From my journal for January 10, 1996
Visit to Hart, the naturopath. I told her that I was struggling with depression. … We talked about suicide a little, I said I felt even about that “it won’t do any good.” Hart agreed, she said “You’ll just have to come back and do it again.” Then she said that the lifetime after you have committed suicide is one of the hardest ones. I’ve been thinking about that — that could account for my difficulties, it makes accepting them a little easier. Except that I get angry, is this a punishment for having made a mistake? Or did I choose to have a life in which I could learn the value of life, even when things are very painful? I think about the time with Rose Marie when I went back to a life in which I committed suicide. I don’t know what to think.
I like my honesty in saying “I don’t know what to think.”
It’s interesting to think that I might have committed suicide in my past life, so now I’m having to learn to hang on, even when my life is very painful and difficult. I’m not at all sure I’ve learned the “value of life.” Yes, I think I’ve accomplished some worthwhile things, but I’ve experienced very little happiness. So what is the “value” of life?
What helped the most was a good visit with Lynnelle last night. I told her about the feelings of despair and hopelessness, that I couldn’t even remember what it felt like to love. I said it was as bad as it had ever been — but back in ’71, I had no love relationship, no job, no real home, no friends, and in ’84 I was physically sick all the time, much more than now. She understood that degree of despair and I think it helped a lot, knowing that someone understood, not having to be so completely alone with it.
Hart said something about facing the darkness, and when she really did it, she always came out to a place of light. “Have you done this?” she asks. Yes, over and over, and I know that experience because it has happened before, but this time it’s not happening. At Hart’s, I wondered: “Have I just failed to face this darkness?”
I find it very odd that I say I have faced darkness and come out to a place of light. I have no memories of any such thing.
But now, reading “Real Moments,” and about the author going off by herself to face the pain of a failed relationship and “stopped resisting … surrendered to my pain … — I started to fill up with a deep, comforting sense of peace.” Karen talks all the time about “surrendering” and I find it sometimes very hard to do. And I think about my attempts to “surrender” to the pain of the airplane noise, and how I can’t do it because I become overwhelmed. Karen said that I can’t do that work while in that level of restimulated pain — and that leads me to the Kripalu teaching of going to the level of tolerance, no farther, and staying there. So I see that she’s leaving something out, and I think this is the difference between crisis — the normal sort of crisis that can bring out hidden strengths that she describes — and trauma, where the system breaks down, and the experience cannot lead to any kind of strength or health or integrity because it actually destroys the psychic systems that make strength, health, integrity possible. She quotes a guru: “The wind blows strong and hard on the tender young trees, not to harm them, but to teach their roots to hold firmly to the ground” and goes on to say “I bless the painful moments in my life, and I thank the wind. Its relentless force has molded me into the woman I am today.”
At Kripalu they talk about the “zone of tolerance.”
I don’t know where I got the ideas about the difference between “crisis” and “trauma.” It’s true that the system for creating normal memory breaks down in trauma. I go on to talk about what if the wind is too strong or the tree too young — the tree gets uprooted — interesting metaphor for early trauma. Trauma happens when the nervous system is overwhelmed, which is all too easy in the case of a child of less than three years old. Their nervous system has not completely matured, and can’t handle events that would not faze an adult.
But the analogy breaks down when the wind is too strong, or accompanied by flood, or the tree too young. What happens to those of us who get uprooted? Normal wind after that does not teach us to have strong roots. And I think about the question of “facing the darkness” and become suddenly angry on my own behalf. Goddammit. I don’t lack courage or integrity, I have faced plenty of darkness, plenty of unpleasant truths. I have surrendered to many emotions and aspects of my being that have been scary or painful — I think how swiftly I went down on the floor to be the floor in my dream, and with what integrity I waited for what that floor had to say instead of imposing my own ideas. And I am facing the current darkness and despair to the best of my ability — allowing myself conscious distractions. But I can’t surrender to the pain of the planes, so I haven’t been able to move through to whatever truth is hiding in that lesson, and I think it’s because whatever event is being restimulated by the plane noise is truly traumatic, that is it caused a breakdown of the very systems I would need to heal. So I need more than just bringing myself to face the darkness, I need help and time and moral support — I need someone like Karen who helps me find the zone of tolerance and stays there with me, someone like Robin who helps loosen the old tensions at a rate I can handle. That’s why this work is so hard, and takes so long.
Actually, the “pain of the planes” is not restimulation of an earlier hurt, extreme sensitivity to noise is a consequence of trauma. That sensitivity is responsible for my difficulties in sleeping, but I don’t realize it’s the same mechanism. There’s no way I could “surrender” to the noise of the planes. What cured the situation was getting on an anti-depressant and the help of a brilliant therapist.
Although at this point I thought I had gone through a lot of pain, and I had, but nothing like the pain of when I started to work with Erica and found out what it felt like to be a baby left alone.