This has been brought on by stress.
Healing..........
I need movement, and have been saddled with this class. Four hours, three nights a week. In the nights I have attended, it has been mentioned several times, "You will never have to use this material in your job"
Well hello, then why am I here?
No one knows. But you are. So, you must do your best. It's my understanding that Latin was once the language of the educated around the world. This was so because of the power of the Church both to educate and to decree what would be taught.
And there you are today, holding those words in your mind, understanding nuances of thought.
Can you view the class as something given to teach you patience or humility?
It is a practice.
It has an end date.
You can do this.
Learning medical terminology is learning another language.
Piece of cake.
***
For the past few days I have been thinking about fairy tale heroines stepping into their new identities between one day and the next, and about how we carry our prisons within us in who we think that we are. If we envision the process of clearing material from a time before we had words or could make sophisticated distinguishments regarding guilt or envy or fear as facing into the Wind, sampling and learning and letting it go, that will help us not get stuck, I think.
So, here is my imagery for us:
:O)
Information on fairy tale thinking and what it can represent:
http://www.vmacgill.net/sleepbeauty.htm
https://thegodguy.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/sleeping-beauty-and-snow-white-—-not-just-fairy-tales/
***
Today, I am wondering how Cinderella learned to see herself differently ~ how she learned to value and understand herself and her role in life ~ once she was saved by the Prince. I mean, one minute she was Cinderella and the next, she was a cherished beauty who wanted for nothing.
How do you suppose Cinderella managed to acclimate herself?
That is what we are doing, now.
How did Joseph either not succumb, or recover from, the mindset "slave".
Or, Snow White. Sleeping Beauty, even. Red Riding Hood. Dorothy. Once their circumstances changed, how were they able to take competent charge of their stories. Given their backgrounds and what they believed to be true about themselves, how was it they were able to learn to interpret themselves in healthy, life affirming ways once their circumstances changed.
Once their circumstances changed....
That is our task, now that we know who the Liar is.
Step One was determining who was the Liar.
Step Two is to clear the lies. To negate the lessons the Liar taught us about ourselves ~ about who we were and what we might aspire to.
***
We have been posting about stars, about navigating by the stars.
A metaphor then, for flying blind, for sailing in the night, the water black and cold, the landmarks unfamiliar.
Which brings to mind the French pirate woman, with her black ships and red sails and lust of vengeance against the King who'd betrayed and executed her husband.
That is a true story.
Not so long ago, I read "Gods of Tango". This is the story of a woman whose choice is to live a marginal existence as a woman without the protection of a man in a time when women were not allowed to work outside the home except as prostitutes...or to masquerade as a man, herself. The book is an exploration of male and of female role and power and self image. Before that, I read an Anne Rice (writing under a pen name) having to do with sadomasochism.
I found these books helpful in gaining perspective on role and power and the mindset of abuser and abused. The courage required to break free of the roles we've been hurt into is an extraordinary and a lonely thing.
We will have been twisted into believing the abuser's take on these matters.
This is where we learn, seasoned sailors that we are now, to scent the Wind and alter our courses. Or, to paint our ships black and our sails, brilliant red, and demand vengeance.
Or simply to leave them behind and sail into the Sun.
That is what Joseph did.
And so, chose freedom, by his own decree.
***
How were each of the fairy tale heroines able to love without discovering first some measure by which they could love themselves.
Or is it like Neitzsche says, and love is there within us and was always there.
Snow White and Sleeping Beauty were gently raised. Cinderella was not. Yet, according to the fairy tale, Cinderella was who she was. Though the evil stepsisters tried to take Cinderella's Prince and the life he represented, they could not fit the slipper which hugged Cinderella's foot.
Because Cinderella was who she was.
Neitzsche's love came first.
***
The imagery describing what this time will be for us has to do with the tainted wind
blowing still from the place of our childhoods. That taint will be so familiar to us that we will not recognize it. How does that poetry go.
In a far land of witches and ogres
in a time of princesses on strings
There was come, to those trapped on that I land
a staunch ally, from the Valley of Horses and Kings.
On the Wind they did ride, the princesses and the Ally
through Fire and thorough Smoke
to the Land, far and fair
On white horses with reigns of
black satin
Seeded pearl ribbands
in their Sun-scented hair
I will find the rest of the poetry.
That is the Wind from the past. That is the abuser, reaching out from the grave to affect our lives, now.
Those are the feelings we must sample and identify and hold ourselves in compassion from.
Again, it will serve us well to remember that any given point in our lives ~ our educations, our marriages, our interpretations of our first sexual experiences ~ or the ensuing ones, for that matter ~ our remembrances will have been, and will continue, to this day, to be tainted by those currents from our pasts.
When our children were so beautiful, when they were safe and when we were safe because they were safe, we loved and we healed and we even tried to make family with our still outrageously dysfunctional families of origin. We defended them. We said, "That is my mother." Or, "That is my sister." It was when our children became so troubled that we broke. Remember my mother's words, when our daughter went into her first dual diagnostic facility: "Well, looks like you weren't such a good mother after all, were you?"
The taste of that time is the taste of my childhood. Sneering contempt, laughter, at my pain and confusion, along with: I told you so. I knew it, and I told you so.
What a crock! And a mean one, too. Nothing helpful about it. No compassion, in it.
So, none of this self flagellation I have been doing for all these years had to do with anything real at all. Only my mother. Only the beggar that was me, looking for what I had done, where I had made the misstep that led to what happened to all of us.
***
I think it will be helpful for us to review family of origin responses to our lives and our children's lives ~ and for some of us, our marriages, too ~ falling apart.
On some level, these will be the attitudes we held against ourselves then and continue at some level, to hold, now.
Where we see contempt or disparagement or surprising rage in our inner lives, there we will find the family of origin and the things they taught us about life, and about ourselves, enshrined.
And this is us, clearing that material.
***
This is the means by which we declare ourselves free of them. In our awareness that we will have been trained to believe ourselves broken and without power ~ which is every abuser's (bully's) primary objective, we learn the nature of the wrongness done us. Once we are aware of it, the wound will heal on its own. We are meant to be whole.
***
It is Brene Brown's "sit with the feelings" but with the deeper understanding that, for us, the feelings will be lies told to validate the insane realities of the Witch Mother. The lies told to us about ourselves will have been intentional. The lies will have to do with every smallest aspect of our interpretations of the essential selves that we are.
That was the win.
It is a kind of thievery.
That is why we could never make sense of it ~ any of it. The win was that we would believe them over ourselves. To them, manipulating our belief systems regarding their value and our own looks like winning. And here is the spookiest part ~ there was nothing personal in their drive to do this.
They do it to everyone in their lives.
Have a look.
You will see.
Huh.
That was the missing piece we weren't getting. That is why no matter what we did or how many times we extended the benefit of the doubt until it became so routine to do it that we blinded ourselves to the building intensity of it in our adult lives, we could not ever change it. That is why we think that when we fell into that shattered state of vulnerability in our grief over what was happening to our kids, we think they attacked. They always attacked. We were not vulnerable until in our desperation to help our kids (and ourselves), we listened to them. Once we realized we had been badly hurt by listening to anything they thought, it was too late.
My mother really did predict a terrible ending for my daughter. With glee. That was the rest of the conversation the night D H insisted we call our parents to tell them what had happened to our daughter.
Oh, how I wish I'd had this site then.
I am so grateful it exists, now.
***
Anyway, once we got that part about how rotten and hurtful and weakening the words spoken over ourselves and our children had been, we kept trying to figure out how angry or disgusted or filled with black hatred we would need to be before we would do to someone else what has routinely been done to us.
And we literally could not imagine actually speaking the hurtful word, or even, allowing imaginary vengeance.
What we are not getting is that their behaviors were nothing personal.
There is nothing personal about what they are doing today.
Abusers abuse with impunity. Their timing may be off sometimes, or they may miss their mark occasionally, but they have a million irons in the fire. That is the piece we are missing. They do not repair relationship. They go away for awhile and reappear, knowing full well where we are vulnerable and, through long practice, just how to go about eliciting our attention. Which is also a theft.
So, there's that.
Here is the answer: We are genetically unlike them. We will never get it. They will never change. They are as incapable of changing their behaviors as we are.
***
To confront and refute these things we were taught about ourselves is to defy the Witch Mother within. We have been navigating imaginary shoals all our lives. There are no shoals. These waters carry no dangers we are not fully capable of identifying.
And turning to whatever the ocean's equivalent of compost is.
Yet we have sailed timidly. We have sailed at night, lest the Witch Mother find us.
Without the lies to guide us, how can we possibly guide ourselves.
Here again, we are different than those raised in kinder homes.
New Leaf had posted about her activities as a young woman, beautiful as all young people, male and female alike, are beautiful. Like Snow White, like Sleeping Beauty, New Leaf died to herself for a time ~ probably, like us, until the birth of her first child. Copa's Sleeping Beauty kiss.
Copa, I miss you.
***
So again, confronting these matters, for us, requires enormous determination to heal. More than for those raised in kinder homes.
The resolution I made to be kinder ~ not kind, but only kinder, was crucial to my healing. This tells us that prior to that consciously taken decision to be kinder, my guiding principles had to do with the cruelty of a forever unattainable perfectionism.
This is the way I was taught to navigate the challenges of a life. I was taught, and you may have been too, to fail through perfectionism. The key: To fail. To subvert ourselves and sap our energies by whirling around some psychic black hole of their creation, a place where even the white magic of light is never released.
The method is immaterial.
For me, it was perfectionism.
This is real life. Nothing is perfect, not for any of us. For others of us it will be some other go to feeling state. It makes a circle. The circle moves. The names fueling the circle have to do with fulfilling the expectation of abysmal failure, justifying the contempt, the negative grandiosity, in the witch mother's eyes.
That is the taint on the Wind.
To please the internalized Witch Mother we must justify to ourselves (!) her contempt. (And in so doing, survive. That is what the Witch Mother held over us: Life. Disfigurement. Terror and pain and the heat of that. Bear in mind there are things I have not posted here.)
I cannot stress enough that this is the underlying truth in our traumatic remembrances. The remembrances are traumatic because we risked a mortal risk to confront the Witch Mother who was hurting those we ~ however that happened ~ were pledged to protect. This is a piece of how we came not to matter to ourselves
and probably, to them. We made that decision, like Martin Luther did too, because we could do no other.
Their dynamics will be different, but for all of us, we did what we had to, to live.
Thinking in this way, seeing in this way, assists us in attaining internal, versus external, locus of control.
So we cast our fates into that crippling wind and are only now recovering ourselves.
We are thrown into a sleep, into numbness, into an endless repetition of fulfilling those role expectations designed to destroy us for a win we will never believe in.
***
Snow White and Sleeping Beauty reach for something beautiful. The red apple, for Snow White. The spinning wheel, for Sleeping Beauty. The betrayal, in both cases is from a jealous female, who poisons the symbol of adult womanhood. For a time, each dies to herself. Snow White...what do the dwarves represent? Sleeping Beauty...what do the thorns represent.
We know that for Sleeping Beauty, the thorns were self-created. This is so for us, too. A defense mechanism, or a series of defenses, grown wilder and sharper through the years. Dismantled instantly not through love, but through trusting herself to love and be loved. Because the Prince worked through the thorns. Because the Prince believed a different truth that was stronger than the truth (than the Lie) the Witch Mother told.
Raised as she was, how would Cinderella have fared after coming to the castle? After marrying the Prince.
Think of the outrage displayed by the Ugly Stepsisters, each trying to masquerade as Cinderella.
Are these roles, the stepsisters, the wicked queen who is the most beautiful in the land (a perfect description of the demands of perfectionism), the offense taken by the thirteenth fairy who sentenced Sleeping Beauty...are these roles internalized in us, the living toxicity shining away like some bleary lighthouse guiding us today by the immoral values systems we knew growing up.
Today, I am thinking recovering ourselves has less to do with rewitnessing deep trauma ~ though that was a necessary step ~ than it does with sampling the air of our childhoods for toxins. Like contempt. Like thievery. Like ridicule.
We breathed that in.
We are comfortable with being held in contempt
and at some level, require it to orient ourselves in the world at large.
This is the basis of my lack of trust. I am certain the betrayal is in the works.
Where is Copa, now.
Gone.
***
Maybe that accounts for our sense of directionlessness, for that feeling of not knowing, that attends healing.
Think of it this way: What would that adult who did (or allowed to be done) what went on in our lives have to be like as a person. I have posted at some length regarding the eyes of my abuser, or her sneer. Or her sense of entitlement, which my sister also dares to have, crying when she does not get her way, which has to do with flaying the victim to the bone for her sake. (Or ~ we are back to my mother, here ~ with her strength, when she kicks or hits or throws things. Which has nothing to do with a bid for pity and everything to do with knowing I was that little, that vulnerable. And that I was raised with those eyes looking at me. That is the feeling of Whore. Speculative; exposed. Time. Sun.
Time stops.
A judgment is made.
Hmmmm.
Cedar