Reclaiming and Re-Mothering the Wounded Little Ones Inside

As I sit down to start writing, my body seizes up in layers of contraction. Most of them start in my back, around and between my shoulder blades and also at the level of my diaphragm. The contractions practically take my breath away. I lie down, breathing slowly and deeply as I (by means I can neither name nor understand) search to find the places and ways in which to begin the physical unwinding process for each vortex of constriction.

After several months of this, I've come to know that what's going on in my body is a physical manifestation of terror. I don't feel the terror emotionally, but some small being long locked inside me feels it intensely. Without words, images or memories, my body is responding to some overwhelming threat I do not, in my grown-up self, perceive.

Curled up in bed on a heating pad, cuddled around my saddest, most forlorn-looking teddy bear under a soft fleece comforter, some of the tension releases. The heat warms the "ice-at-my-core" sensation that comes with the contractions and I ease into the middle of just feeling my body having its feelings of terror. I drift briefly into semi-consciousness, then I am wrenched into wakefulness by a dream: I am driving my car when suddenly some dark fabric-like creature attacks and covers my face. I can't see where I'm going. I can't breathe. I can't pull it off my face. Suffocating and terrified, I wake in a panic.

Awake, I hold and rock the teddy bear and myself. Inside me the "Mommy" croons lovingly to the "littlest one:" "Oh, my little sweetie is so scared. It's such a scary time for you, little one, but I'm right here with you. Honey, you won't be alone, I won't leave you. I'll hold you and rock you and stay right here the whole time. I won't let anyone hurt you, dear one."

When the terror constricts my body while I'm with someone, I pay attention to it. At another time in my life I might have vaguely perceived the tightness as background and gone on with the interaction as if nothing of note were going on in me. Now, I hear my body screaming to me to stop whatever I'm doing because the "littlest one" is being terrified by what' s happening in the interaction. I stop everything and go inside, melting into the pain. Sometimes melting into the pain gives birth to a knowing about what stirred the terror; other times I remain mystified. I just stay with the pain and with the "littlest one" until the wave passes. It always passes if I stay with it and talk lovingly to her. It always gets more intense and persistent when I try to override it and ignore her calls to me. People in my life are getting used to the process; my own fierce determination not to abandon that terrified part of me keeps me centered and encourages them to respect my process even when they have trouble with it.

There are also many moments these past weeks when an elephant's foot of grief, anguish and sorrow lands crushingly on my chest. It feels as though I could crumble to the ground dissolved by tears and by the weight of the unspeakable anguish. In the middle of crossing the street, walking down a supermarket aisle, driving my car, drifting on a boulder in the canyon - when it comes I sob and shake inside and speak softly to the pained little one. "Oh, my sweetie, I'm sorry you hurt so badly. I love you so much. Poor little honey, it's being so hard for you now." The grief deepens and spreads through me as I allow myself to yield to and go with it. After a time, just as with the contractions, these waves of sorrow pass completely.

Remarkably, (but in the end not so surprisingly) when the waves pass I, like a child, am fresh, fully open to whatever is happening in the moment. There is no residue. Life feels vibrant, joyful. I am excitedly engaged in this experience of reclaiming lost parts of myself. In the midst of the awful pain is the incredible joy that I am coming more deeply home to myself.

I am deepening an intense closeness with a handful of women friends both nearby and long distance, and as well with a small circle of women teacher-healers with whom I seasonally sit in Council. I know that these deepenings are part of what is triggering, in the littlest, non-verbal self of me, these powerful echoes of ancient terrors I can't remember feeling. Something inside me is breaking, cracking, falling away. As it does, my being-in-a-body is experiencing all the anguish and terror the "little one" experienced before she long ago shut down and ceased living inside a feeling body.

Exploring Helplessness

Allowing myself to collapse into the overwhelming helplessness of these experiences is something new and different for me. For most of my forty-eight and one-half years I've been competently, effectively and creatively transforming disempowering circumstances into empowering opportunities - essentially never allowing myself to be in any situation where helplessness or having my reality controlled by someone else was a possibility.

Over this past year, the Universe has been providing me with a succession of circumstances that have called forth in me intense helpless and out-of-control feelings. My ordinarily relatively peaceful, serene physical and emotional space has been repeatedly disrupted and violated: by a new landlord (with no sense of boundaries and no respect for the earth) who along with troops of workers has been spending his weekends tearing out the wilderness around my house (so that he could see all "his" property); by a pogrom of possums and gophers who have been under-mining, tearing up and destroying both my tiny patch of grass and many of my grown-from-babyhood plantings; by having my car (packed full of ceremonial objects and garments, musical instruments, art supplies, camping gear and new books) vanish in San Francisco on my way home from a Council meeting only to reappear "vacuumed" clean of all my treasures, including my favorite teddy bear; by having my back go into deep spasm three different times, leaving me totally incapacitated and completely dependent for several days each time.

Instead of the words and figurings that have, for so much of my life, helped me to hold myself through times of pain and chaos, instead of the old "making sense" that would bind the chaos into some form I could name and "do" something about, I each time chose to risk immersion in the "not-knowing, not-doing" place of merely being with myself in the midst of the overwhelm. Each time I consciously chose not to get into the active-interventionist (if we don't fix it, make it better, figure out the most empowering way to tell the story to ourself, we will disintegrate or die) mode.

As a very different sort of "warrior," I've committed myself to choosing to stay in the middle of the helpless, powerless, "out-of-control" feelings. And, this choosing for the first time in my life to surrender to the over-whelming feelings of being "out-of-control" is turning out to be the most empowering commitment I've yet made to myself. I continue to find the courage and patience to stay in the middle of these unaccountable moments as they intensify and then pass. I surrender into rather than fight to contain the intense helplessness. In that conscious yielding, I find a gentleness and peace that enfold me as I rest in the worst of it. To stay with, to fully feel the unlabelled pain, the anguish and my helplessness in the middle of it seems to be the only help I need these days. In surrendering at last to the experience of powerlessness, I am experiencing a kind of empoweredness and wholeness I've never quite found in my former, formidable attempts to avoid or take arms against being "out-of-control". When I let go into the darkness, after a time I fall through the bottom of it into a kind of radiance and freedom that go far beyond anything that's ever come out of trying to avoid or short-circuit the process.

The capacity and courage for this part of my journey is unquestionably sourced by the work I've been doing with myself over the past five years. I've been growing a "Mommy" inside of me who could be big enough and fierce enough to hold open a space big enough and safe enough for me to risk opening to the overwhelming helplessness buried along with the "littlest one" who once lived in constant terror. There is at last someone totally "there" for me, someone completely, absolutely, unconditionally loving, competent and trustworthy who can protect me and make it safe for me to be the child I've never been safe to be.

That someone, the "Mommy" inside of me, was birthed in a labor of self-love that began only when, in great despair, I at last abandoned the illusion that anyone outside of me could ever love me any more than I was able to love myself. (Until then I, when beset with periodic episodes of black depression and self-decimation, would imagine that someone else's love for me might someday love me into a deeper acceptance of myself than I seemed capable of.) In abandoning that illusion, I stopped abandoning my self and began learning to deeply accept myself all the ways that I am, unconditionally - with infinite gentleness and patience for even the most "awful" and "disagreeable" me's.

Finding A New Frame Of Reference

Much of the past five years the journey has been mainly with and within myself, alone. I found it essential to disconnect even more radically than ever before from the "outside world(s)" (both heteropatriarchical and spiritual). To disconnect from the culture(s) that surrounds and assaults us (both through media and all the "acceptable" forms of social interaction), forcing and suppressing us into submission to values, beliefs and norms that are, as far as I can see, inimical to a healthy relationship with one's self, much less with anyone else. Over and over again, through a lifetime of moving consciously, steadily toward greater wholeness, deeper self-love and more nourishing self-care, the intuitive messages from within have guided me to choices that most often are the opposite of everything I've ever been taught about how to encourage growth, strength, healing and relationship. Through an endless progression of "droppings out" I'd already lived most of my life as an "outsider," trusting and living mostly according to my own intuitive knowings, though often at the price of feeling very "crazy." This latest, most extreme retreat from the "world(s)-at-large" gave me back the energy I've always had to expend to keep the constant barrage of invalidating, crazy-making, suppressive messages from overwhelming or crushing the tender shoots of self-loving. With this retreat came the courage, energy and spaciousness to fully accept Darkness and Chaos as my teachers, to open fully to the depths of my own confusion, despair, anger, rage, fear, terror, and meanness and so to receive their profound teachings.

Over and over again I am shown that healing comes from lovingly embracing the very places in myself I had always thought it best to "get beyond." I learn to honor my fears: to not "push through" them; to not be afraid to openly acknowledge them and my taking them seriously; to trust that what I once might have called "running away from" or "avoiding" behaviors are indeed important breaks I need while I grow and fund the energy I need for later goings forth. I learn the power of giving myself my full permission to be exactly where I am at any moment (even and especially when it's someplace I hope someday not to have to be) and also, my full permission to stay there forever if I need to.

I learn that when I deny or disconnect from the "darkness" within: - my sadness, my despair, my meanness, my anger, my rage, my terror, my ungenerous feelings towards others, my wanting things my way - I am robbing my own power. There is an extraordinary magic I learn, that comes when I can own and speak aloud, without shame, these "dark" truths-of-the-moment; I and others can be in truth and clarity with each other rather than being drained by the confounding energies of suppression and disguise and unease. From this sharing change can be born.

I learn to not be afraid to always put my self, my "little one" first in any considerations. I learn that this is my first responsibility to the healing of all beings and of the planet. I learn to dare to speak as much of my inner truth as I am aware of anywhere anytime, no matter what agreements others seem to have made. I learn not to be afraid to admit that my own truths are always more important to me than what anyone else has to say or to offer about what they experience about me. I learn not to be afraid to give up anything that feels like compromise or sacrifice, to trust that when we come from our own deepest truths, all needs can be compatible. And, perhaps most important of all, I learn not to be afraid to lavish loving encouragement and celebration upon myself for always going only as fast as the slowest, most frightened part of me needs to go in order to feel safe.

The path to these learnings and to the "Mommy-inside" has been through reaching toward the abandoned child-within. It began with a teddy bear (selected with very special care), time (five days a week unplugged from the outside world), and the canyons of Ojai. I spent my days practicing caring for and nurturing my body, heart and soul. I did Reiki and yoga in the mornings (unless I didn't feel like it) and walked endlessly in the canyons by day and by evening. I climbed hills, up creek beds, into the arms of trees. I curled up with boulders, melted into little waterfalls and let the streams flow through me. I felt day becoming night, dark becoming dawn. I lived with my favorite canyon through a searing fire that uncovered her bones and then through the almost immediate beginning of renewal as green sprouted out of charred stumps of what had been. I felt young, little and very safe. I played with colored pens, pastels, paints and clay. Drawing and writing in my journal with my left hand (the one that has no rules or expectations) I made space for the "little one" to speak to me with images and words. Always I called for her and talked with her of my yearnings to know her, of my awkwardness in approaching her after for so long ignoring and abandoning her, of my intention to become ever more trustworthy and available to her. Slowly, with caution, she began to trust my intention and commitment to learn to love her unconditionally, to learn to be an advocate for her needs. She began to speak and to share her long hidden self with me.

As always, it was easiest for me to be there for her in her sadness and despair. I would hold and rock myself and the teddy bear that sometimes would "be her." I would listen to her when she felt unhappy or upset and didn't want to be around certain people or to do certain things. I'd make sure we didn't ever do anything that felt scary or uncomfortable to her. We grieved deeply together for all she never had the first time she was little. We grieved for all the ways that I had been as harsh, impatient, intolerant and rejecting of her as the outside world had been in those early days. We grieved for the loss of the chance to feel free just to be little in those early days. And, we grieved for the loss of the dream that anyone else could now or ever mother that part of us. We cried and cried and spent long hours feeling very sorry for ourselves. Then, slowly we began to make the world safe to be little in, at least by ourselves.

Watching and feeling the cycles in nature taught me that moving away is always the beginning of moving toward, if your eyes are truly open. The deep daily bonding with nature reminded me to remember patience, to remember that all processes have their own timing for birthing, blossoming and decaying (provided we don't interfere and restrict that flow by imposing our notions of how it should be). Watching the slow process of new growth after the fire's devastation taught me to remember that the seed of new life is always hidden in the ashes that become its food; that there is no hurry, only time and growing. And, too, that growing is always both the blossoming forth and the dying away. Giving myself fully to the sadness and despair was the beginning of the birth of new aliveness, though it took a long season for the light to return in its new form.

Finding My Anger

As the "littlest one" became more trusting and as I, like the Great Mother surrounding me, became more reliably loving, patient and accepting, there came a time when there was an extraordinary upsurging of intense feelings of anger (the more focussed, specific version) and rage (the more amorphous, all-encompassing version). In numberless situations in which the old "evolved" and "grown-up" me would have psychologically and spiritually "understood" the circumstances and people involved, thereby "spiritually by-passing" the messiness and pain of feeling "small-minded," "mean," "dark" and"negative" feelings, I began to stay open to the "little one" as well as to the "grown-up." When I did that, I could both "understand" and still feel all the ugly, yukky feelings, without judging myself badly for them. I gave up the belief that anger and rage are not evolved things to feel. (I had long ago given up the "nice girls don't..." rule in exchange for this equally emotionally repressive one that "enlightened beings don't...")

It was harder with these feelings than with the sadness, pain and despair, but again I gave myself permission to be in the middle of whatever "ugly, hatefulness" I was feeling, thinking or doing. I gave myself permission to stay there or, in the old way of seeing it, permission to be "stuck" indefinitely, until or unless some release came organically, from my guts.

I found ways to move the energy of the anger and rage through my body. (A special friend, wise in the ways of rage, helped me pay attention to the way it gets caught in the body.) I banged on gongs, drums, chimes, the piano, my bed and (with bataccas) on door jams. I screamed, shouted, cursed and roared at home, in the canyon and often while driving around in my car with the windows rolled up and the music blaring. I stomped and flailed fists and feet on my mattress. The more I allowed myself to experience my rage in the safety of my own company, without judging myself for feeling it, the more I became able to notice the situations and circumstances that, now and in the past, stirred my anger. After a time, I began telling people how I was feeling when I was angry or enraged. Later on I became more and more able, without "dumping" or blaming, to let people know what, in what they were doing with me, angered me. I even sometimes allowed myself to yell it to them when I needed to do that. There was an enormous sense of excitement and freedom that came with permitting myself to really feel the anger rather than just knowing it was there.

When I first started banging and screaming out my rage, I experienced intense palpitations. I could barely breathe. I would have to stop after only seconds of pounding to catch my breath, to find some balance. Then, I'd go at it some more. As the energy coursed through me, I one day remembered a "knowing" that had come to me intuitively when, years before, I had explored with psychedelics. When you attempt to contain or control intense waves of energy/feelings rather than just to allow them to flow through you, their velocity increases to vortex proportions; you feel nauseated, terrified, overwhelmed. When you stop resisting the powerful flow and instead yield, surrender and let the current carry you, you discover that rather than being "out-of-control," you are in the middle of something that has an organismic coherence you can feel in your
bones.

As I surrendered, allowing myself to ride with the intense feelings, they would crest, reverberate then begin to diminish and recede all of their own accord. This was as true for the anger and rage as it was for the grief and despair. Sometimes as I raged, old images would surface of situations in which I had been, but not felt my being enraged. Sometimes there was nothing, after I started banging, but energy and rage. Always, at some moment I would be spent. There might be tears, exhaustion or laughter. But, always a calm would come, and with it, often, some clear "knowing" of what I needed to speak of or to do to change whatever had triggered the rage.

The more I, without judgement, allowed the rage and anger to surface, the more they informed me. My feelings were healthy organismic reactions to circumstances which I experienced as harmful, noxious or invalidating to some aspect(s) of the me I was being in that moment. This important information then allowed me to move into my life in ways that were not possible before I began the practice of listening to my anger. I was learning that surrendering into the "dark" feelings allows for the emergence of one's deepest truths; that owning and receiving those feelings could be not only safe, but illuminating.

There is coherence of the most astounding sort to be discovered in the surrender to chaos. And, that coherence is always more deeply substantial than any "order" imposed by the part of us that tries to control and contain and dilute intense feelings by means of mind and external structure. That coherence is incomprehensible, just as the chaos is threatening, to the part of us that sees the world as either "in-" or "out-of-control:" our rational, logical (male) aspect.

With the "Mommy-inside's" permission, acceptance and encouragement, the "littlest one" began to feel safe to feel her rage and to express it directly in her child's language of immediacy. Without any efforts to translate her reactions into "more suitable" or "seemly" forms, she readily informed people of when she wanted to "put them in the trash" or "bury them in the backyard" for treating her badly or telling her things she didn't want to hear. She could trust that she would not be judged or abandoned for speaking her truth; that the "Mommy" would love her and be on her side no matter what other people might say or do about her outbursts. The "Mommy" also became free to be ferocious in her protection of the "little one." Without taking time to be "polite," she directly expressed her anger at anyone who either treated the "little one" badly or who tried to tell or ask the "little one" something that the "Mommy" knew neither she nor the "little one" needed to hear just then. The "Mommy" was especially fierce about not allowing anyone to "help" the "little one." In fact, "helpful" gestures of most any sort seemed always fraught with danger to the "little one" and to the "Mommy" as well.

Wisdom came from dancing with the depths of my own sadness, grief, despair, rage and anger. I became more and more able to sit with others as they found the courage to risk feeling into their own deepest, darkest feelings. Knowing the power that flowed from moving into and through such feelings unimpeded by my own or anyone else's thought processes and having become more familiar and comfortable with having those feelings resonating their parallels in me, I became freer to serve as a guardian and witness for others in the midst of their chaos. I was less and less fearful that they would not be able to "get through" those places without my "help" or intervention. I was less and less threatened by what feeling-with-them was stirring in my depths.

By my feeling safe to feel-with-them rather than needing to "help" them move through or beyond the immediacy of the energy of their chaotic intensity, I offered a powerful, supportive affirmation of the safety of the process. I was living my belief and trust in the empowering process of staying with the darkness until the eye (or the "I") learns the new way of seeing. My capacity to stay in the middle of that trust in both my own and their natural process nourished the reawakening of their own trust in their own self-in-process. And my sitting in witness with others through their diving into their dark places gradually helped me fund the energy, trust and courage for what has become my own next step. I began opening to terror and helplessness, feelings that were, as I've earlier described, even further from my repertoire of embodied experience than the feelings of rage and anger had been.

Bringing My New Self into Relating to Others

The surfacing of the feelings of terror and helplessness in this newest stage of my journey feels profoundly connected with my slowly increasing embodiedness and my cautious movement out into the world of relating intimately with others from my new emotionally and physically embodied self. Over the past two years the "little one," the "Mommy" and I have been practicing being the all of ourselves we can be, openly, everywhere as much of the time as we can while still feeling safe inside ourselves.

Some days I feel like a one-woman travelling guerrilla theatre troupe as I keep giving voice to all the subterranean levels I am aware of in my interactions with others. I tell them when it feels to me like they've disappeared behind their eyes leaving me a facsimile to relate to. I ask them where they've gone rather than continuing the charade of "communication." I stop them when I start to feel myself wandering away from listening to what they're saying. I no longer feel guilty when that happens in me, I trust it is for some good reason that we can discover together if we look at what just happened. More and more I give up the "dark" secrets I've always kept in my intimate relationships (e.g., where I feel "superior," when I feel stingy). And, many of the secrets I've kept even from myself (e.g., where I still am more "giving" than I truly want to be) are emerging into consciousness as those I relate with choose to share back their own "dark" secrets.

I, for the first time in my life, experience myself surrounded by a number of women who I see as truly my peers in psychological, emotional, intellectual and spiritual consciousness. These are women as deeply committed as I am to the urgency and priority of becoming ever more conscious and impeccable in all their relationships: with self, with others, with the planet; women who are as willing as I am to risk and struggle to be in truth with themselves and with each other; women who are committed to taking responsibility for doing their own emotional homework.

As I come together with these women - in council, in friendships and in a "more-than friendship," our shared intention and clear commitment is to serve the healing, growing and loving acceptance of ourselves and of ourselves-in-relation. We do this with a deep conviction that in so doing we are helping to generate a powerful wave of healing on the planet. The richness and breadth of the possibilities is extraordinarily exciting and inviting. Being in intimate sharings, committed to risking the revealing of our inmost truths--of-the-moment, amongst women who not only carry considerable wisdom and power but who, as well, are committed to holding their own power in the midst of relating that is intense, chaotic, and open to revealing our dark sides - this brings me opportunities I've never yet believed possible for me in relating to other human beings. I have the opportunity, finally and unexpectedly, to risk seeing beyond the limits of what I can see of myself by myself. I get a chance to receive reasonably reliable feedback about where I, unbeknownst to me, disappear. That alone opens whole new realms to explore. I have, as well, the opportunity to become conscious, among equally conscious beings, of myself-in-relation: a part of me that is less familiar in my experience of myself.

Along with the incredible excitement in all this there is, for all of us, a great deal of hard, hard work. And, for me there is the opportunity to have brought into consciousness all the profound fear, terror, and powerlessness that so shaped both the "little one's" early life and all the choices her experiences have led me to make since then about trusting and relating intimately with other people. Somewhere very early in the intense, complicated, arbitrary, competitive and overwhelmingly painful relationship with my biological mother, the "littlest one" learned that there was no one outside of herself that was dependable or trustworthy. My mother's responses to my needs (she weighed 97 pounds after she birthed me at 9 pounds) came with the only barely veiled impatience, rage and resentment that attends feeling that, rather than sharing a loving merging you are being called to give away that which you most crave for yourself. She birthed me (she told me before she died) to give her the affection she felt starved for and then found herself overwhelmed by my needs.

The "little one" can remember being reached for lovingly and reaching back only to be pushed away as soon as she reached back. The mothering I received taught me that needing or wanting anything from outside my self was bad, shameful and dangerous both physically and emotionally. Sharp nails, yanking hands and lots of feeling cold and wet are body rememberings that have surfaced as I've re-embodied. To survive, the "littlest one" disconnected from the feelings in her body and, making a virtue of necessity, she became extraordinarily able to live richly within herself needing or wanting very little from outside sources.

The legacy has been that, for all my life until these past two years, I have always found that the most exciting enlivening moments of my life were those spent in my own company. The preference for inner life and the fascination with introspection along with the early experiences that required incredible sensitivity to subtle shifts in others, all combined to produce in me a functioning level of awareness of ordinarily less-than-conscious process that set me apart from most people I've ever met. Around others there seemed inevitably to be a constriction, a downward shift in the intensity and richness of my experience of practically anything; it was either that or feeling "crazy."

As I've entered into these new relationships I, for the first time in my life, am experiencing being able to be in the middle of the allness of myself around others. Even more amazingly, the richness and resonance of being in relation with others who are as present to their own inner selves and journeys as I am brings me an excitement and intensity that often is even beyond what I can provide for myself. There is in this new experience both the delight and the terror attendant to the sense of "belonging," of no longer always feeling alien. For, with the new found sense of being a part comes the fear of losing that comfort, a loss I never had to imagine contending with since my earliest days. It is this that stirs the fear, terror and powerlessness as I heal into trusting others.

The powerful, unconditional love and protection of the "Mommy-inside" gives me the courage to risk allowing myself to become conscious of these long-buried feelings as they are stirred in the "little one" in the middle of sharing so deeply and nourishingly with these women. Though the depth of their self-awareness and spiritual consciousness invites me to risk telling all of the truth about what I feel each moment, to risk giving up my life-long stance that alone is always better, always safer, it is the dependability of the "Mommy-inside" that allows me to dare again to be this naked and exposed with other people. Because she always keeps the space safe for me or else gets me out of there, I am brave enough to open to the long unremembered fears and paranoia’s stirred in the "littlest one" when I am allowing myself to be all of the available wonderful and awful of me openly in the presence of others. With the "Mommy" standing guard, I am able to begin to allow mirroring to come to me through these women and our interactions rather than receiving that only from the teacher within my own deeps.

I am precariously opening into unexplored territory in me while at the same time opening to experience others' responses to and visions of me. I am trusting that I will not abandon myself, my own "inside-eyes" vision of myself. Even as I go to the edge of what I know about myself, about myself-in-relation, I am trusting that I will recognize in their feedback that which, although new to me, does indeed feel deeply true for me. And, I am trusting that I will be able to separate what is so for me from that which feels not so much about me as about themselves and their conscious or unconscious projections onto me. I am trusting, in short, that I will, even at the edge (and even at the risk of irritating others), always choose my "inside-eyes" view of myself over any conflicting "outside-eyes" view. Because of the "Mommy " I no longer am at risk of having my own critical "outside- eyes" view of me lead me to collude with outside people against my own self-accepting "inside-eyes."

What comes of all this is that I am no longer dealing so much with the historical "realities" that all too often confirmed my "paranoid fantasy" that I was being experienced by those with whom I shared my inmost feelings as either too much, too serious, too convoluted, too incomprehensible or too much bother. Among these special, treasured women I practice being exposed in the very middle of all the "little one's" fears, vulnerabilities and paranoia’s about what others might be thinking or feeling about me or my participation. I practice letting her name the fears and terrors as they emerge in her experience of our interactions (e.g. when she's feeling left out of the "grown-up" talk, when she's afraid that people are thinking she wants "too much" attention). I practice letting the "little one" ask others for "reality checks" when she feels afraid, trusting that they will answer with the truth of what they are experiencing in themselves. And, trusting that they will be answering her from a level of self-awareness and emotional honesty with themselves that is congruent with my own.

I am trusting, too, that even while we are each intending to tell the whole truth, we are all blinded to some parts of ourselves by our fears. So, when as sometimes happens, the "little one" still feels uncertain after the "reality check," her version of what's happening still guides my behavior; no matter what anyone says and even if they all think I'm stubborn, a brat or crazy.

In this new, more trustworthy world of relating with myself fully while relating with others, I get to practice being all of me, feeling the "little one's" terror while at the same time experiencing that I am safe and she is safe both with these people and with me as well. Because these others are willing and often able to acknowledge to her what in them may have triggered her response of fear or uncertainty rather than merely dismissing her terror as "groundless," she is slowly becoming less terrified around them. It feels more and more safe to let her speak directly her "unadulterated" truths of the moment; less that I have to intervene and speak from my old, familiar, more comfortable place of the articulate "grown-up." That "grown-up" has for years spoken very freely and openly about such feelings, most often long after the precipitating moment was passed. Sometimes at edges where the "Mommy" is not yet strong enough to hold the world safe, I still can disappear the "little one" into that old "grown-up" articulate self without realizing I've done that shift. Yet, this happens less often as my special friends and I practice giving and receiving feedback about these less than conscious shiftings in level of interaction that we each do (in our own individual styles) when we are afraid without being aware we are afraid.

Being little, undeveloped, hungry for love, frightened and yearning for closeness has, over the past five years become gradually safe for me when I am alone. I've been learning to stay with these, before now, intolerable feelings without judging myself and without feeling the overwhelming shame and disgrace that always for me attended any hint of such unacceptable needfulness or insufficiency in myself. The growing edge in my evolution seems to be being able to carry that capacity out into the arena that, hidden at the core of me, has always mobilized those feelings most intensely: close relating with others.

When the others around me are willing and committed either to exposing themselves similarly, or at the least to sitting with feeling their own "little self" resonating with mine, I seem now as able to stay in the middle of these feelings as I am when I'm alone with myself. I can let myself feel the "little one's" hungers and terrors intensifying as her closeness with these special friends intensifies her long unacknowledged (by me) yearnings to "belong", to be a part of some healthy "family" and to have more of this magical newness of being all of me with and in the midst of other people.

When I feel safe enough to dive into the middle of her terror of rejection and abandonment, to name it as it's happening, to stay right there in the middle of it feeling that it's okay to feel that terror, to stay embodied, to stay present because it's not here and now that's threatening her - I get to begin to come home to the part of me that's been locked up and denied all my life. My feeling of safety comes both from the trust that I and the "Mommy" will not abandon her no matter what anyone else chooses to do and, as well, from the fact that these treasured people now in my life have proven to be trustworthy and truthful. The issue in her safety is about their being truthful about what they feel even and particularly when they don't like something she's doing or saying. What terrifies her most is when she feels the "pretend" accepting that creates total confusion in her about what's going on. That "pretend" okay always brought later, terrible consequences in her past.

It's because I feel truly safe with these women in my life here and now, because I trust their intentions, that I am finally able to let go into this incredible process of experiencing, reliving the ancient terrors locked in my body unexperienced since so early in my life. The fact that the specialness of these women stirs the "little one's" longings makes it all very present for her and allows for an extraordinary healing to happen now. I am deeply grateful for this empowering opportunity to go so deeply into this place in me.

When the "little one" is so profoundly in her fear and terror, I am not feeling endangered - not by her terror, not by her vulnerability, not by its disclosure as she is right in the middle of vibrating with it, and not by the people we are with. On the contrary, I'm feeling tremendously empowered at being able to experience that much terror, embodied, fully exposed right in the very midst of it. I feel safer and more protected than I've ever felt in my life: I have the "Mommy-inside" right there and the "grown-up" me off to the sidelines; this time the "little one" is not alone with her terror. (She's also not in hostile, dangerous territory.) I am able to reveal the vulnerability precisely because I'm not "alone" with it. There are other aspects of me that are there to help and take care of her if she needs anything more than just to feel the feelings and feel beloved and protected by the "Mommy" and by me. Though my terror and longing are loud and clear, they can be that only because I am feeling able to be there with myself, wanting and needing nothing more from anyone outside of me than that they bear witness in whatever outside way they can as I dive and process and emerge.

Trying to Cope with Others’ Attempts to Be "Helpful"

The most struggle I have these days, in the midst of my terror, fear, longings, needfulness, and yearning to belong comes when others take it upon themselves to start trying to "help" me through my feelings. Even among my cohort of so very conscious women, when the "littlest one" speaks out in the middle of fear, insecurity and vulnerability, some of them respond (albeit lovingly) intending to "fix it" "fix her," "help her understand it's not that way here and now," "make it better," "reassure her it will be okay," "tell her what she needs to pay attention to in order to feel better, help her see where it's coming from, tell her how more safely to navigate through it," or just "tell her it's going to be all right." As if she needs any of that! When that kind of response happens now, the "Mommy" often intervenes with fury. And I, myself, feel exasperated and infuriated at being intruded upon in the middle of my process. Usually the "Mommy" yells at people to stop it. Usually they persist and feel assaulted unduly by the "Mommy." The next step is that the "grown-up" me comes in and tries again to articulate the lay of the land. All of us feel drawn off course and undermined, the processing gets aborted while the explaining takes place. No matter how I keep trying to explain that I need people to stay out of my process, that I am safe even though in the midst of terror, that if I really needed something from outside of myself at this moment I wouldn't be risking the processing at all, - still it remains very difficult for some people to understand.

Clearly, they feel her terror, feel her yearning, feel her confusion and feel it imperative to act to do something about it, despite all my protestations to the contrary; almost as though nothing I can possibly say could counter their conviction that underneath all of it I "really" do want and need "help" from them. Even when I go as far as to stand in three separate places, speaking with three separate voices to get them to see that there's more of me than just the terrified child, they still persist in their conviction. It drives me wild!

The tenacity with which they hold to their reality coupled with my own clarity that I do not want or need assistance or intervention but rather its opposite: witnessing, combine to make it clear that what's being offered as "help" (as if it were for my benefit) has more to do with their own unconscious projections than it has to do with my "need." In fact, the "helping" words and the gestures of physical comfort feel invasive, suppressive, undermining, disorienting and even threatening.

When anyone attempts to mother or "therapize" me while I'm in that child place of being in/with my terror, she keeps herself in her "grown-up" rather than in her own child space feeling the resonance of my child-terror. Her acting to "help" me feels like an invasive attempt to move me out of a place that feels threatening to her. It suppresses rather than promotes my processing. It feels undermining and insulting in so far as it clearly implies she doesn't at all recognize the extraordinary power in me that is allowing me to collapse (at last) into feeling helpless. It is threatening and disorienting to me when I'm at the very edge of my own capacity to hold to my "inside-eyes" view of my self as engaged in an act of self-empowerment while she enacts an "outside- eyes" view of me as incapacitated and in need of outside intervention. And, as I stand precariously in this new place of both feeling the terror for the first time and also exposing it at the very same moment, it totally disorients me.

At this point in my unfolding I am, as yet, unable to hold the space safely open for me to continue in the face of persistent attempts to mother or "therapize" me. Both sets of behaviors are attempts to bring "understanding" "words" and "thought" into this place in which my greatest need is to surrender into the emotional storm without using my mind and too-ready words to contain, shape and control the chaos. Still, each time there is strong pressure from the outside in this direction, that old familiar part of me gets mobilized and I drop out of my process into explaining.

I begin, as I do the work of writing this, to understand the intensity of the rage I feel at those times. When I respond to their pressure by coming out of where I am in order to deal with their manifestations of their own unconscious fear, I am re-experiencing what I suspect happened to me as an infant (and child) with my own biological mother. I am repeating the process of disconnecting from my primary terror in order to protect my mother (or her contemporary stand-in) from the overwhelming terror my terror stirs in her. Again I wind up being "mommy" to the one who acts as if she mothering me. This time around though, I seem at least to be experiencing the rage at that rip-off that I was surely not able to feel the first time around. What I also see in this shifting is that while my own "little one's" terror doesn't terrify me, the terror unacknowledged in those who would attend me does indeed terrify me enough for me to drop out on myself. And, against all my own intentions not to fall into knee-jerk caretaking, there I am doing it again (just as they are) and doing it out of some unacknowledged terror in myself, (just as they are).

I understand, as I write this, that the next step in this processing of my "little one's" terror involves me learning finally how to stay in the middle of my own process even as I become aware of another's great distress, fear or discomfort with it. Until I'm able to do that, I will continue to rob myself of my own pain in much the same way as her "helping" would rob me of it. Until I stop responding to the "help" by being drawn off into the explaining that tries to "fix" her so she won't "fix" me, I continue the life-long process of robbing myself of the empowering experience of sitting with my terror or any of the other painful feelings I have even when that upsets other people. For this next step the "Mommy" needs to be even stronger than she is. (And we're working on it even as we write this.)

In the deepest heart of me I clearly recognize the compelling need to step in, to "be there" to comfort, to try to make it safe or make it better for someone in an extreme state. It's an impulse I've lived with and acted from over and over again through my life. In me, it's seemed to come from the fantasy that that would be what I'd want were I to be feeling as little and helpless as the other appears to be feeling. (A kind of magical thinking that if I'm there to make it okay for you when you're so helpless there will someday be someone there "bigger" than me to help me if and when I might feel so helpless.) My journeying into my own depths has convinced me that that kind of "help" is, at least for me, more crippling than truly helpful. It has also convinced me that the best help I can receive is the willingness of others to be consciously with their own fear and helplessness while I am with mine.

Some part of me continues to yearn (and perhaps is only just beginning to be fully in touch with the depth of the yearning) for someone outside to be "bigger" and more capable than I am. At the same time, it has become ever clearer to me that if that wasn't so when you actually were a child, it is never possible for anyone outside to cross the time-warp to the wounded child inside the grown-up. All anyone outside can do is done by acknowledging and supporting the developing "Mommy-inside" through whom their love can pass to that child. Nothing can be given directly to that wounded child but the illusion that something is being given her. That illusion coupled with the fact that nothing gets through leaves her feeling unsatisfied and not understanding why she feels "so insatiable." It also draws her off the process of birthing a healing "Mommy-inside."

When others act in ways that try to "fix" or "help" someone get through their pain, the "helpee" doesn't get to experience the empowerment that comes with travelling into, through the depths of and out the other side of the pain. Instead of finding her own safety within herself, she gets to feel dependent on the outside one who provides the illusion of safety. And, she gets to remain blind to her own wholeness because someone has robbed her of the pain, the pain whose energy is the fuel for transformation. Being heard, felt with and allowed to stay where you are until you're done being there is the truest support one could have and also the hardest support to come by from real people. The streams, rocks, trees and boulders, the earth itself have heard and helped me in that way.

The Gifts of this Journey

In the struggle to share my process and to be heard, (the projections of those who are listening to me not-withstanding), I have grown incredibly strong, fierce and self-protective. I am becoming more and more able to stand in the midst of the primordial terror connected for me with feeling powerless, frightened or emotionally hungry and little in the presence of people who see themselves as beyond all that. I am becoming more able to stand nakedly in that place, recognizing my stance as an act of the greatest power, no matter how they may view it. My willingness to be there, feeling the power of surrendering into the helplessness becomes an act of transformation: the fierceness with which I defend my right to stay there until I'm through to the other side really forces others to reexamine their own view rather than allowing them to dismiss mine.

I will not be pressured into giving up my terror until it releases me. I will not go any faster than the slowest, most frightened part of me feels safe to go. I can live in the middle of the paradox of knowing there is nothing in the situation to fear while staying with and experiencing the old terror that rises in my child-consciousness. And slowly, as I persist, others around me begin to do the same for themselves. I will not do anything that violates or overrides my feelings or my body and I will honor the power of that stance by naming it every time I take it. And, slowly, as I persist, others begin to respect their own bodies and feelings enough not to be coerced by the cultural ambiance into overriding their own inner messages of truth. And, the more of us who openly declare ourselves in this process of reclaiming the dark, the child and the feminine - the more the craziness of the world as it is will be seen as just that.

I will no longer be shamed into believing that having feelings and being connected with the longings and limits of my body makes me not powerful, not evolved, not worthwhile, not worthy of respect.