{"id":8232,"date":"2024-01-06T09:22:02","date_gmt":"2024-01-06T14:22:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=8232"},"modified":"2024-01-06T09:25:02","modified_gmt":"2024-01-06T14:25:02","slug":"another-look-at-obstreperous-part","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=8232","title":{"rendered":"Another Look at “Obstreperous Part”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some of this material was first published in October, in two separate posts. The Daily Good today<\/a>\u00a0 (10\/22\/23) was an essay by Francis Weller on grief. When I first heard about his work from my therapist, I went to a retreat on the west coast<\/a>. But I have been struggling with a lot of sadness, hopelessness, bleak feelings and when I read this I realized where they were coming from.<\/p>\n

These are the words that touched me strongly:<\/p>\n

\u201cthe places never touched by love\u201d \u201cThese neglected places\u00a0of soul live in utter despair. What we feel as defective, we also experience as loss.\u00a0The proper response to any loss is grief, but we cannot grieve for something that we feel is\u00a0outside the circle of worth.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe anticipated a certain quality of welcome, engagement, touch, reflection \u2026 communal rituals of celebration, grief and healing that kept us in connection with the sacred. The absence of these requirements haunts us\u2026 \u201d<\/p>\n

On Saturday, October 28 I wrote in my journal:<\/p>\n

Woke up and was just lying there when I began to feel awful.\u00a0 <\/span>Hard to describe the feeling: lonely, unloved, as though thrown out of the tribe, not labeled with a crime, but just being unacceptable.\u00a0 <\/span>I realized I have to treat it as a part, and find some love for it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Later in that journal entry I wrote:<\/p>\n

My right shoulder hurts.\u00a0 <\/span>I did way too many puzzles yesterday.\u00a0 <\/span>I was feeling obstreperous.\u00a0 <\/span>I\u2019m going to have to look that word up, but the sound is so good to express how I felt \u2014 angry and perverse so I do something I shouldn\u2019t because it\u2019s bad for me.<\/p>\n

[Margin: Obstreperous \u2014 stubbornly resistant to control.]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now I understand that this is a part of me, rejected, criticized, and exploited by my parents, that I also have rejected, not quite sure why. I think I need to know why so I can apologize to that part, as well as comfort it. I remember a picture of me as a child, standing by a small table. I look very upset. They told me I had been running around and around the table, so they spanked me to make me be still and got a picture of a spanked child. Served them right. I think this has to do with anger that I\u2019m being treated badly and learned that it wasn\u2019t OK to express.<\/p>\n

Surprisingly, I wrote about this same part in my journal for November 28, 1995, 28<\/strong> years ago. Cycle of Saturn, which has to do with limitation. Was that why she showed up? She certainly feels limited and she’s blaming me.<\/p>\n

Well, let\u2019s see if she is here, that sullen angry hurt child. I have a hit of her age as being 8 or 9, and of Mother as a hurt angry sullen child herself. I can feel her presence, but she\u2019s not ready or not willing to talk. She doesn\u2019t want to have anything to do with grown-ups, or with grown-up advice, or with grown-up value systems. This sounds like someone who\u2019s had unreasonable expectations laid on her, to be mature beyond her state of development, to be mature without having grown organically through the earlier stages, and then was given no support for this enormous stretch, or praise when she accomplished it. No wonder she\u2019s hurt and angry.Well, I\u2019m here to listen. Here\u2019s the pen if you want to say something.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re a fine one to give me the pen. You don\u2019t want to hear about what it\u2019s been like to be me. I feel silenced, patronized, condescended to. I can\u2019t express my anger in fine words, or coherent statements, and you devalue it as childish, as being about trivial things.<\/p>\n

What am I angry about?\u00a0I don\u2019t know, I don\u2019t know \u2014 I\u2019m angry at feeling trapped in some goody-goody bourgeois room that\u2019s narrow and full of little knick knacks and when I try to swing my arms to make room to breathe I knock something over and get told I\u2019m being rude and I have a vague sense, or maybe it\u2019s just a hope, because this place is so painful and tight and stuffy and boring, I hope that there\u2019s another world out there, a bigger world, with room to move and breathe and beautiful things that would satisfy my heart and beings that I could talk to \u2014 but you tell me that\u2019s just a fantasy, unrealistic.\u00a0And so I make myself wrong for my hope, and try to fit in among the dusty artifacts, and try to nourish myself on fantasies that are limited because there\u2019s nothing outside me to feed them.\u00a0And now I find that there is a world out there, a world of mountains and trees, a world of artists and musicians and dancers, and you never told me about it, or helped me develop the skills I need to be able to function in that world.\u00a0That\u2019s why I\u2019m angry.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Both these descriptions were posted recently:
\nSee\u00a0Obstreperous Child<\/a>
\nand\u00a01995: Sullen Angry Child<\/a><\/p>\n

They were posted next to each other because I saw the connection, but I want to look at it more closely. I wonder why she didn’t appear more in my life. Maybe she was held back by a protector part, afraid of punishment by my parents. I also wonder about the one in me who “concludes I can’t do it<\/a>” and stops her part way along. I suspect there are lots of creative parts of me who got shut down by “Don’t think you’re so great<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

Actually, I want to get in touch with that part, tell her that I’ve been able to enjoy the world of mountains and trees, I did Sierra Club trips, serious hiking and camping. Musicians and dancers \u2014 folk dance has been an important part of my life for many years. In fact, in 1995 we were getting close to finishing the building of Neskaya<\/a>, a sacred space for sacred circle dance which was rooted in folk dance. Dear Angry One, you have access to all those things through me.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, to go back to what Francis Weller says, “communal rituals of celebration, grief and healing that kept us in connection with the sacred” are something ancestral that we both have missed because of the culture we live in. But we created it in building Neskaya, so that was the realization of a deep, deep knowing and desire. Please congratulate yourself, because your anger and desire helped me push through all difficulties on the way to creating Neskaya.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some of this material was first published in October, in two separate posts. The Daily Good today\u00a0 (10\/22\/23) was an essay by Francis Weller on grief. When I first heard about his work from my therapist, I went to 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":[9,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","category-work-with-parts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8232","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=8232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8232\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}