How I got Goofy (pretty far back)

As children, when something went wrong, we tended to believe that there was something wrong with us  When I read this sentence, by Louise Hay, during the one daily ritual I allow myself (going through my email and posting on Facebook—where the Heal Your Life page I subscribe to appears and inspires me every time I read it) I knew what I’d write about today.

As children, there is something amiss in our lives (because we are observers of the world around us and perpetual sponges, soaking up things we are too young to process correctly) most of the time.  When I was a kid, television—color television—was the newest thing on the planet, and the new, 24” console Zenith my parents proudly purchased seemed to be on 24/7.  And much of what squawked forth portended of things no kid wanted to hear: threats of war, missiles in Cuba, Nikita Khruschev and the Russians.  Headlines spewed whatever had happened locally that day—a man shooting his wife;  three children suffocating to death in a burning home; 47 killed in the plane that went down over Plainfield—and then it all got re-hashed at the dinner table, when my mother asked my dad, “Did you hear about . . . ?”  So here lay the set-up from outside that instilled the fear in me, but lots of stuff happened under our roof as well.

I must interject at this point that my childhood is split into two parts: before my mother died, when I was ten, and after.  This took place during the former.  My mother had a brother, who scared the crap out of me, for as far back as I can remember.   He was her only sibling, so they were close.  And I think he had connections to some groups of ill-repute.  Violence in his household was as common as sneezing.  He had a game he used to play with his eight year old son, to show everyone how “brave the kid is.”  It went something like this:  He’d have my cousin sit across from him at a table and open handedly hit him across the face.  It would start tenderly—like a loving pat—but then it would get harder and harder, and I’d watch my uncle’s wind up get more intense, while my cousin sat there, stone-faced, without flinching.  I sat there, too stunned to move, wanting to run but also worried my cousin would simply fall over dead at any second.  Ultimately, my mother would tell him to stop--and he would--but even then, I’d wonder how these people could do something so fucked up.

Can you feel my internal fear raging at this point?  I wonder if these episodes might have inspired the recurring dreams of the boogie man in our basement, who’d come out of the closet, look me in the eye, and start to walk in my direction. At that point, everyone else disappeared, and everything went slo-mo.  As I attempted to run up the stairs (the same ones I’d go all the way back down, if my dad helped me), my legs would go numb, and I’d freeze in place, as I watched his hand get closer to my ankle.  Then I’d wake up drenched--heart pounding and ears ringing--and run to my parents room, where I’d climb into their bed and snuggle between them, until my dad’s snoring scared me almost as much as the dream had.

By the time I turned six, the world—both inside and out—had contaminated me.  And what was wrong with the world was wrong with me:  I had become toxically fearful.

Before I Get to My Psychodrama

I really want this blog to allow what I carry around in me to come out . . . in whatever order it chooses.  I feel a need, however, to explain something about the group process, so you’ll have a better idea where I came from in 1996, when I did my production.  I had been in group for probably six months (after witnessing the end of the Six Week Anger Workshop and deciding to sign up for an Inner Child workshop that was supposed to also last six weeks—but morphed into six years) with seven people, each of whom left an indelible impression on my life and helped me find my lost self.  One person’s story seemed more horrendous than the last, as we went around the circle each Thursday, exorcising the demons in our heads. 

I secretly felt ashamed for even coming to this group with my insignificant issues.  After all, I had never been sexually or physically abused; I wasn’t an addict; I had been given many privileges in life, and I had no idea what was even the matter with me, except that I considered myself a loser and couldn’t make my third marriage work. I was also severely co-dependent on someone who seemed to take delight in mentally torturing me.  But I had no idea what co-dependency even was.  I had been working on finding a way to function—in and out of M.D.’s, PhD’s, an L.C.S.W. and priest’s offices for over a year—and things only seemed more hopeless.  Never did I consider turning off the continuous loop tape recorder in my head that told me “You should be grateful for what you have,” or “Why would he love you; you are pitiful,” or “You suck at life; the world would be better off without you.”

The people in my group had legitimate reasons to be fucked up:   One woman had been repeatedly raped and beaten  by her father for eight years of her life; another woman had been raped by her father and his brother for over seven years (until her younger sister excited them more); one man who stuttered helplessly had been shamed and verbally abused by his father (forever); three people struggled daily with drug and alcohol sobriety and talked much about picking up the scattered pieces of lives they had trashed; and the oldest member, a woman in her seventies—who had physically outlived those who had scarred her being—couldn’t seem to let go of a sick desire to replace them.  As our lives unfolded, I knew that a part of me had shared parts of their stories.  I felt a connection, but my mind would not allow me much latitude in thinking I might have found my hope, and it kept me on a guilt trip for wasting their time with my trivialities.

I didn’t have much interest in going to the past and liked it when people talked about struggles in the present; after all, I reasoned, we can’t do much about what happened way back when.  Then, the therapist asked me to do her a favor.  “Eve,” she said, “all of what we think are today’s problems are merely reenactments of issues from our childhood.  I want you to make a conscious decision to trust me and be willing to do the things I ask you to do.”  I decided I could do that (when you contemplate suicide as a way out of your pain and self-hatred, you’ll do just about anything).  She asked me to consider that my husband represented someone from my past.  Within a couple days—I had plenty of time to obsess on this—I could see that he had emotionally abandoned me like my dad had; he literally abandoned me on a regular basis the way my mother had (but unlike she, who died on me, at least I could rescue him after a week- long binge).  Come to think of it, he was also unpleasable, like my father, and preoccupied, as well.  Unfortunately, these realizations did not give me relief.  In fact; they only made me feel more stupid because I hadn’t made the distinction between their actions and my worth or lack thereof.  Those realizations wouldn’t happen for a while.  And I certainly wasn’t at at point where I could put my self-flagellating whip down.

This tiny breakthrough, however, did help solidify my trust in my therapist.  [As I write this, I realize my relationship with her might have been the first healthy trust I had ever experienced].  And, it made me more willing to immerse myself in Group and all the reading she suggested.  As a literature major and someone lucky enough to have found books as escape at a young age, I had already sought answers from self-help gurus, and I knew that my therapist subscribed to the writing of John Bradshaw, another of my guides to wholeness over the years .   After so much time running scared and pretending to be whole, I found a reason to hope.  My philosophy had always been:  Why be optimistic?  You are just setting yourself up for greater disappointment.  What I didn’t consider, even at that stage:  Without hope, you are constantly miserable.  And I was. But, now the armor had a chink. And soon thereafter, the slightest ray of light would peek through.

The Turd Under the Microscope

We either deny or strive to let go of addiction, but the real epidemic isn’t the booze, needle, food, spending or sex; it’s the mask of loneliness, isolation and depression, worn by Fear.

Consider this:  We enter the world as wondrous expressions of life’s miracle.  And, from then on—for about twenty years or eternity—we get scared and act out.  First our spirits get trapped in bodies, and then we have to depend on others for our very survival.  And, considering some of the parent figures I know, I don’t wonder where Stephen King gets his inspiration.  Even in healthy settings, humiliation, guilt, anger, and shame exist, and these are among the most toxic emotions.

So, we teach our kids to do what we think they’re supposed to (in order to hide the fact that we don’t know what we’re doing) and when they inevitably screw up--since we tell them contradictory things in the course of a day-- we inadvertently shame and humiliate them.  And yes, we anger them.  In my family, ladies didn’t get angry, so I learned to repress my anger, lest I seem unladylike. And, as I realized I was screwing up and disappointing my gods (mother and father), I sought to distance myself from the part that embarrassed, shamed or got me in trouble. Can you understand how fragmentation of the Self takes place?  I knew there was more than one of me (and I do not mean that I am schizophrenic) when I raised my hand to  narrate a passage from our reader in first grade.  I skimmed the paragraph first, to make sure I could read all the words and heard my own voice in my head, but when I opened my mouth to start the first sentence, a wholly different voice came out.  Why doesn’t she sound like me, I wondered.  I didn’t like this at all, and I certainly didn’t want someone else’s voice to speak for me.  (Right now, I’m realizing how many voices other than my own I allowed to speak for me over the years).

I had a strong sense of independence at a very young age:  Coming up the basement steps, my dad used to lift me to the landing, with a couple stairs to go.  Did you help me, I’d scream.  If he said, No, I’d move along, but if he said, Yes, I’d go all the way back down and come back up  all by myself!  (Funny:  As I write the words, all by myself, I think of how symbolic they are.  Until I found and reassembled the me I had abandoned at such a young age, I truly was all by myself).  Now I am by (meaning next to and the author of) my Self.  There would have been a time when my Rebel would have read what I just wrote and called it crap.  Who is this word splitter, who must think she is so deep and evolved that she can make meaning from re-arranging words?

I can tell youthat I hear one voice now, whether it’s in my head or coming from my vocal chords.  I still have many voices in my head—Critical Parent, Lost Self, Super Hero, Rebel, Nurturing Parent, Cheerleader—and I give them all voice, when they need to be heard.  But they speak through me, a person who seeks to come from the inside out.  What I want more than anything in life, right now?  To feel free.  I still live in my head much of the time.  Life taught me not to live in my heart.  It broke too easily.  So I taught myself to use my head . . . to figure out the answers to life’s problems, my pain, my sadness, my fear.  Only my head told me to find the answers by looking outward, instead of inward.  It rationalized that love had abandoned me, and I certainly wasn’t worth love.  I had been introduced to life by emotionally crippled parents who didn’t get love, so they had a fairly impossible job of modeling love.  So, I looked for my cure out there, where all the problems started.  It’s still my knee-jerk reaction, when I lose sight of my Utility Belt (which I wear on My waist, that carries My tools for My survival and thrival, the very one I came into life with but lost faith in and awareness of).

In retrospect, I think the worst part about living in a head full of voices wasn’t the crowded conference room; it was the cacophony of simultaneous screeching from parts of a divided self, longing to be integrated.

This realization/integration took place when, in an experiential therapy group I participated in, I was told by the therapist that she wanted me to plan my family or origin psychodrama for the following week.   I had been in group long enough to know what she meant.  In fact, I met her when I attended an Open to the Public, final session of one of her six-week Anger Workshops.  Having no idea what I was about to see and feel, I walked into a space about the size of a large conference room, with seating for approximately twenty-five spectators, who would witness six members of this graduating class enact one woman’s family of origin abuse.  She chose (from members of her group) her mother, father, sister and brother. She played herself.  When asked to give those in attendance some background, she told us her father had been alcoholic, rude and dictatorial and physically abusive to her brother on many occasions, which she, her sister and mother helplessly watched.  Her brother molested her for five years, from the time she was nine, until she turned fourteen and he moved out.  Her mother was a religious fanatic who was addicted to prescription drugs, and her older sister, the Perfect One, got straight A’s, never made a mistake and served as the example for her and her brother to never measure up to.

The woman enacting her story, told each character some lines to recite, which had served as mantras in this sick family, and it was going to be our main character’s job to confront the dysfunction (as her adult self, in a safe setting with the assistance of a trained therapist).  I could feel my emotions stirring while we were still in intellectual mode.  Once the drama commenced, each player became the member of that family, and as the insanity of five minutes reached its crescendo and our star reached her own crisis point, the therapist put a stop to the action, took this courageous woman by the hand and lead her to tell each member of her “family” what she needed to say.  As I mopped the tears from my eyes, I noticed the rest of the audience doing the same.  I, of course, thought I was crying for this poor family and figured the rest were empathizing, too.  The therapist had each member of the family de-role (my name is John, and I am not your brother) and then had each member tell the woman what her work invoked in him and her.  Finally, the therapist asked our star how she felt.  And one more thing, which is how I knew I had found what I needed to begin my own healing process:  Before thanking us for our attendance, the therapist told us that if we found ourselves moved by what had just happened, it was not because of our empathy but because it touched those parts of ourselves. As the Perfect One/Sister Glue, I said, “Where do I sign?”

Author Note:  I have no idea as I embark on this journey, if I will be able to convey the depths of the despair, sadness, co-dependency, idiocy, shame, guilt—FEAR—that ruled my life. I do have lots of the journal entries and anger or forgiveness letters I have written over the years, which I think I’ll be motivated to include as I unravel my life.  But I want you to know that there was a time when I didn’t want to pollute the world with me any longer.  There was a time when I was so self-absorbed that I thought I was beyond hope.  Those days are gone.  There are times when I get overwhelmed, doubt myself, feel paralyzed by the outside and need to get less serious with myself, but NEVER, EVER will I want to die again at my own hand. And never again will I feel alone.  That’s what finding myself gave me—my Self—and I promised I would never abandon me again.

Love,
Eve Ryman

A Strange Time to Start a Blog

How many times have I told myself "It's time."  I'm one of those idea people, who thinks of a cool concept, develops it to the flea degree, and then tortures myself with guilt because I don't go any farther with it.  Not this time.  I promise myself, right now, that I am going to write on this blog every day, starting this minute.
And I will do as little as I can to labor over editing it . . . which is really just another excuse not to publish it.  If you haven't guessed, I have a tendency to a) analyze things to death, b) convince myself that my writing isn't meaningful enough to attract an audience or c) delay my gratification too much.

I call this the Healing Through Desire to Heal blog because I am convinced that where there is a will, there is a way.  I started my own healing process about twenty years ago and have watched countless others seem to try, want to heal, but fail in the process and wonder what made me so lucky.  Luck is a huge part of things, and we all have periods when we are lucky (and not so fortunate), but I have concluded that there is something more than the Wheel of Fortune steering our destinies, and I call it a refusal to quit, also known as desire.  I have also chronicled my healing process because I wanted to share it with the world.  Alas, on my journey, I have learned that my process is simply that: mine.  Countless times on the road, I have told someone what worked for me, only to have her look at me with upraised eyebrows and a "What's that? I think I hear my mother calling me" look on her face. 

I heartily believe, that while I haven't the power to heal your pain or suffering, sharing my story might help your process. And, writing about my life will definitely peel another of my layers. This, therefore, has an intention: to randomly discuss, without too much outlining, brainstorming, conception or hem-hawing, my life as a daughter and mother primarily,and how those roles lead to the ultimate uncovery, discovery and recovery of Self. I'm sure the other roles I play(ed)--employee, sister, lover, friend, wife, etc., might also creep in from time to time.  But those are only secondary this time around. 

So, I have declared my mission.  I invite you to join me.  And I will publish this now, before I chiken out.  Stay tuned if you like, or come back in a month or two and see what has unfolded.  This is a good beginning.

Love,
Eve