The vulnerable, sensitive, little parts of me have always been able to immediately sense when the circumstances in which I found myself were unsafe, unhealthy or just not-okay for me. Yet, for much of my life, I rarely paid attention to their rumblings. If and when they got my attention, my conscious mind would dismiss or invalidate these inner senses. So, until my mid-forties, these parts suffered through a good many unpleasant, negative or undermining situations out in the world with people.
Until that season in my healing, I was mean, critical and impatient with my self around any fears/uneasiness I noticed in me.
Through the years I became more psychologically sophisticated. With a whole new vocabulary, I continued to find ways to invalidate, dismiss or ridicule any uneasy, unsafe, untrusting feelings that some interpersonal situations might stir in me. I'd see these feelings as my perverse distortions of what was going on or, as my past experiences being inappropriately overlaid on current circumstances or, as projections of my inner reality onto the actual situation.
At 32, just shortly before I was scheduled to leave my life in New York to begin my cross-country journey into the unknown, I went to do a one-day Charlotte Selver “Workshop in Sensory Awareness.“ What happened there was a clear example of how I typically dealt with these feelings in those years.
The workshop came just 10 days after I had had my first-ever surgery: the removal of a small fatty tumor from the front of my right shoulder. That day-hospitalization procedure had involved general anesthesia and a small number of stitches. These had been removed just the day before the workshop, a workshop I'd been quite eager to experience.
As the group of 10 of us gathered, the facilitator had us go round the circle introducing ourselves and our intentions for the day. As I listened to these people describing themselves, I experienced a very strong visceral queasiness, an almost nauseated feeling. Not one of these people with whom I was to spend the day felt kindred. Most were male. The male facilitator, who had come highly recommended, seemed quite impressed with himself in a puffed up kind of way. Almost without exception, the self-descriptions offered by the participants had, for me, the ring of posturing, of a kind of competitive sensitivity. This was an odd sort of dance that many men seemed inclined to play out in those early days of the second wave of feminism. In ordinary social situations, I found this more-sensitive-than-thou posturing quite irritating. In this workshop where the agenda was for intimate connecting with our selves and each other, it stirred edgy uneasiness. I felt I was in an unsafe environment. I felt very untrusting of the whole set-up. Nothing about it felt okay.
For all seven hours and through the many exercises we were doing, I constantly argued with myself about the feelings I was trying not to have. I told myself that I was being excessively critical of the male participants and facilitator because of my strongly feminist orientation and my then general cynicism about men's motivations. I told myself that I was projecting all of these feelings onto the situation because it was really hard for me to allow myself to be taught something I didn't know by someone I didn't know, especially a puffed up male authority. I told myself that I was feeling overly uneasy because I was still healing and vulnerable from the cut in both my physical and energetic body. I told myself that all the strong body/emotional messages were merely the consequence of my own distortions and inner realities that had little to do with what was really going on in the workshop.
Having in these ways invalidated my gut feelings, I keeping pushing myself to ignore, get over and dismiss these signals, to just be there and do the work proposed. It was an ongoing struggle all through the day. With this intense battle inside my psyche, it was nearly impossible to find room to attend to the sensory awareness of such things as the weight of a stone in my upturned palm as I walked.
In only one exercise was I able to be both in the middle of what was going on inside of me and, simultaneously, in what was going on outside of me in the work of the day. We'd paired off, one of each pair sitting with our back against a wall. Our partner began to move toward us from a starting position against the opposite wall of the room. The work was to discover “at what distance between yourself and your partner do you feel safe.” Only when I had my partner move two rooms away, to the opposite side of the house, did it begin to feel safe to me. In the sharing afterward, I finally was able to talk some about the extreme vulnerability and uneasiness I'd felt all day, and about the intensity of my inner struggle around being there.
If I felt a small measure of such feelings in any such situation at this stage of my life, I'd have quietly gathered my things, slipped out, gone home and written the facilitator a brief note indicating I'd left because it had felt unsafe for me to be there. (In fact, I recently did just that at a movement workshop that I'd hoped would offer me new tools for some body releasing I've been working on.) But, back 30 some years ago, I had not yet learned how to take such good care of my vulnerable selves.
It was in my mid-forties that I first met my inner Little Ones. And, it was only then that I began the practice of becoming a consistently protective, unconditionally loving Mommy to all my little, vulnerable and sensitive selves. (See The Little Ones Story for more about this.) It's this practice that's helped me to be with all my vague (or strong) uneasy, unsafe, untrusting, not-okay feelings in a more caring way. I now know that it does not matter where these feelings come from. I now know that as a good Mommy I must always take these feelings seriously. That means hearing them, acknowledging them with respect and responding to them with love and caring. Only when my fearful selves feel fiercely protected can we sit together and begin to explore the sources of the fearful, unsafe, uneasy feelings. Only then can we safely and together, look to find new ways to cope with these fears or new choices to make.
In our feel-the-fear-and-do-it-anyway/get-over-it culture, we are constantly and from very early on in our lives being socialized to disregard our inner voices, to attend only to so-called objective reality (whatever that is). To openly acknowledge and appreciate that we can act only from what feels so for us in the moment-no matter what an outside eye might see as the supposed truth-of-the-matter, this is a revolutionary stance. It is a radical act of self-care and self-loving to honor our inner voices above all others. And, it is equally radical to act to protect our selves from what might, to others, seem to be imaginary fears.
When you feel uneasy, unsafe or not-okay in any situation, consider taking your feelings seriously (no matter where they may be coming from) and honoring them by practicing radical self-care.
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 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.
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