{"id":1690,"date":"2011-07-12T16:05:18","date_gmt":"2011-07-12T20:05:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=1690"},"modified":"2011-12-26T10:28:33","modified_gmt":"2011-12-26T15:28:33","slug":"understanding-barry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=1690","title":{"rendered":"Understanding Barry"},"content":{"rendered":"

In healing from trauma I\u2019ve had to experience a lot of feelings, some of them really horrible combinations of terror & despair & helplessness.\u00a0 I remember once, feeling the worst pain I had ever felt, I don\u2019t even remember now what emotions or physical sensations were part of it, I realized that I would be willing to do anything \u2014 abuse a child, drink or take drugs, murder someone \u2014 ANYTHING not to feel this feeling.\u00a0 Of course, once I was feeling it, it was too late.\u00a0 But I came out of that experience with enormous compassion, for my alcoholic parents, and for all people who commit violent acts.\u00a0 I looked up Thich Nhat Hanh\u2019s poem \u201cPlease call me by my true names<\/a>\u201d and printed it out to read at the gathering.<\/p>\n

My Past Experiences<\/p>\n

This was written in October 2003.\u00a0 The whole entry was posted 4\/28\/10<\/a>.<\/p>\n

O god I feel so hopeless at this moment.\u00a0 I think if I could just lay down my head and die I might do it.\u00a0 The pain in my heart is so great \u2014 there\u2019s something about this deep level that\u2019s so difficult.\u00a0 I suppose because I\u2019m so practiced at making myself wrong and turning away from this kind of pain.\u00a0 Did my best to sit and breathe with it for 20 minutes.\u00a0 It\u2019s VERY painful.\u00a0 I understand better why people will do anything \u2014 keep busy, drink, abuse children \u2014 to avoid feeling this kind of pain.\u00a0 It\u2019s like an unhealed wound.\u00a0 Part of the pain is the vulnerability \u2014 too open and sensitive, feeling only cold hostility or indifference \u2014 desperately wanting to be safe and warm and comforted and not seeing any possibility of that.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Written in December 2008 and posted May 11\/11<\/a><\/p>\n

This morning, in the sitting, I tried to sit with depression.\u00a0 First I imagined a grey stony figure sitting in front of me, then I had it be depressed Jenny.\u00a0 She was in a small room paved and walled with stone, she was writhing and beating her head against the wall.\u00a0 I did my best to stay with her, to witness her pain, but it was very difficult.\u00a0 I was able to be with it for a bit, but I was also on the edge of overwhelm.\u00a0 It\u2019s just too much pain.\u00a0 I called on Spirit to help me but no one came.\u00a0 I tried to come out of it, to be in the room, feel my body, etc, and that helped a little but didn\u2019t really give me a vacation.\u00a0 I thought about that other time, when the pain was so intense that I understood why people would abuse children, take drugs, kill to avoid feeling that much pain.\u00a0 But it didn\u2019t last very long.\u00a0 This time it\u2019s too much for me, way too much.\u00a0 I feel hopelessly inadequate to the amount of pain entrusted to me.\u00a0 Isn\u2019t that the definition of trauma?\u00a0 I think \u201cThis is a traumatized baby,\u201d and feel a movement of my heart in sympathy, but I also feel a degree of hopelessness and helplessness that keeps me frozen.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Written in January 2007 and posted 2\/25\/10<\/a><\/p>\n

Got the usual invalidating message from R telling me that pain doesn\u2019t exist and I can choose not to think those thoughts. My first reaction is to want to die.\u00a0 My second is to get in touch with my anger at his failure to understand what my life is like.\u00a0 I understand why someone would fly an airplane into a building.\u00a0 First I imagined beating R to a pulp with a baseball bat.\u00a0 Then I imagined smashing a person-sized piece of pottery.\u00a0 Nope, not violent enough to relieve my feelings.\u00a0 Then I imagined driving my car head on into a truck.\u00a0 Still not there.\u00a0 Then I imagined driving my car (smash!) into a rock wall.\u00a0 Then I imagined flying an airliner full of people into a sky scraper \u2014 Ahh.\u00a0 Satisfaction.\u00a0 The pain of having one\u2019s feelings and needs ignored and invalidated.\u00a0 So if this is the helpless angry pain that produces terrorism, my willingness to feel it and refusal to act on it is one way of stopping terrorism.\u00a0 Perhaps the only way.\u00a0 This is work worth doing, worth staying alive for.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When I was in California in the late 60\u2019s I had an experience of being violent myself.\u00a0 I had a relationship with a man \u2014 he was an oddball like me \u2014 he had studied anthropology and talked to me about vision quests, so I thought we had connected on a deep level.\u00a0 He was also dealing drugs, but I carefully arranged not to find out if it was anything more dangerous than marijuana.\u00a0 I went home and to visit a friend in Texas.\u00a0 I was gone for two weeks.\u00a0 When I got back, I expected to hear from him \u2014 we had talked about having a future together.\u00a0 When I tried to get ahold of him he was distant and cold.\u00a0 Finally I drove to his apartment and found he was with another woman.\u00a0 He wouldn\u2019t open the door or talk to me.\u00a0 So I went back to my car, got the jack, and started breaking his windows.\u00a0 Suddenly there were two cops walking in the street.\u00a0 David went to talk to them, saying he wouldn\u2019t press charges.\u00a0 I ran away.\u00a0 Eventually I ended up in the Student Health Center, being filled full of tranquilizers.\u00a0 The amount of energy I had was amazing, I was just exploding with the rage that had been buried for years.\u00a0 Unfortunately there was no one with the knowledge to help me at the time, in fact all the people at the Health Center were concerned that I might try to kill myself.\u00a0 I went through several months of justifying myself to myself and alternately being desperately ashamed.<\/p>\n

I went back to the East Coast, to Maine where I had been happy as a child. That winter I descended into my first severe depression.\u00a0 No one, including me, had any idea that the rage and the depression were connected to being traumatized as a child.<\/p>\n

My own experience tells me that Barry must have been similarly injured when he was very young.\u00a0 The story in the Union Leader says Barry was not respected by his students and abused by some of them.\u00a0 Why didn\u2019t he get angry and defend himself?\u00a0 Abusive parents often respond to a child\u2019s getting angry with severe punishment, the child becomes conditioned against expressing anger.\u00a0 This was true for me too. But the energy of the anger is still there, and it’s way beyond what most human beings can handle.<\/p>\n

Judith Herman, author of Trauma and Recovery, writes, \u2018The survivor is continually buffeted by terror and rage.\u00a0 These emotions are qualitatively different from ordinary fear and anger.\u00a0 They are outside the range of ordinary emotional experience, and they overwhelm the ordinary capacity to bear feelings.”<\/p>\n

When I had begun to heal from trauma by doing Somatic Experiencing, I had a different experience, where the energy of anger was released safely and available for living. See Awakening Kali, posted July 7, 2010<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

By the way, my feeling of empathy for Barry does NOT mean that I condone what he did. Not in any way. And I wouldn’t presume to forgive him either \u2014 that\u2019s for Evie and her family to do if they want to. I just wanted to point out that Barry is still a member of the human race, doing something that unfortunately too many humans do.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In healing from trauma I\u2019ve had to experience a lot of feelings, some of them really horrible combinations of terror & despair & helplessness.\u00a0 I remember once, feeling the worst pain I had ever felt, I don\u2019t even remember now … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spirit","category-trauma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1690\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}