From Christine Caldwell’s “Getting our bodies back”:
“Feelings are intended to move us, and until they move us toward a higher level of organization, they will persist. So that which you keep feeling is that which you haven’t let yourself feel completely.” (p. 119)
“As long as someone else is responsible for our experience (either partly or wholly), then they have the power in the relationship. They have the power to make us feel good or bad. They own a piece of us. And we have to control them in order to get our needs met.” (p. 122)
“When we abandon active rest, when we focus narrowly on one activity for long periods of time, or when we feel consistently powerless in the face of repeated events, we compel ourselves to dissociate. We enter a state of need deprivation, at the same time creating a response that does nothing to fill our needs, but merely dampens our perception that we are in need.” (p. 26)
“Our bodies must tense, shut down, and provide distracting alternatives in order to accomplish control in our thoughts and behavior. Control is very costly; it takes a lot of energy to maintain. It uses many of our personal resources to monitor and select the experiences and feelings that are acceptable or unacceptable. The cost is our aliveness. Whenever we control our experience, we sacrifice a measure of vitality. Most of my clients come into therapy wanting to get rid of certain feelings and only experience certain other, better ones. While it makes sense to want to feel good, doing it through control ultimately fails. It takes a while for many clients to realize this: that the strain and fatigue of control is actually causing their suffering, not the feelings they were trying to select and discard.” (pp. 31-32)
Published on August 18, 2005
in Personal.
Thursday. My only day off this week. My sister’s thirtieth birthday. Last night’s dream: I’m working at the hospital. My Mom is working in the cafeteria. She’s complaining that she’s broken her arm. I say, no way Mom, if your arm was broken you’d be in a lot more pain, you wouldn’t be moving your arm around like that. A code is called over the intercom. The receptionist says that someone is tampering with the water system. It is implied that all available staff should go investigate the situation. Look around for patients who are not where they’re supposed to be. I step into the hallway and notice a little girl running around. I grab her, ask her if she’s a patient, determine she probably is, then return her to the child unit. I let her in the door and she promptly runs over to the group and begins assaulting another child. I make my way back to the CD Unit. Time stretches out in weird ways. Three dudes are coming out of the unit as I approach the double doors. We look at each other suspiciously and hesitantly shake hand as we pass in the hallway. I look down at my hand after shaking theirs. Something doesn’t feel right. I look back at them and see that they’re doing the same thing—looking down at their hands, then up at me as if thinking, “Hey, that guy isn’t one of us, he’s one of them!” The double doors close and lock, and somehow I know that I’m stuck on the unit now with no turning back. As I walk through the unit, it looks like the scene of a nuclear holocaust. Workbooks and other treatment stuff are strewn about all over the place. Nowhere is there a sign of life. I get the impression that either the staff people have been killed (by the three dudes?) or else everybody is dead and gone due the passage of time. As I walk through the unit, away from the locked double doors, I am no longer inside a building, but out of doors, the landscape looking burned out and desolate. I get the feeling that the three dudes are either coming after me or soon will be. There’s no turning back. Eventually, I reach the end of a road, a street that dead ends into a wall of trees and branches so thick that I can’t see anything through it. I wouldn’t be able to stick a pencil though the thicket, much less get through it myself. It is absolutely the end of the road. There is nowhere to go. I just stand there. There’s nothing to do.
Published on August 13, 2005
in Personal.
It all started in college. I must have changed majors fifteen times, searching for that thing I’d “love to do.” Didn’t really find it, but graduation day pushed me to make a decision — Psychology. Worked with disabled folks for about a year, then said, “Fuck this! I will do whatever it takes to find my true destiny!” Moved from up-state New York to San Francisco, just because it was the most different place I could imagine. It was there I stumbled upon Wilber’s books and the whole Transpersonal Psychology movement. I searched through the APA Guide to Psychology Graduate Programs (1992) and came across a description of an East/West Psychology program at the California Institute of Integral Studies that just rocked my world. I decided right then and there that I’d move to wherever in California this place was, but when I looked at the address I was shocked to discover that CIIS was about two blocks from where I was sitting! I put down the book, walked up to Ashbury Street, and two weeks later I was enrolled in the East/West Psychology program. I really thought I had this “do what you love” thing by the short hairs at this point. I would get a PhD in East/West Psychology and be on the cutting edge of academia, hanging out with Ken Wilber and Stan Grof and the rest of transpersonal crowd. I rode that wave to the tune of forty thousand dollars — my total student loan debt after four years of college and two years at CIIS. Also, the whole school was being turned upside down by accreditation pressures (I was told that the East/West Program would likely dissolve.) So, I wrote a master’s thesis, went out into the “real world,” and soon fell back into the rut of dissatisfaction. After a few more years of working with mentally ill people in group-homes, the career koan descended upon me again like a noose around the neck. As usual, I turned to fantasies that some magical graduate school scenario would save the day. Being forty grand in the hole and making nine bucks and hour, I was limited to more mainstream schools that could offer me an assistantship in exchange for tuition. I applied and was accepted to the doctoral program at Duquesne University. They would pay me to go to school — about what I was making at my job anyway. Yeah boy! I was back on top. Except for that little thing about not having any interest whatsoever in any of the courses offered, or any of the research that any of the faculty was doing. Shit! Back into the noose! Then, as fate would have it, I ran into a guy playing guitar on the street, and this guy had so much fire and spirit that he inspired me to drop the whole game of fitting myself into others’ preconceived molds and just flat-out live my real dream — to be a rock-star. Yeah boy! So I told the stuffed shirts at Duquesne to get bent, and joined the band. Of course I still had to work forty hours a week at (yet another) group home, but what the hell, I was chasing my dream. Well, we recorded a few CD’s, toured a bit, and had some wonderful times, but the years rolled on and still no record contract, still no relief from the forty-hour sleep walks. Then I fell in love with a wonderful young woman who won a big fellowship to go to grad school in Lexington, Kentucky. Kentucky! After a year or so of back and forth between Chapel Hill, NC and Lexington, I put my priorities in order and moved to the Blue Grass. And I’m very much in love and actually enjoying my job (as a counselor in a psych hospital) as much as I ever have. But lately I can feel that familiar ring around my neck, and I find myself fantasizing about some job opportunity at Integral University, or a phone call from my former band-mates announcing the big signing.
Anyway, all of this falls into its proper perspective when I make time for my various grounding practices (meditation, somatics, playing and writing music). But how easy it is to put my head back in that noose.