Woke up feeling utterly bleak. Actually this is worse than bleak. It feels like everyone has died and I’m left all alone. It’s not really sad, sad is much easier to bear because it’s moving. This is not moving, it’s too heavy to move. But the song in my mind is “We are the World, we are the children… There’s a choice we’re making, we’re saving our own lives…” That is completely opposed to the energy that’s holding me down. Yes, it feels bigger than me and heavy and hopeless, the end of a wasted life. I wonder if this is how Mom felt, sitting alone in that big empty house? Perhaps this is someone else’s feeling and not mine at all. What does this deep heavy feeling want? To be rescued, held, and comforted. It’s quite a job getting to her. Down a tunnel in the rock. At least it’s not dark, and I have a good sense of where she is. I break into the rock chamber and throw my arms around her. Holding her, I back up, moving up & out of the maze. A lot of dark cobwebby material clings to her trying to hold her back. I keep pulling, the black sticky stuff stretches and stretches, and finally breaks. We flee for home, which is this couch, next to Mocha. I think I’m going to have to clean the black stuff off her, but as she warms up it dries and flakes off. She sighs and falls asleep next to me with my arm around her. She’s exhausted and will need to sleep for a long time.
O gosh. Another Little Jenny rescued. I think I must have gotten much stronger to be able to find her, and break the walls holding her. I hold her tight, feeling such love for her, and angry that she was left alone so long that that horrible helpless hopeless, indescribable by words, is how she felt.
Second cup of tea. Still holding her.
I had been having a struggle about continuing to try to verbally describe the feeling, or try to get away from it into the song. Asking “What does it want?” was magical, shifted everything. Something I learned from my therapist Karen, who asks it frequently. Usually I ask and don’t get anything. I’m glad I did it this time.
Other pieces of this experience: Back in the early 90’s, I went into therapy to try to find and heal the sexual abuse that I thought was responsible for me cutting myself and not being able to have sex with my husband. It was only after the divorce that I discovered I was dealing with PTSD. In one of those early therapy sessions, trying to explore my feelings, I came up with an image of a bombed out village, burning cars, crumbled walls, a lot of smoke, a few people wandering dazedly through the rubble. I realized that that was how my childhood had felt, that’s where I’d been living for years. Later I had another image of me as an old woman, deep in a cave, stirring a big pot of stew and waiting for the children who began to find me and come in. I knew they were my inner children. For years I’ve worked with them, getting to know individuals, rescuing some who were just babies.
Cutting myself was the story I told, actually enacted on stage in Journey Into Courage.
When I wrote the word “break” as I break into the stone chamber, I think of Brenda in Journey, pushing her fist through a window frame as she said “Break – through the window with a 30-06,” telling a story of when her boyfriend tried to kill her.
The song “We are the World” came to mind because it was the theme song for this years Kindred Spirits Camp.