From my journal for December 15, 1995
I went into the session with Karen feeling completely hopeless. I didn’t know what else to do, so I lay down on the bed and kicked and kicked and cried and shouted “No!” I stopped after not very much because I seemed to be feeling better — things lightened up inside — though I distrusted my sense that anything had really happened. Later I realized that what was new was a strong sense that it was OK to say No, OK to kick back, OK to express my discomfort. I think something else that helped was the sympathy and sorrow that I saw on Karen’s face as I told her about the body memory (if that’s what it was). I told Karen how I had sat on Robin’s table crying with the words “My whole life!” going through my mind and how quickly another voice came in to say “You can’t say your whole life was ruined by this incident. You still have blah, blah, blah…” I see only now as I’m writing it how I don’t let myself have my pain, how quickly I step in to invalidate it. I also see that the phrase “my whole life” meant not that my life was “ruined,” but that I’ve lived my whole life in the fear of that shadow.
The “body memory” was of someone (male?) feeling my labia. I have no idea if it refers to a “real” experience.
I told Karen how I had found myself talking to Mother recently. “I’m not coming home again. You hurt me badly in the past, and you’ve hurt me every time I come home. I won’t see you again. I’ll come home for your funeral.”
I found that I was in that neutral place again. At first it felt OK to be there, then. I could feel a judgmental presence, probably mother. So I asked to do the “letting go” exercise again. We piled up the pillows and got out the towel. I let go very gently. It felt good to let go — I didn’t cry as I have before. But I felt the anxiety come back in pretty quickly — I’ve got to have something to hold on to. So I grabbed the towel again, pulled myself up until I felt the tension in my body, and let go again. I did this several times, finally realizing that I wasn’t trusting the floor to hold me up, so I ran my hands over the carpet, remembering the dented/wounded cedar floor. Karen suggested that when I had let go of all the old injunctions from Mom, I still needed something to hold on to. I think actually that if I could trust the floor, I wouldn’t need to hold on. We talked about that neutral place — how it was “good neutral,” a place to stay in not run away from. Karen reminded me that I had never felt safe enough in my childhood to experience “good normal.”
“I wasn’t trusting the floor.” Years later, after I had begun to do Somatic Experiencing, I did experience a floor.
I think I first began to feel “good normal” when I was here at Kendal.
So I lay there on my pillows and began to make sound, first the noises of a baby comforting itself which then developed into a deeper stronger richer voice, actually into my “Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah” song which I think of as being my song, almost a warriors song. It comforts me to have it, as it comforts me to have my death chant (“Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world…”) After singing, something had changed, there was a feeling of finding my voice. I realized that I hadn’t dissolved in tears at the idea of a baby left alone to try to comfort itself. So I write down SINGING as something I can do to self-soothe.
I don’t remember the first song. I can still remember my “death chant” and its tune. The words are from Buddhism. “Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world
A star at dawn, a bubble on a stream
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud
A flickering lamp, a shadow, and a dream.”
On the way back to Franconia, I felt pretty good. It felt like I had accomplished something real in therapy.