Stories

I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s. William Blake

Under the sway of gender binary stories, women learn to hide their anger until they will take no more, while men respond, “I guess we are so different that I will never understand you,” justifying pulling back like boys afraid of mother. Brainwashed in such a narrow cultural account, partners may have little awareness that there is a wider field, a majestic landscape with astonishing possibilities.

To go deeper than the appearance, in Heart-drama we will question both the little and the big stories that reinforce the systems that enslave us, and we seek to get beyond them. We must start by listening carefully, separating out different streams of thoughts, feelings and actions, hearing voices clearly and specifically until they are distinct. We then set out deconstructing what we have always known but never challenged so directly. Little tales are more easily questioned because they are not held tightly, while the larger tend to be wound around our worries of offending someone or being laughed at or even banished from the tribe. Some of the Big stories may have lived as assumptions in the background, even though (as you reconsider them) they may be dangerously authoritarian, telling us only the strong will survive, and we must defensively protect our race, or sex, religion, socio-economic status, etc. Some Big stories are religious and intergenerational, bound to the history of a specific culture or cult. God gives and takes away. When we die, if we have maintained our position in the hierarchy, we go to a better place. Etcetera.

Barriers as storytellers

We learn quickly that any manifestations and personifications of stories that we recognize as characters before us are not listening. They just are not into us. Some may lack compassion altogether or have very thinned-down emotional wiring and so fail to plug in. Whether we encounter these entities—energy forms as personalities—Inside-out or Upside-down, we give them names that reflect their language and dress them in their Halloween costumes. We know intuitively what spiel to expect from the Outlaw, Deviate, Workaholic, Colonizer, Android, Destroyer, Etcetera.

When these characters appear powerful, it generally means they are stuck in runaway feedback loops with a well memorized script (maybe even sometimes convincing). They can hypnotize us, hold sway—even hold us captive—by their insanity, hubris, and/or threats (veiled or explicit). As unconscious beings, they do not acknowledge ego limitations because they do not recognize themselves as vulnerable, maybe not even human. In the extreme, they devolve into a species more reptile and predacious than any creature born from a mammalian womb. When they are especially fired up, these energy forms are a disturbance in the psyche and/or the society, warning us that something needs to be corrected. Intervention is required.

Inspiration will reliably point our attention to Barriers that block integrative functions and Nature’s homeostatic processes.  Inspiration perceives beneath the appearance to the dissociation, mindless amusements, and compartmentalization integral to the lifestyle of minor gods; Inspiration questions all oracles that pronounce big or small narratives as special truth. Inspiration differentiates, names, restrains and contains, what will undermine us, just as the Greeks knew that the Titans must be battled, overthrown and replaced by a more Inspired vision.

To engage in a meaningful encounter with inner and outer personalities requires Apollonian consciousness. It requires discernment and courage to intentionally counter the pull towards murderous rocks in a convulsing ocean, encountering the Sirens but not being dashed to bits. This is our Inspired work. I also think it is a spiritual calling, predicated on what Jung would call the religious function, the capacity to relate to a deeper dimension of life, to hold to what is Divine, what is real and enduring, without being dragged into a prison of the Fallen underworld. The modern psyche, distracted and dissociated, seems in need of such an active, open, accepting and compassionate spiritual challenge.

Indeed, in an age when many stories big and small are sold to us by social dominators, encouraging a cult of followers to collective callous action, traumatizing the defenseless, I think those of us who are weary and suspicious of being forced-fed a transcendental truth could be more open to a personal quest filled with mystery, demanding courage, creativity and heroism, on a path that has potential for healing, meaning, and growth.

What I learned from my father, at the end

Though the real nature of my parent’s relationship was inscrutable to me, as parents’ intimate lives are always mysteries to their children, there seemed some flashes of authentic love and connection. I have role-played about my mother’s loneliness. She focused on what others wanted, which gave her comfort and something to do. I base this on the fact that, after their retirement, my mother often invited extended family for dinners and holidays. And my father was always there in the background, busying himself, keeping things organized, washing dishes and managing other tasks that kept him out of conversation. Maybe his love language was acts of service, if this was love. The “strong, silent type,” he was always more comfortable living in silent movies that went out of style in the 1920s. But I think the family-gatherings provided a scaffold for my father, allowing him to act beyond his stage of emotional development. like a crawling infant learning to stand by holding onto a parent’s finger, in this case my mother’s finger. Or that is just my attempt at explaining (to my bewilderment) how he could play a somewhat convincing role as grandfather when he was so uncomfortable with his own children.

After my mother was diagnosed with cancer there were definite moments when he showed a willingness to be doting, his worse Narcissistic weapons out of sight, his certainties quieted. He seemed genuinely frightened about her leaving (though he of course did not go so far as to express it openly), and certainly there was loyalty and a willingness to be in the role of a devoted husband, housekeeper, meal-preparer, administer of medication for the closing scenes.

Don’t imagine dying-of-cancer was a brief episode. She languished, in and out of remission for years. And, maybe, she was just in an understandably low spot when she shared with me feelings of chronic disappointment with her spouse. On that particular evening, we were alone together for a moment when she told me in an exhausted voice that my father had described the two of them as soulmates (which is a romantic phrase hard to imagine coming out of his mouth). She was softly scoffing about it, with tears in her eyes, pointing to the hurtful absurdity of it.

But appearance can be a veil to reality, so my point here is that I will not minimize their complexities as human beings nor invalidate the evident changes over their years together, both mellowing as they aged, softening their defenses, my mother more assertive, my father less wounding, showing more kindness, less pouting. Now, this represents one of the disorienting dimensions of Heart-drama—or any deep reflection on childhood traumas. The people we role-play are often no longer the same person (if they ever were that person we bring on stage). This can raise loyalty issues, doubts. Guilt. Until we figure out—and this is the wisdom I gained from my father in the end, or more accurately, not from him but because of our strained father/son relationship. I learned this: I was hurt, and the dramas I endured were thresholds to the surplus reality I was warmed up to explore.

Such exploration has its own logic, which is why there is absolutely no need to share your experience or act out justified revenge on anyone who is still living or dead. Blaming or seeking forgiveness or making amends following a bout of Work is a common error in the Fallen world. Confusing symbol with the obsessively literal, archetype with reality, forcing a current conclusion back into history like fitting a round peg into a hole in a universe without a definite geometry. The drama is ultimately not about them and, ultimately, none of their business.

Projecting our current state of affairs, our current interpretations, our realizations and prejudices alike, is not a way to “grasp” the past. As a better response, consider a counter-intuitive protocol used in EMDR to deal with out-of-control Anger. You access your rage, imagining the perpetrator of your injury meeting the worst homicidal narrative you can envision —burn them in Hell if your sympathetic nervous system desires it, smash them into a gory mess, turn them into broken bits by feeding them slowly through some viciously sharp farm equipment, whatever matches the level of Pain the rage is defending you from…until, through the magic of bilateral stimulation, energies shift on their own, a doorway to enlightenment cracks open, some deeper level of spiritual understanding downloads, acceptance, often an unexpected compassion if not for the specific person who injured you, then for all of us, because we are such defective animals, capable of much cruelty.

That is what we wait for after we Work. Waiting can be like holding a sharp thorny pinecone in your sensitized fingertips until Inspiration, perhaps personified as a nurturing form bathed in and purified with loving energies, arrives to take the burden from you. I agree that it is Inexplicable; how can that happen? But it can happen in Heart-drama, as well as in other therapies that invite X-posing the Barriers, feeling the Pain and practicing the Rituals; the framing shifts strangely, as if the polarities (constructed so long ago out of chaos to hold up your mythic world) collapses. Ancient pillars are yanked down. And out of this breakdown a new ordering emerges to anchor something more generous, Truer and more Beautiful. I believe that did happen for me in the Work I’ve done regarding my parents, especially in relation to my father wounds.

Arriving where we started

To return to the ending of the story that I seem to be avoiding, whatever changed in my parents’ marriage was less fundamental and decisive for my father. I had been willing to believe that much of his Narcissism had been carved away forever in the machinery of marriage, like the ending of a Dr. Seuss book with the Grinch heart growing in size; but maybe being detached, self-preoccupied and ill-tempered was more like a cancer stunned into remission by some chemotherapy that life administers to men in predictable and traditional marriages. In this case, when my mother was gone, withdrawing whatever had sustained or maintained him, he relapsed hard. Became furtive. Deceptive. Irritable. Secretly draining his bank account to rescue criminal/drug addicted women, professional victims who prey on delusional, lonely, and horny old men. Easy cons with fantasies of rescuing the damsel.

This behavior was telling a different story than any he had ever shared with me. Rather than the restrainer of spontaneity, he focused on liberating. I did have the thought that there was a new pattern emerging or something ancient remerging, or a voice he could no longer screen from view now in the spotlight. In a sentence, I think he was saying there was something stimulating, erotic, that he felt for women who had the ability to deceive him. The parallel I will make here is probably not relevant. Still, it seems synchronistic to me. If not exactly a rhyming of history, it is a bit of free verse that uses similes and metaphors and odd literary devices, and rhythms that don’t follow any fixed design. Here it is, I find it relevant in some irrational way that when my parents were looking to marry each other, both left first marriages abruptly, immediately excommunicated from the Catholic church and from their origin families, but in the 1950’s it was not easy to find a place to divorce. Nevada was such a place, and so they lived for a time in Truckee, moving into a half-renovated chicken-coop where I was born. The poor wooden structure was all they could afford to rent. This might almost be the plot of a Hallmark movie. A young couple sacrificing all for love. And maybe it felt like that.

My father found work as a meter-reader, traveling around the forested hollers all day, while my mother became a shill at a small casino in Reno. She worked in a brick-and-mortar structure, in a job that no longer exists, as a type of con artist, pretending to be a poker player while, in actuality, she was a paid employee. Her job was to start games, to keep failing games going, to play with house-money, to seduce and push the other actual paying players over their limits. In other words, she was a decoy, like a wooden duck drawing a flock in to their financial demise. I know she was very pretty, and she had the quality of women who have been trained for fawning, a survival strategy that sometimes reduces a woman’s injuries she could otherwise suffer in a male-dominated society. But it can also be a magnet for some men.

You might see where I am going. In his last years my father reverted to this old outline. Though the earliest origins of this tale and details are locked in cold storage and never ever opened to anyone as far as I know, the best I can imagine, he was alienated from family, existing for a time as an Outcast, and in such a state, he could only engage women in a pseudo relationship that involved deception, probably for sex, pitifully allowing himself, a master of gas-lighting, to be gas lit. Self-deception leading to self-destruction. Now that is a strange tale that I could have written myself as a young man before experience interrupted that familiar plot.

I want to return to the idea of forgiveness. I am suspicious of those who tell me they have forgiven. I want to know how deeply into hell they have gone. Have they traveled far or retreated to the safety of a shallow shore, believing they have come away from the broken tomb with the treasure they had been seeking all along. A magical prize. A way to minimize the offense, often conceptualized in dissociated phrasing that tries to explain it away, “Trauma begets trauma, so those who are hurt, hurt others. It’s not their fault. We can’t blame them.”

At least for me, and for many I have accompanied on their daring searches, it is not so simple. The exploration defines us for a time. I think it must. And it changes us. Personally, I have spent many nights on my knees shaking in the memories. And worse than that, I experienced humiliation, the shame of not being able to be fully present with people I wanted to be loving with. The experience of not having an appetite for days, my body a million miles away, baffled mind watching desire and joy evaporate, leaving me unable to explain how against my will, my heart and apparent identity had been replaced by something frozen. It has been a lot to grapple with. And I will not let it be diminished or minimized.

I admit that my earliest resistance to letting it go had been based on defiance. I never wanted to hear an apology from my father because there was an internal part of me that worried that, just in my listening, I might “get it,” in so doing I would forget the harm he caused that young boy, as if a heartfelt response to his story would absolve in a flash of divine light his responsibility. As I imagined it, in such a final reckoning, everything I had fought to unearth, the pain and self-deception and parts of him that I had to swallow and see in myself…would suddenly be gone miraculously in an involuntary act of forgiveness.

But I long ago stopped being resentful, angry or fearful. I had so thoroughly deconstructed his bullshit that there were years when I would have welcomed him if he could have been honest with himself.

In the final years, my wife and I rescued him a couple of times, letting him stay with us. That required more work, until I had become the protagonist enough times in psychodramas that I could find the strength to get him out my house. First into his own apartment, then to a shared living facility, then to a nursing home in a time of COVID, his quality of life declined.

At our last meeting, arriving at the beginning, he was curled up on an institutional bed, mostly blind, with the lingering effects of COVID, advanced dementia and cancer that had spread. I was allowed this brief visit because he wasn’t expected to survive the night (and he didn’t). He spoke softly, hoarsely, while his roommate muttered incoherently, so I had to lean close. “I’m sorry,” he said, though I was not clear what he was apologizing for. I doubt he knew what he was apologizing for, and it was past time to have any denouement. But all the work that I had done did allow me to be present. I had released the heaviest burdens long ago, and I knew how to hold what was left. So, here, I was only a compassionate witness to a man who was too tired to act out any character on the final stage. Through my cloth mask, I comforted him as best I could, as you would with anyone who was lingering in limbo, seeking his own way to let go.