jennydeupree.com

Blended with Non-verbal Parts

Posted on December 17, 2023 by jenny

Friday, December 8, I asked Erica for an extra appointment because I was having such a hard time. I’m being unable to say anything when I’m with my friends, and I imagine they are judging me for it.

I tell her how lost I am. She says “You’re in a part who’s somewhere else, a part feeling really confused, disoriented. Tell her you received her message, as if a friend came in describing her experience.” I say “I hear you, can you tell me more?” but find that she’s non-verbal. I say “Would you like a hug?” She comes running, and I gather her up. I call all the homeless ones, I’m feeling all of them. Erica says “You’re being present, your voice is lower.”

Many of the parts are non-verbal. Maybe that’s why I’ve had trouble talking lately.

I ask if I have lots of parts. She says possibly as many as 25, but the most important thing is creating a quality of relationality. To do that I have to separate from the part, and that’s what’s hard. I’m so ready to welcome the part once I’m separated. Erica says “The only way they can communicate with us is to blend. Blending is actually a golden opportunity. We don’t know who needs help inside until we are triggered. Every time you do a repair it goes deeper and deeper.”

She tells me “Your system is so open, the moment you unblend, the exile runs into your arms. That is not typical.”

I read her what inner teacher said just that morning, because our session showed me the truth of that. I feel so much better. And maybe I don’t need to talk.

Dear Inner Teacher, I’m having a very hard time. Discouraged, lonely, don’t know who I am any more. Please help me.

Dear Jenny, what is happening is part of your spiritual path. All you have to do is keep going, keep searching for what is true. You feel alone because you are blended with an early part who was left alone way too much. In fact you are not alone, there are many spirits around you, watching over you. Your difficulty feeling their presence is because of the many younger parts who were left alone. Your job right now is to accept the feelings of being alone, inarticulate, and asked to do things beyond your capacity. Accept them, hold them, comfort them. That is all you need to do.

Thank You.

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“Conclude I can’t do it”

Posted on December 16, 2023 by jenny

From my journal for Friday, November 17

I’m feeling very empty — not in a good way — this is more lack of meaning and connection. On my list for this week is get help for my cell phone from Don Vogt. I realize that I’ve got to the “conclude I can’t do it” phase with my new phone.

Dear Inner Teacher, I’m really hating myself right now. I desperately need some help.

Dear Jenny, there are a lot of spirits that love you, and we are sorry that you are feeling so bad about yourself. This has been a hard passage. You have been alone too much and Erica has been away. It’s unfortunate that writing group hasn’t met, in some ways that has been the worst loss. Your friend’s comment about being left on the bench was unfortunate because you heard your mother’s voice making you wrong. Dear Jenny, let yourself feel our compassion. How would you feel if someone told you she was feeling desperately lonely and worthless? Yes, your heart would go right out to that person. It’s OK, dear, you will come out of this. Yes, do the dances to These are the Days and Il Cantico.

I had been thinking that it was my friend’s comment that had made me feel so bad for several weeks. Also the loss of Erica and writing group. But typing up this part of my journal helped me see something else. I expect that concluding I couldn’t do something activated a part whose influence made me feel like a complete failure. I started feeling like I couldn’t do anything right. I barely spoke for three weeks.

The reason I would “conclude I can’t do it” was because, when I was a child, I was having trouble doing a project, and my father said “If you didn’t know how to do it, why did you even try?” I had asked for help, but he essentially made me wrong for asking for help. I don’t remember my parents ever helping me with anything. I ended up believing that if I wanted anything to get done, I had to do it myself. This turns out to be one of the most pernicious things I learned from my parents.

Just happened to look at the last paragraph of that journal entry:

The movie was a documentary about tigers. They are beautiful animals. There was one picture of many tigers in cages. Painful. Made me think of the tiger who was given a larger space, but continued to pace the same small rectangle.

Sounds just like me, still concluding I can’t do it, still living a smaller life because that’s all the space my parents gave me.

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Gratitude

Posted on December 15, 2023 by jenny

It wasn’t until December 8 that I checked Feedspot’s list of 80 best blogs on PTSD. I was astounded to find that I was #15, and they said something wonderful about my blog.

Jenny Deupree is a writer and artist who shares her experiences with healing from PTSD on her website. She also writes about other topics such as spirituality, social justice, and the importance of meaning in one’s life. Her website is insightful and moving. She is a brave and inspiring person who is using her writing to help others.

O MY! could that really be true? It’s not a friend “just being nice.” It’s a professional, who knows something about writing, who sees this in my blog. Suddenly I felt something solid under my feet, a place to stand. It felt great.

But then I thought about starting work on another blog post. O my god, what if I can’t write anything good enough? So I haven’t started one until today, December 15. And I decided to just write the truth. It may not be good enough, but I don’t care. I was already thinking this, but then I got a big boost from Elizabeth Gilbert.

Now, today, I’ve been reading Big Magic, by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, and found this:

“… the only thing the ego wants is reward, reward, and more reward. … I know that my soul doesn’t care a whit about reward or failure. My soul is not guided by dreams of praise or fears of criticism. My soul doesn’t even have a language for such notions. My soul, when I attend to it, is a far more expansive and fascinating source of guidance than my ego will even be, because my soul desires only one thing: wonder. pp249-250

That’s why I always feel good when I see the moon, when I teach a folk dance, when I publish a post to my blog. I don’t even care whether anybody reads it — or at least that’s true most days.

So right now I’m feeling enormous gratitude: to the night sky, to Elizabeth Gilbert, and to who ever wrote that piece about my blog on Feedspot.

Posted in Present Day, Spirit, Writing | Comments Off

Effort to Connect with Baby: Scribble Drawings

Posted on December 12, 2023 by jenny

This was last edited on November 27. I didn’t post it because I got caught up in the work with scribble drawings.

From my journal for Thursday, November 23

When I went out with Mocha it was still sunny, and there was a wonderful sense of newness. I think it was the baby, seeing snow on grass and trees for the first time.

journal for Friday, November 24

I don’t feel like I connected with the baby yesterday. I kept forgetting. Tho I can feel her presence right now and she feels fairly contented. O yes, she likes having a wider world to get to know.

I want to tune into the energy of Baby Jenny and see if I can get any information about what she needs.

Dear One, what do you need?
To play with color and shape.
Too bad, I was hoping for words.

I got out my craypas, and using them in order, red, orange, yellow… I scribbled on the page, sometimes not even looking at Scribble drawing produced a face looking backward.

Uncomfortable with what she sees there. Definitely a woman. Slightly snobbish, perhaps horrified by something she sees that is “out of bounds.” A snobbish society woman looking at her creative daughter and worrying. This one won’t value a place in society, she’s not concerned about status.

That’s right little one. The stuff that matters to your mother doesn’t matter to you. She’s uncomfortable, but you just blaze ahead. Alas, the slightly older Jenny is hurt and scared by her mother’s criticism and closes down her creativity to what is acceptable. You, the youngest one, are angry at the older jenny for holding you back.

journal for Saturday, November 25

I did a sort of scribble drawing yesterday, using the craypas in order: red, orange, yellow… I looked at it and saw a face, so I took it as a message from the baby.

The face reminds me of my mother, who buys into that culture of looking good, where money and social status are important. Against this is my statement “I choose to trust that the Universe is Alive, and intelligent and compassionate, holds us all in love, and wants us to be our true selves.”

On Tuesday, November 28, I tell Erica about my scribble drawings and she says they are a profound practice. “You’re going into a deep place”

Posted in Journal, Present Day, Trauma, Writing | Comments Off

Complexity: Dealing with a Number of Parts

Posted on December 11, 2023 by jenny

I’ve been going over my journal since before Thanksgiving, trying to make sense of the journey I’ve been on. As I read over it, I see a number of possible parts that I might be blended with. This is complicated by the fact that I’m an empath, but don’t know it, so I think whatever I’m feeling is mine. It never occurs to me that I might be picking up from someone else. I suspect that when as a child, I tuned in to someone and told my mother, she told me that was nonsense.

I think that a number of parts are operating, including the “protector parts” that dissociate. This makes it very hard to see what’s going on.

In September I posted “Yet Another Young Part.” It was about my reaction to my dog getting a buzz cut and not looking like herself. I have wondered if this wasn’t the beginning of my difficulties. I see that I never actually tried to unblend and connect with the part. Reading the journal entry again, I see that it just as well gives a description of feeling like a child being expected to do grown-up things.

Then is my description of the baby who’s angry at me for hurting her. From my journal for November 22. I talk about a memory of hurting myself, but there was an earlier event that happened in a therapy session in 1992. I was doing a gestalt exercise of talking to a pillow which represented the baby. But I threw the pillow away shouting “It’s not OK to be a baby.”

The Traumatized Baby —I think that baby became the baby on a garbage can that I rescued sometime in January 2006.

It was December 5 when I realized that I had been triggered into a young part “who’s expected to do adult things, even though she hasn’t been taught or supported.” What came back was one time when I had been left alone to take care of younger siblings, I think it was in 1994 that Mama Greene told us about it. I have no memory of it, I must have dissociated.

The “Colonial Dames Incident.” This was a time when Mother wounded me badly, and I wrote about it in my journal afterward. The next day I read what I had written, and couldn’t remember it. I asked my sister, and she said it did happen. Then I understood that I had been dissociating all the painful things Mother said to me, so they were always a surprise. But now that I remembered, I decided I would not give her a target. I would not tell her anything about my life. Mother’s response was “I’m so cheerful she can’t be in a bad mood.”

Mother was always saying “Don’t be so sensitive,” as though I had a choice. I tried, but it didn’t work. I finally did get some help along the way, as you will see in the blog post.

Reading this over today, I find it very confusing. I hope that it’s because I am still blended with parts who are confused, and that you will be able to make sense of it.

Posted in Healing, Journal, Trauma, Work with parts | Comments Off

Ways to Heal Trauma

Posted on December 7, 2023 by jenny

I’ve been watching a show on YouTube. Dr. Rangan Chatterjee interviewing Bessel Van Der Kolk on different methods for healing trauma. I found it very exciting and personally helpful. I’m going to share some of my notes and my experiences, and I recommend seeing it yourself.

BVDK: “Doing something to overcome your helplessness is tremendously important.” People helping each other in natural disasters.
Need to process the stress energy through movement.
Trauma — “your identity becomes one of defeat.”

I always felt better after an evening of teaching circle dance at Neskaya.

The summer after I realized I had been traumatized, but hadn’t begun the somatic experiencing work, I went to the festival of music, song and dance at Findhorn. I was sitting in the benches during an intermission. When they started dancing, I began to feel terrified. I remember BVDK saying “what helps is touch, rhythm, and movement.” I force myself to go down and join the dance, moving in between dancers in the line, holding hands on both sides. Terrified, I focus on the steps. I begin to feel calmer, and finally human again.

C: how about using music instead of EMDR?
BVDK: I’m not interested in listening to a tape. Trauma is about shame and disconnecting from other people — I want to help people in the context of a relationship with someone where you feel no shame. They need to reestablish the capacity to connect with people around them.
C: Is it a good idea to encourage people to do yoga as part of a group?
BVDK: YES

Personally I find dancing with a group of people, especially holding hands, helps a lot. The reason why we need other people, in their bodies, not too far away, is because it’s a good way to regulate your nervous system. Especially for people like me, dealing with complex trauma, who have trouble staying regulated.

C. what can we learn, as members of society, from the victims of trauma?
BVDK: people generally do the best they can to survive. That might be addiction if nothing else is available.
Being nasty to people whose behavior we don’t like is not the best way to help.
Being heard and being in connection with people is important at every stage in our lives.

My life here at Kendal has gone through stages. At first I was new and learning the ropes. My therapist said I would begin to find the support of the ordinary. I reacted “Ordinary! That’s boring.” Living with the constant stress of PTSD, I needed things to be deeply interesting. Gradually, I began to feel safe enough to feel OK with ordinary conversation. I realized that was what “comfort zone” meant. I had never had a comfort zone. Alas, COVID ruined all that. I went through a really bad time of terror, and having to raise my medication, and a lot of work with Erica to deal with my parts. Because I was traumatized by being left alone too much as a baby, the social distancing of COVID was triggering. I am still having trouble. I know that I need to spend more time with people, but don’t know what to do.

BVDK: most really innovative things in our world are invented by traumatized people because they live in a world that’s unbearable.
They have no choice but to find new ways of coping with things, ways that are different from where they live, because if they keep doing the same thing they will die.
Great example: Isaac Newton — worst possible childhood, hid himself in mathematics, created a safe space for himself.
J.K.Rowling — she was traumatized — created an imaginary world — imagined new possibilities.
New ways of pointing things out to people.

C: What would you say to a person who’s stuck in hopelessness?
BVDK: When was a time in your life that you felt good. What were you doing?
What made you feel whole, and safe, and happy?

This reminds me of the shaman’s question to a sick person in the tribe: when did you stop dancing?

What makes me feel whole, safe and happy is dancing folk dances while holding hands in a circle.

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Collective Trauma

Posted on December 4, 2023 by jenny

I’ve been rereading To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World by Gail Hornstein about the life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Frieda and Chestnut Lodge are the therapist and therapeutic community described by Joanne Greenberg in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. That book was very important to me in my 20’s and 30’s, so I got a copy of the book about Frieda when it first came out. Rereading it, I notice things I didn’t see before. Hornstein talks about the difficulty that disagreements between staff that aren’t talked about become problematic behavior in the patients. (p272) It’s clear that the patients pick up the energy and start acting it out. We humans are interconnected in ways that our culture is in complete denial of. It’s a little scary in terms of humanity finding a way to a sustainable future.

I got an email from Thomas Hübl about a course he’s teaching in working with collective trauma. I read it, and the difficulty of working with it makes me feel discouraged. Collective trauma traps us all in dysfunctional behavior. We don’t know we’re doing it because we are not aware of the dysfunction that we are part of. I’m glad to know that Thomas Hübl is working on this problem and training others to work with collective trauma.

Hübl says “When traumatic events happen, we’re quick to point fingers. But we should examine how each and every one of us contributes to the ecosystem that brings these traumas forth. We are not merely separate individuals acting independently. We are ecosystemically interrelated. We always exist in interdependent relationships with the systems we are part of.” See link above for more.

It also explains why I am having such a hard time right now, feeling overwhelmed and unable to act in any kind of normal friendly fashion. I’ve been badly cut off due to feeling completely unskilled socially, and empathically picking up on what other people are not letting themselves feel. I am still triggered by the social distancing of COVID and the fact that many people imagine it is over, and behave in ways that continue to spread it.

One good thing, my blog was chosen to be among the 80 best blogs about PTSD on FeedSpot, which lists blogs about many different subjects. Any of my readers who are interested in more information about PTSD should check them out.

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“We Are One, We Are Home at Last”

Posted on November 25, 2023 by jenny

it is the appointed date. we’ve been at Stonehenge all night and now the sky is growing pale. we stand in a circle inside the stones watching the horizon behind the heel stone. the stone is heavy on the bottom, pointed on the top, quivering in the air. the light grows until the sky is shaking with it. then a sudden flash in a notch on the planet’s edge. light splinters on the heel stone. i look at my companions’ faces and each facets like a jewel, many faces lie there, depth upon depth. i look at rhiannon and see a kindly housewife and a jolly schoolboy and an old wise woman. i look at merlyn and see a medieval scholar and an elfin girl and a powerful king. as ariel always was so each of us is now. then enlarging each member of the company as the flame enlarges the wick is a figure too bright to look at. our true selves greet one another with secret smiles (o yes we’ve known all along) then reach out hands to join in the dance. at the center blooms a new figure, many faceted, many faced. for the transparencies of faces are endless and deep, so many many individuals braided into the whole. the figure grows, towers . . . as one we look at the stars. as equals the stars greet us. there is no need to go anywhere. we are one, we are home at last.

This passage is the end of “The Company of Thirteen” which was a fantasy story I was playing around with, and decided to use in the left-hand pages of The Feminine of History is Mystery. There were thirteen characters, with names from Celtic mythology, Shakespeare’s Tempest, Tolkien, and other sources. Each character was described with a short piece of their story and also an image which was similar to a Tarot card. One of the characters, Ariel, was neither male nor female and constantly changing what they looked like. At first the characters are separate, then they begin to find each other, and gather into two groups. Each group is looking for the ship they left on the shore, can’t find, try to build. Finally the two groups meet. They are surprised by the meeting, and recognize each other. Some old memory is activated. One says “Now we can build the ship!” Ariel says “A ship to take us to the stars.” And to return to their home planet, which they have remembered once they connected. Then Cirdan, the shipwright, realizes that their technology is beyond that of a physical ship, they need a “transporter” to translate their bodies somewhere else. He says they need a “condenser and focus” and draws part of a circle open to a spot at a distance. They determine that there is only one position on land that has the right latitude and longitude for such a thing to work. It is the position of Stonehenge, and they recognize the condenser in the still standing part of the circle, and the focus in the Heel Stone. They have to wait for a particular date, and then they will be able to return to their home planet.

I don’t know what I imagined would happen. Somehow the company would be transported to their home planet. But that’s not what my hand wrote. I realized that the oneness was more satisfying, and that it also fit an unacknowledged theme of the book. That’s the idea of reuniting the separated fragments into a whole.

An earlier statement of that theme appears in a passage about Glastonbury, and the Chalice Well. This is slightly rewritten to fit my Audio-visual presentation “Sacred Sites of Ancient Keltia.”

Below Glastonbury Tor there is a spring, flowing with iron-rich water, the blood of the earth – the menstrual blood of the Great Mother, who is called Annis, Danu, Ishtar, Belili. Her blood is gathered in a great silver bowl, chalice of inspiration, cauldron of rebirth. And through the magic of time, by which all things change yet nothing is ever lost, the Cup of the Last Supper, and the Cauldron of Kerridwen have coalesced, run together like drops of quicksilver, and become that mystical vessel and chalice, the Holy Grail – that offers to each a very personal nourishment, that brings to each the possibility of reuniting the scattered fragments and being reborn as a whole person.

The “personal nourishment” is the idea that the Grail, when it appeared to Arthur’s Court, offered each person what he liked best to eat. One of the stories connected with the Cauldron of Kerridwen/Cerridwen was that the cut up pieces of a child were put in it and stirred, and the child came back together. Words used to describe both the cauldron and Cerridwen are “rebirth” and “regeneration.” For myself, the image of something that has been fragmented coming back into a whole being relates to my efforts to heal from trauma, which I had no conscious awareness of at the time I was writing this book. The image of the merging of the cup of the Last Supper, a Christian symbol, and the Cauldron of the pagans, is something else that came to me, I don’t know if any scholars have suggested it.

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Trying to Connect with Traumatized Baby

Posted on November 24, 2023 by jenny

Read Erica what I had written. She thought it was powerful. We talked about the flavor of the writing.

Notes from the session with my therapist on November 21:

What I wrote was written from a “neutral/wisdom stance,” not from a trauma place, not neutral but beyond shock. I was not welcomed, but not pushed away, I was not seen at all. The neutrality of negation.

Erica asked “What of this is yours?” What happened here? — Is this mine?Who else’s pain is here?

The pain is not in the writing, though I feel the pain when I read the writing. The landscape is a ghost town. It’s not discernible what happened here, speaks to the vacuousness. There’s nothing here to nourish the witness, there’s a hollowness.

The environment is missing nourishment & relationship, it is beyond despair, even despair isn’t big enough. Coming in touch with that level of despair.

Erica says “You’re deepening the journey you’ve been on.” I’m bringing language to the profound desolation of the baby. Putting into language feelings that the baby could never have expressed. The pauses, the spaces, neutrality can feel like compassion. This is the non-judging witness.

The baby has never been mirrored, so she can’t know herself. The sadness, the spaces, the neutrality give the baby space to feel herself.

The challenge of recovery from trauma — People crowd the one who needs healing by rushing, not giving them room. The result of trauma is a bunch of disconnected parts. They need to integrate, need to be given a holding environment, a space that’s not invaded.

Is there more that the baby needs to communicate?

Then I need to respond. What does this young energy want or need? What would attunement look like? How can I show you I am here for you?

The baby needs to know what’s possible. What does connection look like? What happened here?

Ask inner teacher for help.

Thinking about the Feminine of History and the passages that wrote themselves about being held by the circle and “we are one, we are home at last.”

I’m imagining carrying Baby Jenny in a sling on my front, so I can put my arms around her when I don’t need them for something else.

Notes from my journal for November 22:

Dear Inner Teacher, can you tell me about anything that would help my relationship with the traumatized baby or help me understand what to do for her?

Dear Jenny, holding her and reassuring her is exactly right. “Held, not healed.” Holding her in your love and caring is what is most important. She must allow her own healing to happen. Yes, just as in your book the fragments have to self-organize into a whole person.

“Held, not healed” is from Matt Licata.

J: What can I do then, to help the process take place?

I.T.: Collage would be excellent, as it’s fragments coming together. I know this is hard for you. You can also draw fragments, and color them or label them. Movement would be good too.

J: I feel very doubtful of my ability. But it doesn’t have to be beautiful. I can at least make a start.

Even Gaza and Israel are fragments looking to be healed. This work can happen on many levels.

Later, I checked with Baby Jenny, and she was angry at me for being mean to her. I apologized profusely, told her I was not angry at her, but at myself, usually for not getting it right, and I can understand how Baby Jenny thought it was her. I remember hitting myself to stop myself from crying. I expect Mother hit Baby Jenny to stop her from crying. Of course Baby Jenny couldn’t tell the difference between me and Mother.

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Social Distancing Desolation

Posted on November 21, 2023 by jenny

Written in writing group on Monday, November 20:

Don’t know what to say. where to begin. Standing at the door, looking out at the rain. It’s been raining for days. All the people are dead except me. I don’t understand what happened. The river has been high with all this rain. Sometimes I see branches, or even tree trunks floating down. … I wish there was someone to talk to. Maybe I could walk. I do have a raincoat and an umbrella. I could walk down alongside the river. I remember when there were flowers. They were really pretty with bright colors. I wonder what happened to them. … The rain is tapering off. That’s good. I wonder if I’ll see the sun. Maybe I’ll find something to eat. I haven’t had anything to eat for days. But I don’t feel hungry. At least the river is here, so I have plenty of water. … It did stop raining, but it’s still cloudy. The prairie stretches flat in every direction. I don’t see any trees or hills, just grass beaten down by the rain. … When it got dark I lay down by the river. The gentle sound it makes as it moves through the rocks is soothing. I can’t see any stars. … I wish I knew a prayer or a poem or something I could say to myself that would be comforting. … It’s light now. The sun must be up. It’s too cloudy to see. I wonder if I’ll ever find any more people. … I’m tired. Nothing is changing. I’m not getting anywhere. Maybe I’ll just sit for a while. What’s the point of going on? … It’s three days later. I’m still walking downstream. I see something further down, maybe some buildings. … But now I see that they are old houses, falling apart, falling down. The people must have gone away. I look through one of the houses. There are paintings on the wall. I find a kitchen with a stove, but there’s no food. I wonder what happened. I poke around. There’s furniture and books, but I don’t see any clothing. I open a book, but can’t read the language. I wonder if I’ll ever find out what happened. … I go on down the river.

I think this describes very well what a baby might feel when it is left alone, what I felt when I was left alone. Except of course a baby doesn’t have any words. This may be how my mother felt as a child, I don’t suppose Granny was there for her any more than she was there for me. I can see how feelings like this could lead someone to drink. On the other hand, I can see how one could experience this without much emotion at all, just casually walking through the emptiness. Writing it, and then when I woke up this morning, I felt utterly desolate, abandoned by life. I finally had to very fiercely say to myself “I don’t believe that grey empty world is reality. It’s just a painful place I get stuck in, probably connected to things that happened when I was a baby.”

I reach out to comfort baby Jenny, to comfort Mom, and then to everybody who is feeling like this. “There, there, dear. It’s a terrible place to be. It’s not real, it’s just how you feel when you’ve been alone too much. Human beings were meant to be in community.”

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