The Dark Side of the Coin

I am so incredibly blessed. I have two sons and two daughters, and I have relished my role as mother even more than I thought possible.

My oldest daughter is twenty-five, and married with a baby of her own. She is the one who taught me about the three levels of separation.

First, she went off to college. Driving away without her felt like the hardest thing anyone should ever have to do.

Then, after her third year of college, she became too busy to come “home” for the summer. She took summer courses and worked near school. I cried as we planned a “family vacation” without her, for the first time.

And finally, that third level of separation—when she graduated from college and got her first real apartment, and I knew she’d never live with us again. That piercing mix of grief and joy... telling myself, she is exactly where she’s meant to be while concurrently thinking, how can I exist without her?
But I did exist. At first, that's all it seemed to be—existing. In time, I made her joy mine, and when that was too hard, I smiled through the tears.

My younger son finished his third year of college this month. He came home for about a week—most of which he spent with friends.
He has an internship, near his school, so for the first time, he’s not “off” for the summer.
He left last night.
Level two, achieved.

And at the same time, we have "level three" with my older son.
Last May, he graduated from college. He found a job about an hour from our house. For the last year, he's lived here with us—a brief reprieve for his father and me.
Every night, he called me as he left work, asking what was for dinner as he started his commute.
He bought a car of his own, and then saved money so he could get an apartment, closer to work.
He and his girlfriend have been looking at apartments since early April.
Last night, he slept in “his” room for the last time.

When I went downstairs to turn off the lights, last night, I moved through echoes of the day we moved into this house.
How can that be eighteen years ago?
My husband and me and three little kids, seven, five and three years old.

It was such a long day, with the whole move taking place in a cold November rain.
My daughter was so excited to have her own bathroom. (Of course, we didn’t know that was temporary, at the time. Her little sister wouldn’t come along for another year.)
My older son chose his bedroom because he liked the windows. I can still see his big dark eyes as he looked over the room that would be his and his alone.
My younger son was just thrilled to be sleeping in a big-boy bed for the first time.

Another wave of memories washed through eighteen years in this house. I relived all the times I tucked my little ones into bed . The bedtime stories. The tears. The irritation when they didn’t stay in their beds. The warm compassion I felt when one of them crawled into our bed after a bad dream.

This morning, my sons’ rooms feel very empty. While their unmade beds scream out that they were just there
just there
such a short time ago, a million things have shifted in irrevocable ways. Long gone is the dinosaur wallpaper that lined each of their bedrooms—one trimmed in blue and the other in green. Bath toys and baby shampoo have been traded for deodorant and shaving cream. The smudges and hand prints have been washed away along with the laughter and cries of “MOM!” from the top of the stairs.

Today, I sift through it all, not yet able to smile through the tears.  I know things are exactly right—that my kids are thriving in their lives. But, before I can really move into that reality, I have to allow myself to feel this moment, painful as it is. I can’t move on until I’ve thoroughly appreciated the masterpieces that have appeared on the canvases of my children’s lives—appeared despite a lot of mistakes… coaxed out with enough love to make up for all that was lacking.

And, I know my baby has only one year of high school left and will begin her journey away so very soon. And, I know I know the day will come when I will get used to the quieter house.
But not yet.

Grief and joy are two sides of the mom-penny, flipped high in the air the day I first found out I was going to be a mom. Ever since, I've had no choice but to shift with that twisting coin. As it turns, I will eventually come to comfort. I will learn to revel in the time I am allowed to share with my children, and in the unwavering knowing of how amazing they are.

But right now, I'm in the shadow of the underside of that coin. Right now, there is loss.

Every transition opens space for something else—I believe that—but I am excruciatingly aware of how hard it is, how empty it feels, when that space first appears.

And today, I miss my boys.
I just miss my sweet little boys.

Never-Ending Life

Do the leaves that lie broken in a falling snow know that Spring will follow?

To me, the shift from night to day and back again, the phases of the moon, and the continuous cycle of seasons are like a promise of what awaits us, beyond this world. Like the buds on a new branch, we see only the snow, the spring, and the leaves that we bring forth. We watch as our creations grow and change, their full color emerging and ultimately fading, and then that for which we've struggled drops away... turns to dust.

Staff of Life                        ~Shen 11-18-11

Writing Exercise Submissions: A Future Free of Fear

The writing exercise I posted on Sunday came from Day Three of the Twenty-one Day Consciousness Cleanse. I've been working through this book for about a week, now.

When I was telling someone about the book, recently, she asked , jokingly, if it was like the Twenty-one Day Colon Cleanse.

I replied, “Yes, but without the diarrhea.”

Actually, it wouldn’t be hard to compare the two concepts. In both instances, the idea is to clean out the old in order to more easily absorb what’s coming in. Debbie Ford describes the purpose of the consciousness cleanse as emptying the vessel we bring to God. Spirit can only fill the space we bring. If we only have a thimble-sized gap to fill, that’s all the God we get. Purging the resentments and unresolved conflicts and emotions inside us is the way to create that space.

All of the old emotions and experiences we have refused to acknowledge and work through are debris which fill up the container we each carry with us. By looking at our feelings – identifying them, allowing them, and then turning them over to our higher power to hold for us – we not only gain the wisdom and lessons of each experience, we also make more room for God and connection in our lives.

The writing exercise was:

Write a short story about your life free from the toxicity of your past. Allow yourself to dream an easy, carefree future filled with fun and frolic. Be creative as you describe you walk, your sense of well-being, and your deep gratitude for life. Give yourself the gift of dreaming a new future.

I received one submission, this week, from Gail at “Know Your Its”

Here is Gail’s entry:

As I look back over my life I can honestly say that each experience is part of the fabric of my design. For years I tried to deny parts of my tapestry, going to great lengths to rid myself of myself. Over time I came to realize that each square of my life's tapestry has purpose, meaning, and value despite its, at times, harsh, very harsh truth. I no longer see any of my past as toxic because to do so would mean I am toxic and I am not. In order to love ALL of myself I had to accept my past as part of me, not all of me, but part. Blended with so many other life-giving experiences. Today, I can honestly say I have arrived. I am at a time in my life where I am preserving all of my world as it is - I have no great goals or projects to complete. That is not to say that I am not open to learning new things and experiencing more of life, but rather I am content in my place,my space, my world which includes all of my past, all of me. I have surrendered to my truth, embraced my past, and I am in charge now, not it. There is nothing to run from or hide from or deny - and no desire to separate myself from myself. I am whole. Amen.

Thank you Gail! I can see the hope and peace of your future. I know you are already finding it, in the present. I especially love the line "trying to rid myself of myself". That's a great way to describe the impossible task we set out for ourselves when we deny our experiences and emotions.

Here is what I wrote:

My past is a gift. Every experience I’ve had has made me who I am, right now, and I feel like a gift: to the world; to God; to those I love; and to myself.

I’m a gift waiting to be opened by those people I’ve yet to know – and they are gifts to me. Knowing this, I can walk confidently into new relationships, waiting to see what we bring to each other. Every relationship will bring me something. Those that bring love enrich my spirit. Those that bring conflict teach me about myself and the nature of all things. Those that bring me both are the greatest teachers of all.

I’ve expressed, acknowledged and walked through all of the old experiences and feelings. I’ve surrendered to them and then surrendered them to God. In so doing, I’ve gained the wisdom I was meant to gain and now I have room for so much more to come my way. Because I no longer judge fear as cowardly, tears as childish or anger as wrong, I can feel each emotion as it comes up. Because there is nothing left inside to be triggered, I am not overwhelmed by my feelings and pass through them easily, confident that I will come out the other side with more understanding and new growth. Because I allow myself to know sadness, fear and anger I can easily find the other side of each of these emotions – Joy, peace, and gratitude.

There is so much room inside me, that I am open to each experience in a new way. I am present to the moment, taking in the sights and smells and other physical sensations right along with the feelings they bring with them. The more connected I am to life experiences, the more connected I feel to who I really am. My true nature - the spiritual being inside this body – is consistently awake and connected to the great power of the universe.

*****

Co-Consciousness and Integration: New Thoughts

It's Day Two of the Consciousness Cleanse. I did my morning routine and read the exercises, which I will do this afternoon. For anyone who’s been in a twelve-step program, you can understand the Day Two exercises as a mini-fourth-step. My only concern with this is that I need to be able to do it in a reasonable amount of time. My fourth step took months. Debbie Ford suggests thirty minutes for the exercises. I’m going to try for an hour and make myself give up the thoroughness that I am sometimes obsessive about. (sometimes?)

I’m excited to be doing this process, and already feel shifts taking place inside me, just from reading the book and remembering to connect first thing in the morning. That said, I have something else, which is pressing on my mind.

I’m talking about the eight-year-old.

In my obsessive way, I've been exploring co-consciousness and integration for the last several weeks. I have been looking all around the internet and re-reading old message board comments I remembered seeing years ago, and writing long journal entries about these concepts.

This morning, I'm a guest blogger at author/therapist/blogger Mary Armstrong website. an excerpt from one of my blogs about the eight-year-old, on her website. The post is about the concepts of co-consciousness and integration.

Over the past few years, I’ve gradually been integrating lost pieces of myself, into the whole which I think of as “me”. This is not an easy process. It’s stressful and confusing, time-consuming and disorienting. It’s also well worth it. To have access to these parts-of-self which were previously closed off to me, is amazing. To be able to function from a place of wholeness instead of from only a fraction of who I really am, brings me a kind of peace I didn’t know was possible. It is allowing me to be more active and less reactive.

In any given situation, our actions and reactions are not only based on the current circumstances. In an instant, without effort, our minds take in our situation, categorize it based on past experiences, and then offer possible courses of action. If this didin't happen, each experience would stand alone, there would be no connection between what happened yesterday and what's happening today. It's necessary for us to exist in a time-line to have stored memories and use them in our decisions about what to do now.

For the most part, we aren’t aware of the process. In fact, it takes a great deal of effort to become conscious of this process, and even more effort to look at the suggested courses of action before moving into action. Moving forward without making a conscious decision is living reactively. Looking conwsciously at the situation and then deciding whether the messages from the past are warranted or should be ignored and then moving forward is living actively.

The more emotioanally charged your past situations are, the stronger your mind’s "suggestions" of action will be when they are triggered. If your mind categorizes your current situation as the same as something traumatic from your past, the “suggested” course of action may feel more like a demand.

For instance, if you are aware that there is something extremely hot in front of you, your mind is going to say, “don’t touch that.” If you move closer to the fire, your mind may begin screaming at you to move away. It may take a great deal of will and self-talk to override this message. If it was necessary to touch the flame – say to rescue someone else, or to keep something important from burning – you could override the message, but it would cause you a great deal of inner turmoil.

If you’ve experienced trauma, there may be unusual links inside you which trigger this same kind of turmoil. Personally, I am uncomfortable thinking of sunflowers, or dolls with eyes that open and close, and I panic if I think of something covering my face. (I actually drew in a deep breath just writing that sentance.) These may seem irrational on the surface, but because my mind has linked them to danger, it feels the same as the 'don’t touch it – it’s hot' message.

Before I began integration, I stayed in one aspect of myself most of the time. This aspect was unaware of a lot of the trauma and the links my mind had set up. I knew I didn’t like dolls or sunflowers or having my face covered, but I didn’t know why.

Because denying my past was a survival strategy I'd become used to, I didn’t look too closely at the why. I sometimes wondered about it, but the memories were not available to me and I moved quickly into another strategies. It is not possible to override the messages without looking at them closely, and that seemed impossible, so instead I would go into panic-mode. It left me feeling out-of-control, as if the world and my experiences had power over me and I had no power of my own.

As I’ve integrated the pieces of me which carried the memories attached to sunflowers and dolls and the hand over my face, I understand where the messages are coming from, I’m not afraid to look at them, and I can take that moment to decide how reactive I need to be. I calm myself down. I think, This isn’t really hot, at all. Eventually, I am able to put my finger right on that imaginary flame, and when I do I find that it can’t burn me, anymore.

So integration is the answer. Right? Well... it has been the answer that's worked for me, thus far, but then, we come to the eight-year-old.

I’ve lost count of how many pieces of my past have integrated into the person I think of as me. I thought I understood what integration looked like, for me. Although each one has been different, there were certain givens I’d come to expect.

The eight-year-old has been different from the beginning. She is much more complex; more complete. The other parts I’ve integrated were connected to specific memories, or specific ages. Despite her name, the eight-year-old is really not just eight. She seems to be made up of all the ages up until eight.

I think she is who I was before I became “me”. I’ve been trying to integrate her into me, when in reality I may have to integrate into her… and I’m not even sure what the distinction is. It feels very different in my head, but when I try to explain it, it doesn't sound different at all.

I feel a bit like I’m the infecting virus.
She seems to be the one who was here first… doesn’t that make her more worthy than me?

The things which are triggering for her are the exact things I still can’t look at closely, and consequently the messages they bring up for me are very hard to override. When she is angry, I feel angry and the anger doesn’t easily subside even when I know it is about something from the past and not about what is happening right now.

When she feels slighted, I feel an intense sense of failure but at the same time, I feel very defiant. Her message may be, I need. Mine is, I have to meet that need but I don’t want to.

I know this eight-year-old part and I have to be completely open with each other if we are ever to get past these old trauma-based triggers - and I'm not the only defiant one. She is fighting this as much as I am, even though she is pretending that it's all my fault.

I haven’t really been discussing my obsession with co-consciousness versus integration with my therapist, until today. It may seem like a surprising oversight. So much other stuff is going on and I send her so many emails but sometimes I just don’t seem to get the right pieces out there and she will say, in the kindest way possible, "you should have brought this up sooner." Unfortunately  I don't always know what is most important, and that’s probably because I am reacting to the messages being triggered by current situations.

You see why I need a consciousness cleanse?
I see that I’ve been reconsidering my position on co-consciousness, but I am aware that I am doing it out of fear – which is exactly what I’ve seen in others. I’ve felt as if integration was the more functional choice and avoiding it in favor of some kind of agreement between parts-of-self was going to be confusing and distracting. It’s interesting, to me, that now that it feels like I am the one who may be lost in the mix, I am much less willing to move into a full integration. And this feeling - this fear of being lost - is not based in reality because as I've gone through this process nothing has been lost!

The idea that she is the "real me" is bringing up a lot of stuff from the past, and so I am aware I am being reactive in not moving forward with integration. Logically, I understand that we are both real. I know that we need each other and that we are truly two sides of the same coin.

Emotionally, I feel as if my sense of being real or valid is being threatened, and this is something that's come up again and again, in therapy. Although I've worked with old messages of "I'm not real" or "I'm not important" quite a lot, it still seems to be screaming in my head, right now.

So, I am trying to override this particular “don’t touch-it's hot” message. I’m trying to get myself to walk into the fire, and accept integration with the eight-year-old, whatever that takes. I am also allowing myself to hold back until I feel more comfortable. I've had many years of separateness. I am still here, and so is the eight-year-old. I can give it time to unfold.

Holding back rather than pushing my way through is a huge step for me. It shows that I am looking closely at what's happening and so when I do proceed it will be actively and not reactively. Patience is what I need right now - for myself, for the eight-year-old - for the “us” which I'm hoping will one day simply be me.

*****

Being: Part One

For some time, I’ve been trying to gain a deeper understanding of the concept of “Being, not doing”. When I started writing about it, this morning, I realized I have more thoughts on this topic than one post can hold. So, without knowing exactly what part two will look like, I decided to call this part one.

At my CoDA meeting last night, we read Mary R’s story in the Blue Book. Mary R is apparently one of the founders of the CoDA organization. While the concept of codependency had been around for a few years, she and her husband were instrumental in turning the idea into a twelve-step program.

After we read the story, the floor was open for sharing. Before anyone could begin, a fairly new member said, “I have a question. What does she mean by ‘needlessness’?”

In the story, Mary R wrote that needlessness was one of her character defects. She said that this is what prevented her from sincerely asking God to help her with her seventh step.

I looked around the room, and no one seemed ready to answer the newcomer's question, so I gave it a shot. “What I got out of it is, sometimes we deny that we have needs. I think she was saying that she was unable to acknowledge her needs and unwilling to ask for help meeting those needs. Because she thought she was supposed to be without needs, she didn’t even feel as if she could as God for help.”

I looked around, taking in the affirming nods, and felt good about my answer. Saying it aloud had the extra advantage of clarifying the concept in my own mind.

We all have needs. No one can meet all their needs. Yes, we are adults and we are supposed to be able to take care of ourselves, but that doesn’t mean we never need any help.

My father is an excellent example of someone who struggles with needlessness. He is an old man, closer to ninety than eighty. He had a bad fall a year or so ago which has left him with chronic pain and a great deal of instability when he’s on his feet. One need he has, which he refuses to recognize, is the need for help when he’s walking. He will not use a cane, and often refuses the offer of a steadying hand. He is so certain that he is not supposed to need anything  that he would risk another fall rather than accept help.  

Maybe you're thinking, Sure, he needs help. He's an old man. But not me...

Consider what you would do if you were suddenly stricken with an appendicitis. I’m fairly certain you would have to accept the help of a good surgeon as well as nurses, orderlies, and other hospital staff. There's proof that you sometimes have needs.

But what about when there's no crises? Shouldn’t I be able to meet my own needs, then?

I believe the anser to that question is no. We are able to take care of ourselves in many ways, but refusing to consider asking for help in meeting our needs is unhealthy and self-defeating. We are not alone on this planet and there's no reason to behave as if we are.

Then why do we do it? Why is is such a common thing in our society to think we have to do everything ourselves?

Denying our needs is something we were taught. If you were told not to cry or chastised for expressing anger, you were being taught to deny your need to feel and process emotions. If you were forced to do things you didn’t want to do, you were being taught to deny your need for autonomy. If good eating and sleeping habits were not modeled by your parents, you were taught to deny your own most basic needs. If positive attention and touch were replaced by neglect or abuse, you were taught to deny your need for affection, physical contact, praise, and affirmation.

Thinking about this, last night, I realized that I carry needlessness to an extreme. I have a tendency to look at even basic needs like exercise, food and sleep as optional. They're not! Is there anything more absurd? I don't even allow ME to meet my needs. 

I have to remind myself constantly that it’s okay to take time for myself, that hunger and fatigue are not feelings I should ignore, that pain is neither a reason to panic nor to dissociate from my life. Physical and mental discomfort are clues that I have a need waiting to be met. It’s an opportunity for self-care and sometimes self-care includes reaching out to God or other people for help.

But, we don't want to completely rely on others, right? When is it okay to ask for help?

My therapist has a “three strike rule”. This means when I suddenly discover an obstacle in my path –  an emotional block, an upcoming event, an unexpected twist in my life-path – I am to make three attempts to solve the problem myself. I may try to walk around it, push it out of the way, and step over it. If none of those things work, it’s time to determine what kind of help I need. Is it something I can let go, and allow God to handle? Or, do I need to call a therapist, sponsor, or friend?

Acknowledging my needs is an important step in learning to BE. Ignoring my needs leads to dissociating from my life. Instead, I choose to move forward consciously, taking time for myself as needed, happily offering a hand to others when they ask, and accepting support of all kinds,  when that's what I need.