This is a continuation of the post from September 13, called Moving Along the Bottom. The journal entries are also from November 1995
Work with Karen. Exploring the bottom. Lying on the bed I’m aware of a featureless waste, a whiteout where all perspective is lost, where a mouse can be mistaken for a polar bear. Karen asks what I need to feel safe to explore. Perhaps she sees the tension I’m not originally aware of. First I notice tension in my forehead and cheeks. Exaggerating it, I find myself trying to back into the bed, trying to disappear but very slowly so no one will notice. I try to think of real world situations that feel like that, and come up with dancing school — as a wallflower I couldn’t leave the room, but didn’t want the other children to notice my situation. Another situation is the one of being forced to be nice and polite when mean Mrs. So&So comes to visit. I want to stick out my tongue but know it’s not allowed, I hope she won’t notice me and ask me inane questions to which I do not know the answers. I don’t belong here, I don’t know the rules, I think there must be some other way to live, I want to find the people who are like me. I’m surprised to find how thoroughly the values of mean Mrs. So&So have soaked into my psyche, like tobacco smoke into the curtains, I see that she is there, preventing me from even imagining the highly subversive act of looking inside myself to find out what I want. I know that she is so powerful because my mother was on her side, couldn’t sympathize with my wish to stick out my tongue. I asked Karen how to get rid of these deadly figures, she said talk back, tell her she’s a hypocrite and to get out. So I did and it helped a little, I started being able to breathe. Then she asked me what about dancing school, and first I talked back and told them the set-up was stupid and the dances were stupid, and I wanted to do real dances that came out of the earth and had thousand-year-old roots, that I wanted to do my own dances and not have to wait till some boy asked me to fox trot… then I said I’d like to put on my raspberry leotard, and my fright wig, and my hiking boots and go in there with my boom box and some loud music and show them some real dancing.
Karen Collins is a therapist I saw in Montpelier for many years. She works with Bioenergetics, which involves a lot of movement. I would get on the bed to have a temper tantrum, or be given a tennis racket to beat a pillow with, etc.
I don’t remember who “Mrs So&So” was, or maybe that was just a designation for certain disapproving friends of my mother.
We talked some more about that 50’s environment and how inhibiting, narrow, flattening, appalling it was, how there was all that concern with looking good, keeping a smooth innocuous surface, and no contact with depth or color or passion. It was like living in black and white, and having some vague sense that color existed, but everyone around you said No, this is all there is. (I remember Fred accusing me of wanting “impossible mythic fulfillments.”)
Fred was someone I lived with for a short time, and left because something was missing in our relationship.
I saw how I kept looking for “my people” — when I heard about Beatniks I knew I was one, Bohemians, civil rights workers, Vietnam War protestors, I found one group after another. Lying on Karen’s bed, I saw that all these people never felt quite right — searching for what wasn’t right I realized that they were just roles defined from the outside, the ones who were anti-establishment, and I wasn’t choosing out of what I felt on the inside. All those people are political and sociological, there was no depth no spirit no soul. It was soul that I was looking for, that there had been no place for in my childhood. I wondered when I had first come across what I was looking for and realized it was dream class, in Brunswick.
What startled me in the work with Karen was to be in contact with a child-self who doesn’t know what I know now, who was looking for a world where she belonged and people who could meet her heart-to-heart, and who had no idea that they really existed (outside of Oz and Narnia). She doesn’t even have the language to describe why the environment she’s living in feels so limited and oppressive or to name what it is she’s really looking for. I also kept having these times when everything would just stop, I wouldn’t know what to say or do next. I think these are connected, I think those pieces of my child-self are trapped behind an amnesiac barrier, and that’s why I have no direct line to source. There’s no continuity, no tap root. I’m like a shallow rooted tree, easily felled by the wind. Karen suggested that there were many triggers that catapult me back into that world, the grey world of refrigerators and vacuum cleaners and advertising that uses fear of social embarrassment to sell soap, that world where shamanism does not exist (or is a quaint anthropological phenomenon) where there are no great trees, wild animals, spirits, drums, altars. No wonder my life becomes meaningless and not worth doing.
I find it fascinating that I say the “pieces of my child-self are trapped behind an amnesiac barrier.” Internal Family Systems describes this as a being in a pocket of time.