{"id":3132,"date":"2012-09-03T11:30:12","date_gmt":"2012-09-03T15:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=3132"},"modified":"2012-10-15T10:51:00","modified_gmt":"2012-10-15T14:51:00","slug":"no-enemies-within-july-1994","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=3132","title":{"rendered":"July 1994: No Enemies Within"},"content":{"rendered":"

From No Enemies Within<\/a>, the story of Norma, whose wounded self made signs while her verbal self rattled on about past abandonments and failed to see present support.\u00a0 “I care about you.\u00a0 I’m curious about you.\u00a0 We’re not done yet.\u00a0 We’ll never be done.\u00a0 Don’t give up.\u00a0 I’m still here.\u00a0 You don’t have to work so hard.”\u00a0 From the wounded vulnerable self to the wounded try-to-fix-it self, these words weave reconciliation.
\nI’m trying to find a way to reconcile the screaming baby and the screaming mother within me.\u00a0 I realize that I’m so angry at that screaming mother that I could kill her.\u00a0 I imagine a scenario: Mother, somewhat drunk, changing diapers angrily, sticks baby with pin.\u00a0 Baby starts to scream and mother yells at it, slaps it, perhaps even picks it up and shakes it.\u00a0 Baby screams even harder.\u00a0 Mother leaves it to scream.\u00a0 I know this scenario in my cells and bones, I know that if I express my pain I will be hurt more and then abandoned.\u00a0 I see why I experienced leaving yesterday as such a failure: I can’t make the noise stop, so I’ll leave the scene.\u00a0\u00a0 (god! I don’t believe it.\u00a0 There goes the glider plane, out into the cold grey day.\u00a0 I hope it rains soon.)
\nGet the walkman.\u00a0 Sit at my desk and cry.\u00a0 I feel so defeated.\u00a0 (“We’re not done yet.”)\u00a0 What’s the point.\u00a0 (“Don’t give up.”)\u00a0 I feel completely weakened in my body.\u00a0 (“You don’t have to work so hard.”)
\nSo can I find some compassion for that Mother?\u00a0 She was raised in the school of the stiff-upper-lip.\u00a0 Her mother was probably psychotic.\u00a0 She gave birth to her first child while her husband was away fighting a war.\u00a0 She didn’t have any support for dealing with her feelings of fear and grief, she didn’t have any one to help teach her how to care for a new baby.\u00a0 She had no disciplines to help her when things got difficult, no way to put her feelings aside in order to take care of her child.\u00a0 She saw the child as a source of her own comfort and got angry when it didn’t provide comfort and instead asked her to be the comforting one \u2014 she didn’t know how to do that.\u00a0 And I’m still angry at her narcissistic attitude, though I see it as a case of arrested development: she never got beyond Kegan’s stage 2) the “Imperial” self<\/a>, she never got to the place where she could see that other people had different insides, their own needs and wants.\u00a0 Now can I have compassion for such a one?\u00a0 She was failed by her culture, which supported her narcissism, but not the parts of herself that might have been able to learn compassion and tenderness.\u00a0 I can sympathize with the new mother (unsupported & unmothered herself) who gets upset when she can’t stop her baby from screaming.\u00a0 And I do have great compassion for the enormous unacknowledged guilt she must have been feeling: knowing she was hurting her baby and not knowing how to stop it, and then all that buried because she could not admit that she might be wrong, she could not admit that she didn’t know what to do.\u00a0 I can certainly sympathize with the frustration of not being able to help, with not knowing what to do and not feeling able to ask.\u00a0 I imagine that Mother’s frustration with not being able to help had more to do with her image as a “good mother” and with the inconvenience to herself of the baby’s crying, I don’t think she cared about what the baby was feeling.\u00a0 And that’s what I find so hard to forgive.\u00a0 I don’t think she was saddled, as I was, with fears of inadequacy, I think her fears were all centered around how she looked to the outside.
\nOK.\u00a0 That’s mother.\u00a0 And I’m still angry at her and find it hard to forgive her for having a baby and then making her own welfare more important than that of the baby.\u00a0 It’s interesting to notice, as I write, that though she can be “nice” she’s really not capable of compassion or tenderness.\u00a0 So then I turn and look at myself.\u00a0 I see that following her example, I have also screamed at myself for being hurt, I have hit myself for crying, and then I’ve been very angry at myself for not behaving better.\u00a0 It has taken me a long time to learn compassion and tenderness, and even longer to learn to extend compassion and tenderness to my own wounded self.\u00a0 I’m still struggling to do that: because it’s not “convenient” for me to be subjected to this pain, because the pain prevents me from producing something that would justify myself in the eyes of others.
\nWhat is the unmet need of the one who has mothered me so badly, bullied and pushed me, ignored my cries of pain?\u00a0 She saw that the world was a tough place to get along if you were too sensitive, that you were attacked if you were too vulnerable, so she did her best to get me to hide, or rise above, my sensitivities and my wounds.\u00a0 And then she tried to push me to produce stuff that would be acceptable in the world because she thought that that was the way to find people who would support me.\u00a0 And then she was continuously sabotaged by a very powerful part of me that insisted on being true to myself, that felt that denial and hiding of pain was hogwash.\u00a0 What a battle!\u00a0 This is the real battle, not between me & my mom, or me and the planes, but between the part of me that’s screaming her pain, and the part that’s trying to protect her: “If you do that, you will be first attacked and then abandoned.”
\nAnd inside me now is an adult artist, a strong woman, who can turn to each of these agonized fighting children and say to the Screamer: “Yes, it is right for you to speak your pain.\u00a0 Spill it out, and then I will edit and shape it into a form that can be put out into the world, because it’s important for other people to know about.\u00a0 It’s important for all of us to begin to share our painful stories.”\u00a0 Then she turns to the Protector and says: “Thank you for all the years that you have worked so hard to keep me hidden.\u00a0 I appreciate your efforts, even as I see that they were misguided.\u00a0 I need your energy now to help me hide when it’s appropriate, not to deny the vulnerable parts of me, but to protect all of me from outside hostilities.\u00a0 This means maintaining strong boundaries within which I can be whole, instead of impenetrable barriers between parts of me.\u00a0 And I also need help with the discipline of writing practice, painting practice, not to “produce” for the world, but to keep my creativity flowing for my own health and satisfaction.”<\/p>\n

That was a big piece of work, and one I keep doing over and over.\u00a0 I wish I felt better.\u00a0 I guess I need to find a way to get it down to the non-verbal levels.\u00a0 Well.\u00a0 Take it to Karen.
\n[Typing it up now, a little over a month later (October 12) none of this seems real to me.\u00a0 It seems very distant, something written by someone else.]<\/p>\n

Today (September 3, 2012) I’m very impressed with my analysis of the situation, and the hard work I was doing in trying to see my mother clearly, and to see the internalized mother accurately.\u00a0 I’m amazed by this sentence: “Yes, it is right for you to speak your pain.\u00a0 Spill it out, and then I will edit and shape it into a form that can be put out into the world, because it’s important for other people to know about.\u00a0 It’s important for all of us to begin to share our painful stories.”\u00a0 This intention became Journey Into Courage<\/a>, and then this blog.\u00a0 What is saddest to me, is that for all my excellent cognitive work, no healing was happening.\u00a0 That’s why it sounds so distant only a month later.\u00a0 The part of me that needs to be healed is frozen in my brain and nervous system, encoded in my cells. Eighteen years ago, Peter Levine’s first book Waking the Tiger<\/a> was not even published yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From No Enemies Within, the story of Norma, whose wounded self made signs while her verbal self rattled on about past abandonments and failed to see present support.\u00a0 “I care about you.\u00a0 I’m curious about you.\u00a0 We’re not done yet.\u00a0 … 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":[8,5,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-depression","category-healing","category-trauma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3132","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=3132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}