I remember, at 23, sitting with my first therapist-a great Mama Bear of a man. I had come to him feeling suicidal, awash in soul-crushing despair and desperate to find a way to fix my broken self. This extraordinarily compassionate, fiercely maternal man (who helped me to save my life) seemed so wonderfully calm. His whole being radiated peace. Nothing seemed to ruffle or distress him. He seemed beyond problems and issues and conflicts. He appeared to be living in the middle of the very place I longed and ached to be: serene and completely fixed.
That impression of someone living-in-Nirvana, beyond struggle, became my benchmark, my image of the there that I wanted to reach. Though the gap between that there and
As with anything I undertook in those days, I hurled myself into the deep work: pushing, rushing, hell-bent to be the best-ever patient-to be cured in record time. If he addressed my hurry, I mostly did not hear it. If ever I heard the barest hint of a question about it, I felt he was being patronizing. Already a dedicated overachiever, I was invariably racing ahead of myself, often able to make enormous strides at seemingly incredible speeds-usually while quite unaware of the cost to my being of this breakneck pace. (See 75mph for more about that.)
When I graduated from our working together a year and a half later, I felt significantly fixed. No longer suicidal or immersed in despair, I had also learned some powerful skills with which to navigate my always-intense emotional life. I continued to believe Nirvana was attainable. But, by then, I had begun to realize that it might well take some time and living in order to reach that magical place from which life would become a matter of coasting.
Twenty years, five therapists, considerable spiritual searching and several cycles of great despair later, I finally began to grasp that this Nirvana didn't really exist.
For many of those twenty years (until I, at 44, began the work I started with my last therapist) I would be filled with self-loathing, devastating disappointment and a sense of unutterable failure each time I cycled through a time of despair and feeling broken. During these feeling-broken times, I would feel convinced that the preceding periods-when I'd felt a strong sense of self and wholeness-had merely been times of living in delusion. Had I truly been as whole as I believed myself to be during those times, how could I possibly feel so broken yet again?
In that last therapy (that ended some 3 years later), I first discovered, then began reclaiming and re-parenting, the wounded little one(s) inside of me. (See the Little Ones Story for more about that.) The process continues even now. Immersion in this extraordinary journey and witnessing the healing journeys of the hundreds of women with whom I've worked during over 40 years as a therapist, have given me a very different vision of the ways in which we grow throughout our lives. This newer vision is more generous, more realistic and more forgiving than my old vision of reaching Nirvana.
My experience repeatedly teaches me that growth is an ever on-going process, not an achievement. As each of us moves through our own healing journey, we move on a spiral path, passing over and over again through the same fixed points, but at a new level each time. These fixed points, the coordinates through which our spiral of growth unfolds, are the issues that we have come to work with in this lifetime. At each new threshold in the spiral-the time of our moving to the next deeper layer in our process-we are likely to encounter yet another, more subtle version of these issues.
A narrow, shortsighted view of these moments leads us to criticize and disparage ourselves for being “in the same old garbage again!” The same shortsightedness makes us believe that the progress we thought we'd made till this moment was illusory.
The truth is that when it seems that we are passing through the same old place again, it is a new self that is passing through a new iteration of that old place on the way to a still newer emerging self. So, each time we notice that we are confronting new versions of the old dragons, we can, instead of doubting ourselves, feel assured that we are indeed in the midst of moving forward, moving through a threshold.
Like so many of us, I grew up having the psychic/emotional responsibility for mothering/parenting my own mother. With this emotional initiation, one of my fixed points/coordinates is the repeating terror and challenge of choosing to respond to my own needs before responding to the intuited or perceived needs of another who touches my heart. At each new threshold in my spiral of growing, I am pushed by Spirit into making some new, more subtle version of this choice. As I make the choice I inevitably feel, in some little part of me, a familiar (though lessening) terror of murderous, dangerous retaliation from the person to whom I am not responding.
I hold this frightened part of me close. I lovingly remind her of how many times we have passed this test without something terrible happening to us. I promise I will continue, always, to protect her. I assure her that I will always stand between her and whatever anger the other person might have about how we are choosing. I let her know it will be safe for us to hear the other person's feelings, that those feelings cannot destroy us. In time she feels safe again.
In my own unfolding, the recurring wave of unaccountable despair, of feeling broken and lost is also always a clue that I'm about to open into a whole new place/part of myself. This lost, despairing feeling is the anticipatory grieving (in some little part of me) for the imminent ending either of a chapter/season of my living or of a way of being in myself.
This little part of me needs my reassurance that she will not be abandoned by me as I move into the new spaces of my life and myself. She needs my loving comfort in her fearfulness and grief. I hold her close. I remind her of how many times we have gone through this kind of threshold before. I remind her of how very far we've already come without me ever leaving her behind or alone. After some while, she seems done with feeling both the fear and the grief. We move into the new season of our life-long adventure holding hands.
When you feel discouraged about your progress, consider reminding yourself of the more generous view of the growing process. Remember, too, to be loving and comforting to your inner little one.
And, consider lovingly holding your own little one's hand.
P.S. So many of your delicious e-mails send appreciations for the affirmation, support and nourishment you receive from the site. When I answer them, I don’t always remember to let you know that having your own deck of the Rememberings and Celebrations cards is a way to bring this same loving voice into your everyday world, to have it at hand as you need to remind yourself of the "real" truth moment to moment in the crazimakingness of the so-called real world!
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The card on this page is part of a set of 64 handcolored bookmark-size cards called the Rememberings and Celebrations deck. They can be used as an oracle, a meditation focus or a "book-in-pieces" to kindle and grow a compassionate, gentle, unconditionally loving, fiercely protective inner-Mother to help you carve safe healing space for your emerging self and for the wounded little ones inside.
If you'd like a deck of your very own to support you in your journey, click here to download Order Form.
Please feel free to e-mail me at rposin@hotmail.com. to share your reflections and responses to any or all of what you find here . I'd really like to hear what touches and nourishes you!
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