From my journal for February 2, 1996
I spent most of my session with Karen crying. I told her about the awful pain I woke with Tuesday morning and how everything that I could hold on to had disappeared. I told her what Lynelle had said about that pain being connected to early infancy, and said that I needed to cry like a baby. So we made a place on the floor by the bed, and I cried and cried. When the first high-pitched cries died out I rested for a while and then tried to make the sound that came from the pain in my chest. That resulted in some desperate, agonized screaming. Every now and then I’d get this sudden vision from outside: here’s this adult woman lying on the floor screaming like a baby, how stupid and ugly. Then I would come back to myself with the knowledge that I had to do this and just keep going. I also kept saying to myself “there, there, dear.” Karen stayed in physical contact with me, gently patting my knee or my wrist. At one point I opened my eyes and saw that she had lain down on the cushions to be with me. I heard a little voice say inside me “will you be my mommy?” and I thought that Karen really does love me, I don’t need to ask her, I see it in her willingness to stay with me in my misery. Again I got a hit of her seeing me as ugly: tears on my cheeks, snot dripping from my nose, my ugly face with wrinkles and mustache, and then I knew that she doesn’t see me that way.
I sat up and blew my nose and drank some water. I said I had a “more adult” pain that needed to be released, so I lay down on my back and began to vocalize. The most extraordinary series of sounds came through me. It started like the wail I made when I spoke for the floor at the theater workshop, and went on into a wild keening and lamenting. I saw women with shawls, great rocks, bleak landscapes. It felt like generations of women all mourning children who had died horribly. Sometimes it seemed that they were dealing with corpses on a battlefield.
I wish I could say that I felt better after all that crying, but there’s clearly more to do. The pain in my chest had eased but was still there. (It felt like there was a tight band around my chest. I could breathe deeply but not widely, if that makes sense. This morning I can breathe widely, but feel a little pain on the right side.)
Yes, there’s a lot more crying to do. I have a lot of grief, things I need to mourn about my childhood and what I didn’t get. I find my expression interesting: first there’s the crying of a baby who’s alone and wants someone to come. Then there’s some desperate, agonized screaming, this is NOT OK. Then there’s some strange wailing that seems to connect with ancestral trauma. My description reminds me of the Greek folk dance we sometimes do that represents women stepping over the bodies of men killed on the battlefield.
Karen Collins is the therapist I worked with for many years. It’s very interesting that I want her to be my mother, clearly a response to my experience of neglect. The times when I see myself as ugly are my introjected mother, who had no sympathy for my pain.