Category Archives: Growing, Personally

A Belfast filmmaker recently described the experience of growing up next door to a police station. Awakened frequently, the family regularly evacuated and returned to blown out windows. Did he realise that 25 years later that he referred to the building next door as “the playstation”?

My work centres on helping folks get “unstuck”. I support their journey through career change and business start-up.

The method is rooted in their stories. They learn they are not “Sean the accountant” or “Susan the mother of 4”; I begin to know them while they begin to understand themselves. They describe where they came from, I reflect their story back. They start moving in a new direction. Not one I choose for them, but one illuminated by the light of their own story telling process.

Simply put it is the way in which we share the full measure of our experiences.

Stories are delivered not entirely in the words. Therein lies the magic. An adolescents’ yarns spun about where they were and what they did reveals the most important truths often in what was left unsaid.

The onus is on the listener to take what you like and leave the rest. The carefully chosen words unconsciously deliver the message in the moment, and a fuller one later when compared to other tellings.

Sometimes hard truths are so painful that while we initially take in the whole story, we describe only part of it to ourselves and others; it is how we are able to live with the pain. Later, over many years in the retelling, we process the experience in safer times and places. Ultimately, we come to terms with the whole truth, by observing the edits and enhancements across time.

When we devalue storytelling we lose a way to communicate, even to ourselves. How many of us have told the story of a difficult experience so many times, that in each retelling we let go of a piece of the shock, pain or horror and come to terms with it. We plant the episode in the past, we grow and learn new ways to cope. In retelling or reframing an experience, we are applying new coping skills to the remembered event.

That Belfast filmmaker now tells stories for a living; more importantly he has come to understand the grievous long term impact of having believed a life of midnight evacuations and  shattered windows was  “normal”. He now knows it was not. It was trauma.

His message:

Fear is the Enemy of Creativity; Fear is the Thief of Dreams

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Bridget is the Celtic goddess of abundance traditionally honoured on February 1st. A floodgate is the metaphor I’d used for years when I described my fear of being paralysed if I unearthed a long buried childhood trauma. Rage, even the expression of mild anger, was forbidden in the household and schools I was reared in. Portray life as it “should” appear: Don’t emote.

Still I’ve learned to trust that life is to be lived and not controlled. So, I spent 4 days raging that after half a century the floodgates opened. Last week, I fully experienced the memory of a trauma that sent me into a rage. Pretending life was “normal” became impossible. In that rage though, I reclaimed myself from the polite peace I was maintaining to make things comfortable and normal for the folks around me.

Apparently, I’d wasted half a century fearing I would drown in a flood. Perhaps the liquid metaphor was right, but it turns out that I was dying of thirst.

The most important lesson distilled in the “Artist’s Way”, is that to recover an authentic, creative self, one needs to embrace anger; it is a friend. Not a kind or gentle one, but a loyal one.  It is truthful.

The other message is that we recover our authentic selves one day, one step at a time. Our unconscious minds are to be trusted. That memory I’d feared and suppressed did not return until I was able to handle it.  It is for that I am most grateful.

If you are interested in taking steps to reclaim your creative self, decide to. Adopt a discipline of listening to your body and being mindful of your real feelings. You are first and foremost a human being, not a human doing. If you are “doing” polite, if your life is about pleasing others, all work and no play – rethink it. Take a walk, a yoga class, have a massage. Feel yourself.

I am often reminded of a catechism lesson of my childhood: “Who made you? God made me, I was made in the image and likeness of God”. Embrace the divine within you. Even the gods of our ancestors raged. One even sent a flood.

Yesterday was Bridget’s day, I’m particularly grateful that the gods and goddesses described by Christians, Jews and Pagans are consistent in their message. I needed to be reminded that even an abundant flood of anger is empowering. And a blessing.

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Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.  Kahil Gibran

Who chooses pain? “Not me”, I want to shout.

Julia Cameron refers to the morning pages taught in the Artist’s Way as meditation suited to westerners.  They work for us because one doesn’t actually have to be still, you write to access the wisdom of your interior self.  In my box of “recovery tools” this is one I have favored lately.  There are many others.

Which tool works best? “It works if you work it” is the chorus spoken in unison to routinely close most 12 step meetings.  Still I find there are days I resist picking up any tool and “working it”. Take the morning pages – “I am cranky, so I didn’t write them” or is it “I’m cranky because I didn’t write them”?  Am I troubled and unfocused because I haven’t been vigilant, choosing self care, good food, less drink, more rest? Have I been doing too much and not allowed myself to just be?

This month I can answer yes to most of those queries, thus, I guess I must conclude:

So who chooses pain? “Clearly me”.

In my troubled times especially, when focus is difficult and the morning pages have not been enough to quiet me, I pick up a book of daily mediations from one of the 12 step programs. This quote about “the bitter potion “… begins a July meditation in the OA (Overeater’s Anonymous) book, For Today (1982).

If it were not for the pain, I wouldn’t be here (in recovery). Only when the pain of food addictionbecame worse than the pain it was intended to kill did I become willing to abandon the pretense of controlling my life.

Getting in touch with my pain is a new experience. Until the day it brought me to my knees, food was my first line of defense against any and all pain, even that caused by the food itself.

In OA, I have come to understand that I must let myself feel the pain before I can recover.

For today: I no longer choose to avoid my growing pains. My Higher Power, my program, my meetings, my friends – all stand with me as I face, head-on, whatever must be faced.

Have you “chosen pain”?

My guess is that if you are still reading “food” might not be part of that choice, or even alcohol, drugs or gambling – but perhaps workaholism, depression, perfectionism, love addiction (see Pia Mellody’s landmark book, so titled).  Whatever behavior we use, I have used almost all of the above, we choose the behavior to numb the feelings we think would otherwise overwhelm.

What feelings are we numbing? To know you have only to honor the physician within you. And start assembling the tools that will be the help you need in order to be supported on your journey inward.

You are the physician. The sick self is merely the part of you that is keeping you from being the best you can be: the most content, the most available to joy, the most fully present in each day.

And let me close with an apology if this seems trite or canned or easy.  My own struggle began with not even knowing there was a sick self to heal.  I was fine. I was in control. I had it all. The fact that I was irritable, cycling through moods from depressed & paralysed to wildly energetic & creative was not a problem, it was simply “how I am”. It took hitting bottom – multiple times, confronting the demons of addiction in my behavior, perfectionism; in my attitude, pessimistic; in relationships, codependent and controlling; and substance, food;  to bring me to my knees. To the “rooms” for AlAnon meetings almost thirty years ago, OA meetings and a treatment program twenty years ago, CoDA meetings after that, and therapy all along.

Sadly, as I read that instead of the gentle voice I have cultivated in my efforts at self care – I am hearing a bit of a judging tone, “really, you needed thirty years to get this?” So let me gently assure myself – and you -  that this is not a linear process.

Recovery is the journey of a life time. Simply living a conscious life. There have been struggles on the way – daily in the work itself, but the struggle left me not bloodied and scarred but open and vulnerable. This is not an arming for battle, adding a layer of armor to deflect blows. It is a stripping down, a shearing of the thick coat of matted, coarse and wiry fur insulating us from real feelings. And as we work through the grief and the sadness, experience the anger cleanly and throw off resentment we expose soft skin. Only then can we await the touch of kindness and support available when we learn to seek it from the right people in safe places.

And if learning to trust the abundance of good people and safe places takes you less time than my thirty + years, I can confidently assure you that every moment of pain experienced is redeemed with many more moments of exquisite joy.…