Prelude to a Kiss – WALKING WITH GOD, part 1/5
WALKING WITH GOD
(part 1 of 5-part series)
Prelude to a Kiss
“Life force is that part of us that always attempts to act on our own behalf and get our needs met.” -Dr Z
Life force is both powerful and vulnerable. It can be a great strength and joy but it can also be stifled and thwarted, turned aside by forces that tell us that we are not worthy, that we should be different, that we are not enough. When we believe our life force is inappropriate or unwanted we suppress this authentic energy that seeks to express who we were born to be and becomes something other, a false construct constantly changing to meet the needs of others. Suppression of our authenticity can make us strangers to ourselves.
This was my experience through most of my adult life; my thoughts were based on what I believed others wanted me to think.
For many years I could not have told you anything truly honest about myself because I had no idea who I really was. I lived by an unconscious set of rules designed to ingratiate me into social circles, friendships, and romantic relationships. I became a chameleon, hiding in my own skin seeking to transform into a vision I saw of myself through the needs of others.
It has been an interesting turn in recent months, as I’ve continued to delve into my past and unbox the relics of experience, that I’ve gone beyond the time of my father. I believed for quite a while, with good cause and evidence, that all my wounds came from him. My father came back into my life around the age of 11 and I had given little thought, in terms of being wounded, to the years before this.
Dr Z persisted, session after session, in bringing me back to my earliest years and, though I resisted for a while, eventually I went with him. I did not want to go into this period because a part of me ached to believe that some part of my childhood didn’t damage me. There is still a small boy in me that does not want to question the fundamental assumptions that my experience is based on.
But the implicit and usually unconscious bargain we make with ourselves I that, yes, we want to be healed, we want to be made whole, we’re willing to go some distance, but we’e not willing to questions the fundamental assumptions upon which our way of life has been built, both personally and societally.[1] -Bill Plotkin
My assumption was that life until Bob returned from his long absence was relatively healthy, even ‘normal’…whatever that means. While many parts were, many weren’t. My mother worked a great deal, struggling to raise a son on her own without help or support from her ex-husband, and often relied on her parents to assist with child care. I would spend a great deal of my early years with my grandparents, even living in their home for long periods.
When I think of my childhood it is always at their small white and blue-shuttered house, never at any of the apartments I lived in with my mother.
Grandpa Charlie was a quiet, kind man, with a booming voice he would employ to great effect in moments of frustration, who worked his whole life to support his wife and family. One of my earliest memories is sitting on his lap while he watched Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News- I reached up with my tiny hand to rub several days’ worth of stubble on his face, the prickly texture fascinating to me. To this day when I feel something with a similar texture, such as a hairbrush, I am psychically transported back into his lap.
Grandma Betty was always frail yet ruled the house with absolute authority. She was extremely Catholic and plied guilt and threats of eternal suffering with equal parts alacrity and aplomb. When talking about her my mother and I often say that she did the best she could, and I fully believe that. But she also was the first person to teach me to stifle my life force and hide behind a mask of inauthenticity, to believe that I was unwelcome in my unadulterated form.
I was threatened with damnation on a daily basis. If I didn’t mind her I would go to Hell, if I didn’t believe in Jesus I would go to Hell, if I didn’t go to mass on Sunday I would go to hell, but most of all I would go to Hell if I wasn’t ‘good.’ I recall many sleepless nights huddled under my covers with only my eyes peering out into the dark as my young imagination conjured images of what it was like to burn forever. I struggled with my mortality and the fear that I was not acceptable in Heaven, nor anywhere, from a very early age.
Though I did not have the words or even concept to understand this at the time, “being good” was presented by them not as a goal but as a value judgement. I needed to not only act appropriately but to BE good, to have the intrinsic quality of goodness about me.
I was born in 1970 and the Cold War was in full force during my early years. “The Russians” were another threat she used against my cousins and me;perhaps she thought she was being clever or funny, but in my young mind I imagined hordes of ravening man-beasts coming at me with guns, blades, and bared fangs.
Be good or the Russians will get you.
It was terrifying.
Grandma Betty had had heart surgery many decades before and when my cousins or I would stress or annoy her in some way she would say we were “pulling her wires,” referring to wires used to close her heart. The inferred threat here was that we would injure her or worse.
Be good or you’ll kill your grandmother.
One Christmas, when I was 5 or 6, I came down the wooden staircase (that I was forbidden to slide down on my butt!!) to the parlour on Christmas morning. I eagerly ran up to my stocking on the fireplace mantle and found it full of charcoal briquettes. I can still see them as clearly as a photograph; more than 4 decades later I could easily draw the pattern of light and dark on the black, shiny surface of the three visible pieces of charcoal. The image is burned indelibly into my mind.
Santa leaves coal for bad boys. I was bad.
I am bad.
There was a sinking, contracting feeling as I felt my authentic self retreat and, for the first time I can recall, go into hiding. I was bad; a condemnation of my existence. Looking into that coal-filled stocking was the first time I peered into the funhouse mirror that reflected back the twisted and vile vision of myself that I would see for another 40-something years.
I believe Grandpa Charlie and Grandma Betty thought they were being funny and perhaps also trying to teach me a lesson that Christmas. There was no humour in this for me but there certainly was a lesson: I became ashamed of who I was, of every thought and feeling and desire. I was bad and therefore every part me of was bad. Every thought and need and desire was bad.
To be shame-bound means that whenever you feel any feeling, need or drive, you immediately feel ashamed. The dynamic core of your human life is grounded in your feelings, needs and drives. When these are bound by shame, you are shamed to the core.[2] – John Bradshaw
Eventually, I was led to an upstairs bedroom and shown a pile of Christmas presents with my name on them, as if that would somehow ameliorate the suffering. I remember opening them without joy or expectation, merely going through the motions. A part of me, of course, wanted to open them and see what was inside but there was also a distance, a holding back of feelings. The glee of a young boy’s Christmas was gone, replaced with confusion and sorrow.
I was opening presents in exile, apart from the others. I was shunned and outcast, separated from the tribe.
I’m sure it seemed like such a small thing to my grandparents, but I was also a small thing back then. To a small thing as I was everything else seems larger than it does to grown ups. That Christmas Day haunts the little boy inside me to this day.
This was the first time I can recall experiencing emotional dissociation, something that would become my main defence mechanism through the rest of my childhood and into adulthood. This is when I learned that I was not welcome, a being outside of and unlike the rest, unworthy and undesirable. This is when I learned to suppress my life force and live according to the expectations, real or perceived, of everyone else in order to fit in.
I am Other.
—
Adults often forget that children cannot possibly understand their humour. I see it all the time in small ways; parents making mildly sarcastic comments to their children or telling jokes with an adult edge to them that kids may laugh at just to seem like they get it even when they don’t.
Just yesterday I was at the zoo, indulging my love for photography, and I heard a mother asking another woman if it was ok to throw her daughter into the bear enclosure to be eaten. The pre-teen girl was right there and though I could not see her reaction I was horrified for her.
Words have power, more so for young children. Young children do not have a strong ego. They don’t have the wealth of experience and foundation that adults do. When your mother tells you that she is thinking about feeding you to the bears or your grandmother tells you that you are bad there is every chance that you will internalise those words and believe them. As happened with me, those words and actions can become a part of your self-image.
Later at the zoo, I also heard a father talking to young child in a stroller. “I’m sorry, you have to stay in the stroller for a little while because you were not being g…you did not act very nice to your brother.” I wanted to cheer and hug this man for catching himself before telling the little boy he was not good. Instead, he reframed his words to talk about the boy’s behaviour and not the child’s humanity. Bravo and well done, sir.
—
Approximately a year ago I had undertaken a solo mushroom journey at home and the Christmas coal scene played out in my vision. I saw my younger self; jet black hair and wide, glistening eyes, standing just outside the light of a campfire. Huddled close in around the fire, well within the circle of warmth, were shadowy shapes that represented family, friends, perhaps the entirety of the human race. I stood motionless looking in from the darkness, knowing I did not belong to the joyful, laughing circle of humanity.
Then I was back in that upstairs bedroom, alone with the pile of unopened presents before me and the door to the room shut. I watched my 5 year old self begin to cry as the loneliness and solitude overwhelmed him. All he wanted was to be a part of the group, to feel loved and accepted. Yet here he was upstairs, away from the family enjoying their Christmas in the parlour; exiled.
He opened his mouth to scream and I flew in and down his throat to become him. I was 5 years old again, wondering why I wasn’t loved, aching to be loved, needing to be loved, but feeing unloved. In the physical world, my adult body began to cry and then to wail. I howled in agony for nearly 45 minutes, the bottomless grief of a child feeling the loss of his very Self spewing uncontrollably from my adult mouth. My face buried in a pillow, the sorrow of an entire lifetime poured out in torrents.
A few weeks ago I was working one-on-one with Dr Z using heart medicine (MDMA) and we explored this image. I began to feel anger but could not focus it. Dr Z asked me if I could feel anger towards Grandpa Charlie and I realised I had never been able to do so. So I tried. It was hard, but it came. I felt anger for what he had done, for putting coal in my stocking and teaching me that I was bad.
I loved him, and I can easily cry thinking about losing him to this day, but he also damaged me. He never intended to, but damage is damage no matter the intention. I spoke aloud to him and told him what he had done, how deeply that wound had split my soul, and I felt the strength of my life force begin to return to me. I finally was able to defend that little boy, to stand up for him and say, “No, this is not ok. This is not funny and this is not appropriate. This is wrong.”
I love you but you hurt me.
By expressing this anger and acknowledging how I was restricted my life force, my power, and my Self were coming back to me. 4 and a half decades is a long time to be without yourself but I am ever so grateful to have the opportunity to get to know me again. .
References
1 Plotkin, Bill. (2003). Soulcraft. Novato California: New World Library.
2 Bradshaw, John. (1988). Healing the shame that binds you. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications.
