A book I really like is called that.  But it’s also the state of a little part of me that got seriously freaked out earlier this week and can’t be consoled.  I was all managing as best I could and all, but then my therapist canceled our last appointment on Friday before being away a week.  She has her reasons for these things, always, but that doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

I was in her office wanting to die and feeling unheldtogether and unheld, and so I dearly wanted/needed to see her soon after to get my self righted.  But I think it’s really that attachment stuff, with her being my attachment figure, a base to run to and yet I feel rejected (rightly or wrongly, whatever), and in fact I also was feeling terrified (and that’s not about her, it’s about a previous attachment figure–this one does sometimes pull away when I need her desperately but sometimes she has been really there for me and in any case I don’t think she’s cause for that kind of fear, except in the sense that she can reject me, and that’s not nothing, but it’s not sadism I guess).  Fright without solution is the attachment phrase they use, I believe, when we can’t run to the figure we most need when we most need her.

No wonder I feel how I feel this week, when I think of it like that.  And it is like that, to a part of me that isn’t real connected to the rest, and that I don’t know how to reach.

They tell me there’s hope.  And by they, I don’t mean people who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.  I mean people who do, who know this territory because it’s been theirs too.

I made a little visit to the ole vortex yesterday.  I forgot what a terrible place that is–it’s odd to be able to have that place within me but not be entirely aware of it except when I’m lost in it.  It’s just not integrated with the rest of me–dissociated would be the word I suppose if I wanted to get all psychological about it, which apparently I do.  My wonderful group therapy group (the second “group” is there in case you missed the first I guess) talked with me about it and it was amazing to hear a bunch of people who know–and I mean KNOW–that place because they have it too.  I do wish they didn’t have it, but to be able to share the experience was the next best thing to not having to have it.  And it is a deep level to share/connect on.  I do like depth in my social experience.  Hold the superficial chat (unless it’s especially pleasurable, of course) and let’s dive down deep.

The thing that triggered this punched-in-the-stomach plummeting-into-a-bottomless-pit sensation would seem rather trivial, it was me feeling rejected because my therapist didn’t have the time for me I wanted and it’s a quick trip from that kind of thing to feeling rejected and that segues seamlessly into “I shouldn’t be here/it would be better if I had never been born.”  Even I can see that that might be a tad extreme.  But in the moment I think I was in an emotional flashback and it was way back and if I imagine how a baby might feel if she felt unwanted and was washed over with shame, this state, this inner vortex, is exactly what I’d imagine.  It’s sort of heartbreaking when I think of it that way, in the abstract.  Harder for me if I think of it as myself, but still, it’s something to even begin to allow a little of this reality and the sadness of it into my consciousness.  A little is plenty; more might  be shattering.  That’s kind of the point of dissociation I suppose, to keep what can’t be known at bay, and in time, maybe letting a little trace of it through, a little at a time, to be metabolized and/or kicked out as poison.

Somehow I don’t like to admit it, but things seem different, better.  Maybe I feel like it’s begging for trouble to say it.  Maybe I feel like it’s saying that the difficulties haven’t been truly difficult.  That second one feels especially like what it is–it rings true as I write it.  I don’t like to report on doing better/okay because I feel like it’s saying the hard things aren’t really so hard.  I think that desire makes some sense because I’ve experienced (and learned to inflict upon myself) a lot of feeling told that things I’m going through aren’t really that bad.  People have told me that explicitly (when I was little) and implicitly it’s seemed to be the message sometimes too.  So I don’t want to be going along with that–I am trying to refuse to participate.  But I can imagine it’s possible to say what’s true about the difficult and the lessening of difficulty without either one nullifying the other.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression–I’m not perkily chipper or anything.  I have misgivings, doubts about how much I can handle.  But I don’t feel as crushed.  I am not sick with grief, nor paralayzed with self-doubt or anxiety (I have been both at times recently).  That’s some pretty serious improvement, if I think of it that way.

I am learning a little bit about entering into feelings and moving around in them rather than freezing or creating dangerous diversions (I still like my diversions, but I don’t always use them to avoid the difficult stuff).  I am learning a little bit about doing what’s in front of me and leaving it at that, sometimes anyway, which is more than no times.

I can’t believe I’m managing with all that’s happened lately.  Maybe I shouldn’t look too closely lest I find I’m like Wiley Coyote and really standing on thin air and ready to fall as soon as I realize there’s nothing beneath my feet.

I guess there is though–it just feels like everything’s spinning–there is that nice ground for me to dig my fingers into.

Still.  I feel like everything’s spinning and/or I’m falling apart.  Even if neither is actually happening, the feeling’s still a problem, to me anyway.

I’m so afraid.  This October holiday thing isn’t so easy–the scarecrows and robed figures are not easy for me.  It’s a scary world, all the time, not just when we play around with the idea of fear as if it’s something we can tame.  Maybe it is, for  some people, some of the time.  But the thing is, malice is real.  It may only be a transitory apparition in a mind that isn’t altogether well.  It may be as little as that, or more, and maybe it doesn’t even look like malice.  Mabye it’s not intentional always; maybe it’s the only way a person sees to keep his or her own fear at bay.  And yet, it is what it is.  Some people have power over others and they use that power to hurt.  And if that’s not malice, what is?

Malice is real, and it leaves its traces in whatever it touches, and its traces live on in me.

Only I won’t pass it on to some other hapless victim, at least not one that’s outside me.

The only way I know how to handle this alone is the way I always have.  My therapist tells me I don’t have to handle it alone, that we can talk about it next Tuesday.  That sounds like handling it alone to me, ’til then, and it’s not like it’s going to pause and wait for her.  So it’s swimming, and I don’t know how to hold it, not without it ripping through me.

As I mentioned in my last post, I just found out that my therapist is leaving town in a few months, and it’s felt pretty devastating.  Mostly it’s because I’ve worked with her for a bunch of years (I don’t have a very good sense of time so I’d have to do some research to actually say how many, but a bunch, four maybe) and I’m attached.  The time I’ve been with her has included my father’s death and some icky memories coming up last year, and temporarily separating from my husband, and some other things of various intensities–a lot of stuff has happened, in other words, and I’ve gone through it with her.  It’s unsettling to say the least to imagine it ending.

Also, I just simply really like her, and the absence will hurt.

Also, the word is really that I love her, and I know people say you don’t truly know your therapist so it’s all just a transference/idealization thing but after all the time we’ve spent together I do know her in a certain way–not the way friends know each other or something like that but I know her mannerisms, how she responds to things, her presence–these things are her.

Also, losing her is more of a loss of mothering than the “real thing” because what she gives me is the real thing.

Also, the loss of my father and the loss of my idea of my family (which needs to be lost, but it’s still a loss and it still hurts) are fresh so this is all just one big wound of loss.  Also.

I think the only way to get through this is to work on knowing that her presence in my life isn’t totally disappearing because knowing her has changed me, and I’m not changing back.  I have to have her inside, heart-wise.

I also am trying keep the pain moving.  I’m not trying to ignore or suppress it; I’ve been taught that doesn’t work, by her and others.  But I can keep it from getting stuck or becoming something other and more harmful than simple, straight-up pain.  I am swimming in the pain; it swims in me.  It will do to me what it will to do me.  All I can do is not make it worse by resisting it.

Yesterday after some deep yoga on my way home in the car,the deep sobs of a child who has lost her mother flowed free.

I just found out two days ago that my therapist is moving across the country in a few months.  Unexpectedly.  My fear has long been that I’d be rejected.  This isn’t that, unless I were somehow powerful enough to drive her away.

No, this is just loss, pure and simple, devastating.

I actually asked some friends to hang out with me because it’s hurting so much.  I haven’t ever done that quite so openly, except of course with her, my therapist.   I must be desperate.

Trying not to think too much about the whole failure thing–the feeling like a total failure–I can tell my thinking has been distorted so it’s not use thinking.  That’s probably true a lot of the time; I never have much luck when my thinking mind gets spinning and hungry for blood.

Thanks to a very skillful and kind fellow who helped my reconnect to why I care about this work I do it seems a bit different/better.  That’s the only thing that works with me, really, or at least when things are ultra-dire.  I have been trying to stay with that a bit, through the “die die die” chatter that’s been going on upstairs, oh so helpfully.  Trying to stay connected with what I care about, how I care, why, . . .that sort of thing.

Maybe this really is an Anahata thing, a heart-chakra job of opening the heart.  It does close in on itself when shame gets triggered and all hell breaks loose inside.  There’s no fighting shame directly, but there is re-opening what it closes down.  It can work the other way sometimes too, that someone can reach in from outside.  That’s tricky though because I can be prone to seeing everything as a sign of either my awfulness or invisibility.  But when I feel love–if I can connect with it–I feel real.

I’m not entirely connecting with what I’m saying here; the pain and shame can feel so heavily draped on my that I can’t feel beyond them and inside is constricted.  But I know it’s true.

So the past year or so I’ve been trying to cope with and even just find a way to live with some terrible memories that had recently come to my attention–not that they were entirely new to me exactly, but as I said they came to my attention.

That has been sort of consuming.  It’s not over; I don’t suppose these things ever really are but I think there’s a lot more to this phase.  Hopefully it won’t be so different and shocking and disorganizing.  It needs to be less so, because I haven’t exactly had my full energies left over for a job that requires a lot of energies, and not just literal energy but full-on engagement.  All this is to say that I didn’t so well as I’d have liked last year, and the signs are clear enough that I have to reconnect and re-center if I want to keep at it.  And I do.  I’m not thrilled that I have to pay for things that supposedly weren’t my fault.  They’re mine to be responsible for now though whether I’m thrilled or not.  Still.

The other thing is that I so so so want to either withdraw or take the screw you approach and I’m afraid that neither would be helpful.  It appears that I have to behave in an adult manner.  It also appears that I have to find my center even if some people don’t think that I will.  That’s not new.  Throughout my entire life I’ve always had some people who believed in me but often had plenty who didn’t, and often those were quite loud and unkind about it.  ADHD and oppositionality  and precociousness don’t exactly win popularity contests.  Still, it’s daunting.

The shame of feeling exposed and criticized (by being evaluated) and in for more is enough to drive me right off a high cliff several times over.  That’s not new, but do I still have the heart for it?

Two roads, diverging, that sort of thing.

We boil the significance of our lives down into one little essence, force it into one little shape.

As if.

As if it’s so simple, or so clear at the time or in retrospect that we did what was best for us, or that one path is necessarily so much more fated or commendable than another.

As if.

Not that I’m dissing Frost–far from it–far, far, from it–because he didn’t really make things so simple as we take him for sometimes.

Irony, dripping with.  Frostiness.

That’s the way I like it.  Sharp, biting, but beautiful.

Good fences don’t really make good neighbors–you didn’t think it was that simple did you?  Because good fences just make cleanly separated people.  Not just in my little opinion supra-added to the poem either.

And two roads, sure, and far hence we might well be saying that it made all the difference.  But that doesn’t mean that it did.  That’s the younger man thinking life is all turning points and obvious courses, and the older man wanting to believe it mattered that much and that he did the right thing.  We all want these things.  That doesn’t make them true.  Not untrue either, not one nor the other.  The poem holds these possibilities.  It’s not some stupid cutesy piece of syrupy copy for a poster.  It’s the real thing–the kind of work that penetrates to the mystifying heart of human life.

Well now that I’m running out of ranting I’ve almost forgotten what I was going to say.

Something about two roads, feeling faced with two ways of being in the world, and not knowing which to choose.  I am told to take the healthy way.  I am drawn to the more exciting and dangerous and wildly energizing and potentially bloody and promising way.  Perhaps neither is really what I think it is.  Perhaps I don’t have to chose.  Perhaps they aren’t really even so distinct from one another as I think.  Perhaps I can’t have it all, or can’t escape anything.  I don’t know how to frame the situation, how to envision the space I’m in.  A clearing in the forest.  Let’s leave it at that, for now.

In spite of what lots of self-help books say, and even what therapists sometimes say, feeling the fear, “sitting with the feelings,” doesn’t always make it go away.  I think it’s true with grief and probably many feelings, just not always with traumatic/scary ones.  With grief, I find the idea that the only way is through, to go into it rather  than fleeing it (well a little fleeing might be okay, if only for a moment’s respite).

I know they don’t claim fear goes away instantly if we sit with it, but I do think it can stay just as intense even if we feel it, and sometimes it can get worse with time.  I’ve read some trauma theory about how with instrusive memories the fear/stress can grow or escalate each time it’s reexperienced.  The brain doesn’t know it’s not “really” happening now.  It’s feeling it now; it is now.  Or it’s the only now there is.  That’s also what trauma does:  it makes one moment expand as if it’s happening for all time.

I do think that shaping our own stories about the trauma and where it fits into our lives (as we see it–not as someone else tells us it should be) helps.  That, and someone or someones to listen, to witness it.  Narrative seems to be my solution to everything, just about, along with poetry.  I can live with that.