.

     

    “I was about to commit to the study of yoga and do so with a paralyzed body. The truth that my body possessed memory, that it was also conscious, was as undeniable as the man yelling from the back of the elephant.  But I had no idea what this meant for my practice of yoga.  How do you interact with a body that you cannot feel directly but is conscious nonetheless?”

     

    “This story of the monk’s mistake was reassuring to me.  I did not need to know anything in advance.  I just needed to stay open to my experience, to what was obvious.  My yoga practice would talk to me like the man on the back of the elephant.  I just needed to listen and not prejudge what I was being told.”

     

    “This story also made me feel less alone.  The Universe would talk to me when and if it was needed.  My task was simple:  I only had to listen.  If I did, the Universe’s guidance would be obvious, not hidden.  I would feel connected, not disconnected.  The phrase “back of the elephant” became my reminder to listen to the experience of my life and not deny it.”

     

    “My lifelong commitment to yoga, my practical journey through mind-body integration, begins slowly after surgery.  Not only am I sore, but this is also new territory for both Jo and me.  During our first meeting postsurgery, I am still unable to do any poses.  I just need to tell her about the tunnel I have been in- the hospital, the body memories, the grief.  This intimacy is a testament to the strength of our relationship. Although there is already a deep connection between us, we do not know each other that well.”

     

    “We are on the dojo floor – two willing students have helped me down – and Jo is sitting directly in front of me, spine erect, with the soles of her feet pressing against each other.  The pose is called baddha konosana, and she sits in it almost the entire time we visit. Teaching without teaching.”

     

    “She listens to my story, says little, and absorbs much.  She intuitively knows that I have much to let go of. She knows firsthand the way memory can uncoil from a body. As I tell her about my time in the hospital, I expect vacant eyes of polite disbelief.  But instead, she nods, looks down and whispers, “I know.”  Jo and I have met each other at the perfect time.  My need is obvious.  But Jo, too, is in transition.  She is in the very early stages of starting what will become the San Diego Yoga Studio. She is ready to strike out on her own and is gaining confidence.  She is also ready to take her fourteen years of yogic experience and consciously combine it with her uncanny ability to empathize with and project into another person’s body.  In order to teach me, she will have to intuitively connect with what it’s like to be paralyzed.  She will have to imagine how yoga might manifest through such a body.  Luckily for me, Jo has this rare ability in spades.”

     

    “So begins one of the relationships in my life of which I am most proud.  There was no model for us to follow, no example from which to learn.  Jo teaches Iyengar Yoga, a highly refined system developed by yoga master Sri B.K.S. Ivengar.  After meeting me the first time Jo had called two senior teachers in the Ivengar method for advice.  Their recommendations of one or two seated poses and some shoulder and arm stretches were of little help. She had already exhausted their ideas in our first session.  She was left to her own devices, to her own creativity, to an uncommon openness that would guide our work together.  She didn’t have to be an expert. She knew Iyengar yoga – that was clear.  I was her student – that was also clear. But we explored the possibilities of yoga and paralysis together.  She made me a partner in a great experiment – the mark of a fabulous teacher.”

     

    “Jo had the patience and the foresight not to force the Iyengar system of yoga onto my body. For instance, she did not worry that I could not do standing poses – the poses that are considered to be the building blocks of the entire system.  Instead, Jo had faith in the system’s underlying principles.  Iyengar yoga distinguishes itself from the other styles of yoga by its heightened empasis on alignment and precision.  I believe the reason for this is profound.  When anatomical structures – bones, muscles, ligaments, tendons, skin, and so on – are brought into greater alignment, the mind connects with the body more fluidly and with less effort.”

     

    “This phenomenon is easily experienced. Sit in a chair, slump your shoulders, and let your neck and head jut forward away from the torso. We all know this position – we call it bad posture. Now, sit up straight, life the chest, broaden across the collarbones, and extend out through the top of the head.  Notice how presence activates in the inner thighs and down through our feet, especially through your heels.  The mind moves without intent, without volition. As the chest lifts and the spine extends, the mind follows the more efficient distribution of gravity and naturally increases its presence in the lower extremities.  Iyengar yoga, by emphasizing alignment and precision, maximizes the effortless form of mind-body integration.  It is the beginning of realizing an energetic connection between the mind and body.”

     

    “Of course, this realization did not come to me all at once.  I had been practicing consistently for about six months. Each morning I would get up, drink some water, and then sit in my blue velvet chair.  I would take a few minutes to feel my whole body, to activate a sense of presence through my base by focusing on the weight distribution between my sits bones and imagining a connection between my chest, tailbone and my feet.”

    “My actual practice was limited to four poses.  I would get down on my blue exercise mat and do each pose three times.  Dandasana: legs straight in front, palms pressed into the floor beside the hips, lift the chest.  Upavista Konasana (“wide-legs”): Legs far apart as possible, hands grab the legs just below the knees, lift the chest.  Baddha konosana: Soles of the feet pressing evenly into each other, interlock the fingers, grab underneath the feet, hold them firmly, lift the chest, and stretch torso up. Siddhasana: one leg bent at the knee, with the foot pressing against the opposite thigh; the other leg bent at the knee and the foot set upon the ankle of the first foot; join the thumbs and forefingers to rest the back of each hand upon each knee palms facing upward. With such a limited repertoire of poses, I was forced to learn from subtle differences between them.  I was made to look more deeply into what could easily have become ordinary.”

     

    “Just doing four poses was exciting enough.  My body, paralyzed though it was, was taking the shapes of real, bona fide yoga poses.  I would sit on the floor, use my arms to move my legs, bring the soles of my feet together, grab underneath them, and lift my chest.  The outward result was pleasing.  If a snapshot of my version of baddha konasana were held up next to a snapshot of another beginning student’s pose, they would have looked roughly the same.  I could do it.”

                    Matthew

     

    As he shared his experiences, he affirmed mine yet again.

     

    My experience with yoga has merged me with my body, where before I lived a few feet from it.  Also, it has given me wonderful insights as I yoga along.

     

     

  • Affirmed by His Experiences

    Maha Mudra, a chapter from Waking by Matthew Sanford.

     

    “When I return home from the hospital, everything seems the same – my blue velvet chair, the sounds of my fridge, the creaking of my wood floors.  Everything except for the feeling that I have recently chatted with aliens.  That’s how my body memories strike me.  How could my body have memories?  Bodies don’t have memories, minds do.  Not only did I believe this growing up, but my philosophical studies reinforced it.  Now, in the span of a few days in the hospital, my sense of who I am, where I begin, and where I end once again has broken wide open.  My body interacts with the world and records it regardless of whether my mind is having any experience.”  Matthew

     

    This is so reassuring to someone like me who has no memories of the actual molestation, the rape that my friend witnessed, and yet my body has given me the feelings of it, the paralyzing terror.

     

    While Matthew couldn’t recall the accident where he was paralyzed, his body was aware of the whole ride and recorded it and stored the information in feelings.

     

    It is the storage that I find remarkable.  It is stored until we are strong enough or willing to seek deep inside of us and explore the feelings that seem to be there at odd times, or feelings that don’t match our thoughts in reality.

     

    When my body responded physically to the news that my father was a pedophile, there wasn’t any thing I could do but follow its lead.  I knew by the second day that I too was a victim; I just didn’t know how I knew, for my mind was still as blank as ever.

     

    Yet deep within my cells, I felt the truth of it all.

     

    I knew that he molested me, I knew that all the times I feared him were justified and I felt this to be true, with emotions and feelings that were beyond an intellectual thought.

     

    Matthew continues.

     

    “ This seems simple enough.  For example, at any given time, the back of my head is visible to the world during every instant that I am awake.  My body is also present in every second that I am alive, even while I am sleeping.  Both of these thoughts are easy to grasp intellectually, but to feel them – that is different altogether.  I felt those body memories in three dimensions.  They went beyond the two-dimensional mental experiences and instead expressed themselves through the three dimensional experience of my body. That my body could be a possessor of memory made me confront something that was undeniable.  My body – not just my mind was also conscious.  How does one truly open to something like that?”

     

    “The act of “opening” consciousness makes us feel both uncertainty and the onrush of silence that comes with it.  This is one of the reasons that becoming aware is often painful.  There are many stunning things about the Grand Canyon.  One of them is the eerie silence that accompanies its vast expanse.  It is both awesome and unsettling – one knows not to stand too close to the edge.  The feeling of openness and a confrontation with silence are deeply related.”

     

    “Opening to the fact that my body was conscious caused me intense grief.  I took advantage of my thirteen-year-old body so many years ago. It was subjected to profound violence and I abandoned it in the process.  Did I really need to?  Was it really my only option?  The existence of these body memories made me confront the silence and uncertainty of recognizing my own mistakes.”  Matthew

     

    I know the grief that follows this awareness of consciousness within the body, the neglect we feel for not knowing it was alive and filled with feelings and how it awaits for our cue.  I am humbled by this body and I am now trying to release it from any other feelings that are lodged within. 

     

    Yoga seems to be a vehicle for doing this.  Matthew also speaks of his experiences with yoga…

     

    I will write more on that tomorrow.

     

    For now, I am affirmed by his experiences. 

     

  • Waking

    In Matthew Sanford’s book, “Waking” he writes in the chapter called “Body Memories”.

     

    “I am in the hospital, but what am I healing?  Is it my back or is it my past?  Whatever it is, I am on fire. What should be only a three- or –four-day stay turns into seven.  I cannot sleep.  Time won’t let me; ghosts won’t let me; past trauma won’t let me. Each time I drift off toward sleep, there is a fury. Startled, twitching, jumping, screaming – not mind, but body.  I can’t see it coming.  Blindsided, hammered, bouncing, thudding, breaking.  Then I wake to quiet, to stillness, only for it to repeat when I doze again.  I am exhausted, but it won’t let me sleep; whatever has me in its clutches won’t let me sleep.  I am overwhelmed.”

     

    “I am besieged by a past that I can no longer see.  I try drugs.  All these years later, they now give a patient control of the IV morphine drip.  I press a button and bingo.  I am trying to eliminate the transition into sleep; my aim is to move straight into passed out.  It doesn’t work; nothing works.  Something deep within me has uncorked.  I am coming apart. That thirteen-year-old boy is calling me back.  I am being pulled back into what I left behind.”

     

    “Over time, it dawns on me- I am having flashbacks.  Almost all of my physical trauma has occurred between the states of wakefulness and sleep.  I was dozing in the car when we slid down the embankment.  I was in a coma during those first few gruesome days.  I was on Valium when the screws went into my head, when they broke my wrist, and on and on.  So often my trauma had come when my guard was down, when I was trusting the world, when I was taking a nap.  Whether it is being in the hospital again or having my spine manipulated, my body is making me relive my past.  It is gaining voice because I am finally strong enough to let it.  My body has been terrified, and I am grief-stricken that it has suffered silently for so long.  I can’t stop crying.”

     

    “This goes on for nearly three days. Barfing body memories is what I am doing.  It feels completely out of my control.  But the memories are helping me regain a semblance of continuity. For example, I have mentioned before that I have no memory of the day of the accident. That’s not exactly true.  I have no mental memory. But I am learning that my body has retained the memory; it has been holding pieces of my history until I was ready.”

     

    “The experience of my body memory is hard to describe.  I now know the feeling in my body when our car shot hard left as our tires hit dry pavement.  I can feel the car tumble from left front corner to end over end.  More than anything, I can feel the terror of traumatic time, the pause, the hanging, just before impact. (This feeling is still triggered when I am landing in an airplane and the brakes engage.)  I now know that the blow to my upper thorax came from the right side at a downward angle, sweeping through my torso, from right-side ribs to left hip.  I also know- from the ‘inside’ – my shallowness of breath, my struggle for air, and my drift into shock at the accident scene.  Still, twenty-five years later, if my spine moves too much or too quickly during yoga, I go into a mild version of past shock.  My spine is still letting go of echoes of trauma.”

     

    “These memories are not visual. They are not thoughts.  They are experienced, something like the inward feeling of falling into a dream, only to wake up just before rolling off the bed.  They are pauses of fright and held in the silence before breath.  They are my body bearing witness to what my mind could not.”

     

    “As I lie in that hospital bed, I am temporarily living in more than one dimension at a time.  I did not expect this level of healing.  I thought I that losing the metal in my back would be enough, that this would neatly end a twelve-year chapter of disintegration.  Healing, however, is not instantaneous.  It is earned. There is no way to step around my body’s past experience.  I am terrified.  My body has much to say, and it needs acknowledgement.  More importantly, I need to feel grateful.”

     

    “As I wake up to the horror of traumatically induced body memories, I am forced to feel death – not the end of my life, but the death of my life as a walking person.  I absorb death as I watched that young boy having screws twisted into his skull. The silence within which I found refuge was a level of dying.”

     

    “In principal, my experience is not that uncommon, only more extreme.  We all experience levels of dying throughout our lives – the process of living guarantees it. As each day passes especially in our later years, we become increasingly aware of our own mortality.  If we can see death as more than black and white, as more than on and off, there are many versions of realized death short of physically dying. The death of a loved one sets so much in motion: grief, a sense of loss, tears, anger, transcendent sense of love, an appreciation of the present moment, a desire to die, and on and on…”

     

    “What happened to me was simply more dramatic.  I absorbed an unusual dose of death at an age when I still had much living to do. Then I made it worse by working to overcome my paralyzed body.  I used my will to step over it, to step over the perceived death of two-thirds of my body.  My actions unknowingly injured me.  Now, I can’t stop crying because in this hospital I am experiencing the convulsing body of a suffering, but I am doing so as an adult…”

     

    “During the previous twelve years, I have borrowed against my body.  I have unwittingly relied upon the resounding beauty of its discipline against death.  When I “left” my body during my traumatic experiences, it was my body that kept tracking toward living.  It was my body that kept moving blood both to and from my heart.  Often, as we age and can no longer do what we once could, we say that our bodies are failing us. That is misguided.  In fact our bodies continue to carry out the processes of life and unwavering devotion.  They will always move toward living for as long as they possibly can.  My body did not as for the rupture that it experienced, but it somehow survived it.”

     

    “I am still returning to my body and will do so for the rest of my life.  I will leave this hospital with the crushing realization of my body’s commitment to my living.  I did not mean to take it for granted.”

                    Matthew Sanford

     

  • All or None Religion.

    My mothering skills have huge pockets of All or Nothing options, accented with control and responsibility that is overly dramatic and leaves me with little options to manuver through issues that I find are out of my control. 

     

    While talking to my brother I was trying to figure out how this ‘all-or-none” works within dysfunction, like what how is it applied and why?

     

    How was I taught this and why do I still use that as my “go to tool” in conflict resolutions.

     

    Charles Whitfield in his book, “Healing the Child Within”, writes.

     

    “This is the ego defense that therapists call splitting. When we think or act this way, we do so at either one extreme or the other. For example, either we love something or we hate them.  There is no middle ground. We see the people around us either good or bad, and not the composite they really are.  We judge ourselves equally as harshly.  The more we use the all-or-nothing thinking, the more it opens us up to behaving in an all or nothing fashion.  Both of the actions tend to get us into trouble and to cause us to suffer unnecessarily.

     

    We may be attracted to others who think and behave in an all-or-none fashion.  But being around this kind of person tends to result in more trouble and suffering for us.

     

    Table 3 lists types of parental conditions associated with dynamics of AcoA’s, and adult children from other dysfunctional families.  While all-or-none thinking can occur in any of these parental conditions, it occurs especially often among fundamentalist religious parents. They are often rigid, punitive, judgmental, and perfectionists.  They are often in a shame-based system, which attempts to cover over and even destroy the True Self.

     

    All-or-nothing thinking is similar to active alcoholism, other chemical dependency, co-dependency or other active addictions and attachments, in that it sharply and unrealistically limits our possibilities and choices.  To be so limited makes us feel constricted and we are unable to be creative and to grow in our day-to-day lives. 

     

    In recovery, we begin to learn that most things in our life, including our recovery, are not all-or-none, not either-or.  Rather, they are both-and.  They have shades of gray, they are somewhere in the middle of a 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 and not either a 0 or a 10.” 

    Charles Whitfield.

     

    I am beginning to see how it is applied and why.

     

    It limits the possibilities and choices and covers up our true self. 

     

    That feels right. 

     

    Yet it feels dreadful that is what I am doing to my children, when I offer the all-or-none attitude.

     

    While all-or-none seems to be easy and cut and dried, it actually reduces the choices so small, it leaves little room for both-and.

     

    I than fail to see my child as good and bad, or energetic and lazy, that they swing and sway to both sides, depending upon what needs to be done.

     

    I write them off quickly, too quickly when my reality becomes overwhelming to me, when my fears rush in that I am being abused again by their lack of caring for my home, their dishes etc.

     

    This ideology is the corner stone of my being a huge foundation that I leaned upon and lived from.

     

    It is so much easier to manipulate others from there.  Manipulating others is a scary premise to raise children.  Manipulating them for my benefit…Instead of finding solutions with multiple choices. 

     

    I lived by the hard and fast rule, do it my way or leave.

     

    Or its cousin, do it my way or I leave.

     

    Each and every time I feel overwhelmed or out of control, I want to bring this dogma back into my world, to wield the cumbersome sword and dictate to clear my world of riff raff and true selves begging to be heard.

     

    It is so hard to wrestle yourself free from the ties that bind this to my way of thinking, to be open to others ideas and solutions, to bring them in and see if this is just my problem or a family problem.

     

    I will ride the mower with this thought, “attempts to cover up or even destroy the true self.”  And sadly we both suffer, no true self remains standing in the all-or-none religion.

     

     

  • A Caring Ear.

    “Healing the Wounded Child Within” by Charles L. Whitfield MD.  Story Telling as part of the healing process, he writes.

     

    “Telling our story is a powerful act in discovering and healing our Child Within.  It is a foundation of recovery in self-help groups, group therapy and individual psychotherapy and counseling. 

     

    Each of our stories when complete contains three basic parts: separation, initiation and return (Campbell, 1949).  Twelve-step self-help groups describe their stories as “What we were like,” “What happened,” and “What we are like now.”  People in group therapy may call it risking, sharing, participating, and ‘working’ in group.  In individual counseling or psychotherapy we may describe it by similar names and psychoanalysts may call it “free association, working through transference and through unsolved internal conflict.”  Among close friends, we may call it “baring our souls” or “having a heart-to-heart talk.”

     

    In sharing our story we can be aware that gossip and wallowing in our pain are usually counterproductive to healing.  This is in part because gossip tends to be attacking rather than self-disclosing and it is generally incomplete, following the victim stance or cycle.  Wallowing in our pain is continuing to express our suffering beyond a reasonable duration for healthy grieving.  There is a danger here that maybe observed in some self-help meetings: When a person tries to tell a painful story that has no apparent or immediate resolution, the other members may unknowingly label it as “self-pity” or a “pity party.”  In this case, while self-help meetings are generally safe and supportive, the bereaved may wish to look elsewhere to express their pain.

     

    Simos (1979) said, “Grief work must be shared.  In sharing however, there must be no impatience, censure or boredom with the repetition, because repetition is necessary for catharsis and internalization and eventual unconscious acceptance of the reality of loss.  The bereaved are sensitive to feelings of others and will not only refrain from revealing feelings to those they consider unequal to the burden of sharing the grief but may even try to comfort the helpers.

     

    Our story does not have to be a classical “drunkalog” or long in length.  In telling our story we talk about what is important, meaningful, confusing, conflicting, or painful in our life.  We risk, share, interact, discover and more.  And by doing so we heal ourselves.  While we can listen to stories of others, and they can listen to ours, perhaps the most healing feature is that we, the story teller, get to hear our own story.  While we may have an idea about what our story is whenever we tell it, it usually comes out different from what we initially thought.” 

                    Charles Whitfield

     

    My story telling began in journals to myself, and eventually I was daring enough to have a blog.

     

    I do know the ‘risk’ it takes to stand and speak about your journey, and also the benefits to being heard.

     

    The biggest part of the storytelling is to have compassionate, caring, listeners.

     

    My blog seems to be that.  It is always available for me to place another bout of confusion down, a new wave of understanding, a twisted and unraveled past hurt, a present moment of disbelief, my blog is my group therapy.

     

    I also love that I have some faithful group members that willingly share parts of themselves with me and give me feedback so that I know I am being heard.

     

    All it takes is one ear and you can begin to unload mountains of grief even if the ear is online and it changes from day to day.

     

    I want to thank all the faithful ears out there who read, comment and allow me to share my story as my life continues forward, as I learn about my past and how it still affects my nowadays.

     

    A storyteller with out a listener will not work.  We need the listener, we need to know another soul is hearing us, can see us, and understands.

     

    The healer is a caring ear…

     

     

  • Triumph….

    In Carolyn Jessop’s book, “Triumph, she writes about Mind Control.

     

    “I started studying mind control after I escaped.  I truly had had no idea that I’d been in a dangerous cult.  I’d seen the FLDS referred to online as “the largest polygamous cult” in the United States and dismissed that as ridiculous. But as I read and studied more, I realized that’s exactly what I was born into.

     

    One of the books I encountered early on was Robert Lay Lifton’s  “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalitarianism: A Study of Brainwashing in China.  It was a revelation.  Lifton articulated the most common criteria of mind control.  When I considered them in the context of the FLDS, I knew all of them applied.  Just as in a totalitarian system, the FLDS took steps to control our environment, demand purity, claim scientific and moral truth for the cult dogma, destroy personal boundaries, require confession, and insist on the supremacy of the group belief over individual thought.  Language was manipulated to keep everything in black and white.  We were to follow the teachings of our leader and no one else- least of all women, whose submission was essential for polygamy to thrive.

     

    Arbitrary limits are the horizons beyond which we cannot see.  Sometimes they are self-imposed, but in my life the FLDS controlled everything.  For years, I accepted the limits and assumptions without question.

     

    Keep Sweet!  It is a matter of life and death. You have had the teaching regarding what is required in order for us to survive the judgments, sufficient of the Holy Spirit of God that we can be lifted up and then set down when it is over.  That will be the remnant which will go to redeem Zion.  The wicked will be swept off the face of this land.  The wicked are they who come not unto Christ. There is only one people who comes unto Christ, and that is this people under His servant.    FLDS Profet Rulon Jeffs, Sandy Utah, December 4 1992

     

    This religious doctrine created and enforced the arbitrary limits that defined who I was.  With no genuine and sustained exposure to the outside world, I had no way to challenge my indoctrinations, which is how mind control thrives.  I believed I was being protected from the destruction of God and a dangerous, frightening world.  It never occurred to me that this ‘protection’ was in fact destroying me.”

     

    Further on she writes,

     

    “In the ‘keep sweet no matter what’ world of the FLDS forgiveness meant that you accepted what had been done to you, you weren’t angry, and you trusted the perpetrator not to do it again.  I’d no idea there was another way to forgive. But now I am learning it:  by letting go of anger, never trusting my abusers again, and by seeing them for who they truly were, I achieved genuine forgiveness.

     

    In the FLDS, if someone harmed you and you refused to have anything further to do with that person, you were the one committing a crime by holding on to bad feelings.  If you ever complained again, you were the offender.  This twisted logic created a kingdom of sociopaths, because no one was ever held responsible for harm except the victims.  The FLDS notion of forgiveness had been used in such hurtful and damaging ways that it became a way for an abuser to maximize the damage he or she could inflict without any consequences.  It certainly guaranteed that the victim would remain powerless. To forgive in the FLDS seemed to be masochistic.  Now I was wrapping my mind around a new reality:  forgiveness had nothing to do with trusting a person who’d injured you. It involved letting go of the anger you felt and making space for new emotional growth….  I wanted vengeance and vindication, which are driven by a craving for justice. But that craving had trapped me in an out of control cycle: I wouldn’t let go of my victim status until justice was done.

     

    I wanted Merrill to stop rationalizing cruelty as ‘necessary.’ I wanted him and the other wives, especially Barbara, to understand that there was absolutely not justification to their treating me, or anyone else, the way they did.  I wasn’t naïve enough to think that Merrill Jessop would ever apologize to me.  But I wanted some acknowledgement that what had happened to me was not my fault.  That fact that this was never, ever going to happen didn’t make me stop wanting it.  The truth, my insistence of justice in an unjust world was really holding me hostage.  Forgive? Me? I thought forgiveness might make me more vulnerable to my abusers because it might make me appear pliant.

     

    I was beginning to grasp that forgiveness is about breaking the chains that bind you to your captor.  Being in a relationship with someone that is dangerous is self-destructive. Holding on to your anger at someone is self-destructive. The only way to break free is to sever all the emotions you have toward that person.  For so long I had thought that unless justice was done, I could never heal.  But sometimes justice is impossible, so the choice becomes to remain unhealed or to let go of the anger that the lack of justice has aroused.  It came back to exercising the power I had: I couldn’t control whether justice would be done, but I could control my attitude toward the injustice.

     

    It’s been said that desiring revenge is like swallowing poison and waiting for someone to die.  I believe that.  It took discipline and work for me to release all the anger I felt toward Merrill. But nothing I’d ever felt compared to the relief of dumping one bad emotion after another. Go. Goodbye. Gone.  I had no more expectations.  I no longer had to fix anything…. 

     

    Let me be clear about the kind of forgiveness I’m talking about. Sometimes one forgives in order to remain in a relationship with someone she cares about, even if the person has caused her pain and anguish.  It’s not a blanket pardon; it’s the trade-off one is willing to make when preserving the relationship is more important than correcting justice.  Allowing people to be human and make mistakes, even thought those mistakes hurt you, is important.  You don’t want to eliminate that person from your life simply for hurting or disappointing you.  This kind of forgiveness is far more common than the kind I used to change my life.

     

    Forgiveness I practiced enabled me to move ahead and start making my life more about me. It renewed and deepened the strength I needed to deal with the challenges facing me.  Most dramatically it changed my need to remain in Merrill’s family. From that point on, I was no longer emotionally or psychologically engaged with them.  Justice was up to a higher power; my job was to discover a way to protect myself and my children. This meant, of course, that I’d eventually have to leave the FLDS."

                    Carolyn Jessop

  • Caught

    One last section from ‘Sickened’…by Julie Gregory.

     

    Spring thaws the farmhouse, and in front of the mirrors, my breasts begin to form. They get white, tigerlike stretch marks on their sides from a burst of growth.  My hipbones expand like a time-lapsed flower in bloom.  I grow like a girl in puberty. The pod I was stuffed into has perforated breaks in the skin, and I, ever so painfully, am unlacing myself from the tight shell.  I use my fingertips to tug and pull laces loose, unfurling myself from the cocoon I’ve been kept in, folding and falling, jutting the angles of crooked atrophied limbs out of its hold.

     

    I touch my face in the mirror, study it for hours.  I need to see what my face says.  What my expressions look like to others, what my eyes do, whether my face twitches, like hers.

     

    Away from the mirror, I do not register that I am pretty.  I cannot comprehend I have an attractive body.  Or that it holds in its untapped wisdom the potential to heal itself.  My instincts are wound tightly into a ball of fishing line, so tangled and knotted that it will take months of daily, delicate picking to see loops in the line and pull them free.

     

    I curl my body up in front of the mirror; skin and bones, the ribs of my back casting curved shadows over my thin skin.  I study tiny blue veins, fascinated by the light pulse that pushes blood through on its own; an affirmation that I am living.  I do not have to pump the blood myself; it is my heart that keeps me alive.

     

    I look at every part of myself through the mirror, wanting to see what anyone outside my skin would see.  My hands, they look so beautiful, I turn them around and around in the mirror mesmerized.  I look at my face again, soft and childlike, my body lean and lithe.  I step away from the mirror but nothing comes with me. The moment I lose contact with my reflection, I lose touch with what I see there.

     

    My mind is imprinted with images of a sickly reverberation of what I felt like inside and believed to be true of myself for all of my twenty-six years: That I am some bizarre, frail creature, destined to die early.  My mind’s eye sees me as a stooped and wasted, with dark greasy hair, a slaughterhouse horse’s long, sunken face, drooping bottom lip, absent eyes.  Since that is what I believe, that is how I feel. Since that is how I feel, that is how I act. And since that is how I act, that is how the world treats me.

     

    So I step back to the mirror and there she is again, that girl, that strange girl that everyone else sees.  I reach my fingers out to feel her face.  My eyes cannot get over it.  They peer at her suspiciously. Surely this is not me staring back?  Truth in my mind and truth in the mirror are completely opposites. And I am split down the middle, straddling the chasm between two worlds, flitting back and forth between the world I know and the one that exists in the glass.  It will take me three years of pacing between the two before I can finally bring them together.

                    Julie Gregory

     

    My mother had a magical mirror and words would allow her world to remain perfect, sins could be erased with the magical phrase, and it would erase all blemishes that may other wise appear, returning him always to be whiter than snow.

     

    It is horrifying and shocking to see the damage he was able to do, while she continued to stare dreamily into her cracked mirror of dreams.

     

    Behind the wall, lay many broken little girls whose wounds could not be erased so easily.

     

    There are no simple phrases that will return your world upright, restore trust and love and give you back faith.

     

    When we are taught that words can erase deeds, we are left in twisted place in our minds.

     

    In our minds a mirror appears that switches things around, but in reality nothing changes.  Nothing.

     

    It feels like the magic mirror was the release hatch my father needed, the escape door…. Her words allowed him to change magically into a kind man, always.

     

    Her catch and release program allowed another little girl to be caught.