a piece of my soul

So I sit down to blog tonight to process. I’m aware that something in me deeply wants to tell a story, and understand my reaction, and have someone get me, because I need to get me, and the only way I can get me is to share it with someone else.

I think this is a principle fundamental to my recovery, and sorely sorely lacking in the provincial mental health care that I have experienced, generally speaking.

It’s the transformative effect of deeply sharing and deeply witnessing. It is this effect I have witnessed in the circle practices I have been blessed to be exposed to, that I have found most helpful in my recovery from a life time of suicidality. I find that with most of my contact with provincial mental health care, the person is somehow trying to halt, suppress and/or minimize my inner experience, in the effort to “treat” it.

I am a survivor of childhood emotional neglect and abuse, and a member of the 12-step recovery program for Adult Children of Alcoholic and Dysfunctional Families (ACA for short). My fellow ACA members would all most likely have similar reactions to anyone telling them that they “use dramatic language,” and especially someone at the other end of the line at a CRISIS RESPONSE UNIT telling them that this is written in their file.

Because of my experience in ACA, I will venture to generalize here, and say that most survivors of neglect and abuse in childhood have been told all their lives that they are “dramatizing what happened” or somehow made to feel that what they are feeling is inappropriate and inaccurate, and that they are not perceiving reality. I will also venture to say here that his recurring message causes almost as much damage as the trauma itself, if not more.

ACA is a program for people with childhood trauma, abuse and neglect, with literature that speaks of the importance of feeling the feelings we never felt, and how difficult it is for us to a) recognize when we might be in danger, b) reach out for help and c) talk about our feelings. To be told I use dramatic language justifies my fear in doing all three of those things, and re-opens many aspects of pain, fear, self-hatred and hopelessness in me.

I was deeply and adversely triggered by this contact with the CRT, and the idea that every person who works there  is going to see that statement when they open my file. I stayed on the line for nearly a half an hour and thanked the woman at the end of the call, feeling strangely confused; went numb and dissociated until I arrived at an ACA meeting that night. In speaking what had happened, I became very angry, and left for the second part of the meeting.

The ACA welcome speaks about how we, as Adult Children, grew up with the rules of “Don’t talk, don’t trust and don’t feel,” and how the goal of our meetings and our recovery is to break those rules.

Pertinent words from the ACA text book, which have brought me great clarity, validation and healing from experiences like the one I am writing about:

“Every adult child has unexpressed grief, which is usually represented by the symptoms of depression, lethargy, or forms of dissociation. Grief is loss that is stuck beneath denial, willful forgetting, and the fear of being perceived as dramatizing the past. … If we sought help before ACA, our childhood loss was usually diagnosed as depression and commonly treated with ineffective methods.” – Page 199

“Identifying our feelings and talking with others about how we feel is a critical step in breaking the isolation we have lived with for so long.”

“We are seeking a full remembrance of the childhood … With a full remembrance, we revisit the feelings that came with the abuse or hypercritical behavior of the caregivers. We remember the event, and we remember the feelings. By seeking a full remembrance, we break the “don’t remember rule” of the family.”   - Page 34

“…uses dramatic language.” When I hear that, I interpret that my language is not appropriate or accurate to the reality of the situation. I am hurled back into the confusion about what is real, doubting what I am feeling and what is really happening, and the isolation and shame in that confusion that I have felt all my life. To me, this statement invalidates what is real for me, and implies that I am exaggerating my experience to get attention. Actually, I am trying to put words to it, to name it, to make it real so that I can heal from it. I am trying not to isolate, and not to hide or minimize my feelings.

How am I using dramatic language when I say that I am scared and trying to be pro-active about finding myself alone in a big house, and have often felt dissociated and suicidal in this situation? How am I using dramatic language when stating the fact that I haven’t eaten a meal in 3 days since my last therapy session, and have stayed home for several normal parts of my routine, and I have been feeling residual parasympathetic shock that I am just starting to come out of?

Can you handle the word suicidal? How about depression, or sadness. Or here, how about I tell you I’m feeling “off,” and completely leave out all of the above?

Are you going to tell someone who calls in and says they’re feeling suicidal that they are using dramatic language? Oh, yeah, that person isn’t really feeling suicidal; they’re just being dramatic. They’re just wanting attention.

I’m not sure if you could have invalidated me or re-triggered me in a bigger way. It’s taken me 2 years of recovery while not working in order to be able to recognize when I might be in danger, and be able to take action and reach out before I harm myself. Minimizing the drama of that is hazardous. Putting any negative judgement on what I share when I reach out, especially that implies I am exagerating, is also very, very hazardous to my recovery.

I feel like never calling the crisis line again. Several of the professionals I have been in contact with in the provincial system, as well as the beliefs and programs that structure its care (such as CBT, positive psychology, etc.) seem to want to help me to minimize the pain. While I can understand how this is a very logical desire when someone is in pain, it doesn’t lead me to the cut on my leg that the pain is trying to tell me about, and that would take away all the pain if healed well; and most importantly, it directly re-triggers the very thing that damaged my sense of safety, self-worth, stability and identity in the first place.

Who is the Crisis Response Team there for? Because it certainly doesn’t seem like they’re there for survivors of childhood neglect and abuse, or whatever the f#@k I survived that has brought me to this healing path.

Huwa!

what’s your book cover

I’ve been having book covers and titles coming to me. What, if anything, I ever end up doing with them, it seems like part of my therapy to express them. What is your book cover?

Ennea-type Four

Cover via Amazon

From ‘The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram: Nine Faces of the Soul’ by Sandra Maitri, on Ennea-type Four (me):

The Soul’s Journey of Ennea-type Four:

“The key to the development of a Four is the virtue associated with this point, equanimity. [...] Fundamentally, a Four needs to approach her experience without reacting to it, without clinging to it, and without needing it to be right, dramatic, or out of the ordinary. Only then is it possible to respond to life with equilibrium.

Striving for the exceptional, the exciting, and the extreme gradually becomes replaced with an appreciation of calm and of simplicity. The need to be SPECIAL becomes replaced by a recognition of her humanness –how ALIKE she is to others – which in time she sees is in itself extraordinary.

As a Four gets out from under her superego […] A [previously inaccessible] sense of recognition arises of herself [only] when all [possessions, careers and striving of any kind] has been stripped away.”

Psychology / Inner Experience of Ennea-type Four:

For an Ennea-type Four, loss of contact with Being in early childhood is synonymous with the loss of perceiving and experiencing herself as inseparable from and arising out of Being. What results is a profound inner sense of disconnection from the Divine, which is the underlying all-pervasive belief or fixation of this type, described as melancholy on Diagram 2. In order to experience ourselves as disconnected from anything, we must take ourselves to be a separate something that has lost its connection to a separate something else. The apparently inevitable identification with the body, which is the deepest identification a human being rooted in the personality has, leads to the conviction of our fundamental separateness for those of all ennea-types. In other words, because each of our bodies is distinct from everything else, we come to believe that we are all ultimately discrete entities. While fundamental to all personality types, this belief is the foundation upon which all of the resulting assumptions and characteristics rest for Ennea-type fours due to their particular sensitivity to Holy Origin.

Like a boat loosed from its moorings, the inner experience of a Four is of being a separate someone who is cut off from Being and set adrift. There is a poignant inner sense of disconnection and estrangement from others but, more important, from the depths within. This loss of contact with Being is experienced by a Four as having been abandoned, as though Being has withdrawn or withheld Itself. Initially, this is experienced as though her mother or family has pulled away from her, but at root is loss of contact with Being. What is left is a sense of lack and of lostness, which feels as though the very substance of herself were missing. There is a great longing to reconnect, to become anchored again in the connection that has been lost.

Fours are dramatic, emotive, romantic, and seem to suffer more than the other types. There is often a tragic quality about Fours, arising from an inner hopelessness about ever being truly content. It is as though they are eternally pining for a lost connection that has been missing as long as they have been alive, and the inner grief seems inconsolable and forever unchangeable. In some Fours, this melancholy is obvious, while other Fours appear very upbeat and exuberant. The zeal behind such a Four’s efforts to present herself as buoyant and optimistic, however, belies the despair underneath this façade.

Fours want to be seen as unique, original, aesthetic, and creative; and being one of the image types –those on either side of and including Ennea-type Three—present themselves in this way. They value their refined taste and sensitivity, which they usually feel is deeper and more profound than that of others. While they often seem superior and standoffish, inwardly they feel socially insecure, afraid of not being loved and included. They tend to feel alone and abandoned, estranged and not really reachable by others.

Related articles

On Love: An Excerpt from Sandra Maitri [innerlight]

way of council

Last Wednesday, i began a series of about 10 weeks of therapy every week, alternating between group and individual sessions.

I feel very lucky; not many people get this experience here, without paying for it themselves.

So, I have moved out from my Mom’s place, replaced my car, and begun this intensive period of therapy. I am beyond broke, currently living off what little I’d saved for my training in Systemic Family Constellations, which also begins this month. ‘Hoping to sell my car and a couple of other random items in the next week or so.

My first therapy session in these series was a clearing with my regular therapist, using the technique of Way of Council, with the assistance of another therapist. Both are also trained in Heart Centred Hypnotherapy, and this was also part of the session.

These are the notes the Way of Council therapist made on the session, and I wanted to put an image to them, do something with them other than have them on a lined piece of scrap paper lying around.

Next week, I begin the group therapy, which is a Way of Council group, for patients of my therapist only.

nursing my sanity

artist unknown

when i look at myself in the mirror, I frequently experience feeling suddenly exposed by my appearance. i have been out in the world looking like that, and no one said anything?

when i express myself, i frequently experience feeling suddenly mortified by what I have written or said. i shared that? what was i thinking?

I experience catastrophic self-doubt, humiliation, mortification.

it’s as if everyone can see right through the lie in me, what i am unknowingly trying to hide.

everyone knows but me, until the retrospect and i am aghast.

don’t look in the mirror,

and don’t present. just be.

that is my sanity.

my transparency & humility with all of this,

my acceptance of more than one Self and the fact that they disagree with, and contradict, each other sometimes,

my acceptance of the fact that i am not consistent and coherent –

that, is even more my sanity.

it’s so much more than vanity and being hard on myself; it’s a fluctuating sense of identity and confidence, that changes so drastically and frequently that i cannot keep up.

i can only accept this reality and live transparently with it.
view it with curiosity and share the adventure.

from a healing place

by innerlight

on love: an excerpt from Sandra Maitri

The Enneagram figure or diagram. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Sandra Maitri’s The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram: 9 Faces of the Soul, I found this stunning description of love; but it does require a small amount of pre-amble.

In the work of the Enneagrams, the term Holy Idea refers to an experience of reality; it has NOTHING to do with religion. Another way of describing the concept of the Holy Idea, in my own words, might be ‘Universal Human Experience of Reality’. There are 9 of them, which correspond with the 9 points of the Enneagram, which represent 9 dimensions / patterns of human experience.

While many online descriptions of the Enneagram types read much like horoscopes or astrological descriptions of personality, Maitri’s book describes the dynamics of the inner psyches and life patterns of each type, with specific reference not only to the personality, which is described by Maitri as being the outer-most level of consciousness, but also to the Soul and the Spirit.

In the chapter on the 9th point, this description of the Holy Idea of Holy Love (that is how it is talked about in the book) is quoted by Maitri from her colleague A.H. Almaas:

“Holy Love is a clear and distinct quality of the very substance and consciousness of each essential aspect. Holy Love is seen in the positive, uplifting, and blissful affect and effect of each aspect. It is the sweetness and softness in Love. It is the lightness and playfulness in Joy. It is the preciousness and the exquisiteness of Intelligence and Brilliancy. It is the purity and the confidence of Will. It is the aliveness, excitement, and glamour of the Red or Strength aspect. It is the mysteriousness and silkiness in the Black or Peace aspect. It is the wholeness and integrity in the Pearl or Personal Essence. It is the freshness and the newness of Space. It is the depth, the deep warmth, and the satisfying realness of Truth.”

Maitri goes on,

“Holy Love is the perception that our essential nature, regardless of which of its qualities is forefront at any given time, is innately beautiful and that the experience of it is always a positive experience. …When we experience Being directly, without the filter of our conceptual mind, the effect it has upon us is of a sense of meaning, of value, of benefit, of fulfillment. Our souls relax, our hearts open, and we experience a sense of well-being in such moments. We are responding to the inherent characteristic of reality that Holy Love describes — its pure positivity.”