Show and Tell

Below is a tale I'm telling at the Hearth "Show and Tell" story-telling evening in Ashland, Oregon on April 18, 2013

This story is about my mother and her legacy to me. The object I want to show and tell about this evening is a glass Lalique button. Lalique, for those of you who haven’t heard of him, was a French glass designer who died in 1948. Right before my mother died she gave this button to me with a note: “This is signed R. Lalique (right on the edge). In 1978, it is worth $100-120. It will increase in price (exclamation point!) It will pay you to offer it at Sotheby’s,” a famous auction house.

In 1978, when my mother died, I was 23. I tucked the button away somewhere. About 20 years later I found it again. I was, by then, living in France. Excited, I called Sotheby’s in Paris and had an appointment with an appraiser there. About a week later, I got a call to come back in. When I got there, I was told that the button was a fake.

As I left those prestigious Sotheby offices, I sobbed, stumbling to the metro. “She’s done it again, even from the grave. Damn her.” I could hardly believe the intensity of my feelings.

The backstory is this: my mother was a mixture of Cinderella and Madame Bovary. She came from Grapes of Wrath type poverty. Her father kidnapped her and two of her siblings from Arkansas to go pick grapes in Modesto. She ran away from him and became a mother’s helper when she was a teenager. When she was in her late 20s, a twice-divorced woman with a troubled 7-year old son, she met my dad at a party. He was Prince Charming to her Cinderella, the savior and the damsel in distress.

I imagine that she soon found what a marriage, a husband and three children could provide and what they couldn’t. Then she began what I think of as her Madame Bovary period. For those who don’t know that name, she was a character from a French novel, written in the mid-1800s. Madame Bovary believed that finding the right man would lead to her happiness, and when that didn’t work, tried to find other ways to find meaning and satisfaction in her life: making a beautiful home (driving her husband into debt to do so), charity work, religion, lovers. All her searches turned sour, as she was always looking for external solutions to inner issues, and always looking to find her value from the outside world.

So it was with my mom, though her searches were somewhat different. She took an entrepreneurial tack, not really possible for a woman in the 1800s, and a little before her time in the 1950s, 60s, 70s. She started all kinds of small businesses, what at one time I would have disparagingly called “jobbies.” Inventions of all sorts, designing and making home accessories, and yes, buying and selling buttons, antiques and other collectibles.

Problem was, she had a very high standard for success. If she didn’t become rich and famous from her ideas, the project was an abject failure. When she was enthusiastic about a new project, she was so much fun to be with! I would get swept along and swept away by her excitement. But when I found her in bed drinking, I knew things had gone south. When things didn’t pan out as she hoped, she would get depressed, stay in bed, cry, and drink. Then I felt side-swiped and even betrayed, with no one to comfort me; my role was to comfort her. Her highs and lows, her dreams and dashed hopes, were like a roller coaster ride.

So aiming high and getting excited about things became a real problem for me, because I knew what happened when things didn’t go as she expected, and of course, ultimately they never did.

Another problem for me, growing up with this, was the shame and humiliation I felt about my mom and her “schemes.” Partly I was picking up on her humiliation and partly it was my own. The thought of being related to, and possibly even like this woman, was not something I wanted to entertain.

Fast forward to the day at Sotheby’s. Talk about reenactment. I got swept up in her excitement AGAIN! Even though I knew better! And the feelings of being side-swiped and betrayed by her from the grave completely triggered me, along with my humiliation because the appraiser at Sotheby’s (of all places) was witness to both my and my mother’s shame.

It took me another decade to understand things in a new way.

What I really inherited from my mom and what the button symbolizes are tenacity and creativity and resolve and the power to make something from nothing, even the way she got herself from poverty to upper middle class. The creative spirit that kept her moving forward with her dreams. Her ability to keep getting up, keep rallying, even when her hopes were dashed. Because, until the day she died, she still kept getting up. Instead of making me ashamed, these things now make me proud.

The other gift of the button is a kind of cautionary tale, to not look outside for what is only to be found inside.

What I also understand is this: I too, like my mom and Madame Bovary, had been turning towards externals for meaning in my life. Ten years ago, when I decided to go back to school and get my Masters in Transpersonal Psychology, I turned inward. Finally. Events at grad school led me to a massive dark night of the soul which lasted 2 or 3 years. Often during this time, I would hold onto table tops as the only things I knew were real. Looking back, I realize that it was my mother’s example which had given me the tools, courage and determination to keep getting up, and to harvest what she had planted.

I’ve gone to where you wanted to go, Mom.  I’ve taken your tenacity and resolve but used them in the service of inner depth. Through this, I’ve found my calling, facilitating the inner exploration of others, in my own creative and unique way. I’ve picked up the baton that you’ve passed on to me. Thank you.

Embracing the Dark Night of the Soul

It may sound paradoxical but this is meant to be an inspirational piece about the dark night of the soul.  Those of you who have heard of the dark night may have an idea of the amount of pain and confusion there can be. 

For those of you who don’t know the phrase, it originated in the 16^th century with St John of the Cross who used it to describe spiritual crises. Now it has also come to describe psychological ones. One of the symptoms of the dark night is no longer having any sense of solid ground…and that is so. You’ve found that the solid ground that you’ve created up until then was not completely based on reality.

Dark nights seem to be the result of events bringing unconscious material to light. Carl Jung thought that the psyche itself organizes these events in order that the individual grow. One of the definitions of enlightenment is to make the unconscious conscious. Dark nights are one way to get there. 

Marion Woodman, a Jungian analyst, wrote “Creative suffering burns clean; neurotic suffering creates more soot.”  There is a big difference between wallowing in non-productive and repetitive pain and using the opportunity of these deep and powerful emotions to bring greater self-understanding and ultimately greater liberation from our stuckness and repetitive patterns.

In the dark night, we wrestle with our demons ~ who are also our angels since they bring gifts that ultimately heal.  The author John Sanford wrote about this in the biblical story of Jacob:

“Jacob refused to part with his experience until he knew its meaning…everyone who wrestles with his spiritual and psychological experience, and, no matter how dark or frightening it is, refuses to let it go until he discovers its meaning, is having something of the Jacob experience. Such a person can come through his dark struggle to the other side reborn, but one who retreats or runs from his encounter with spiritual reality cannot be transformed.”

Having gone through two major dark nights in my life, I have enough experience to not only believe, but to know that this pain is a blessing in disguise. For me, in both periods, I have had the steadfast motivation of wanting to understand why I created the circumstances that I did because I was determined not to recreate them. I wanted to learn the lesson once and for all.

I think typically dark nights tear down old systems of being that aren’t in sync with reality or our own growth. In my dark nights, I felt forced to let go of the illusion (or delusion) that I have any control over others’ decisions or actions or feelings. And I have had to face that during the whole of my life I had organized my personality, my ways of being, to try to stay in control.

In order to stop arguing with reality and stop trying to control things I can’t control, I have to stop those behaviors. The dark night being a threshold period, I didn’t yet know how to be without those ways of being. I was brought back to an ancient childhood state of such anxiety and vulnerability that I could barely function. I had to stay connected with myself and start developing new inner muscle, new ways of being which are more authentic and less strategic.

Old ways were torn down so that new ways could be built, and along with it a hopefully higher level of consciousness.

Sometimes we have to descend to ascend. I find through these dark nights that I am endlessly humbled, in the best possible sense, a continual casting away of arrogance and false pride. If you ever find yourself in your own dark night, persevere with strength, courage, faith and self-love. Remember there is gold at the end: your own liberation and growth and more and more well-being.

"Midway in my life's journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood. How shall I say

what wood that was! I never saw so drear,
so rank, so arduous a wilderness!
Its very memory gives a shape to fear.

Death could scarce be more bitter than that place!
But since it came to good, I will recount
all that I found revealed there by God's grace."

~ Dante's Inferno

Exploring the Pied Piper Archetype

“Trauma in youth becomes attraction in adulthood.” ~ Zach Rosenberg

“You will notice that what we are aiming at when we fall in love is a very strange paradox. The paradox consists of the fact that, when we fall in love, we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom we were attached as children. On the other hand, we ask our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted upon us. So that love contains in it the contradiction: The attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past.”

~ from Woody Allen’s "Crimes & Misdemeanors"

Sometimes we do the “work” of relationship with a flesh-and-blood Other, and sometimes it’s an inside job.  Because I saw that my attraction to “Mike” (see Part I for the back-story) was a reenactment of my past wounding, I realized (painfully) that to stay engaged with him would not be a good thing for me.

That left me with the “inside job.” My dear friend, Kim Allouche, a New York therapist, has known me for decades. She pointed out that in the past when I’d been disappointed in love, my focus was on the Other. What were his motives? How could he do that to me? How wrong and screwed up he was. What I was unable to do for a very long time was to see that whatever he was up to and why, I was susceptible and receptive to this type of allurement and I said yes to the invitation. Not seeing that it was my choice (as an adult) kept me in the victim role, the passive recipient of what someone had done to me versus a truer picture: that I was an active and willing participant in what had gone on, unconscious as it was. 

What Kim noticed this time around was that I was focused on myself: Why am in this situation, with this person? What am I doing here? I started to understand just how much of a reenactment it was. With Mike, there was a certain felt-sense that was very familiar. He seemed to offer a sense of merger (promise of "oneness") with me that felt similar to other, older Pied Pipers who had shown up when I was very young.

This time I didn’t make Mike bad and wrong, nor did I make myself bad and wrong. I stopped pointing a finger at myself or at the Other ~ new behavior for me.

My psyche really stepped up to the task by providing lots of dreams about Mike, one of which featured the Pied Piper. The dictionary refers to a Pied Piper as  “someone who offers strong yet delusive enticements.”

In the fairy tale, the Pied Piper was hired by the mayor to rid his town of its rats. The Piper did so, but the townspeople refused to pay him. In revenge, he played his flute and lured all the children of the village away to a cave, never to be seen or heard from again.

I can see how the Pied Piper appeared very early in my life, as the magical Other who seemed to promise meaning, goodness, wholeness, who would take away my pain and loneliness (both psychological and existential), and ~ even more magically ~ with whom I would remain my idealized, perfect self always.

Part of my process of divesting the Piper of his power over me is to understand his origins, come to terms with the delusive nature of his enticements, and hardest of all, mourn him. That which I so longed for with this particular archetype in the flesh  was never a real possibility, nor will it be in the future. As Anais Nin wrote, “Everyday the real caress must replace the ghostly lover.” The fantasy must be mourned so that a newer reality can emerge.

What the Pied Piper also did was rob these children of their childhood; the other part of my grieving process is to mourn the precocious loss of my childhood.

On a lighter note, there’s another part to this relationship work. I loved Mike’s humor, spontaneity, impulsiveness, sense of fun and adventure, aliveness. In truth, these are all aspects that are less developed in myself. There is a finger pointing here, but it’s not in judgment. It points to what I could cultivate in myself so that I don’t need to annex it from others.

Exploring Aloneness

"The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself." 

~ Mark Twain

I wake up this morning feeling empty; a dread-full feeling of emptiness, contrary to a spacious (and therefore pleasant) feeling of emptiness. My usual “cure” is to get on the treadmill of Busy, to get lost in my to do list, and to not feel my feelings.

Instead, this morning I take the homeopathic approach: going into the dis-ease instead of trying to get rid of it. I sit with it, and don’t try to manipulate, change or run away from it. I don’t go to the fridge or facebook or my email. I don’t call a friend or do errands. I take the time to write in my journal and commune with myself.

It’s taken me a very long time to learn that it’s a really good move to attune to myself when my feelings are unpleasant.  What I notice now, within this sense of emptiness, is that I feel really alone, physically, emotionally, psychologically and meta-physically.

My friend, Betsy Lewis, tells me that when she feels lonely, most often is it “existential loneliness,” and doesn’t have to do with a void that another person can fill, a helpful reminder to me.

Expanding on my earlier post, “Exploring the Other,” I realize now while journaling that my #1 “go-to” for existential loneliness is imagining someone who will basically become one with me so that I won’t have to feel these painful feelings, what Jungian James Hollis calls “the Magical Other.”

My teacher, Sandra Maitri, says that no one can get into our experience with us. This is different, to me, than being seen, held, understood or reflected by another person. This is about having a felt-sense of being merged, being one with another, a pre-verbal experience I had in the womb which I long to recreate, where everything is safe and cozy.

When I ask myself, “How come I feel like this today? What is happening?” I became aware I’ll be signing my divorce papers in a few days, and my youngest son and his girlfriend will be moving out of my house shortly, both seismic events in a human life.

I don’t think I’m as much worried about finances or who will take care of me when I’m old. At the root of it, I think it’s about: who will keep me company? And: Who can I hinge my existence and my reason for living on? I notice that my mind travels to the Magical Other, the cure for loneliness, and the idealized panacea for – seemingly - everything.

Sandra Maitri also says, “Sometimes even our complaints about significant others keep us company.” All kind of things can keep me company: my inner critic, my anxiety, my guilt. Even worrying can keep me company. Somehow in my psyche, all of these feelings become preferable to "empty." Hmm.

Wow. I’m beginning to realize how little any of this has to do with either feeling loved or being loving.

Exploring the Other

Exploring the Other

“I alone must become myself; I cannot become myself alone.” ~ Pittman Mcgehee

My mother always told me that she and my dad met, fell in love, and were married just like Cinderella and Prince Charming. This kind of love story was literally my mother’s milk. Never mind that the “happily ever after” part didn’t quite jive.

Not only was this myth well-entrenched in my psyche, but it seemed to me early on that it was much better to be a man than a woman. I remember, at 8 years old, thinking: I want to be a man; they can do what they want.

In fact, the story my mother was living out was more Madame Bovary than Cinderella. This passage from Flaubert’s novel represents another, different message I received:

“She hoped for a son ... this idea of having a male child was like an expected revenge for all her impotence in the past. A man, at least, is free; he may travel over passions and over countries, overcome obstacles, taste of the most far-away pleasures. But a woman is always hampered. At once inert and flexible, she has against her the weakness of the flesh and legal dependence. Her will, like the veil of her bonnet, held by a string, flutters in every wind; there is always some desire that draws her, some conventionality that restrains.”

So, since I couldn’t be male, I made an unconscious decision to do the next best thing, the only thing I could do: ally myself with the male figures in my life in order to annex some of their power and bask in the reflected glory of being chosen by them.

Unfortunately, this played out in a lot of sexual acting out, but that’s a different story.

Cut to the present. I am 57 and have been separated for 3 years after having been married for 24. Since I split up with my husband, I’ve focused on my relationship with myself as well as changing my dynamics with men. I’ve done that by working with a male therapist on my transference issues; dancing tango; and having (heterosexual) guy friends for the first time in my life. I taught classes called Exploring Masculinity through Film, in order to understand the other gender in new ways, trying to walk a spell in men’s shoes.

I also belong to a large psycho-spiritual group that meets twice a year, and so have the opportunity to get to know “my brothers” there as human beings, who have “stuff,” just like me. Through all this, I’ve gotten my bearings in a whole new way with men. I feel more equal, not feeling either inferior or superior, under-powered or overpowered, intimidated or intimidating.

In terms of ever being romantically involved with a man ... well, I thought that maybe that part of my life was over. And I felt okay with that.

And then. I had my first post-marriage dating experience with “Mike”. Three dates in three weeks. I hadn’t gone out with anyone in decades.  I got to see more fully where I was with men. I saw ways I had changed significantly, and ways in which I hadn’t.

Mike was compelling, a version of a kind of man I used to get involved with. For one thing, I was getting mixed messages. In the past, if I were confused, I chalked it up to my insecurities. This time, I could see that if I was feeling confused, there was a reason. Things just weren’t adding up.

In the past I felt a longing to be “seen” fully by a significant Other. Through my experience with Mike, I saw that not only do I feel seen by lots of people in my life, but because I am more comfortable with more aspects of myself, I am showing more of myself all around, parts I had hidden before. So I saw that I didn't need that special person to be the only one to whom I revealed my whole self. I saw as well, that I can set boundaries, instead of going along with a compelling scenario that isn’t going to be good for me.

I also saw how quickly I could get “hooked in,” and how some of my same patterning was still in place (also material for a different article!). I realized how I’ve repressed my wants and needs because I hate feeling frustrated when I don’t get what I want, and the anger, even rage, that ensues.

At first, when I got so hooked into Mike, I felt like something was wrong with me. How could I get in so deep, so quickly? What I’m seeing from this experience is that many things are true at once. That although it’s important to develop the Self and self-sufficiency, there are important factors that play into the drive for relationship.

First, I keep forgetting that there is a natural drive for one-on-one connection! That there are parts of oneself that can only be expressed in the context of a dyadic intimacy.

Second, there is the unfinished psychological/emotional business that people who attract us often present, what’s called “repetition compulsion” or “reenactment.” Not only are we sensing a familiarity with this Other on an almost radar-like level, but there is often the unconsciousness hope that the same kind of man/woman that wounded us will be the one to heal us. We want to finally make the wrong thing right; this time it’s going to be different.

It’s a great idea, but chances are that it won’t happen – unless that person has done their own inner work, and the couple can deal together with the dynamics that come up, consciously.

Third, we all face existential aloneness. The fact is: no one can get inside our experience with us, as close as we might get, and as interrelated as we might feel. It seems natural to want to soften, with an Other, the harshness of how aloneness sometimes feels.

Lastly, most of us have been under the influence of cultural romantic conditioning. We need only look at films, books, songs and ads that reinforce ideas that romantic love is a holy grail. For some of us, romantic relationship has unconsciously replaced the role of religion: something bigger than us that gives our life meaning.

You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You 

One current idea tells us we should be whole and complete on our own. But what about the Mcgehee quote I started with?  “I alone must become myself; I cannot become myself alone.” How can I live this paradox? How do I locate and develop new “self-and-other muscles”? How can I find the place of being both together with an “other” and separate at the same time?

How can I see through the illusion of romance, without becoming cynical, while still retaining its beauty?