jennydeupree.com

Halleluia Chorus from Quinhagak, Alaska

Posted on November 27, 2022 by jenny

One thing that’s fun about reading through my blog again is I find things that cheer me up. I posted this in October 2012, and it just cheered me up again.

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Unfinished Business with my Ex-Husband

Posted on November 25, 2022 by jenny

I didn’t write this in my writing group, I wrote it on February 9, 2022

Last night I was reading Composing a Life and she talked about how people could still maintain a relationship after divorce, and I thought about how hurt I was, and still am, at D’s complete rejection of me. I wonder about writing a letter. I don’t even have to send it.

The things you said that really hurt. You aren’t fun to cook for any more. I can’t live off my wife’s money. I’m supposed to feel sorry for B because the man she loves is married to someone else.

I wasn’t fun to cook for because I had to eat a very restricted diet due to systemic yeast. He started working on making concertinas because he “didn’t want to live off my wife’s money,” but he’d been living off mine for 18 years. He actually bought some very expensive things and justified it because I wasn’t able to be sexual with him. Or with anybody, due to PTSD, my default to activation is freeze. But we didn’t know that then.

You may have forgotten that, because I wanted you to be happy, I encouraged you to go see B, I never tried to stop the divorce, I gave you a very generous settlement. I was not hurt by the divorce, but I was very hurt by the way you cut off all friendship with me. I remember coming back to the house to get some of my things from the hut, and you came out as though to stop me with the coldest look on your face, like I was an enemy. That hurt far more than the divorce.

In fact his coldness wrecked all my feelings about having had a good relationship with him. There were times when I thought he was wise and helpful, I even thought he loved me, and maybe he did at first. But it must have ended a long time ago. I think maybe I never knew who he was.

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Unfinished Business with Mom

Posted on November 24, 2022 by jenny

I’ve been getting a lot of messages about dealing with your unfinished business, especially from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.

In writing group for Monday, November 21

In my journal for 1986 I wrote about being home after my father died and his funeral. Mother was drunk that night, and I was very angry with her. She said something like “I want comfort and I ain’t gettin’ it.” I didn’t even try to reply. But the next night, for some reason, I treated her very kindly, like I would treat someone that I loved who was senile. The next morning I came down and found a sober Mom. “I’ve made a decision. I’m going to be all right.” I said “O good, Mom. What did you decide?” I was hoping to hear her explicitly say she was going to stop drinking. But she didn’t. She just said something like “I didn’t think it was worth going on, but now I’m going to be OK.” I said “good for you.” What I didn’t see until much much later, was that her willingness to stop drinking might have been connected to my kindness the night before. Maybe because my other efforts had never made any difference? I remember thinking that without some structure and support, like AA provides, she probably wouldn’t be able to stay sober. But looking back, I wish I had decided to be kinder. I remember we went to dinner with some of her friends and when they asked what she wanted to drink she said “Water on the rocks.” I wanted to cheer, but of course didn’t. But I might have told her afterward that I was proud of her.

Years later she had a stroke. I went to visit her and there was a speech therapist trying to help her speak again. She would say a sentence like “I went to the grocery store and bought —” and asked Mom to fill in the blank. Poor Mom seemed to think there was a right answer, didn’t understand that she could just say anything at all. She also was very reluctant to try walking. I was disgusted with her unwillingness to make any effort. Now that I’m older myself I have more understanding and compassion for not being able to find the energy to make the effort.

The last time I saw her she was in a nursing home. I was in Cincinnati for several days and went by in the morning on my way to the airport. But she wouldn’t wake up to say goodbye to me. I’m thinking “this could be the last time she’ll ever see me, and she won’t wake up.” Then the nurse came in, and Mother woke up for the nurse. I decided that if she couldn’t be bothered to wake up for me, I wouldn’t make the effort to see her again. And I didn’t. The next time I went to Cincinnati was for her funeral.

But now I wonder if it would have been a good thing if I had gone home without expectation and just sat with her.

What I actually wrote in my journal was:

I did much better with her this evening. I realize that last night I was really angry and disappointed that she was drunk and I got very cold and abrupt and fast and efficient. No wonder she was so nasty and complained of not getting any comfort. So tonight I just jollied her along like a problem child. [Actually I felt like someone with a parent they had loved, but who was being destroyed by senility.]

July 29 Tuesday morning: Sober Mom
[I went down to breakfast and was greeted by:]
A normal person: I’ve made a few decisions. I’m going to be all right. For a little while it didn’t seem to matter but now I’m going to be OK.
I said O good ma (teary)
What decisions did you make? [I wanted to hear her say explicitly that she was going to stop drinking.]
Mom: I don’t know, I just woke up in the middle of the night and decided it was worthwhile.
That horrible person won’t be around any more
Me: that makes me very happy.

[I didn’t write again for a whole month.]

I read this to my therapist, and told her that I had recognized that I actually hated Mom. She said that was a result of unexpressed hurt and grief. She gave me some suggestions for writing what I would say to Mom about being hurt, what Mom would say to me. She also said that the younger me wouldn’t have been able to go back again without expectation. She was absolutely right. I couldn’t possibly have gone home with no expectation.

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The Trip with Ricky

Posted on November 22, 2022 by jenny

Monday, November 14

I did this in writing group. Tried to do a left handed writing, but it went to another story about something else I thought was a failure that actually turned out to be a success. It’s slightly edited.

By the way, “Ricky” is Richard Demarco who owned the Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh, and did the trip during the Edinburgh Summer Arts Festival, in 1978.

Write — what to write. I’ve just been talking about left-handed writing. Wonder if I could do one. Just keep the pen moving she said. I went on the trip with Ricky. Joined them in Sligo — climbed to the cairn of Queen Maeve — never been investigated by archeologists because the Irish people refused permission. Maeve is the Warrior Queen of Connaught. We also went over the border to Northern Ireland for a music festival. It was strange, the border defined by barbed wire, people with guns guarding it, stories of people being shot. It was scary. Then what — on to Newgrange in the Valley of the Boyne a huge mound faced with pieces of quartz.. The roof box over the entrance had been found by archeologists and reconstructed. The quartz had tumbled down from the front. They tried to put it back, but the stonework was not equal to the work of the past — it looks like a public bathroom. So I took a picture of the door and the roof box over it, and as little of the facing as I could manage. We went in, up the tunnel to a cruciform opening at the end. At the winter solstice the sun shines through the roof box and up the passage for several days. You can tell the exact day of the solstice by how far up the passage the light reaches.

We were a good sized group of people, always changing. Most were young, artists and art students, who had gotten grants to travel all the way from Edinburgh to Malta. I had signed on the the Celtic part of the tour: Ireland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany. Ricky had enticed me to come by pretending to be interested in my knowledge of archeoastronomy, but really he just seemed to want to collect a group of people who would have different ideas. At one point it seemed that the travellers had separated into intellectuals and anti-intellectuals. I didn’t fit in either camp, in fact I felt very much not belonging. I would find people who could talk to me about what I was interested in — we went to a lot of Neolithic stone structures — but they seemed to leave a few days after I found them. I felt more and more disappointed and left out. It wasn’t until much later that I realized that almost as soon as friends left the trip, someone else with similar interests would join. If I hadn’t been so ready to see myself as uninteresting, I might have looked forward, wondering what what new person might join the trip. I look back now and laugh.

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“Failure” Redefined

Posted on November 21, 2022 by jenny

Monday, November 7

My friends Judith and Sharon and I are doing a writing group together on Monday nights. I wanted to work on the understanding that what looks like a failure might actually be following the voice of your soul. Judith does a weekly comment on the Torah, and I found this week’s suggestion for writing beautifully appropriate.

From Judith’s commentary on the Torah:
Do you know of this voice that comes to you and says:
Leave the home known to you, leave the self known to you, go to search for the land of your soul?
Often this voice comes in the form of a crisis, a tantrum, a sudden life upset from without or within.
Did this voice call you one time or several in your lifetime?
Is this voice calling to you now?

Written in Monday night’s writing group, with Judith and Sharon:

I was in Davis, California, at the University. I was seeing a therapist. One day I told him about my childhood. He said “You must have been very frightened.” In fact, I had been given far too much responsibility for the younger kids. I went back to my apartment and wrote in my journal “It was OK to be frightened! It was OK to be frightened!” Later I thought that must have freed something in me. The next day, since I hadn’t heard from my boyfriend since I got back from Christmas, I decided I was fed up with him, but I wanted to borrow his truck to take home a door I had bought to make a big table with. I went to where he lived and knocked on his door. But he wouldn’t come to the door. I could see that he had another woman with him. I went to my car, got the jack and started breaking his windows. Two cops came walking up the street. I knew that would be upsetting for David because he was dealing drugs — something I had tried hard not to know, but did know. I went back to my car. I heard David telling the cops he wouldn’t press charges.

I went to my friend Kathi’s and told her what I’d done. She said “But, Jenny, you can’t do that.” I freaked out, and took myself to the Student Health Center. They took me in, and put me on Mellaril. They kept a very close eye on me, I think they were afraid I was going to commit suicide. I was freaked out — some combination of excitement and fear. I kept going to classes, but the medication was really slowing me down. When I finally got out, I stopped taking the medication cold turkey, and had a rather freaky withdrawal. But I survived. and decided that I had had enough of California and that I would go back to New England.

I kept what was left of the bottle of Mellaril. I thought it was a tranquilizer but in fact it’s an anti-psychotic. It turned out to be a good thing I thought it was a tranquilizer, because that first winter in Portland Maine I was suicidal. But I had been told of someone who tried to commit suicide by taking a whole bottle of a tranquilizer. He didn’t die, but just got very tranquil. Years later, I worked on a suicide hotline and discovered that the minimum lethal dose of Mellaril was 600 mg. I had been taking 300 mg a day when I was on it. I had easily had enough to kill myself but fortunately didn’t know.

I think now that this whole experience was my soul saying “California is the wrong place for you. Let’s go back to Maine.”

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My Life as Directed by my Soul, Not Someone Else

Posted on November 18, 2022 by jenny

I have been given two descriptions of patterns of my behavior that don’t work in my life. The first came from Structural Consulting, developed by Robert Fritz. I go after what I want, have an initial success, look for support and approval, don’t see it, try to fix myself, and don’t get what I want. The second was given to me by a brilliant therapist. I start a process, succeed on the first couple of steps, on the next step something goes wrong, and I conclude I can’t do it. I did an earlier post on them. I don’t remember who first said “you redefine success as a failure,” but I did see a possible source in my mother saying “Don’t think you’re so great” — that is, don’t talk about your successes — and my father saying “If you didn’t know how to do it, why did you even try?” — if you can’t do it, give up.

Dr. Hollis asked the question “What wants to find expression through you?” which was very powerful for me. So I got his book called “What Matters Most.” In my work with his ideas, I started looking for what things I had done because I was directed by my soul, not by someone else’s ideas of who I should be. One of the more fascinating things was seeing that often something “went wrong” and forced me to do something different. At the time, I saw it as defeat, but looking back, it was often that my soul said something like “This isn’t working. Let’s try something else.”

There were also things like creating Neskaya. I often say it’s the most selfish thing I’ve ever done — because my whole self was involved. I acknowledge other times when my soul was acting through me. Journey Into Courage — I don’t say here that my friend Beverly and I were talking about putting together some street theater to protest domestic abuse, but we weren’t getting to it, and finally I said “God, if you want this to happen, you have to get someone else to do it.” I don’t remember how long after that that a friend told me someone was offering a drama class for survivors of domestic violence. I went, and it turned into Journey.

I’ve also seen that teaching Sacred Circle Dance and Astronomy are activities where my soul leads. I get to share something I love with people who are eager to learn and my ego doesn’t get in the way at all. I have no need to prove that I’m a good teacher, or that I’m really intelligent. I just want to share something I love with people who want to know about it.

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Matt Licata on Trauma

Posted on October 24, 2022 by jenny

I made a draft of this post back in December 2021. I’m not sure why I didn’t post it then. Matt Licata can be found here.

from Matt’s course on Tending to the Soul:

“So, just to define trauma in a really simple, experiential and nonclinical way, which I’ve been asked to do, trauma occurs when our capacity for information processing is overwhelmed by emotional and somatic experience, that we don’t have the internal resources or the external support to integrate and metabolize. So, what happens in these moments of overwhelm is that this material is stored outside of our conscious awareness in subcortical and bodily circuitry, where it’s held for a future moment, a time when those resources are in fact available.”

One way to understand this is that experience that we don’t have the resources to process stays in our brains and nervous system as unintegrated parts: sight, sound, emotion are stored in separate parts of the brain so we only remember one part of it, and it feels like it’s in the present moment, not the past. This is why I like the word “metabolize” for the integrative work of processing trauma: the undigested pieces of the experience are integrated and stored as ordinary memory instead of fragments of an eternal present.

He talks about developmental or relational trauma and describes this type of wounding “as the result of ongoing failures of empathy and mirroring. Chronic misattunement or neglect, rejecting, dismissing, shaming behavior from early caregivers, various forms of narcissistic injury and attachment wounding, … the unbearable, the unendurable, the unworkable psychic and somatic states which arise from this sort of misattunement …. [as a result] our sense of self is profoundly affected, often resulting in severe shame and low self-worth and feelings of being unsafe, of being unwelcome and that we just don’t belong here, that something is profoundly wrong with us at the most basic level.”

For me, my mother’s “mis-representation” left me with a sense of being defective. I first went into therapy in my 20’s to try to fix myself.

“Because as young children, it’s not possible for us to see our caregivers as anything but perfect and safe and strong and wise. What happens is that when this empathic failure occurs, we internalize the blame for that as a way to make sense of something that is actually unbearable. ‘Oh, I see,’ we say to ourselves. ‘I’m continuing to get shamed and rejected, or not understood, or not tended to, or not held. But I know the reason for that it’s because there’s something wrong with me at a basic fundamental level. It’s my fault and if I can just change and become someone different, then maybe I’ll be seen and held and loved.’

“.. It’s more safe to take this on than to see our caregivers as anything less than perfect. I mean, if we can internalize the blame, then there might be something we can do about it. But to see our caregivers at fault is unworkable in the psyche and the nervous system of a little one, it can provoke a real terror.”

The work that I did with the terrified parts of me in June and July was a result of this protective inability to see Mother as “less than perfect.”

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What is Wanting to Find Expression Through You?

Posted on October 18, 2022 by jenny

In the last few months I’ve been having a pretty hard time. First was dealing with low thyroid, then I had a bad fall and my ribs are still hurting from that. In fact, I’ve had a hard time since COVID started. Lockdown triggered my early trauma of being left alone when I was a baby, and the social distancing didn’t help. I went through a period of terror which turned out to be younger parts of me, and my therapist was able to help me. When I first came to Kendal, it was because I needed the support of regular meals being offered and people around all the time. Eventually I began to be comfortable with ordinary life in this community, and I was able to lower my anti-depression and anti-anxiety medications. But when COVID started I had to raise them again, especially to help with the terror. So things have been pretty tough for a couple of years. That’s why starting to feel good again was such a big deal.

My memory is that I read the DailyGood on “What Is Wanting to Find Expression Through You?” and I immediately asked myself the question and what came was “Teach Astronomy,” and I started feeling better right away. So I went back through my journal trying to find the entry where I described that process only to discover that it had happened over a number of days. That original DailyGood was published on October 1, so it took me at least two weeks to go through the process.

Actually, I did immediately know it was Astronomy that wanted to find expression through me. I started talking to people about it, and my energy and enthusiasm increased. That’s when I started feeling better. I began thinking about how I would teach. What seemed most workable to me was to do something similar to the class in Observational Astronomy I had done for SLL in the 1980’s, but not for credit. And to do it here at Kendal instead of trying to do it through OSHER. Then I realized that I didn’t want to bother with the more recent topics like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, but just to do the video of the Sun Dagger and my audiovisual presentation, followed by a talk on Stonehenge, and then have star walks on clear nights.

It’s true that I have been feeling much better for what feels like a couple of weeks, but my journal entries suggest that it was more gradual. I find this fascinating. It’s not the first time I’ve found discrepancies between my memory and what I actually wrote at the time.

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Guidance from 2006

Posted on October 9, 2022 by jenny

This was written in October 2006 and posted in January 2011. It’s relevance to the present moment is absolutely astonishing. I also see truths that I didn’t believe at the time, especially the advice not to try to do activist work, my vocation is different. Good advice that I need right now. Also the part about “we are at that deep inner place where what is divine in you merges with the divine core of the universe.” This was a concept that I hadn’t met until I moved to Kendal and started going to Quaker Meeting.

Dear Guides and Guardian Spirits, I’m feeling very bummed out. I’m completely discouraged by the political situation, I’m scared that if the future gets really bad I’m not robust enough to survive. And at the moment I’m not able to feel that what I do at Neskaya is worthwhile or even makes a difference. And I’m scared that you won’t be able to say anything helpful because you’re not real, you’re just the voices of my own inner wisdom, and it feels like I haven’t got anything left.
Dear Jenny, we love you very much. We are gathered around you, supporting you. We are both your inner wisdom voice and discarnate spirits who wish you well, we are where the circle meets itself, we are at that deep inner place where what is divine in you merges with the divine core of the universe. You are in a “bad patch” right now. Your feelings: hopelessness, helplessness, fear about food, are the feelings of a baby who has been left alone too long. They do not give you real information about your current reality. Yes, things are bad in the realm of politics and war, but there have always been bad times in the history of Earth. And there have always been times when people have banded together to triumph over disaster. You are doing your part: your part is to maintain Neskaya as a sanctuary and to teach the dances. Your job is not to “get” anybody to do anything, but to provide something for them to do when they want to. Do not break your heart by trying to make things happen in the social-political sphere. You must keep your heart and spirit strong: we recommend meditation, spiritual reading, flower essences, art, dance, and exercise outdoors. Your first priority is to take care of the traumatized baby. It is OK to have these complete lapses of confidence — but they are the result of trying to take action that life has not equipped you for. You see the vision, it is your job to hold that vision, you are not required to “get” anyone to change their actions, any more than you were required to get your alcoholic parents to stop drinking. Let go of those efforts, and leave it to the people whose work it is to call their congresspeople, reform the electoral system. You are a brain cell trying to do the work of a leg muscle. It is not appropriate. Let it go. One day at a time. We love you.

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Exercise: Being Brave

Posted on October 4, 2022 by jenny

Pat Schneider says “Write something that feels too huge, or too dangerous, to tell.” p90 She gives a couple of examples, a short piece, a poem, where what’s really happening is revealed at the end. I thought I would try it.

Here’s what I wrote:

I travelled with a fellow Wellesley student to Europe the fall after we graduated, in 1964. She knew a translation of Rilke’s First Duino Elegy. It started: “Who if I cried out would hear me amid the hosts of angels? For beauty is only a seed of dread, to be endured yet adored since it disdains to destroy us.” Then toward the end “Ought not these sufferings of ours to be yielding more fruit by now? Is it not time that, in loving, we freed ourselves from the loved one, and quivering, endured, as the arrow endures the bow, to become in the gathering out-leap something more than itself. For to remain is nowhere.” I even remember the German of the last line: “Denn Bleiben ist nirgends.” I tried to find a copy of that translation without success. Compared to other translations I think it is rhythmically better.

Years later, I was sitting in my apartment, after another man I had gone to bed with once had told me he had a girlfriend coming the next week. This sort of one night stand happened over and over. I had frozen, I don’t remember what I said, or if I said anything. Maybe “Oh. Goodbye.” I never expected to see him again, and in fact I didn’t.

I wrote in my journal about what had happened but didn’t describe my feelings. No one ever saw my pain, or validated it, or offered comfort.

I stared at the blank page. Then I went to the bathroom and got a razorblade. I came back to my journal and drew the blade across my wrist. I put my finger in the blood and wrote in my journal “WHO IF I CRIED OUT” but there wasn’t enough blood for the rest.

There is still more to be added to the story. I thought that cutting myself was because I had been sexually abused as a child. Ellen Bass says this in The Courage to Heal, but I also was unable to have sex with my husband, so that seemed to make sense. This is the story I told in Journey Into Courage. I worked on the issue in therapy, but nothing ever came up. It wasn’t until ten years later that I realized I had been traumatized. People who have been traumatized, but not physically wounded, also self-mutilate, as if to make visible the wounds they feel that don’t show.

At the time of Journey Into Courage I wrote several poems, out of the energy that had been released by speaking the truth on stage. It’s the only time I wrote poems that really felt to me like poems. One, Blood and Stone, almost describes my experience of trauma, though I didn’t know that’s what I was up against at that time.

I have just spent 30 minutes revising this piece. Something new for me, trying to live up to Pat Schneider’s recommendation to make it the very best I can. Usually I stop a little short of this amount of revising, though often it’s important to quote a journal entry verbatim. This wasn’t a journal entry, but a writing to an assignment.

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