{"id":5073,"date":"2016-02-23T16:34:37","date_gmt":"2016-02-23T21:34:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=5073"},"modified":"2016-05-16T20:01:26","modified_gmt":"2016-05-17T00:01:26","slug":"written-in-blood-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=5073","title":{"rendered":"“Written in Blood”"},"content":{"rendered":"

About the time I started doing Journey Into Courage<\/a> in 1990, I began to make a book out of excerpts from my journal.\u00a0 I was inspired by reading in The Courage to Heal<\/a> that people often cut themselves as a result of sexual abuse.\u00a0 I was working in therapy to try to uncover such an incident.\u00a0 I do have one memory of my father molesting me when I was 12, but that seemed a bit too mild.\u00a0 I was also looking for the reason I wasn\u2019t able to have sex with my husband, but never found any past event that seemed to explain it. \u00a0I called the book\u00a0“Written in Blood” because when I cut myself I often wrote and painted with the blood. \u00a0I planned to end it\u00a0with Journey Into Courage.\u00a0 As I was going through old journals looking for entries for Written in Blood, I also found pieces of writing that spoke of the Shamanic part of me and the Artist part of me.\u00a0 I called the artist \u201cNika,\u201d and I wrote a lot of imaginary stories about her life while I was in a workshop with Deena Metzger<\/a>.\u00a0 I also started one on the passage through menopause, called \u201cDialogues with the Moon.\u201d\u00a0 I already had a long project called \u201cRitual Year,\u201d which involved finding a passage for each day of the year.\u00a0 I thought of going back to that one recently, knowing that I have a lot more positive writings that I could substitute for the painful ones.\u00a0 But I haven\u2019t enough cognitive energy for such a project, the deep therapy I\u2019m doing takes most of my mental\/emotional energy.<\/p>\n

I had a great idea, which was impossible for me to work out, it would have meant writing a lot of fictional journal entries since there were far more entries about \u201cBlood\u201d than about Nika or Shaman.\u00a0 My great idea was that I would write\/compile three separate books, with dated entries, such that it would be possible to collate them and have one book, a journal of a person who suffered from child abuse, but who was also an artist and a shaman.\u00a0 It was a great idea, and I might have carried it out if I hadn\u2019t been dragged down by the woundings of the past.\u00a0 At that time I wasn\u2019t on medication, nor did I have any idea that I was suffering from PTSD.<\/p>\n

It was in 1995, after we finished the movie of Journey, that I fell into what I now know was a severe depression.\u00a0 I think I was hoping that a new project would keep me going.\u00a0 I was walking with my husband one day, talking about \u201cWritten in Blood\u201d and he asked me \u201cIf you wrote a book and it got published, what would you have?\u201d\u00a0 This sentence came out of my mouth without thinking \u201cThat would prove that I deserve to live, even though my parents were disappointed in me.\u201d\u00a0 When I understood that that was the point of this whole big project, it was like a whole block of my life fell into the sea.\u00a0 If proving something to Mom & Dad, or if not to them, to a wider and more inclusive \u201cthem,\u201d was the motivation behind all this work, I did not want to keep doing it.\u00a0 I stopped typing up my journals.\u00a0 I thought I might even stop writing, but it was too important a part of my life.\u00a0 I kept the notebooks, but I didn\u2019t start typing again until 2003 and then I only typed what I considered to be important.<\/p>\n

Recently I decided that it was time to let go of that project.\u00a0 So every time I make a fire, I use about 10 pages to help it get started.\u00a0 Recently I saw some quotes that might be used in a blog\u00a0entry.\u00a0 Here they are:<\/p>\n

March 1985<\/p>\n

[I was very sick with systemic yeast and severe depression.\u00a0 My friend Miriam was concerned about me and came to our house and did a lot of work to get me going again.]<\/p>\n

Saturday morning we did voice work in the formal gestalt manner with a different chair position for each voice.\u00a0 The first voice is the one who is trying to kill me.\u00a0 She resembles the fat, ugly, crazy person from the earlier life.\u00a0 She says “I want to die, what’s the point in going on, nothing’s any good, the world is all poisoned and dying, there’s nothing I can do, etc.”\u00a0 How old are you?\u00a0 “Four.”\u00a0 What’s happening?\u00a0 “I’m shut in the closet.”\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 “I was showing off.”\u00a0 Who did it?\u00a0 “Mother.”\u00a0 I was singing and dancing and she made me stop, she said I wasn’t any good at it.\u00a0 I shout at her:\u00a0 What’s wrong with showing off?\u00a0 Why shouldn’t I sing and dance?\u00a0 So what if I’m not any good \u2014 how am I going to learn?\u00a0 Mother turns away. \u00a0Miriam says “Not much use asking her questions, is it?”\u00a0 Then she said that there were other parts of me that might be able to help\u00a0 (Depressed one felt some relief at that idea)\u00a0 and asked for permission to talk to them.<\/p>\n

The second voice is the inner child.\u00a0 I got out the doll to help me because it’s so hard to get in touch with that voice.\u00a0 “I’m very intelligent.”\u00a0 “I’m very affectionate.”\u00a0 How old are you?\u00a0 “I’m very old.”\u00a0 She’s interested in nature, she likes flowers and the ocean and mountain streams (here she began to cry because she hadn’t been let out to see these things).\u00a0 She said she was interested in earth energies and geology and astronomy and making connections.\u00a0 We had to check in with depressed voice who was in mourning about the poisoning of the planet. \u00a0Miriam said to depressed voice “You do care, you do really care about the planet.\u00a0 You just don’t know what to do about it.”\u00a0 The she turned to child and said “If you could do anything you wanted with the planet… ” and child knew \u2014 a great surge of visionary energy and the planet blossomed with trees and flowers and people using healthy bodies in healthy ways.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

April 1985<\/p>\n

While in Connecticut, my sister\u00a0and I had lunch with Mom and Dad.\u00a0 What a sad, thin meeting.\u00a0 We talked about nothing significant: not Jo’s job, or my book or my health, or Jack and Milda’s separation, or Dad’s health.\u00a0 He looked much worse, I think he’s disintegrating on all levels.\u00a0 Though they knew I had come to New York to see a doctor, the entire exchange went like this:<\/p>\n

Mom:\u00a0 How are you doing?
\nMe:\u00a0 OK
\nMom:\u00a0 new subject
\nDad:\u00a0 Well, did your doctor say you were getting better \u2014 I have this\u00a0cough, my throat is really full of stuff, etc.<\/p>\n

He did not give me room to give an answer.\u00a0 He didn’t really want to know, just asking the dutiful question.\u00a0 And what an odd way to put it, as though the doctor<\/span> was the one to know whether I was better.\u00a0 I felt no connection with Dad at all, we made our usual ineffective attempts to make conversation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

October 1985\u00a0 \u00a0 Image from therapy:<\/p>\n

I’m sitting on the dirt.\u00a0 In front of me is the body of my infant daughter.\u00a0 She is bleeding from her vagina.\u00a0 Her clothes are blackened and torn.\u00a0 She is frozen, or perhaps burned.\u00a0 I wail and rage.\u00a0 It was done by members of my tribe, adolescent boys.\u00a0 This tribe performs clitoridectomy on young girls.\u00a0 I said I wouldn’t allow it to happen to my baby, so they took her and raped her and she died.\u00a0 Someone brought her body back.\u00a0 At first I can’t bear to touch it, finally I pick her up and hold her on my lap, crying and groaning with the pain of rage and loss.\u00a0 No one is with me, no one comes to share my grief or stand up for me.\u00a0 Outside the tent I can hear shouts and fighting.\u00a0 Some disaster has befallen the tribe.\u00a0 I think of the pain my daughter suffered and I can’t bear it — I’m almost a child myself.\u00a0 Unable to stand it, I back out of my body leaving it crouched over the baby.\u00a0 My mother comes in and takes us both into her arms, begins to mourn, she has lost both daughter and grand-daughter.\u00a0 The women all come in, weeping and wailing.\u00a0 I am some sort of a princess, my death is a disaster for the tribe.\u00a0 I back off further, seeing the whole tribe, the men and women, the tents, the flocks.\u00a0 Their impulsiveness, ruled by the emotions and the unconscious, the close emotional ties.\u00a0 The awful things they do are because of tradition, they don’t know why, they don’t question.\u00a0 The whole tribe are buried in sand, dried out, packed together in a dry grave.\u00a0 They’ve been buried now for four hundred years.<\/p>\n

I’m walking in a rocky desert place.\u00a0 It’s very dark, dark clouds overhead, a bit of light near the horizon.\u00a0 I’m carrying a baby wrapped in a shawl, I don’t know if it’s alive or dead.\u00a0 I’m barefoot, wearing a ragged dress.\u00a0 My whole village has been destroyed behind me, I’m looking for help, or water, or something.\u00a0 I just keep walking; I’m afraid to stop for fear I won’t be able to go on.\u00a0 At one point a group of horsemen gallop around a cliff.\u00a0 They seem to run me down, but go right through me instead.<\/p>\n

I see a big rock up ahead and finally sit down to rest.\u00a0 My baby is dead.\u00a0 There’s no point in going on.\u00a0 After a while I see some people, beings of light, wandering toward me.\u00a0 They invite me to join them and I do.\u00a0 We walk among the plants, caressing them and helping them grow.\u00a0 We come to a stream and I touch tiny plants which then flower.\u00a0 But everything is dusty, there is no green anywhere.\u00a0 I ask if we can’t make rain, but they reply that it’s inconsistent with the larger pattern.\u00a0 I don’t really understand, but keep moving with them.\u00a0 We climb up the rocky creek to a grassy plateau.\u00a0 Silvery grass and a few trees and herds of wild animals.\u00a0 We follow the herds like shepherds.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

March 1986<\/p>\n

My father’s health is worse.\u00a0 The throat cancer has recurred and there isn’t anything they can do about it this time.\u00a0 He will probably die by choking on his own blood.\u00a0 What a horrible way to go.\u00a0 I cried when I heard about it, thinking about that poor man facing such a death with no resources at all, no self-discipline, no spiritual faith, no courage and dignity strengthened by practice.\u00a0 He’s spent his whole life avoiding discomfort, now he has to face this.\u00a0 Unless the habit of denial allows him to avoid the knowledge of his death even at this point.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About the time I started doing Journey Into Courage in 1990, I began to make a book out of excerpts from my journal.\u00a0 I was inspired by reading in The Courage to Heal that people often cut themselves as a … 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":[9,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5073","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=5073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5073\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}