Tag: confusion

The Halfway Mark & I Am Broken

Now that’s a confession.

Because I write about healing and how to do it and all the ways we can “get back on the horse” after unfathomable losses over many years, it is a shocking confession to me.

Today is significant to me not only for this revelation but because I started this blog on March 14, 2023. I have committed to writing a post a day every day for a whole year. This is the half way mark. High marks for stick-to-it-ism.

I have devised a clever strategy. So I will not feel the true depths and agony hiding in the pain abyss I am carrying. I play an artful game of “feint and parry,” “na-na-na-boo-boo” and the biggie, “You can’t hurt me!”

Lately, however, I am edging toward the rim of the abyss. The pain looks up at me slyly from the measureless depths. It chuckles softly. “I’m gonna getcha. You know that, don’t you?” And the minute I hear that whisper of a threat, I rev up in to high gear. “The hell you are!”

My voice raises and thins and speeds up. My fingers fly faster over the keyboard much more driven than they need to be. I realize there is no need for this manic typing. The words will come out eventually no matter how slow or fast I type. But in an attempt to evade the mocking incessant whispers of pain, the typing seems possessed by an Olympian drive.

I cannot even conceptualize what “surrender” or “letting go” means. I imagine it means death. Psychological and literal. I have entertained the conceit that I have actually been letting go in recent years. I realize I have been tested lately. External forces have triggered and exposed what hasn’t fully healed.

Then the dominoes fall. Just like the 100 foot oak trees behind our new house. I am emotionally bereft. I have tried to live above it all. Real losses and the threat of loss have been swimming in and out of my life for decades. “I laugh in the face of fear and danger!! Ha-ha.” Not.

Occasionally I acknowledge pain’s presence, then let it move along. Lately, the hateful thing seems poised to throw itself onto my emotional beach, loll about sunning itself and indicates its intent to stick around for awhile.

They say that the way to conquer the thing you fear and loathe is to get up close to it, make yourself vulnerable and befriend the creature. Talk about easier said than done. What I know today at exactly the halfway point in my daily blog writing exercise, I have never been so awash in pain and uncertainty.

If I were you reading this, what would I tell you by way of hope and comfort? The platitude scarves would come out. “This too shall pass.” “You are stronger than you imagine and braver than you think.” “What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.“ Etc.

That last quote is by Thoreau. It has always struck a resonant chord in me even though it seems to expect an enormous amount of us. It expects we will have sufficient time, wisdom and inclination to fully explore and find that which lives deep inside us. I feel I have never had an adequate amount of any of those three things to find out who and what I really am.

Once in another place of transition in my life, I was lost and confused. My direction in life, how I wanted to live, where I wanted to live. The counsellor I was talking with simply said: “That’s perfectly okay. Confusion is a legitimate place.”

In my mind, I have committed to writing daily about what I observe, what I’ve learned and whatever else came up. To honor that process, I tap into it all – good, bad and ugly. Even the uncomfortable bits. Only time will tell if this confession is a catharsis and sparks another deep healing phase. I have fear and I have hope.

Again it was my old friend Thoreau who said: “Not until we are lost do we discover who we are.”

That being the case, and if Henry is right, I should be on track to solidify a pretty tight sense of self at the end of this waterpark ride.

Here’s hoping.

In the meantime, I’ve got work to do. As I have always done, I will put one metaphorical foot in front of the other. And I’ll keep writing. That is something concrete I can do to contain and examine the pain. Most days, it helps.

ED. NOTE: The Universe often does show up with guidance and comfort. This morning’s message from a spiritual newsletter I read is: The beauty of being lost is the same thing that makes it scary — we must look within ourselves to find the way.

On it. 🙂

Shite Sandwiches

“There is no love in your family.” The Turkish-born psychiatrist summarized my lived experience in a single sentence. I just didn’t know it yet.

It was both earth-shaking and yet felt a little nefarious. “No love?” I wondered wordlessly. “In MY family?” “Is that really what he said?”

I hashed that one line over and over in my head for years.

When the psychiatrist said that simple, explosive line during our biweekly session, I honestly had no idea what he meant. “No love?” “In MY family?” “But, but?” It somehow felt like someone pouring ice-cold mineral oil down my spine through the back of my shirt. I wasn’t sure what I was really feeling but I knew the feeling was foreign and confusing and cold. Ice cold.

I once saw a woman psychologist on the Canadian West Coast. I remember her well-groomed spotlessly clean white West Highland Terrier. I remember she had a long, beautiful green leather couch in her drawing room. I was envious of her beautiful living room and dapper dog.

She listened to my story with keen attention. I trotted out the “no love in my family” story. “A Turkish psychiatrist I once saw,” I told her, “said there was no love in my family. No love? Imagine that? My parents and siblings tell each other we love each other all the time!”

I was slightly frustrated and reluctant to let go of the fantasy that mine had been a happy, wonderful childhood. That I came away from it hurt and confused and beset by dark and difficult feelings was on me. Something was wrong with me. Because they loved me. They told me so all the time.

At one point, the kindly West Coast psychologist looked up from her notebook with reading glasses perched stereotypically on the end of her nose: “Your confusion is understandable,” she said. “If someone feeds you shit sandwiches all your life and tells you they are feeding you steak, you are bound to be confused.”

First, “No love in my family?” Now this. Shit sandwiches that were supposed to stand in for steak? Psychotherapy was nothing else if not extremely confusing and full of strange utterings.

It took many years to realize what these sage advisors actually meant. With time, their insights eventually touched and deeply impacted me. It was true that my childhood was filled with neglect and abuse – sexual, emotional, and psychological. But no one “wanted” to hurt us, I believed.

Caregivers so utterly wrapped up in their own personal problems who have unresolved trauma holding the reins of their own behaviors and being don’t necessarily realize what harm they are doing. Not to themselves and much less to others.

Parents who are intelligent enough to realize these deficits are bad things for a child want very much to cover them up. Or more likely, they are inclined to act as if they are not important. “That’s life,” I often heard my mother say. Along with, “Hand me that bottle of pills from beside my bed, will you sweetie?”

At other times, her head hung limply into the toilet bowl, Mom would retch thick black-green liquid that smelled terrible. She would quickly cover: “It’s only bile, dear. I’m throwing up bile because there’s nothing else in my stomach.” If there was medical import in that statement, it was lost on me as a ten-year-old.

Seeing my mother’s head in the toilet and knowing she was “sick” again was familiar and made more sense. Fluffernutters for supper again tonight.

A Healing Path

A young lady named Nicole recently asked me a simple question in an online forum I belong to: “What is a healing path?

That question gave me pause. I hadn’t heard the question put so simply before. So this is what I told her.

“My healing path started in earnest when I hit the proverbial brick wall. Everything I believed about my mother’s “love” for me was shattered when she went to bat for my husband in the wake of our divorce.

I went through what is best described as a “dark night of the soul” as I tried to make sense of her betrayal. I was in a very dark place for many years. I was living in an emotional and spiritual shitestorm.

My personal life was a mess. Recently released from my job contract. A new baby was on the way. Marriage breaking down. Mother’s defection.

I sought out a therapist at that time because I simply had no one else to turn to. I could not make rational sense of the many mistakes I had made and was making. I tried to drink away the pain. That stopped working long before I finally quit drinking for good.

My mother’s explanation for my acting out was that I was – possibly – a ” bad seed.” She skilfully omitted the neglect and abuse I experienced in my childhood in her summation of me. The bad things in our childhood were never discussed. It enraged her on the occasions when I tried to bring it up.

My next steps toward healing were because I desperately needed to protect my son. I had previously sought out counselors from time to time before but with the presence of my son on the planet, I was incentivized. There was nothing easy about making the choice to heal and get healthy. Nothing.

When I first started to confront my past and upbringing, everything got progressively worse before it got better. I clung to the belief that life would eventually change and improve. It took a lot of sheer faith to just keep going.

I was driven by my love for my son and the need to create a better, saner life for him. That was the carrot that kept me going. I recognized in those awful early days of my infant son’s life that if I went under, he would go under, too. It was sometime around then that I took full responsibility for my life.

Today I am comfortably estranged from my family of origin. They were not helpful to me and completely devoted to my mother and her narrative.

I realized the decision to create my own life and work through my pain was up to me and me alone. That totally sucked. But it has finally paid off in a certain peace of mind and internal calm that greets me every morning. I stopped drinking almost 23 years ago after several failed earlier attempts.

I am in no way suggesting that my healing path is or should be everyone’s path. But here are some questions to ask yourself to light a fire under the choice to embark on a healing path.

Am I happy with myself and where I am in my life? If not, why not? What’s in the way or holding me back from being happy? Are there patterns I can identify in myself that keep me unhappy? Am I comfortable in my own skin? This is hardly a comprehensive answer.

This is only an anecdote about one person’s path. You know you are on a healing path when you start acting every day in your own interests. Your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are progressively more in alignment with your core beliefs, wishes, desires, and goals. When this is happening, you know you are moving closer to yourself which is the ultimate goal of healing.

I don’t know if this answer is at all helpful. It is a profoundly personal journey. But good on you for asking the question. Ask others. Keep seeking. Failure is a given only when we stop moving forward.

Being confused about where you are heading on a healing path is not failure. Confusion is a legitimate place and an integral part of transitioning to a healthier way of living.

Good luck to you and I hope you do pick the healing path. Not everyone does. It requires a considerable amount of emotional heavy lifting and for quite a long time.

You may one day discover the healthier you are, the better role model and inspiration you can be for others in the world you live in. You can be a better friend, a better parent, and a better champion of your own good self. In short, a better human being. I hope this was of some use to you, Nicole, and wish you well if you elect to set out on your own healing path. It is so worth it.”