Woke up feeling utterly bleak.\u00a0 Actually this is worse than bleak.\u00a0 It feels like everyone has died and I\u2019m left all alone.\u00a0 It\u2019s not really sad, sad is much easier to bear because it\u2019s moving.\u00a0 This is not moving, it\u2019s too heavy to move.\u00a0 But the song in my mind is \u201cWe are the World, we are the children…\u00a0 There\u2019s a choice we\u2019re making, we\u2019re saving our own lives…\u201d \u00a0 That is completely opposed to the energy that\u2019s holding me down.\u00a0 Yes, it feels bigger than me and heavy and hopeless, the end of a wasted life.\u00a0 I wonder if this is how Mom felt, sitting alone in that big empty house?\u00a0 Perhaps this is someone else\u2019s feeling and not mine at all.\u00a0 What does this deep heavy feeling want?\u00a0 To be rescued, held, and comforted.\u00a0 It\u2019s quite a job getting to her.\u00a0 Down a tunnel in the rock.\u00a0 At least it\u2019s not dark, and I have a good sense of where she is.\u00a0 I break into the rock chamber and throw my arms around her.\u00a0 Holding her, I back up, moving up & out of the maze.\u00a0 A lot of dark cobwebby material clings to her trying to hold her back.\u00a0 I keep pulling, the black sticky stuff stretches and stretches, and finally breaks.\u00a0 We flee for home, which is this couch, next to Mocha.\u00a0 I think I\u2019m going to have to clean the black stuff off her, but as she warms up it dries and flakes off.\u00a0 She sighs and falls asleep next to me with my arm around her.\u00a0 She\u2019s exhausted and will need to sleep for a long time.<\/p>\n
O gosh.\u00a0 Another Little Jenny rescued.\u00a0 I think I must have gotten much stronger to be able to find her, and break the walls holding her.\u00a0 I hold her tight, feeling such love for her, and angry that she was left alone so long that that horrible helpless hopeless, indescribable by words, is how she felt.<\/p>\n
Second cup of tea.\u00a0 Still holding her.<\/p>\n
I had been having a struggle about continuing to try to verbally describe the feeling, or try to get away from it into the song.\u00a0 Asking \u201cWhat does it want?\u201d was magical, shifted everything.\u00a0 Something I learned from my therapist Karen, who asks it frequently.\u00a0 Usually I ask and don\u2019t get anything.\u00a0 I\u2019m glad I did it this time.<\/p>\n
Other pieces of this experience:\u00a0 Back in the early 90\u2019s, I went into therapy to try to find and heal the sexual abuse that I thought was responsible for me cutting myself and not being able to have sex with my husband.\u00a0 It was only after the divorce that I discovered I was dealing with PTSD.\u00a0 In one of those early therapy sessions, trying to explore my feelings, I came up with an image of a bombed out village, burning cars, crumbled walls, a lot of smoke, a few people wandering dazedly through the rubble.\u00a0 I realized that that was how my childhood had felt, that\u2019s where I\u2019d been living for years.\u00a0 Later I had another image of me as an old woman, deep in a cave, stirring a big pot of stew and waiting for the children who began to find me and come in.\u00a0 I knew they were my inner children.\u00a0 For years I\u2019ve worked with them, getting to know individuals, rescuing some who were just babies.<\/p>\n
Cutting myself was the story I told, actually enacted on stage in Journey Into Courage<\/a>.<\/p>\n When I wrote the word \u201cbreak\u201d as I break into the stone chamber, I think of Brenda in Journey, pushing her fist through a window frame as she said \u201cBreak – through the window with a 30-06,\u201d telling a story of when her boyfriend tried to kill her.<\/p>\n The song \u201cWe are the World<\/a>\u201d came\u00a0to mind because it was the theme song for this years Kindred Spirits Camp<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Woke up feeling utterly bleak.\u00a0 Actually this is worse than bleak.\u00a0 It feels like everyone has died and I\u2019m left all alone.\u00a0 It\u2019s not really sad, sad is much easier to bear because it\u2019s moving.\u00a0 This is not moving, it\u2019s … Continue reading