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Posts tagged ‘Self-love’

Jan 29

Is it Well with Your Soul?

My younger brother called over the weekend. We always reminisce about what was once normal. So, today I’m in a reflective place.

I grew up in a very formal German family. That was the culture of my father’s family. I called my grandparents Grandma and Grandpa, and my aunts and uncles were “Aunt or Uncle so-and-so.” It was a matter of respect for our elders. We deferred to their seniority and never used their first name. That was a no-no! So, my brother and I wondered what has happened!

I’m wondering why the boundaries are slipping away in families, and why there is a lack of respect?

This got me thinking about how, despite the fact that more people know about boundary issues, the boundaries in family life have become more disturbed or relaxed. I’m taken back to the fact that many people no longer understand how to form healthy relationships.

We now have options. We can distance ourselves from family members, and we can claim that we’re too busy to connect. We can block those we can’t bother to connect with or completely remove them out of our lives. We no longer need to work out issues.

Now, pulling away from family isn’t new: the way, and the reasons we do it, may be far more creative now. In my family history, my own great-uncle on my father’s side pulled away. I never got to know him. We lost out.

The question becomes one of making the right call, and when ties should be severed.

Now I mention my mother. My mother’s upbringing honored her English and Welsh heritage. She wanted peace in the home.

I grew up in a family where my brother and my brother-in-law butted heads, and their arguments became very unpleasant for the rest of us. One was ultra-conservative and didn’t read both sides of the issue. The other got angry too fast. To be honest, our move to Europe solved the issue for us as a couple. Other family members withdrew from family activities.  

In sorting all of this out, I’m realizing that my upbringing failed to teach me how to deal with volatile family situations. My mother was a peacemaker. She wasn’t dysfunctional about it. She and my father were more on the neutral end of things. The problem is that when I look back, I’m not sure that our home was as peaceful as it looked from the outside. I’ve learned a few things about peace in the past few years. I attribute this learning to my own grief process, and the outcome of doing deep soul work.

The most important thing I’ve learned is that peace starts within each of us. Once we have made peace inside, we can slowly move into our homes, neighborhoods, and the wider community to build structures of peace. From that point it can radiate out further like a ripple on the water.

What does it take to first go inside, and then move outside of ourselves? I believe that if we can’t be completely honest with ourselves, we can’t be honest in other areas of our lives. We must first commit to the inner war of the soul. Some people call this shadow work. For others it is holy work. Whatever your own term for this is, it is brutal work that must be met with brutal honesty. It takes more than asking for peace, wanting peace, or hoping for peace. Peace within asks us to confront ourselves on multiple levels. How are we doing on respecting others, understanding racism, and understanding what it means to be a world citizen? How do we see poverty or domestic violence? How do we view the world we live in? A friend of mine has asked me: “Is it well with your soul?” As I reflect on this question, I believe the answer has to be that my soul is a journey in progress.

There are areas where I catch myself in thought and make notes to work on it. It starts inside.

I’m learning that peace is a complex issue. I’m understanding that my mother might have made more peace inside, but she wasn’t able to fully create this peace outside of herself. And so, undesired conversations happened in our home. The results from these conversations were understood to be destructive, and my mother could not quell the word wars at family gatherings because shutting down feelings and emotions is a form of disrespect to others. Could she have laid down the law? Yes. Would that have served peaceful purposes? Maybe. But not for my brother and brother-in-law. I don’t remember the conversations anymore. I do remember the tense, ugly feelings and emotions that played out in the room. Maybe that’s what makes world peace so hard.

Aug 12

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Soldiers of the Mind, Part 2: Honorable Discharge

Continued from Soldiers of the Mind, Part 1: Walking the Battlements.

As I write this days after my therapy session, and having sat with my thoughts, I still don’t know how I will discharge this soldier that defended me from something that wasn’t mine to defend. Decades of living, and I realize now I held on to an order of defense that wasn’t mine at all but had gotten routed to me by others who failed to soldier properly.  

Why hadn’t logic and reason won out in this situation? In moments of reflection, I felt relief. I hadn’t seen things in the proper perspective. I kept thinking at lightning speed that I knew better! No, I didn’t. Not really. 

How Our Soldiers Trick Us

The lie I was telling myself was that I needed to protect the people who should have been protecting me, and who failed to listen to the child and young adult in a vulnerable position. My own inner warrior was hurt, angry, and tired of carrying something that wasn’t mine to carry. This heavy backpack had been placed on me at a young age by people who turned their heads instead of seeing the wounded.

Here I was, in a war of the mind because I had not been able to let go and say that it wasn’t my responsibility to defend. As I write this, I’m angry. I’m angry at people who should have cared enough to stop the circle of violence that raged in my life. I’ve not had one broken bone due to abuse—the brokenness was in my head. The warrior screams out patriarchy! Now there is new understanding surrounding some of the choices I’ve been guided into making over the past decade.

Our soldiers believe what they are programmed to believe. It starts when we’re young, and it creeps in slowly. By the time we’re adults, our thoughts and behaviors have become ego-syntonic. All seems normal. We don’t question what is present, and we defend our inner normalcy. The disruption comes when the cracks begin to form, and what we once believed as syntonic, or in harmony, with ourselves becomes ego-dystonic.

A good way of thinking about this is to think of how you first thought of your home as normal, and then you went to friends’ homes where there wasn’t chaos, or a parent or sibling wasn’t abusing someone. There was a different feeling in the home. Things were done differently.

Inside your head, that soldier is having to sort it all out. Wait a minute! Slowly, how we once viewed our world is altered. In healthy adolescent development, we begin to challenge and to rethink it all. We rebel to grow and to find our own personal normal. It is when we fail to question our own status quo that trouble begins to brew, and our soldiers light torches to signal threat when there may be no threat at all.

Soldiers must be called off because they are trained to act according to procedure. Most soldiers don’t question the orders because questioning can get you into a court-martial situation. Teaching our soldiers to question in intentional ways and to break cycles in our minds is needful.

A year ago, my head began to spin after a close encounter with death. It took about five months for everything to unravel and for me to really understand that my soul was not at peace. It was a thought that began to nag at me and to challenge the ego in new ways. Syntonic became dystonic, and I knew I had more shadow work to do. For that, the soldier had to leave my head and be told thank you and goodbye. The defender of my mind needed to be honorably discharged from service. It was time to stop a raging internal war and to survey the carnage. This run of the river would be much different than other stretches I’d run.

Running the River

It would take months of research to find the new therapist, and that would be helped along by an incredible spiritual director who would support what I was about to do.

In The Way of Discernment, Elizabeth Liebert lays out the framework I used to enter into the process of discovering who to see for this healing process. I found a gifted healer.

As an enneagram type eight, I understood that I’d need to let myself navigate the entire circle to bring to the forefront everything I’d need to prepare for the crash that was about to arrive. I’d let myself prepare and plan for the journey by spending time thinking about what might happen and planning for the unforeseen that would arrive. I’d observe myself closely and track it all, and I’d not stop the emotions from surfacing. I’d also ask for some helpful companionship. I’d do all of this prep before the first session, and so when the first day of talking came around, I was ready to have the soldiers of the mind face confrontation.

With many soldiers ready to be discharged, the last one stood, steadfast in her knowing that she alone was right. She wasn’t right at all. This warrior woman was not going to leave the castle battlement without a good reason to do so, and I was being handed reasoning that made sense. It wasn’t I who needed to protect anyone! The fault lay elsewhere.

Ritual and Healing

For me, rituals that I construct have always played a role in freeing me to go to new places.

In the fall, winter, and spring, my home is filled with the scent of burning candles. I breathe in the scent of a room and move to peaceful thoughts and days where the light and darkness move me to a quieter place. As the spring returns light and new growth to the earth, I hope for new things.

This past spring was a time of preparation for the castle battlements to be cleared.

My first therapist had created a story for me. It featured a lost girl who sat on the edge of a forest, and she knew that she had to go into that place, and she was scared. She went in with a guide, and in a meadow beyond the scary she discovered a butterfly with a gift: a lavender pearl.

That pearl has traveled with me for decades. I’ve crossed through many hard places, and the butterfly and pearl have been with me.

Building our own rituals of healing is a multi-level thing. It requires finding our spiritual, emotional, and mental epicenters.

I do know that my goodbye ritual began with a prayer of healing, hope, and understanding that I was not walking into this particular forest without two friends by my side.

I admit to not knowing how I’ll send this last warrior away, but she is on notice. It has been a week, and as I make my way to the battlement to hand this warrior woman her honorable discharge orders, I’m uncertain of what the goodbye ritual will look like.

Maybe a candle will be lit, a chocolate offered, a sunflower presented as a means of closure on this chapter of my life. Maybe a new dress? I know it will be meaningful to me, and to what the future can bring. I’m beginning to cry just thinking about it, and that’s a sign I’m on the right path.

Aug 5

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Soldiers of the Mind, Part 1: Walking the Battlements

“Gail, this is not your shame. This is your x and y and q’s shame.”

I sat in my chair, stunned, completely speechless, and relieved. I was also feeling so many other things in that moment. At the end of the session, my therapist looked at me and said that I looked exhausted. I was, and it is taking time to sort out what happened to me in that hour.

Decades of sadness, anger, and a feeling of needing to protect something washed over me. Logically, I understood I’d been protecting something. But what? I loved those people, and yet I didn’t love what had happened. I’d ripped the duct tape off the final wound and insult in my life, and there was nothing to say at first.

First, I needed to think about what had just happened in order to open up the way for the words to come.

What I was feeling in that first moment with my therapist was the shame of a burden that had been placed on me by others. Vulnerable, and with my heart wide open, I sank. And then I asked a question only I could answer: How do I resolve this? How do I jettison decades of damaging thinking? 

My usual process after such a session of deep shadow work is to let the heavy stuff sit in its juices, and then return to it hours or days later.

This time, things are slightly more intense. I’m sitting with the verbal release of the burden and am now asking myself how to let go of things spiritually and emotionally. It is going to take time to figure out what I need to do to let go completely. This is new for me because other issues have healed naturally.  

The difference between knowing what to say and feeling what has to be said is vastly different.

Feeling what needs to be said is about more than empathy; it is a different type of knowing. It is a real understanding of what is at the bottom of the dark well shaft where the light doesn’t reach. It’s dark and cold, and it doesn’t smell so good down there. At times people live in the well shaft, and people need to know how to find an exit.

Most of the time the help we need to exit the well comes from within ourselves. Healers can guide with questions so that we can find our way out of what might be equated to crossing the river Styx.

Richard Rohr, in Falling Upwards, speaks of the need to discharge our loyal soldier. This concept stems from Japan and the end of WWII. Soldiers had returned to communities where their warriors were no longer needed, and yet the communities still needed the men. How could they become useful in new ways? The soldiers needed to be released to make way for the new.

Many times, our old defenses are like soldiers walking the battlements of our castles. They are alert to our needs long before we realize we need to defend ourselves. They send the signal by lighting the torch. Slowly, as the message gets passed from one waypoint to another in our psyche, the soldiers that are needed are called to the front to defend us from our own monsters and goblins.

This journey is rarely pleasant, as most soul work isn’t easy. Acceptance is the process of facing what our psyche would have us deny. Our soldiers stand strong in defending our status quo. Our status quo is all about having us stay in our comfy clothes when we need to put on the clothes of work so that we can leave the safety of sheltered environments and look at the hard things of life.

Next week, in Part 2, I will share how it was to leave that safety of my sheltered environment to look at some very hard things.