Category Archives: Uncategorized

Good lord

Whoosh!  The very fact that I was willing to release that stinky-ass poem to the world should dispel any misgivings I have that I am still worried what other people might think of my self-expressions.  

Unfinished

Tonight

I took three great breaths

conjured liquid darkness

set fire to the portside sinew

 

Tonight 

all waters were stilled 

a promise was kept;

no soul will drown tonight.

 

and the clumsy thunder of

my dancing feet 

tips continents off their shelves and

puts the earth to right again

 

Let all who dwell here raise our heads

and cast our eyes upon the proving moon:

We have not lost the sun.

The long fall through the middle

What to do, while cartwheeling through space?

I note the flashes of ground below as I spin, measure geography and points of entry, planning a landing spot as if I had aileron and rudder with which to choose.  Elaborate mapping, as if I had more control than just continuing to breathe and keep eyes wide.  Tears fall upward, and the occasional crash into cliffside or boulder, the whip of branches across my face, are welcome: I am grateful for that violent sense of self in unhelpful space.

She has released me, her face another flash of landscape, concern and love a series of snapshots that bring comfort and fresh grief.  I am alone again, in between; motherless, awake, alive, unsure.  I am no longer what I was, am not yet what I will be, and in between, this long, long fall, in which I am all, and nothing.

 

Objects fly through the air, stars wheel through the universe. All fall eventually. If we become obsessed with definitively mastering the decline, we are lost. If we achieve peace within the intervals of rising and falling, we find grace.

(Arthur Chandler, On the Symbolism of Juggling: The Moral and Aesthetic Implications of the Mastery of Falling Objects. http://www.juggling.org/papers/symbolism/)

 

Silence surrounds

Musee des Beaux Arts  –WH Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening
a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Oh, fuck you

Your Type Four EnneaThoughtsm for April 23rd—

A major feature of your personality is the tendency to long for a rescuer who will understand you and take away your loneliness. Watch for this in yourself today. (Personality Types, 153)

 

Dr. GoodLove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Process Whereby Emotions are Passed on or Displaced from One Person to Another

So, this happened.  I was struggling, trying to understand the feelings of fear that had been generated by my projections upon her.  She asked me to try to get grounded, centered.  When I stilled myself, and quieted a bit, I could feel her. I was thinking about something else, then felt this undeniable pressure, heat, not painful heat but cool and hot at the same time, a pure stream of mentholated energy coming in from the left side and wrapping around me, penetrating my chest, as real as the clothes on my back, as real as her sitting across from me.  Pressure, color, warmth, tangible substance, surrounding and filling my core, and I could feel the fire in me rise up to meet it. 

I am a scientist by training.  I believe in evidence, quantification, experience; concrete concepts yielding repeatable results.  I grudgingly allow for the world beyond those things because my experiences, unquantifiable and outside the reach of proof, have illuminated that world.  But I still look with a narrowed gaze at the phenomena of the heart, of the soul; always ready to question, to doubt.  It almost offends me, the presence of that world, because I am always challenged by it, dared by it to engage and embrace it.  And I resist, because what kind of scientist would I be if I didn’t?

But, all that said, I will sign my name to this: that feeling was real, it came to me unbidden, made its way in before I knew it was coming, and it grew.  And I could touch it with my own heart.  And I knew it came from her. Not because she is the magical therapy fairy, but because she is a human being who can gather and project her energy, and whether she was doing it intentionally at that moment or not (and I won’t presume, but I’d place a bet), it was her.  

(Inner Scientist: that’s probably just a useful delusion, but hey, it’s been a rough year, we’ll let her have it.)  

(Just occurred to me that it’s entirely possible that the Inner Scientist is actually the Inner Fear Person with a diploma.  But god, don’t tell her that, it’d kill her.)

I am not in love with my therapist, nor obsessed with her, or overly dependent, or infatuated, or distracted by her.  I do not wish to be her lover, her friend, or her family (I’m occasionally her child, but most of the time that’s on purpose.)  But in this moment in my life I love her as deeply as I have ever loved anyone, albeit in a very specific way.  I adore her.  I think she’s beautiful.  When she enters a room I get a ridiculous case of the puppy wag. I think she hung the fucking moon.  And it doesn’t embarrass me to admit it, because I know its genesis, and am conscious in its creation.

I am in the midst of transference: sweet, terrifying, fascinating, painful, and miraculously healing.  I have entered, knowingly and willingly, into a relationship of absolute trust with another human being.  And by absolute trust, I don’t mean that I always interact with her in a trusting way (kinda one of the reasons I’m there), but that she has established, through her behavior, words, and most importantly her energetic and emotional attunement (oh yeah, get on board, we’re going full lingo on this one), that she can be trusted. Not perfect–just completely worthy of trust.  And the times that I have opened myself to her, she has met me with integrity and kindness, and, yes, love.  And those times have been among the most transformative of my life.  There are several moments of deep healing in our time together that I will never forget, moments which left me profoundly relaxed and securely rooted, with a soaring heart.  Moments which had minimal active cognitive content, other than being able to process the event and understand its place in my healing.  Moments which have done more to change my perspective than years of talking, thinking, struggling.  

I have been changed, I have seen and felt new ways of being, I’ve glimpsed a new land. It’s not mine yet, I know nothing of its geography, but I know it exists. I will let it sit, and see what happens six months from now, see if I can find a way to keep it, to continue to engage with it outside.  If I keep it active in my heart, I may be able to look back and confirm that it was real, so the scientist in me might be satisfied, too.

And again, the flush of fear, knowing that there is no way for this all to resolve and internalize before our time is finished.  I’m scared, not just by the impending pain, but by the possibility that, if we don’t manage it properly, I might be damaged by cutting things off in the middle of this transference, before its resolved, before I have taken ownership of my feelings.  I have a creeping sense of danger that I don’t want to ignore.  As much as I want to pretend it’s not happening, I can’t; it’s time for us to start negotiating the end.

Word of the Day

Sehnsucht

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Sehnsucht (disambiguation).

Sehnsucht (German pronunciation: [ˈzeːnzʊxt]) is a German noun translated as “longing”, “yearning”, or “craving”,[1] or in a wider sense a type of “intensely missing”. However, Sehnsucht is difficult to translate adequately and describes a deep emotional state. Its meaning is somewhat similar to the Portuguese word, saudade, or the Romanian word dor. Sehnsucht is a compound word, originating from an ardent longing or yearning (das Sehnen) and addiction (die Sucht). However, these words do not adequately encapsulate the full meaning of their resulting compound, even when considered together.[2]

Sehnsucht represents thoughts and feelings about all facets of life that are unfinished or imperfect, paired with a yearning for ideal alternative experiences. It has been referred to as “life’s longings”; or an individual’s search for happiness while coping with the reality of unattainable wishes.[3] Such feelings are usually profound, and tend to be accompanied by both positive and negative feelings. This produces what has often been described as an ambiguous emotional occurrence.

Notes on a Goat

I read an interesting post the other day, by a therapist named Martha Crawford. (What A Shrink Thinks, Read more of this post)

The post was about the scapegoat and his role in the family, community, and workplace.  She wrote in part about her experience with a co-worker, whom she called The Angriest Social Worker in the World. This woman was the conduit for all the frustration, anger, judgement and pain generated by the bureaucratic inhumanity of the institution; she would vent and complain and vibrate with barely repressed hostility through their meetings, while the rest of the group maintained relative equanimity and reasonable expectations.  

Eventually the woman burned out and was gone.  It was assumed that peace would reign with her departure.  But instead, a general dissatisfaction and “crankiness” arose among all the remaining clinicians, especially within the author, until she and two of her colleagues evolved into The Three Angriest Social Workers in the World.  

Her point was that every system needs a goat (or goats?): families, workplaces, communities.  Where none exists, or when one departs, some member of the group will be “chosen” as the next vessel for the dysfunction of the collective.

I know I am the goat of my family, the black sheep, the one who carries the shame and guilt and provides the rock bottom against which the others measure themselves.  That is a role I assumed.  It’s not my only role, but it’s one that has followed me throughout my life. 

The post got me to thinking:  Where else have I replicated that family role?

After my parents’ divorce, absorbing all that rage and sadness, I undertook my first (but not last) turn as troublemaker in school, and became a fighter, protector, and bully.  More shame and guilt, some of which I still carry today. 

Continuing, at age 11-12, I “appointed” myself one of those whose job it was to absorb the horrors of the Holocaust, taken on as it caused me to attempt to make moral sense of the world. I thought I was exposed to it because I was meant to be one of those who carried the guilt for it (not even Catholic, how did I pick this shit up?) and that I had to learn about it because that was how it could be set to right.  I wanted to join the Israeli army and protect Jews everywhere.  I became more adept at guilt and shame, and was plagued for years by horrific nightmares until I was able to work it out and release some of that burden.

I was Brenda’s vessel for dysfunction; I believe my presence in part enabled her to interact in healthy and constructive way with her other students.  As time went on, and my usefulness waned, I became the rageful rebel, was cut off like the poisoned limb I was, and eventually disappeared.

In both of my “high-impact” jobs, I was the goat. System-appointed, and self-appointed.  In both, I started out as a nobody, under incompetent rule.  I overthrew the incompetent ruler with the assistance of a semi-powerful mentor/champion, who encouraged my battle to improve the workplace, but was ultimately too weak and/or self-preserving to support me, and abandoned me (dad). As the dysfunction of the workplace escalated and became toxic, I was the point-person for everyone’s venting: respected, a leader, trying to put things to right, but also an absorber and the voice of the disaffected, angry, suffering “family”. The peacemaker, the intermediary between the “kids” and the “parents”. 

As the dysfunction reached a peak, the necessary conversion happened: new rulers asserted the rules, and the family receded into a more passive, accepting, functional place, adapting to the new realities; I, on the other hand, had collected all of the pain and anger and allowed it to overtake me.  I couldn’t let go of what I still witnessed and couldn’t accept, I couldn’t participate in it.  I lost touch with my rational, self-protecting parts, and became this walking talking font of rage and judgement. Most everyone turned away from me.  I became the problem.  Seeing the portents of my demise, I was too consumed with the emotional burden of my role to do anything sensible to prevent it.  In fact, at that point it was probably desired.  I was eventually excised, and the system continued as before.

So how do I break that chain?  How do I stop absorbing, and how do I quiet my mind and heart enough to not rage against authority; to not speak the truth as I see it, unfiltered; to raise my own self-preservation and well-being above that of the system?  Why does it feel like my own survival depends on fixing the problems in the group, on resisting the ones in power who are responsible?