XI Healing and Growing

“Everything psychic is pregnant with the future.” Carl Jung, CW, para 53

Now that I have achieved some loosening of the restraints, no longer at least helpless in the seclusion room up to my neck in a body suit with ribs of unbreakable plastics, the equation has changed. It is no longer is there a way to free myself, because there is. But what now?

What to do with my ability to look at something other than the wall. To just see the faces of those who are employed to maintain order, the conditioning agents hired to keep the population safe from disruption, to keep me safe because I have been at risk for testing limits and ignoring the rules and the lies. I see that I have been detained on this particular psychiatric floor due to caste, or class, or accident or historical moment.

If you can’t keep yourself safe, then we must impose limits by whatever means is necessary. There were parts of me that swallowed that like medication. That commanding voice blurred the Inside-out and the Upside-down. It drowned out Inspiration with the notion that someone somewhere else knew better, and they should take control.

But now I’ve been somewhere else. I’ve been someone else more authentic and I’ve seen Beauty, busted through doors locked for my own good, and I know the secret that the Fallen World is just control. And I question the antiquated law of hierarchies that states the least among us must stay in charge of drawing up the treatment orders.

Alluring Future. The A in EXPAND.

An Alluring Future arises out of the daily Reflections and the response to Inspired Rituals. I’ve found it to be true, with all creative endeavors, that eventually a transformation takes place in my experience, in my being-in-the-world. There is an ever-greater pull toward healing and growth as a result of Enlarging, X-posing barriers, and channeling Pain into Ritual.

Narrative of Purpose. The N in EXPAND.

All creative work challenges limiting stories. And the artistic process itself changes the narratives and permits an embodiment of other stories. It corrects or at least alters the original distortions, shifting the horizon lines. Life feels more purposeful.

Develop (or Despair) The Final Letter in EXPAND.

Develop, embrace growth as your purpose, commit to growing in internal awareness, in your actions taken in the world, in relationships in all their forms, in and with all manners of beings on the planet, ultimately deepening the sense of life as sacred. And more importantly, to continue. To refuse what is akin to dying. Frankly, I’ve been dead in the past. And I prefer to be alive.

A.N.D. 

Promise, Redemption, Expansion

 The key in memory work is to have no other goal than helping the client to have a different experience of an old event. That’s transformation.   Janina Fisher

A=Alluring Future

Our future cannot be clearly imagined until Beauty has a greater pull than Pain, and Truth has a greater pull than Self-deception.

Whether we have the luxury of a group setting or in our individual work, our ability to enact a different outcome and to be a witness (dual awareness) leads to emotional freedom. Often, we also come to some wisdom; we know now that abuse, neglect, attachment trauma, violence, emotional abandonment, shaming etc. was clearly beyond what we could have ever expected to manage at that time. This is “corrective” because, in the letting go of self-loathing and toxic judgment, we can be more self-accepting, maybe even self-loving. And now our future seems more Alluring; it draws us to its promises.

An actual repetitive ritual of letting go of our old story is not necessary for many of us because the energy that fueled the suffering has subsided. From the observing presence—our True Self—the historical drama is severed from who we are today. To the degree that the painful memory still arises in our minds, it seems irrelevant (or less relevant). That’s the best scenario.

But every enactment has its own truth, and awareness takes time to arise out of the drama and from the rituals. Meeting with a well-trained therapist to make deep inquiries can speed up the unveiling and the healing. There’s always some work to do if we give ourselves the time and make the effort.

Work becomes junk if we ignore the insights or misplace them in our daily clutter.

N=Narrative of Purpose

It’s a much different story if you experience yourself as victim in a tragic universe versus an actor in a world of Beauty (connection) and Truth (authenticity).

Though what we gain from this Work is difficult to put into language, and it does not fit into a simple principle, often in the end we’re left with a window into a new way of living. There may be a sense of redemption that restores our relationship with ourselves and with others or with life   A debt that we never really owed may have been cleared from our slate.

Shame (I’m bad) is exchanged for a recovery of what our Heart truly came into the world to know (I’m lovable, loving, and intentional).

In the best outcome of this Work, the Tragic myth has been deconstructed to the point that we are no longer experiencing ourselves as a stranger in a strange land. Based on attachment research, Dan Siegel explains that you’re very likely to pass your adaptations from a difficult childhood on to your children, if you don’t take the time and find the opportunities to make sense out of what has felt senseless. Making sense includes creating a coherent narrative of one’s own life.

Daniel Seigel, The Mindful Therapist

It is not uncommon to realize for the first time how a multigenerational evil has been mindlessly perpetuated, passed along by caregivers; the parent-figure themselves no more than unconscious postal workers delivering their own unprocessed horrors to your address (your Heart, mind and physiology).

Or we recognize that random violence and natural catastrophes were “not about me.” In this place we were born into, our failure to thrive was not a result of personal failing. And we are inherently resilient.

D=Develop Continually

How do we know if expansion has occurred? We know because we experience more potential to step away from Pain and Self-deception, to find some space. We become less blended in ego-state language, and we obtain more flexibility in our responses. In practical terms, expansion means that the things that trigger us can be recognized but don’t have to hijack us to the point that we get lost in the past or get caught in the trance of an addiction. Expansion provides us at least enough metacognition so that we can quiet the voices sufficiently and move with intention.

This is never a perfect resolution, not the ending that we may wish for in our romanticized fiction. We move forward with an embodied hope but never with “truth” as many would depict it: factual certainty or something that can be used competitively or to solidify status and the status quo.  Our Truth is something that we cultivate and continue to do our best to anchor in a ground of wisdom.