jennydeupree.com

From my journal for November 17, 1995.  By this time I am regularly questioning why I keep writing.  I am typing up roughly a year later, and sometime next year I stop typing completely.  I thought I might stop writing, but I didn’t.

I seem to have completely lost interest in my own writing at the moment, finding it hard to read, can’t see that there’s any value there that would make it worth typing up.  Well plod on.    Except that I have a suspicion, maybe even a hope, that this is another one of those thresholds of blankness, that I will arrive on the other side, some day, with a new awareness and new appreciation for my life — though I suppose it’s possible that some new clarity would change my relationship to my writing.

Well, why am I still writing?  It gives me something to do, a discipline of noting what’s around me and jotting it down.  I write the daily details because I know that, in the past, something I’ve never suspected — a physical symptom say — will reveal its importance.  Often I’ve been glad to read about what the house looks like, or a series of mundane errands, because it gives such a sense of my real life in this house.

Went out to fill bird feeders, crunching over the snow.  Chickadees coming singly to the one outside my window, and a larger nuthatch.

Something about the depression and the way it’s brought me to a new place, new questions about my life, and this sense of contacting child-pieces that have been lost behind frozen barricades.  This seems like important work, an important place to explore.  Would I even be here if I were on medication?  This is the major question I have about taking it.  On the other side is the way in which airplane phobia depression has wrecked the last few months, and I see that I couldn’t even get to this deep place of knowledge, “exploring the bottom,” until the planes had been stopped for long enough that I could begin to feel safe.

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

Woke this morning with that song in my mind.  I remember how well it expressed for me that cold dark time when I was living in Portland and was so depressed.

From my journal for November 18

I’ve finished reading Doris Grumbach’s Fifty Days of Solitude, and I’m a little disappointed.  It’s not a journal but a memoir.  It’s very literary, black and silver, on the surface, or perhaps I should say that she’s on the surface of the depths.  I think she’s reached that frozen layer that I’ve been writing about, and failed to pass through it to any kind of real joy, real communion, real pain.  She acknowledges passion, but in a dry cold way.  I have a sense of someone saying “I’m an adult.  I know that life is cold and lonely and hard.”  I know what it is, there’s no heart here, no soul.  There is awareness, she doesn’t try to shut out all painful realities, acknowledges her lack of interest in the painful realities of the contemporary scene, her compassion is the kindness of a liberal intellectual, it’s not heart deep.  I think of Etty Hillesum’s fire, of Rilke’s rivers of blood.  I feel chilled by Grumbach’s writing, want something that breaks through that frozen layer to something real.  (I don’t know how to define “real” except to say that it’s the fire that lives under the ice.)

And that brings me to the poets.  I love the story of the person who said that the first thing to do after a political revolution is “kill the poets.”  Because the poets remind us of deeper truths than those of politics, that it’s not so simple as good guys and bad guys, that what is more important than political power are the urgencies of the heart.  “More important” is the wrong phrase because it suggests that political maneuverings and the urges of the heart could exist on a continuum, in the same dimension, when the truth is that they inhabit or constitute vastly different worlds.  In the political, social, historical realm, the urges of the heart are invisible behind other urges — for power, for sex, for revenge, for possession, for security — and I don’t know to what bodily or psychic organ to attribute them.  Perhaps they are the urges of the glands, though in the political realm they look/feel like urges of the heart, because the true urges of the heart are like the stars that can’t be seen from the brightly lit streets of the city.  The true urges of the heart are for love, not sex or possession, but as appreciation and support of a being’s uniqueness, for creativity and generosity instead of power, for understanding and healing instead of revenge, for life open to the wild spontaneous winds of the great powers of the universe instead of the dull safety of “security.”  This is the reminder that the poets bring to me, that being a failure in the social-political-economic world does not matter, that it’s only by attending to the urges of the heart that we can construct or grow — or create — a life worth living.

Actually, now I would say urges of the reptilian brain stem, instead of the glands. Otherwise I’m amazed at my writing from so long ago. 28 years ago. Cycle of Saturn.

From my journal for Sept 5,1995

Reading the new version of Son-Rise — a friend offered it to me because of their practice of radical acceptance of their autistic son — I find myself very angry at the exposition of their philosophy, the idea that “happiness is a choice,” that nothing is impossible, that all we need to do is change our beliefs (which they see as an easy matter, subject to an intellectual process) — “change the belief and we change the feelings as well as the behavior.”  [Margin: not according to Anna Salter]  While I agree with this last statement, I think their whole philosophy is dangerously one-sided, they have failed to take into account the differing nature of beliefs that have been adopted through different means, at different ages and stages of development, they have no idea of the power of conditioning.  I remember how easily, and with amusement, I was able to drop my belief that Sears & Roebucks was a terrible store, that no one could live in Maine through the winter, and how I continue to struggle with the belief that I am worthless and powerless, how long it has taken me to learn to believe in my own creativity and generosity and how that belief easily crumbles in the face of adversity.  I can see why their “option process” failed to work for survivors of childhood sexual abuse — our belief that we are evil and worthless, that we deserve to be the objects of someone else’s exploitation, is one that we learned through experience, from how we were treated.  It’s not like beliefs we learned later on, about what we can and can’t do, that were learned through an intellectual process and can be disempowered through intellectually understanding.  The idea that “nothing is impossible” is a very painful invalidation of the experience of survivors, if nothing is impossible, we should have been able to prevent our parent from molesting us, we should be able to heal ourselves, we should be able to make everything OK.  All our lives we’ve been trying to do the impossible: make it that it never happened, get our parent to stop drinking, so to be told that nothing is impossible just adds to our pain and guilt, increases our self-hatred and self-invalidation.  What we need most is the revelation and reassurance that some things are impossible, that a two-year-old can’t prevent her father from orally raping her, and that she can’t just make the resultant damage disappear by “changing her beliefs.”

At that time I still thought that I had been a victim of sexual abuse, and had no idea that I had been traumatized.  Interesting that I had dropped my belief that Sears & Roebucks was a terrible store, because Mother had threatened to send me “back to Sears & Roebucks.”  What I still had, alas, was the belief that if I didn’t behave as authority wanted, I would be “sent back” — that is out on the street, unable to take care of myself.  The story about the “two-year-old” was the story of one of the women in Journey Into Courage.

At this point in 1995 I had no idea I was dealing with PTSD. From my journal for November 10:

Second cup of tea. … and nothing to say.  I feel cold.  There’s the ache in my stomach and heart that feels old and dead, the “what’s the use” feeling.  I suspect that I’m dealing with a complex tangle of rage and grief which is why neither feeling comes clear in a form I can discharge by myself.  I have wondered if the grief I unloaded with Robin wasn’t grief about being so depressed — that’s why I felt better for a day, but because it didn’t address the underlying cause, I’m still feeling bummed out.  I can see that suffering the symptoms of chemical depression — being unable to make decisions, etc. — leaves me unable to go on with my life in a way that I feel good about, so of course I feel a lot of anger at myself about that, and a lot of grief for my poor lost wounded life.  Well at least this confirms my decision to see Dr. Stoll and explore medical help.

Robin was a body worker I had been seeing.

Yesterday in the work with Karen I tried to cry, and vocalize, and pound on things, but mostly what happened was I kept arriving at the place of grey frozen hopelessness.  Karen said “hopelessness is a concept, not a feeling.”  But I don’t think it, I feel it.  And what I feel is numbness and lack of energy.  I said I felt like I had been up all night, crying all night, and I didn’t feel the relief of a good cry, instead I felt exhausted, and didn’t know what to do next, and didn’t have any energy to do it with if I could think of something.  I sat there staring blankly at the pillow too tired to do anything, too uncomfortable to lie down.  Finally Karen suggested that I had frozen some part of myself because it was too painful to feel those feelings.  She kept saying that it was unfair that my mother had left me alone so much when I was a baby, but this didn’t bring any answering spark.  She thought perhaps the anger about such treatment was one of the things I had to numb.  She also said that I had spent a good bit of my life running away from this sense of numbed hopelessness.  I felt comforted by the idea that the numbness was something I had done to wall off some part of myself that actually might be of value to me: the part that gets angry about injustice and is colorful and passionate.  And I see that trying to run away from the numbness, or jack myself up out of it, are not the same as sitting with it and allowing it to thaw so I can recover that part of myself.  I find it interesting (sarcastic inflection) that having decided to spend the hanging out with the numbed part of myself, I promptly get quite sick.

My description of numbness and frozenness I can now recognize as symptoms of trauma: when you can’t fight or flee, freeze is the default. Standard forms of psychotherapy are not designed to heal trauma. Not until I start doing Somatic Experiencing will I begin to address these symptoms.

In this passage I see that I am essentially a creative person, but I’ve never been able to actualize more than a small percentage of what I was capable of. The reason is because of my mother constantly telling me “Don’t think you’re so great.” I had no idea how damaging that was, but I can see it here in my response to the little four-year-old running around, showing off her skirt. I was only able to do it at the Woman’s Way Retreat because I felt safe, and I wasn’t me, I was acting the part of a child. I also see how afraid I was of doing anything that might cause mother to “go away.” But that was how I was traumatized as a baby, mother going away and leaving me alone.

From my journal for October 16, 1995

I’ve been imagining an art project that I might work on.  I’ve thought about covering the cardboard dodecahedron with collage — with a whole “carpet” of cut & pasted images and bits of color.  I would need to reinforce the structure and I’m not sure how to do that.  … [lots of ideas for similar projects] …  so that’s a lot of possible cardboard-and-collage projects.

But I never did any of them.

The important thing about the session with Karen is that I was forced to see the way in which I am unable to receive my accomplishments.  I trivialize them or go numb.  When Karen asked if I could celebrate what I had done in Shenandoah, I burst into tears and said “No.”  I have no sense of my contribution as being something valuable enough to celebrate.  …  Karen pointed out how I trivialized Shenandoah — well it’s just a bit of community theater, not very meaningful.  Then I had to acknowledge that it’s about a man who is anti-war because he really cares about his children, and Karen reminded me of how important community art is for the healing of the planet, for the future.  Karen also reminded me of the four-year-old who ran around at Woman’s Way “Look at my skirt!  Look at my skirt!” and asked if I couldn’t find that energy inside me.  But I can’t, I feel like that was someone else, like she’s dead.  Karen began to speak for her, and it made me very uncomfortable and scared.  I told her to stop and called her a show-off and said she was bad, but she wouldn’t stop and I was desperate to shut her up and said “Something terrible will happen if you go on like that.”  I don’t have a clear catastrophic expectation, I don’t hear a voice in my head, I just feel a chill, a thickening tension, a draining away of all value, inspiration, exuberant energy.  I think that what I’m afraid of, what I in fact experienced that was so devastating, was the withdrawal of love, and that scared me so badly that I shut down anything that I thought might have caused Mother to “go away.”  And I know for sure mother wouldn’t have been able to tolerate me feeling good about something creative that I’d done.

This passage shows how my mother shut me down, and how I learned to shut myself down, in the fear of something horrible happening if I dared express exuberance.

Woman’s Way was a week-long retreat working on psychological issues with a number of different modalities. At one point we were told to choose a partner, and then one of you would be the child and the other a mother for a time, and then you would switch roles.  As a child, I imagined I was four years old, and I put on a gold lamé skirt that was among the many costumes available. The woman playing mother was very supportive. But now, away from that supportive atmosphere, I could only try to shut down that energy.

I had an image of that exuberant four-year-old, in her gold lamé skirt, at a vast distance from me, down at the end of a long dark tunnel, and I wonder about doing something in cardboard and collage — “The attempted murder of Tinkerbelle” or something.

Needless to say I never expressed this image in art.