I found this absolutely fascinating. I was trying to work with parts, but I didn’t have the help of a therapist who knew about that work, and I didn’t know anything about the Internal Family Systems model yet.
From my journal for September 6, 1994
From No Enemies Within, the story of Norma, whose wounded self made signs while her verbal self rattled on about past abandonments and failed to see present support. “I care about you. I’m curious about you. We’re not done yet. We’ll never be done. Don’t give up. I’m still here. You don’t have to work so hard.” From the wounded vulnerable self to the wounded try-to-fix-it self, these words weave reconciliation.
I’m trying to find a way to reconcile the screaming baby and the screaming mother within me. I realize that I’m so angry at that screaming mother that I could kill her. I imagine a scenario: Mother, somewhat drunk, changing diapers angrily, sticks baby with pin. Baby starts to scream and mother yells at it, slaps it, perhaps even picks it up and shakes it. Baby screams even harder. Mother leaves it to scream. I know this scenario in my cells and bones, I know that if I express my pain I will be hurt more and then abandoned. I see why I experienced leaving yesterday as such a failure: I can’t make the noise stop, so I’ll leave the scene. (god! I don’t believe it. There goes the glider plane, out into the cold grey day. I hope it rains soon.)
Get the walkman. Sit at my desk and cry. I feel so defeated. (“We’re not done yet.”) What’s the point. (“Don’t give up.”) I feel completely weakened in my body. (“You don’t have to work so hard.”)
So can I find some compassion for that Mother? She was raised in the school of the stiff-upper-lip. Her mother was probably psychotic. She gave birth to her first child while her husband was away fighting a war. She didn’t have any support for dealing with her feelings of fear and grief, she didn’t have any one to help teach her how to care for a new baby. She had no disciplines to help her when things got difficult, no way to put her feelings aside in order to take care of her child. She saw the child as a source of her own comfort and got angry when it didn’t provide comfort and instead asked her to be the comforting one — she didn’t know how to do that. And I’m still angry at her narcissistic attitude, though I see it as a case of arrested development: she never got beyond Kegan’s stage 2) the “Imperial” self, she never got to the place where she could see that other people had different insides, their own needs and wants. Now can I have compassion for such a one? She was failed by her culture, which supported her narcissism, but not the parts of herself that might have been able to learn compassion and tenderness. I can sympathize with the new mother (unsupported & unmothered herself) who gets upset when she can’t stop her baby from screaming. And I do have great compassion for the enormous unacknowledged guilt she must have been feeling: knowing she was hurting her baby and not knowing how to stop it, and then all that buried because she could not admit that she might be wrong, she could not admit that she didn’t know what to do. I can certainly sympathize with the frustration of not being able to help, with not knowing what to do and not feeling able to ask. I imagine that Mother’s frustration with not being able to help had more to do with her image as a “good mother” and with the inconvenience to herself of the baby’s crying, I don’t think she cared about what the baby was feeling. And that’s what I find so hard to forgive. I don’t think she was saddled, as I was, with fears of inadequacy, I think her fears were all centered around how she looked to the outside.
I’m astonished at this description of my mother. From everything I’ve learned since, I believe it’s a very accurate portrayal.
OK. That’s mother. And I’m still angry at her and find it hard to forgive her for having a baby and then making her own welfare more important than that of the baby. It’s interesting to notice, as I write, that though she can be “nice” she’s really not capable of compassion or tenderness. So then I turn and look at myself. I see that following her example, I have also screamed at myself for being hurt, I have hit myself for crying, and then I’ve been very angry at myself for not behaving better. It has taken me a long time to learn compassion and tenderness, and even longer to learn to extend compassion and tenderness to my own wounded self. I’m still struggling to do that: because it’s not “convenient” for me to be subjected to this pain, because the pain prevents me from producing something that would justify myself in the eyes of others.
At this point I know that I can feel compassion and tenderness for other people and creatures. I’m still almost completely unable to extend them to myself. In describing the “one who has mothered me” I am talking about a part of myself.
What is the unmet need of the one who has mothered me so badly, bullied and pushed me, ignored my cries of pain? She saw that the world was a tough place to get along if you were too sensitive, that you were attacked if you were too vulnerable, so she did her best to get me to hide, or rise above, my sensitivities and my wounds. And then she tried to push me to produce stuff that would be acceptable in the world because she thought that that was the way to find people who would support me. And then she was continuously sabotaged by a very powerful part of me that insisted on being true to myself, that felt that denial and hiding of pain was hogwash. What a battle! This is the real battle, not between me & my mom, or me and the planes, but between the part of me that’s screaming her pain, and the part that’s trying to protect her: “If you do that, you will be first attacked and then abandoned.”
And inside me now is an adult artist, a strong woman, who can turn to each of these agonized fighting children and say to the Screamer: “Yes, it is right for you to speak your pain. Spill it out, and then I will edit and shape it into a form that can be put out into the world, because it’s important for other people to know about. It’s important for all of us to begin to share our painful stories.” Then she turns to the Protector and says: “Thank you for all the years that you have worked so hard to keep me hidden. I appreciate your efforts, even as I see that they were misguided. I need your energy now to help me hide when it’s appropriate, not to deny the vulnerable parts of me, but to protect all of me from outside hostilities. This means maintaining strong boundaries within which I can be whole, instead of impenetrable barriers between parts of me. And I also need help with the discipline of writing practice, painting practice, not to “produce” for the world, but to keep my creativity flowing for my own health and satisfaction.”
That was a big piece of work, and one I keep doing over and over. I wish I felt better. I guess I need to find a way to get it down to the non-verbal levels. Well. Take it to Karen.
[Typing it up now, a little over a month later (October 12) none of this seems real to me. It seems very distant, something written by someone else.]
I’m still typing up current journal a month later. It often gives me a new perspective on what was happening.
In fact, I think it was an astounding piece of work, except that it was mostly on the intellectual level. I certainly couldn’t separate the parts from myself as observer which is what allows me to feel tenderness and compassion for them..