A couple of days ago I posted something from August about “no will to live,” and my struggles with it, trying to understand why it’s so hard to take in positive feedback. Looking back from a month’s perspective, and after the work with Caryn learning to say “stop,” I saw that my fear was rooted in trauma, the fear of death if I dared to feel good about myself. That’s a way of standing up for myself, to see that it’s not just some trivial problem, some easy choice that I’m failing to make. I think that helps me side-step it somehow. Caryn said it wasn’t possible to answer the question “why.” I have answered it but that doesn’t immediately solve the problem. But it does explain why I’m having such a hard time with this. Practicing saying “stop,” being able to say it firmly, is the antidote to the trigger that knocks me into “no will to live.”
Beverly called in the evening, she had read the blog post and was concerned about me. She was concerned that even “feeling good about myself” is a kind of judgement, that I needed to be doing something that “gave me pleasure” and then I wouldn’t have the focus on me at all. I think what she’s saying is quite true, it’s like when I’m being able to do my creative stuff I don’t worry about whether I’m good enough to “deserve” to live. The issue of “feeling good about myself” may be a red herring. It’s not so much about judging myself according to other people’s ideas. It’s really closer to feeling OK about myself just as I am. I think the point at which I’m able to see through the uselessness of the whole struggle to find out why, was made possible by practicing defending myself. When I can say “stop” to protect myself, and say it in a way that’s firm, not apologetic or defensive, that action itself reconstitutes the will to live.
Byron Brown explains very clearly why the ability to defend yourself is ITSELF the will to live.
From “Soul Without Shame” by Byron Brown
The complete quote can be found here posted 7/6/10
“The energy for active defending is available to you the moment you recognize that your deepest nature is being constricted by the experience of being attacked. … The sense of outrage awakens your essential strength and with it the capacity and clarity to defend your own truth in the face of judgment. Ultimately, this truth is nothing but the integrity and aliveness of the human soul.” p 219
“Essential strength … may begin as anger at the debilitating effect of self-judgment, but it emerges as an assertive strength to be yourself without the need for acceptance, approval, or acknowledgement of anyone else. Most fundamentally, it is the strength to be yourself without a self-image but with a sense of presence that is grounded, clear, and vitally alive. True strength is the basic instinctual energy of survival and self-protection, which we recognized as missing or blocked in the judgment process in Chapter 4…. You as a child did not have the physical presence and capacity to embody this instinctual energy for your own protection. Even if you could have, it was dangerous to do so because you were still very dependent on adults for survival. That is no longer the case. Now you can begin a vital aspect of your journey: recovering that compassionate, intelligent vitality — the strength essence.” p 220
“The judge’s activity is aimed at blocking contact with the freedom and expansiveness of the living soul. So each form [of defending yourself] points to a way of tapping into the dynamism and aliveness of who you are now, unconnected to your history.” p 245
“You must step out of the judgment loop. This is the real soul work. … This is when you assert your fundamental aliveness and freedom. This is when you align yourself with the deep longing to be real and present in your life against the self-defeating experience of judgment.” p 291