jennydeupree.com

1995: Sullen Angry 8-yr-old

Posted on October 30, 2023 by jenny

From my journal for November 28, 1995

Well, let’s see if she is here, that sullen angry hurt child. I have a hit of her age as being 8 or 9, and of Mother as a hurt angry sullen child herself. I can feel her presence, but she’s not ready or not willing to talk. She doesn’t want to have anything to do with grown-ups, or with grown-up advice, or with grown-up value systems. This sounds like someone who’s had unreasonable expectations laid on her, to be mature beyond her state of development, to be mature without having grown organically through the earlier stages, and then was given no support for this enormous stretch, or praise when she accomplished it. No wonder she’s hurt and angry. Well, I’m here to listen. Here’s the pen if you want to say something.

You’re a fine one to give me the pen. You don’t want to hear about what it’s been like to be me. I feel silenced, patronized, condescended to. I can’t express my anger in fine words, or coherent statements, and you devalue it as childish, as being about trivial things.

What am I angry about? I don’t know, I don’t know — I’m angry at feeling trapped in some goody-goody bourgeois room that’s narrow and full of little knick knacks and when I try to swing my arms to make room to breathe I knock something over and get told I’m being rude and I have a vague sense, or maybe it’s just a hope, because this place is so painful and tight and stuffy and boring, I hope that there’s another world out there, a bigger world, with room to move and breathe and beautiful things that would satisfy my heart and beings that I could talk to — but you tell me that’s just a fantasy, unrealistic. And so I make myself wrong for my hope, and try to fit in among the dusty artifacts, and try to nourish myself on fantasies that are limited because there’s nothing outside me to feed them. And now I find that there is a world out there, a would of mountains and trees, a world of artists and musicians and dancers, and you never told me about it, or helped me develop the skills I need to be able to function in that world. That’s why I’m angry.

And I have liked working on the costume for the “Lady from the Black Lagoon,” and I thank you for that.

O, my dear, I’m so glad you were able to tell me about what it’s been like for you, and I don’t blame you for being angry at me and distrusting me, and I’m trying to find more ways to find nourishment from the “outside” and to support you in creative expression.

November 29

Woke at six, feeling rested and grateful to be feeling better.

I have to say I’m blown away by this conversation. This is work with “parts” long before I started doing it with my therapist. I wish I remembered the “Lady from the Black Lagoon.” Although she doesn’t say it directly, I think she doesn’t want to have anything to do with adults because Mom & Dad were so unhelpful. I love her description of a “goody-goody bourgeois room that’s narrow.” It doesn’t describe the house I grew up in so much as the emotional tone of my parents’ lives.

I think this 8-yr-old is the same as, or similar to the obstreperous child I wrote about in the last post. Looks like I need to let her be both angry and grieve. Or maybe I’m the one who needs to grieve because I never let her out in my life. No, that’s not true. After I had been doing Somatic Experiencing for a while, I got one of those emails about calling your congressperson to complain about something. I wanted to do it, and instead of being immobilized by my anger, I was able to go to the phone and make the call. I was so pleased.

Posted in Activism, Healing, Journal, Somatic Experiencing, Work with parts | Comments Off

Obstreperous Child

Posted on October 29, 2023 by jenny

The Daily Good today (10/22/23) was an essay by Francis Weller on grief. When I first heard about his work from my therapist, I went to a retreat on the west coast. But I have been struggling with a lot of sadness, hopelessness, bleak feelings and when I read this I realized where they were coming from.

There is another place of grief that we hold, a second gateway, different than the Iosses connected to losing someone or something that we love. This grief occurs in the places never touched by love. These are profoundly tender places precisely because they have lived outside of kindness, compassion, warmth, or welcome. These are the places within us that have been wrapped in shame and banished to the farther shore of our lives. …

These neglected places of soul live in utter despair. What we feel as defective, we also experience as loss. Whenever any portion of who we are is denied welcome and instead sent into exile, we are creating a condition of loss. The proper response to any loss is grief, but we cannot grieve for something that we feel is outside the circle of worth. That is our predicament, we are chronically sensing the presence of sorrow but we are unable to truly grieve because we feel in our body that this piece of who we are is unworthy of our grieving over. Much of our grief comes from having to crouch and live small, hidden from the gaze of others and in that move we confirm our exile.

There is one more gate to grief, one difficult to name, yet it is very present in each of our lives. This entry into sorrow calls forward the background echo of losses that we may never even know to acknowledge. I wrote earlier about the expectations coded into our physical and psychic lives. We anticipated a certain quality of welcome, engagement, touch, reflection, in short, we expected what our deep time ancestors experienced, namely the village. We expected a rich and sensuous relationship with the earth, communal rituals of celebration, grief and healing that kept us in connection with the sacred. The absence of these requirements haunts us and we feel it as an ache, a sadness that settles over us as if in a fog.

How do we even know to miss these experiences? I don’t know how to answer that question. What I do know is that when granted to an individual, the aftermath often includes grief; some wave of recognition rises and the awareness dawns that I have lived without this all my life. This realization calls forth grief. I have seen this time and time again.

These are the words that touched me strongly:

“the places never touched by love” “These neglected places of soul live in utter despair. What we feel as defective, we also experience as loss. The proper response to any loss is grief, but we cannot grieve for something that we feel is outside the circle of worth.”

“We anticipated a certain quality of welcome, engagement, touch, reflection … communal rituals of celebration, grief and healing that kept us in connection with the sacred. The absence of these requirements haunts us… ”

On Saturday, October 28 I wrote in my journal:

Woke up and was just lying there when I began to feel awful. Hard to describe the feeling: lonely, unloved, as though thrown out of the tribe, not labeled with a crime, but just being unacceptable. I realized I have to treat it as a part, and find some love for it.

Later in that journal entry I wrote:

My right shoulder hurts. I did way too many puzzles yesterday. I was feeling obstreperous. I’m going to have to look that word up, but the sound is so good to express how I felt — angry and perverse so I do something I shouldn’t because it’s bad for me.

[Margin: Obstreperous — stubbornly resistant to control.]

Now I understand that this is a part of me, rejected, criticized, and exploited by my parents, that I also have rejected, not quite sure why. I think I need to know why so I can apologize to that part, as well as comfort it. I remember a picture of me as a child, standing by a small table. I look very upset. They told me I had been running around and around the table, so they spanked me to make me be still and got a picture of a spanked child. Served them right. I think this has to do with anger that I’m being treated badly and learned that it wasn’t OK to express.

While I was still married, but my marriage was beginning to break up, my husband said several things that I got angry about much later, but failed to notice at the time. A form of denial. I wonder if the incident involving Mother and the Colonial Dames was another example of denial that I became aware of, and began to protect myself against.

Posted in Depression, Healing, Present Day, Spirit, Work with parts | Comments Off

“I gave my life energy to sacred meaning”

Posted on October 25, 2023 by jenny

From my journal for October 18

Feeling weird. Woke up feeling weird. Not sure I can describe it. I don’t think I have a fever, I found my thermometer, but will have to wait, because I already had a drink. At the thought that I might die I feel relief.

A good session with Erica yesterday. She said of me “the deepest truth is I gave my life energy to sacred meaning.” Yes, I think that’s really true.

Thinking about “giving my life energy to sacred meaning.” Teaching folk dance/sacred dance, teaching astronomy — we live in this astonishing universe. My search for truth and beauty, and trying to create them. Building Neskaya. Certainly my presentation of “Sacred Sites.” I look at my angels on the wall, and the Ben Shahn. I think of the Dancer and Red Woman paintings. I never was interested in money or status. All I ever wanted to do was share the things I love with people who wanted them.

“I’ve given my life energy to sacred meaning.” I keep going back to look for it. I think I’ve got the words now. I would never have been able to say it that way, but it feels exactly right as a description of what I have done with my life.

Walking Mocha, thinking about dying, I feel so happy. It must be because Erica named what I have done with my life. I feel complete. I feel finished. Now my prayer is “Thy will be done.” and “Thank You.”

Posted in Circle Dance, Healing, Journal, Present Day, Spirit, Vocation | Comments Off

Help from Inner Teacher

Posted on October 22, 2023 by jenny

Written on Sunday, October 22

Dear Inner Teacher, I’m feeling very lost, my brain is sluggish. I desperately need help.

Dear Jenny, know that many spirits love you. If you can’t do anything practical except the minimum — feeding yourself and walking the dog — that’s OK. Morally speaking. You have been alone too much and don’t have the support you need to be able to do more. On the other hand, some of the things that are hard for you to do, like work on the machines, or go to exercise classes, have negative consequences. You might ask a friend, Demaris or Judith, when they go to let you know so you can go too. The other difficulty is your grief. As you were reminded by today’s Daily Good: you need to be in community to grieve. You live in a culture that avoids grief. The other difficulty is that you have enormous grief, not for something you had and lost, which is relatively easy to grieve, but for something necessary that you did not get. Namely: comfort, support, tenderness, and many other things that a child needs to grow up healthy. You need to find a group that will help you grieve. Maybe the Thursday night group at Turning Point.

Thank You.

Posted in Guidance, Present Day, Spirit, Trauma | Comments Off

“to reteach a thing its loveliness…”

Posted on October 18, 2023 by jenny

Written in writing group on Monday, October 17:

Met Gwen & Sandra near the stairs — said I was having a hard time. They both hugged me, asked if I felt loved. I said yes.

Won’t you look down upon me Jesus
Won’t you help me take a stand
You just gotta see me through another day
My body’s achin’ and my time is at hand
I can’t make it any other way…

These lines are from James Taylor’s Fire & Rain

Song in my head. Won’t stop. But I feel so totally helpless to make any kind of difference. I’m so tired, I just have no energy at all. Can barely do the things I have to do to take care of myself. Seems like I spent the morning writing checks and getting them into envelopes. Then I tried to help the people who are writing activist postcards, but I couldn’t find the room. Pushing my cart so I could pick up my groceries, down to the health center and back.

I keep trying to return to metta: May all beings be held in lovingkindness, may the Israelis be held in lovingkindness, may the Palestinians be held in lovingkindness, may Netanyahu be held in lovingkindness, may Trump be held …. won’t you help me take a stand, you just gotta see me through another day.

Reading about the life of St. Francis. What an amazing human being! But how hard it was for people to get what he was doing. The writer, Richard Rohr, is a Franciscan, but he learned all the wrong things. I don’t know how he found his way through. He talks about the importance of learning how to be with silence and solitude, and how you can learn about god and non-duality. But people can also value being alone because they feel superior, or want to look superior. I haven’t got the words right, but what struck me is that my difficulty with silence and solitude is due to early trauma, not some kind of pride. I wish I could make friends, talk to people more easily, I just never learned how. Lately I’ve been feeling horribly alone and completely useless, unable to do anything good for the world I love. Francis talks about not being important, about living on the margins — how did he do so much good? Because he obviously inspired people, not by what he said but by who he was, by how he moved through the world, what he did. At the time of the Crusades, he went to talk to the leader of the Muslims, spent 3 weeks with him, but was never able to convince the Crusaders that what they were doing was wrong and was bound to fail. Was that when it all began?

I’ve been reading Eager to Love, the book about St. Francis by Richard Rohr. For information about Francis’ visit to the Sultan of Egypt at the time of the Crusades, see Chapter 10: Entering the World of Another: Francis and the Sultan of Egypt.

After I read my writing to my friends in writing group, Judith said she wanted to read the poem St. Francis and the Sow, by Galway Kinnell. It’s a poem I know from a reading by David Whyte, tho the only words I could remember were “to reteach a thing its loveliness…” This is only the first part:

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.

My heart was warmed by her gift.

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

“This time it’s all of us or none”

Posted on October 13, 2023 by jenny

Puerto Rican Jewish poet and activist Aurora Levins Morales poem “Red Sea”:

We cannot cross until we carry each other,
all of us refugees, all of us prophets.
No more taking turns on history’s wheel,
trying to collect old debts no-one can pay.
The sea will not open that way.

This time that country
is what we promise each other,
our rage pressed cheek to cheek
until tears flood the space between,
until there are no enemies left,
because this time no one will be left to drown
and all of us must be chosen.
This time it’s all of us or none.

This poem was sent to me by a Jewish friend.

The trauma I see happening in the Israel-Palestine war is a consequence of trauma. The trauma that was inflicted on the Jewish people by the Nazi Holocaust, they are repeating on the Palestinians. Gaza is a Ghetto, a Concentration Camp. The only way to stop the continuation of the trauma is what? Can all the nations of the world demand a cease-fire instead of supporting one side or the other? I am deeply ashamed that my country is supporting the Israelis. The future looks very bleak.

I reach for Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jew who was murdered in Auschwitz, who helped as many suffering people as she could and did her best not to hate the Nazis.

PS Today is Friday the 13th, considered bad luck by Westerners, but good luck by pagans. Friday is the day of Venus, Goddess of Love. Thirteen is the number of moon months in a year.

Posted in Present Day, Spirit, Story, Trauma | Comments Off

1995: Struggle to Find Compassion for Myself

Posted on October 12, 2023 by jenny

November 24, 1995

I’m sitting outside the Dojo in Montpelier while Dana teaches class. I came with him because I wanted to go to the Psychodrama performance “Surviving through the Night.” Someone gave me the flyer when we had the Journey showing in Woodstock and I really wanted to check them out and support them. It was supposed to be at “Spaulding Auditorium” in Barre, but I couldn’t find it. … [I kept trying, going around the same roads and turns without luck, finally I gave up & went back to Montpelier] … I found myself feeling like Eleanor, wanting to hit myself in the head, wanting to smash myself because I couldn’t find it. I found myself explaining in great detail why I couldn’t find it, and saw that I was trying to justify myself to some harsh judge who was saying things like “What do you mean you couldn’t find it? How can you be so stupid!” etc etc. … I quit trying, but like Eleanor I’m unable to support my own decision, I immediately start to second-guess myself, I recognize how hungry I am for finding my own people, other people who are using theater to heal from trauma, and I’m really upset that I wasn’t able to find them.

Eleanor is my friend who was badly traumatized in her family.

This reminds me a lot of that time at Kripalu when I wasn’t able to bully my way into the folk dance. I feel just like I did then, disappointed, upset and vulnerable, and angry at myself for being that way. That time it took me several hours of struggling to find my way to a place of compassion for myself. Let’s see if I can do it again.

OK, dear, in the first place, you were very tired as you came over with Dana. You weren’t feeling any actual motivation for doing this, you were just doing it because you knew theater is important to you. (o damn, I really am disappointed, and I haven’t let myself cry because I’m so angry at myself.) Then, when you tried to find the place, the driving was difficult because of the bright lights: it’s very hard for you to see, the directions were inadequate, you simply didn’t have enough information. The only thing you could have done differently would have been to go back to the Texaco station and ask the young woman for more specific directions, and by that time you were too upset to overcome your embarrassment, and you would have had to walk in late, and the whole thing was just getting too hard. And you were all alone and didn’t have any moral support, and there was a good chance that the event would have been painful and re-stimulating.

Yes, I know you’re disappointed. It’s really painful to come so close to something and then miss it. And the truth is that it was just too hard. You are just too depressed to fight your way through that many obstacles. I bet there were people who wanted to come to Journey Into Courage and missed performances the same way. There, there, dear. Next time, it would be a good idea to get someone to go with you, and to call for directions first. Don’t try to do something so difficult by yourself.

Well, that does feel a little better. What I feel now is enormous sadness and disappointment, but I don’t feel that awful anger. The truth is that things are just too difficult right now.

November 25

Dana was very comforting to me in my disappointment. He didn’t seem to think at all that I could have done differently, he understood that it’s just too hard sometimes. …

He thinks that the major problem that I have is that no matter what I do it’s wrong. In my psyche there’s this judgmental presence, that I’m always trying to explain myself to. I don’t hear its voice, I deduce its presence from my constant whining, justifying, explaining how it is that I’ve done the best I could — I said I’m expecting an inquisition. (Dana of course responded “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition. Our chief weapons…”) I don’t hear the voice of the judge until I stop and call it up, but I do feel the presence of the judge. Dana said he senses someone with folded arms, tapping their foot. And there I am, desperately explaining the extenuating circumstances, hoping for a kind word, but there is no “kind word” in my psychic ammunition. I suspect the best I ever got in my childhood was “OK, but don’t do it again.” I probably never heard “There, there, dear, it’s OK. You’re forgiven. We love you anyway.”

I wrote about Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest in a blog post in 2011, don’t know when that happened. That’s when I understood that Mother never forgave me for anything. There was no way I could make amends, there was nothing I could do except make it not have happened at all. Only recently did I find something that helped me understand how damaging that was.

Posted in Journal, Trauma | Comments Off

1995: Trying to Pretend I’m “Normal”

Posted on October 11, 2023 by jenny

From my journal for November 21, 1995

No headache this morning, just the despair. The headache would have been manageable without the despair, I’ve lived through worse, but last night the two together were too much. I see that the hopelessness is once again triggered by the helplessness, by the belief that if I don’t know what to do, no change is possible. That’s where I get scared that this could go on forever, I have no belief in any natural cycle or any outside help that will bring me out of it. I see that this goes back to “I cried and cried and nobody came.” When I know what to do, I’m capable of working very hard to do it. When that doesn’t seem to be working any more, then I get confused and lost and scared. The headache was confusing because it might have been a “good” headache— clearing toxins because of exercise — and an indicator that I need more exercise — though I’m so tired that that one’s hard. Or it might have been a “bad” headache, an indicator that eating all those grains is not good and I should go back to the stricter diet — but that’s almost too hard to contemplate, it’s been such a relief having Jack’s good food to eat. [We hired someone to cook for us.]

“I cried and cried and nobody came.” A phrase that was periodically written in my journal. I had no idea that it referred to being a baby left alone, and that such an experience is traumatizing for a baby.

November 22

Driving home, I saw that I was wounded, damaged, and trying to pretend I was normal, trying to live a “normal life.” That seemed a mistake, false somehow, like making carob “brownies,” an inferior substitute, instead of just making carob cookies that were true to the nature of carob. So instead of trying to live a “normal life,” what I need to do is find a way of managing my life better so I’m not so debilitated by depression.

So I’m back to working on noticing and appreciating little things, hoping that enjoyment will return in its time. I remind myself that I love Dana, Lynelle, Shenanigan, Beverly, theater and this house, that I love trees and rocks and streams and mountains, the sun and the moon and the stars. That knowledge helps me hold on when everything is so bleak. I need to work at accepting my lower level of functioning, and not being so judgmental and angry at myself. I need to find ways to make it safe and easy to express my creativity. I’d like to find a way to channel my angry energy into creativity so it doesn’t turn back on me and cause depression. This is my work for the rest of my life. And I need to find ways to structure my life so that the airplanes don’t drive me crazy next summer.

When I finally started seeing Dr. Rankin, a specialist in depression, she told me that the chemistry of depression makes it impossible to enjoy. This was revelatory.

November 24

Ah yes, “trying to pretend I’m normal.” I’m reading over this notebook and came to the place, after seeing the shrink, where I see that I’m trying to deny being wounded. It’s out of that attitude that I’m angry with myself, the expectation that I should act like a normal adult instead of a frightened child.

I have been working on not being angry at myself for a long, long time. A long time ago, I realized that I’m the person I’ve treated worse than anybody else. It’s just in the past couple of years, almost thirty years since this was written, that it has become automatic to offer compassion to myself when I’m feeling bad.

Posted in Depression, Journal, Trauma | Comments Off

1995: “Holding the Space”

Posted on October 10, 2023 by jenny

From my journal for November 30, 1995

Eleanor said yesterday that she could feel me “holding the space” at Hart’s and she thanked me for the amount of energy I was pouring out in her direction. It surprised me, because I was not consciously aware of any such thing. But I remember how the people at Upcountry Arts said the meetings were really different when I was there, and also how body workers would comment on my ability to move energy that I couldn’t feel. What I see is that it happens automatically in the case of Eleanor. Since I’m not aware of doing it, I don’t know that I am doing it, and can get easily drained. Also, because it’s not a conscious action, I don’t know how to stop doing it. I know that I have felt badly lately because I haven’t been able to “be there” for Eleanor (and that reminds me of Alice saying she tried to “be there” for a friend the way I was for her and couldn’t do it) because I’ve been focussed on my depression. Maybe depression functions to shut me down when I’ve given away too much of myself.

Hart is a Naturopath Practitioner, and I took Eleanor there, probably also paid for it.

And so now I wonder, since I do this thing so automatically without realizing it, and without “doing anything,” holding the space for Eleanor and Beverly, listening to Alice and Lucy (who says she feels much better after spending time with me) and making circle dance work — Since these things seem to be a result of my presence, without any conscious effort on my part (though it is an effort at some level, I know by how drained I become) perhaps this is “who I really am” — if those words have any meaning. I can see that if this is the result of me just being myself and not trying to do anything special, then that’s how, “just as I am,” I could be a gift to the universe.

Just as I am, I am a gift to the universe, the quality of attention, of presence, is the gift, not anything I do. How amazing! Perhaps the depression is grinding away the ego so that the Presence of God can come through. Could I be present in this way for myself? Because this is where/ how — the only place — I can find God.

For reasons I don’t understand I’m feeling a lot of terror.

It’s amazing that I couldn’t see that of course I would feel terror after announcing that I was a good person, doing good in the world. Talk about “thinking I’m so great.”

From my journal for the present, Sunday, October 8, 2023

Dear Inner Teacher, I desperately need some help. I spend all my energy taking care of myself and what’s the point? There’s nothing I do that’s worth staying alive for.

Inner Teacher: I remind you of people telling you you hold them in your energy field. This is something you do without being aware that you are doing it. The only time you’ve been aware of it is when you say “May my presence be a blessing” and feel the energy flow through you. You’ve been channelling this divine energy all your life. Remember when you sent your energy into your foot — you didn’t feel anything, but the body worker did. This is the source of the glow that people see. It’s attractive to some people and scary to others. It was scary to your mother which is why she said “Don’t think you’re so great.” You are doing good work for the world you love, that’s reason enough to do the hard work to keep yourself functioning.

I find this so hard to believe. Inner Teacher keeps saying these kinds of things, and I have great respect for him, but believing that I might be a good person, doing good for the world? Then there’s the embarrassment of posting this piece saying that I do good without knowing it. But that’s “thinking I’m so great.” What a tangle.

On further thought, I see that “I” am not doing anything but opening myself to be a channel for divine energy. It’s not “me” that I think is great, it’s the energy. Sometimes I’m amazed that the energy is willing to come through such a miserable failure as myself. Then I wonder if feeling like a miserable failure is what hollows me out to be a channel. Well, it doesn’t matter. I can feel the energy when I say “May my presence be a blessing,” and I’m grateful for that much certainty.

Posted in Journal, Spirit, Vocation | Comments Off

1995: Struggle with Issues Around Medication

Posted on October 8, 2023 by jenny

From my journal for November 19, 1995

I’m afraid I’m not keeping up with my discipline around sleeping. I think I’ve dropped my discipline because I see Dr. Stoll in a couple of days, and I’m hoping for a magic bullet, a small dose of an anti-depressant that would make it easier to sleep, that would make it possible to wake up rested. At the same time I have great distrust of drugs and doctors — and actually no positive experience of medication that actually helped. And I think how last summer I let go of my discipline around food, expecting to fall into the safety of dance camp, and it wasn’t a safety net at all.

There’s a fine thin snow falling. I can hear Dana’s heavy breathing from where he’s sleeping on the couch, I can hear it over the furnace that’s running (I turned it on when I got up) I don’t like that we haven’t slept in the same bed in so long, but I realize that I couldn’t sleep at all with that sound going on. It’s not really snoring, but it’s noisy enough to be a problem. I guess I’ve been hoping that anti-depressant medication, if it helped me sleep, might lessen my sensitivity to noise.

November 20

Reading through journal entries on depression. This is being very hard. My life looks like someone struggling through a swamp full of brambles, pain and crisis and depression succeeding each other like recurring themes in music.