Playful Perspectives

The Process September 23, 2011

This is the process as far as I understand it, and I’m not sure that I do have real answers.

As much as I could pretend everything was ok, because from the outside, it really does look like everything is ok; there was always this underlying low grade pain.  A low energy, that makes doing things particularly at home an incredible effort.  It feels like something is wrong.  That the numbers don’t add up.  Its even more difficult to believe when perhaps in my outside world, I appear strong, happy, alive and excited about life.  In fact in connection I really do feel like that and it is genuine aliveness.  However when I retreat back to my home, to the monotony of the daily dross, a sadness or urghhh feeling comes over me.  It may take a few days or a few weeks even, but I will go to that place.  The voices say “what is wrong with you?”  ”can’t you enjoy what you’ve got” “you are so much luckier than the majority of people living in this world”  ”shut up and be grateful.”

The other part of this is that I had disassociated myself from any of the pain about those teenage years.  That is not to say that I haven’t dug into it before, or gone back and done work on other bits of it.  The rapes though had rather carefully or skillfully been avoided, to the extent that I thought they had been dealt with.  So they were a bit like a blind spot.  It might be staring everyone else in the face, if they know about that trauma, but to me perhaps I had so disassociated myself from them that they were dismissed as a cause for why I might have this low disconnected energy.

I also think that the idea of forgiveness is quite pertinent here.  I had created a story of forgiveness for all the parties involved.  Somehow I naturally saw events in the scheme of something bigger, but having put that story of forgiveness on top of the actual feelings about it, I had perhaps created a psychological barrier to it or a mask or a veil.  Rage and anger, at the vile abuse of events so awful, is the appropriate response.  And actually, either side of the rapes, were situations that warranted rage and anger.   We wonder about the recent rioting across Britain, but how many parents are absent?  How many parents are even aware that they are absent? Even if they are around, they may not be present?  How painful is it for young people to have no one there for them?  And what happens as a result of this?

It was as much a painful leap to shift from the old story, the forgiveness story to the anger.  It was a huge emotional leap.  I know that that sounds strange and almost incomprehensible.  It is so easy to feel anger at many situations in life, and yet to not feel any for your own.   In my old story, I was safe, I had survived.  When something like that happens to you, you don’t really have anywhere to go… or at least I didn’t.  No where safe.  My best friend knew about it, but she was 13 too, I am truly grateful that she was there for me but she and I didn’t have the skills necessary for dealing with it…  so either because of shame, fear, guilt, you learn a strategy for keeping it inside, or at least from potentially threatening people.  Ironically I really don’t like secrets…  So I didn’t keep it as a secret, I could talk about it later, as something that happened.  But no real association with it.

So the process I went through last week involved, making that leap to anger.  Quite simply that.  I think.  They say that depression is repressed anger.  And so the release, which will have to be practiced, allowed me to be present, it released me from a veil.  In a sort of Eckhart Tolle way,  the ‘pain body’ was standing in the way of me being fully here now.  I kind of knew that too.  I just didn’t know what the pain really was.  Perhaps thinking that it was my ‘lot’ in life.  In ordered to explore the rage I used an imaginary writing process.  There I could experience the anger, and express it.

The process goes on, because, NOW, I am experiencing a panic.  It is a panic, that produces all kinds of addictive behaviours.  Going to the fridge, checking in on the computer, smoking and drinking lots of coffee and tea.  It could be the vulnerability of exposing myself.  It could be a feeling of being cut off from source.  I don’t feel safe.  It could be back to the teenagers fear of no one being there for me.  It could be a fear of how readers are interpreting what I have written…  ( do they think I’m attention seeking, manipulating, do they believe me????).  Also what is noticeable is that there is an effort from this place to leave home, there is a voice inside that is saying “stay at home you are safe there!”    Actually while it is very uncomfortable, I understand at some deep level that it is actually part of the process, and another way I disconnect from being here now.  So it also has a level of excitement …. that I know I am alive.   Not sure where to go with this panic…. (perhaps not to the fridge!) … be with it?…  feel it?… not run away from it?…  AND BREATHE……