I’ve been meaning to write for almost two weeks, but I’ve been stymied by yet more technical difficulties. After a liquid accident, several crucial keys on my laptop stopped working. I had to get the keyboard completely replaced. Fortunately this cost me a lot less than expected…praise be to resale outlet stores.
**
So last time, I left off with a personal-development cliffhanger: did she do Lisa Brown‘s visualization exercises regarding her mother? What happened???
Lisa’s exercise was this: first, to recall a time I felt loved and/or appreciated by my mother, and to fully experience all the attendant feelings; second, to recall a time I felt love and/or appreciation toward my mother, and to experience whatever feelings arose around that. My difficulties performing this exercise so far had had to do with that squirmy feeling I get that my mother is trying to smother me.
But I gave it one more try.
I performed the first before going to sleep one night. What I remembered was being rocked in the rocking chair by our fireplace as a child while my mother sang the lullaby Bye Baby Bunting. This made me cry (feeling a sense of loss) until I fell asleep; it was a release at the time, but I awoke with a familiar heavy sadness, and that recurrent physical sensation of having a raw, yawning, ragged hole torn open in my chest.
The second visualization involved playing hooky from Sunday School with my mother at the coffeehouse across the street from our church, while I was still “questioning the faith.” I felt very close to her then. This visualization had a similar effect, making me cry, opening up that sore place.
For an entire week after that, I was awash in feelings of unworthiness and abject unlovability. Which sucked.
**
How exactly do you think my mother rejected me? I queried Lisa via email, after managing to write up and report my results. (She has steadfastly maintained that this is at the root of my difficulties.)
It took a few days for her to reply. “The rejection is the kind where the other person refuses to let you be visible,” she wrote, “to acknowledge who you are and what you want, including space. It’s not the kind where they don’t want you around.”
Your mother is in your circle, and the only way to feel better about her is to assert yourself with her. I assume she punishes you when you do this in some way.
In addition to asserting yourself with your Mom, being successfully self-assertive with all relationships will help. It’s about being you and feeling cherished by others — friends, lover, family. It’s about honesty. As you work on this with everyone, the feelings from the past will heal. Getting acceptance in the present is very important.
Her distinction made a lot of sense. I hadn’t identified that behavior as rejection before. But I was again reminded of Elsa Becker in Frank Schaeffer’s novels, condemning her young son for nearly every natural thought or desire he had. I thought of my mother’s omnipresent frown, her own “anxious hovering readiness to take offense and disapprove,” and the constrictive overall atmosphere at home that made me vow at nineteen never to live under my parents’ roof again. And that’s to say nothing of the smothering.
I could see how the refusal to allow someone to be seen, and appreciated for who they are rather than who you want them to be, was a subtler but no less painful form of rejection. What would it have been like, I wondered, to have been “cherished” in all my profane and curious disorder?
**
I had described for Lisa some of the methods I’d used to try to heal my persistent and at times overwhelming heart-pain on my own — Eckhart Tolle’s meditation on the “pain-body,” for one, as well as various and sundry other solutions offered by the self-help movement — all of which encouraged a kind of emotional self-sufficiency.
Lisa’s answer was about to astonish me.
You’ve done much to heal the rejection pain that you have experienced in your life, and actually are further ahead than you think (and most people with this challenge).
The missing piece is that you need one person in this world that you love and trust completely…preferably a romantic partner. When you feel survival fear, you need to make money to assuage it. When you feel performance anxiety, you need to perform well to feel better. When you feel unlovable, you need to give and receive love in a healthy relationship. The work you are doing will help you attract it, but that’s the main work that needs to be done now for you to heal your fear.
I don’t agree with Tolle. I believe much of the sadness you feel (and love pain) is a longing for love and understanding. This cannot be healed by sitting in a dark room feeling sad. Tolle’s method is how you heal trauma from the past, not a void in the present. The pain is asking you to get out there and make a connection and get the love you need in your life. That’s it. That’s why being with (Sam) took the pain away. The pain is from having an unmet need in your soul.
For some reason her words brought me overwhelming relief. I read on. “If you are waiting to feel 100% lovable before having a loving relationship, you will be waiting a long time.”
I was floored. I read that line again. If you are waiting to feel 100% lovable before having a loving relationship, you will be waiting a long time.
I couldn’t remember ever hearing anyone in the pop psychology, personal development, or spirituality arena uttering such a heresy. What was practically the wallpaper for any discussion about love or relationships was the assumption that you had to be in love with yourself first. No one could love you until you were whole, healed, and happy — all by yourself.
What Lisa seemed to be saying to me was that some wounds could only be completely healed within a loving relationship. I had done virtually all I could on my own. No wonder I felt relieved.
The confidence you seek comes from ‘winning’ – having a loving relationship in reality. As you improve your relationships, you will feel less justified in blaming yourself for everything. A key, of course, is selecting more evolved individuals in the first place. (Sam), for example, was not able to hear the slightest request. He became very afraid and bailed…not good. So he was actually not evolved enough for you. You need someone with more self-esteem.
As you improve your relationships, you will feel less justified in blaming yourself for everything. An inner constriction seemed to loosen as I read. That terrible ache in my chest ebbed. Lisa wasn’t blaming me. Maybe it wasn’t all my fault, after all. Maybe Sam’s own feelings of unworthiness did get in the way. Maybe I didn’t “make” him abandon me.
**
As my loyal German reader pointed out in one comments thread (citing Alice Miller), it’s a pervasive taboo among those of us who grew up in middle-class, educated, ostensibly “Christian” homes — where we were never starved, locked in closets, or beaten (other than the occasional spanking or paddling) — to say that we had something other than entirely loving and supportive homes. It’s seen as outrageously “ungrateful,” and we are “spoiled,” horrible children unduly influenced by the permissive indulgences of modern psychology to make such criticisms. (One need only read some of the comments Amazon.com customers have left about Frank Schaeffer and his books to see what I mean.) Honor thy father and mother means, in practice, that we are bound to absolve them of every shortcoming, and accept that whatever we may have suffered at their hands as children we surely deserved. If they in any way rejected us, then, it is our fault.
“But they did the best they could…” surely most parents do. But to admit that their “best” still damaged our forming psyches, and to accurately identify the damage, is to allow healing to begin for ourselves. You can’t forgive if you remain in denial, or collude with denial.
Since the day I read that email from Lisa, I haven’t experienced that nearly intolerable, gaping “chest wound,” that deep and intractable pain, even in situations where it might otherwise have been triggered. She appears to have been absolutely correct: I have blamed myself for everything — no doubt including, on whatever unconscious level, my earliest experiences of rejection by my mother (and family). I do know I’ve practically spent a lifetime apologizing for my mere existence. Sorry I’m so inadequate, I’ll do my best to make you like me. Every rejection, every criticism has been borderline traumatic. No wonder I’ve never tried to write much of substance for public consumption! This may also be why even the “passive rejection” of which I spoke last time has been so painful.
**
The proof of the effectiveness of accepting Lisa’s diagnosis was in the testing. And in the following weeks, I got tested.
First, a longtime, middle-aged caller, kind of an oddball, who had been doting on me at work for months, began to give me the cold shoulder after I drew a boundary and asserted myself (he had tried to invite himself along on a coffee date with a mutual friend). This upset me far less than I would have expected, and I decided to leave him be. I realized, on more than just an intellectual level, that I didn’t need his approval or his affection in order to be okay…and that, furthermore, I wasn’t going to run after him if he was going to act like a pissy fifth-grader. I had a feeling he would eventually miss me, anyway, and come around.
After that, a new trainee, an artist, a rather short and nondescript fellow in his thirties who had been exceedingly friendly to me at first (which was more than enough to make me notice him — I’ve lately had an almost unfair bias toward “regular” guys), began to outright ignore me. He instead turned his attentions toward a young woman who reminds me of me in my twenties (dressing up and wearing makeup rather badly — in her case, emulating that Amy Winehouse eyeline-like-an-Egyptian fad — when she knows the guy she likes will be around). After his inexplicable failure to acknowledge me, I saw them huddled together, talking and laughing flirtatiously. I felt a mild shock of unexpected letdown, but it was nothing like the overwhelming flush of shame, that feeling of needing to hide myself, that would typically have accompanied such an event. I was pleasantly surprised.
Another person of interest, a compact ex-marine who physically reminded me of Sam, and whose affectionate squeezes I had welcomed, started avoiding me once our religious and political differences came to light. That would have put me off, anyway — but having him reject me first would usually have stung far more than it did.
In all of these instances, the difference was that I felt, on a visceral level (not just rationally recognized), that if this person doesn’t like me, it doesn’t mean that I’m inherently flawed, and that nobody will. A particular man’s reaction to me wasn’t necessarily my fault — and what’s more, it didn’t mean that there was “none for me.” It didn’t mean that there wasn’t enough love to go around, that the Winehouse-girl’s “win” meant my “fail.” What emotional investment had I really made in any of these gentlemen anyhow?
If my brief happiness with Sam taught me anything, it’s that you only need that affirming response from one key person — as Lisa pointed out.
**
No, I don’t need everybody to love me. I don’t even need the ones who thought they liked me to continue liking me, if they decide not to. Lately I have followed up on some hints men already marginally in my life have made about wanting to go out, only to find them lukewarm or passive about it. One gave me his number to call. Another responded feebly and inconclusively to my follow-up email after telling me in person “We should go get some food sometime!”
If I know one thing for sure, it’s that I am no longer going to play the hot pursuer. I’m officially abandoning my old, ineffective habits. I did ask Sam out first…but his feelings toward me had become quite clear by then. He needed me to say something; given his position, he wouldn’t have made that first move. After that, he pretty much took the wheel. Our courtship flowed with an ease previously unknown to me.
**
As I mentioned, I vowed at nineteen that I would never live under my parents’ roof again, never depend on them again, never ask them for further support. There was a profound loneliness attending that drastic choice, and I squared my shoulders under an imaginary yoke, imagining a life of scarcity and hardship (which seems so far to have adhered to my expectations). I felt exceedingly alone in the world, knowing that henceforth I would be the only person I would have to rely upon. At the same time, I knew that I was choosing being myself over belonging. If the choice was to be who I was, alone, or be loved as someone I was not, within my family, I would choose to be who I was.
Now it dawned upon me that this assumption had unconsciously carried over into adulthood, and into every arena of my life. What’s more, I had a chip on my shoulder about it. All those times I had claimed “Men don’t want women who are X,” I had thought that that “X” (e.g. sexually aggressive) was “just how I am,” and I wasn’t about to change my modus operandi — a concession which seemed to me dishonest — for anyone. What I didn’t understand was that it wasn’t about who I was; the problem was that I was operating without an understanding of how boundaries in human relationships really work. I was forgetting empathy. I was forgetting how much I dislike being over-pursued myself!
Once my lone-wolf stance began to soften, my ossified pride began to crumble as well. When you’re a rock, you don’t have needs. You can feel like a superhero, giving your love to weaker humans, asking for nothing in return. I had always scorned that media stereotype of the aging woman growing increasingly desperate for a husband, pathetic in her object-less longing.
But that was before I tasted genuine reciprocity. And before I touched the apparent root of my wound. Affirmed by my experience with Sam, given permission by Lisa, I started to let myself feel the naked yearning for love I had felt in childhood, before I had suppressed it out of shame, or despair, or both.
I started to let myself really feel my loneliness, as well as my envy when confronted with a young couple choosing a spaghetti sauce at the grocery store. It was more than just envy, it was a sense of being left out, of being “outcast from life’s feast,” as James Joyce put it — a feeling as familiar as not being chosen by either kickball team. I let myself experience it now, unmediated, rather than anchored to the context of a particular situation, of wanting and missing a certain fixated-upon person.
**
While engaged in all of this inner upheaval, I happened to watch Sean Penn’s film adaptation of the book Into the Wild, which proved uncannily apropos.
Christopher McCandless, the film’s protagonist, models himself upon the lone-wolf archetype depicted by writers like Jack London and Henry David Thoreau — sacrificing what he sees as a compromised belonging for fierce, purist self-sufficiency. Minimizing the importance of human connection, he could be quoting a yogi or a born-again Christian when he preaches to a much older (and probably wiser) man, “You’re wrong if you think that the joy of life comes principally from the joy of human relationships. God’s place is all around us — it’s in everything and in anything we can experience.”
One thing that intrigued me, however, was his observation, made to a RV-driving hippie, that “Some people feel like they don’t deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past.” On the surface of things, McCandless is referring to the hippie’s girlfriend wandering alone on the beach, but he speaks with such authority that one can’t help but wonder if he’s talking about himself. What does he do but “walk away quietly into empty spaces” (where he will eventually die)? Earlier scenes suggest that he isn’t exactly visible to his parents, whose values (and fights) trouble him deeply. Perhaps his ferocious independence, like mine, germinated from a sour-grapes rejection of belonging.
His last scrawl (before starving to death on an abandoned bus in the middle of nowhere) is made between paragraphs in one of his beloved books (ironically, Family Happiness by Leo Tolstoy): “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.”
McCandless seems to recognize, at last, that he has missed the point…but by then it’s too late.
**
I can say it now: I want to love and be loved. I want to have the kind of amazing emotional and sexual connection I experienced with Sam, but I want that bond, and the two of us, to be strong enough to weather challenges. I want us to create the kind of safe space where we can both be free to have all of our feelings, desires, and needs…to get angry, to get scared, to work through our difficulties, and be the best occasion for one another’s growth and evolution. But most of all, I want — I need — that relationship to be the setting for the experience of love I never had. Not another replay of an old script, with a new person playing my mother or father, acting out the same impossible scenarios of the past where I somehow wind up invisible, frustrated, voiceless.
Lisa predicted that success in other areas would come if I found success in this one. And honestly, I do feel as if I’ve been trying to swim with cement blocks on my feet. I’ve done the best I could, but it’s hard to contribute much to the world when you’re starving inside and won’t admit it.
**
Our old friend Rick returns to the call center, eyes characteristically bloodshot and evasive. I walk right up to him and tell him that there are no hard feelings, that I know where he went (i.e. jail, which visibly embarrasses him), and that after he left, something really great happened to me. This last tidbit makes him focus for all of ten seconds. “Oh yeah?” he says, finally looking me in the eye, intrigued.
“Yeah.” I say, smiling. I realize that I am over Rick. He seems decades younger than Sam now. Then again, he did warn me that he was essentially a fifteen-year-old boy.
**
At a rally downtown for health care and financial reform, my attention is arrested by a young man recording the proceedings with a digital camcorder. He looks a lot like my beloved Damien, gaaargeous in a certain bearded Irish way with his tweed cap and plaid scarf, and I have a hard time not staring. I may have become more egalitarian in my tastes, but his beauty mesmerizes me. He notices me noticing him, and I look away. More than once. I wish that there were some uncontrived way to meet him. After the rally, while I am standing with a circle of activist friends, he works his way over until he is chatting with someone standing beside us. He is practically at my elbow.
When his companion walks away, I turn to him and smile. “So what were you filming?”
He has beautiful green eyes and a high-tenor voice, and is probably no older than twenty-five. We chat amicably for a minute or two, until we are interrupted by some Jobs With Justice cohorts requiring his attention. He gives me an apologetic nod and a smile, and I nod and smile back. I turn back to my circle, marveling at how easy that was. And then I see Eli.
**
“Eli!” That history grad student I called “beautiful and whip-smart,” who disappeared from work at almost exactly the same time Rick did, clearing the way for Sam. Impulsively I hug him, without even thinking about it. I discover as we talk that I no longer feel intimidated by his looks or his intelligence, nor am I worrying about saying something stupid. He’s still writing his doctoral thesis, volunteering for MoveOn, and working for his father’s construction company. He tells me that he made a point of asking an activist co-worker at the call center to say hello to me. (I did get that message. Eli was so far from my mind at the time, however, that I actually had to think for a minute!) Apparently Eli has never forgotten me.
Now he enters my number directly into his phone — supposedly in order to let me know about another demonstration — and calls me that same evening with the details. He adds that we need to have drinks or coffee and “catch up.” I say we do indeed.
So that’s happening Sunday.
**
Is Eli “the one?” I doubt it. But we’ll see, won’t we? I can’t believe how much simpler everything seems since I owned up to what I never got, figured out what I need now, and threw the doors wide open. It’s almost as if I just got visible.
Recent Comments