Impassioned
This points us again to the importance of compassion once awareness has begun to germinate. The Saboteurs are both sly and powerful when it comes to maintaining their control over our lives. If we begin to beat ourselves up for the Saboteur pattern we have just discovered, we are right back in Saboteur mode again. Here we need to learn to be like a discerning anthropologist. We look clearly at what is before us, to see it as it is, without judgement or evaluation. We simply ask: “What is going on here?”
Relationships
Having grown up in circumstances in which we often felt unsafe or even threatened, we are always in a stance of defensiveness and high alert, parrying the balls that life hurls at us, non stop, in the cosmic pinball machine, never having or taking the time necessary to bring sufficient awareness to the situation, the awareness that would enable a creative, conscious response. We soon became exhausted and chose, as a survival strategy, to tune out of the insufferable pain we carried deep inside, in every tissue of our bodies. The irony is that we need to encounter, embrace, and transcend this pain if we are to get well. The prerequisite is that we relinquish the old habits of “zoning out”; be they by means of ingesting substances or engaging in addictive processes, or both…
Trapped
As long as we are constantly hijacked by our Saboteurs, fear rules our lives and the lives of those around us. This takes place sometimes very obviously, sometimes more subtly. Fear’s toolbox contains a very powerful device that, if not addressed and relinquished, will ensure that the old order will forever rule the day. This device is denial. For many years I stewed in the juice of denial. Sara Bareilles describes the dynamic eloquently in her sublime song “Orpheus“:
Missing the world
The one you knew
The one where everything made sense because you
didn’t know the truth…..
Indeed, many of us didn’t know the truth for long stretches of our lives. Denial has an important role to play in our survival…
Balance
So, it was really telling when, in a recent yoga lesson, we went though balance exercises which included the Vrikshasana (The Tree Pose, where standing on one foot we bring the other to the inside of our upper thigh), that the terror of childhood – as a felt state – returned. My heart began to race; I began to sweat and couldn’t maintain my balance for longer that twenty seconds. Of even more interest was the fact that my breathing froze. Despite all the insights and, indeed, practice in so many other modalities and situations, here we had the default patterns re-asserting themselves immediately, and with a vengeance…
Two Wolves
I like to see the two wolves as representing reality and delusion within my own perception. Our sorrow, our fear, our shame, our loneliness, even our despair; these are fragile and have no more substance than a shadow. This is the reality. We create the delusion, ourselves, when we begin to focus on our sorrows and fears in a way that adds fuel to them. The more we complain about them, over-analyse them, identify with them, or push them away, the more “real” they appear, the more solid and independent of us they seem to be, the more power they have over our well-being.,,
On Purpose
The central argument Frankl makes is that life has meaning whatever the circumstances, even when profound suffering is encountered. The title itself is the core message: we can and must say “yes to life” not because of circumstances, but in spite of them. It is easy to say “yes to life” when everything is going well. If that “yes” is contingent on circumstances, however, it can never be sustained because, as we all know, circumstances change as much as the weather in my native Ireland. Everything, even our existence in this incarnation, is transient…
This Time
Even the most articulate and hard-working of us may find we cannot erase the imprint of a parent who was too busy or depressed to notice us or who seemed to consider us a burden. We then interpret this as our caregiver wishing we’d never been born. When we internalise such stances, our shame, if it could speak, would repeatedly tell us that “the world would be a better place if we were dead”. Our lives change only when we reconstruct the missing inner maps that should have been formed in safety and attunement…
Redemption
That is what the Twelve Steps are all about: a shift in perspective. Before we begin the journey of recovery, we are caught firmly in a trap that we cannot spring through self-sufficiency or mere egoic willpower (ergo the need for a “Higher Power” of our own understanding). We also suffer from a chronic perception disorder because of having lived so long in chaos, overwhelmed mode, denial, delusion, and the suppression of all the emotions we could not process or endure during the first, formative years of our lives. As traumatised adult children, we see the world as we are, not as it is..
Emotions
In my family of origin, as I experienced things, there was no common language for dealing with the multitude of feelings that are integral to the human condition. It was as if we tried, in a group effort, to read Anna Karenina in the original without any prior knowledge of the Russian culture, language, or even the ability to read Cyrillic script. Emotions are sometimes characterised as `feelings in motion´. A wide array of emotions exists. The following list captures those generally identified as the most common: Acceptance, admiration, affection, amusement, anger, angst, anguish, annoyance, anticipation, anxiety…
Solid Ground
For many of us who lose their way having emerged from dysfunctional families, the opportunity arises when, after a period of active acting out in substance and/or process addiction, we finally get sick and tired of being sick and tired, and `hit bottom´. While this is not an ideal way of finding solid ground beneath our feet (we usually land on our ass, in fact!), it does enable us to finally begin inserting a solid foundation into the skimpy structure of what our life had become…
