IMPERFECT Lady

Perfect for Me.

A thought came to mind yesterday as I wondered about the withholding of truths, that perhaps it is the desire to be perfect that stops us. We don't want to say things that are upsetting or we don't want to not go along to cause waves so we refrain from our truths to look better, seem more perfect, nicer even. Yet in this 'nicer more perfect' mode, we are not feeling that inside. Inside the storms rage, the contradictions swell, and it seems like we are split in two...having to wear 'nice' while feelings and emotions as well as knowledge seem to overwhelm the inside. Just like pretending you don't have raging reaction to a bad food, where your stomach is turning, sharp pains, nausea, etc...and you continue to have a calm pleasant face. Being truthful is to vomit up all what we hold inside, getting rid of the turmoil that is infesting our insides.  And we want to do this in  pleasant non-hurtful manner, or without causing grief...which is impossible. The reasons and sources of our angst usually aren't  wonderful experiences, but rather trauma.  Speaking up about trauma will not sound or feel like chatting about the purchase of a new car.  It will hold pieces and shards of pain, hurt, betrayal, fear, anxiety, shock and horror.  It will reduce you to a shaking quacking hurt soul, and you have to explain how you feel. We unveil our wounded soul.  The same one we had to cover up in order to survive, we now take the chance  of dying in order to speak of it. And there is a dying of sorts.  The death of the survival person, the one who lived pretending the abuse didn't happen.  This survival person is who people liked, who got along, who was 'nicer' and 'kinder'....and we are afraid that the truthful person will be annihilated. In my case it happened.  My survival self (the pretending trauma didn't live in my body) was accepted and my truthful self rejected. Being rejected for being my truthful self felt like being abused a second time around, but this time aware and fully present...And this time, I didn't have the the body's natural survival mode of "Disassociation"....I wanted to feel this, to accept this, to acknowledge this, to honor this IN order to now live in reality. I wasn't willing to revert back to my childhood ways of living a life inside that was totally different from my presentation to the world.   This time, what I feel inside matches the features on my face or my actions and often times, non-actions. I no longer care if I am perfect for you, I am always perfect for me. " The First Casualty of Dysfunction is truth" Carl Huhta

What we endured.

From Martha Beck's book, Leaving the Saints "All my life, I'd read and reread a thousand religious epigraphs to the effect that "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."  I'd always been told this had to do with joining the true religion, learning the true description of the Holy Trinity, memorizing the true Commandments.  Now, with that gong like tone thrumming through me, it all seemed so much simpler.  The truth I needed to be free was simply the reality of my own life: This is what I feel.  This is what happened to me. To know these small truths was to know myself; to speak them was to connect with my real self, other human beings, and God." Martha was told by many people she was not allowed to tell her story of abuse, that the church's reputation was on the line, that her father needed to be held up as a pillar of its community, that many mormon spiritual lives depended upon her silence... except one woman came to her. "Martha...I don't believe God would ever ask anyone to endure that sort of thing without talking about it.  No one. No matter what."  Her voice when through me like an arrow, through all the pain and confusion and fear to something at my very center. My body filled up with a kind of resonance, like one of the huge gongs I'd seen in Shinto shrines that make the air throb when they ring.  It shattered my reserve, and as usual, I started crying.  Rosemary just sat there, not a shred of tension or resistance in her presence.  "Was it your father?" she asked, quietly.  I covered my face with my hands to keep myself from falling apart, but it was like trying to protect a sand castle from high tide. "I didn't tell you!" I gasped, when I could speak.  "Where did you hear that?"  She shrugged and tapped her chest. I felt that sense of resonance again, crumbling all the barriers of my mind.  "You can't tell anyone!" I whispered.  "And I can't tell anyone! Ever! I can't!"   "Martha, listen to me."  Rosemary's voice was no louder, but it had taken on a peculiar intensity.  I remember thinking that I should pay close attention. I was right. The next three words Rosemary Douglas spoke changed my life forever.  The moment she said them, I knew that this was the stable patch of earth in the landslide, the single great spiritual truth upon which I could build my life now that all other foundations had proven frail and uncertain. The words weren't God loves you, or Jesus is Lord, or Keep the faith. Rosemary put her hand on mine, looked right in my soggy eyes and said, "You are Free." We are not free until we can speak our story, to tell of our experiences...and sadly we wait for the permission of those who hurt us.  What a great gift this woman gave her, to say, "I don't believe God would ever ask anyone to endure that sort of thing without talking about it.  No one. No matter what." At times this blog feels as if I don't have the right.  But I agree with Rosemary, we must talk about what we endured.

All it wants is truth.

Last night I woke up a few times with very strong feelings between Character and the Situation. That most often we blame the situation rather than blame our selves and the lack or the choice of action we took in each situation. There seems to be this wide separation in our thought patterns that has us victims of circumstances rather than participants in our lives. We don't arrive with Character, but rather over time and through the valleys and mountains in our lives we begin to layer who we are by what we do. Oddly enough, we somehow tend to NOT believe who others are, we keep blaming the circumstance rather than the character. The circumstance is often times the accumulation of past events coming home to roost, it is not just a wild card that happened into our lives... The Universe is the perfect score keeper and it never lets us get away with anything, the 'karma' deal is right on.  We do indeed reap what we sow and the longer we put off harvesting, the bigger the crop we have to tend to when we finally get around to seeing what we planted. What I am here to tell you is you can't plant denial and pull up honesty. You can't spread seeds of bullying and come up with people who don't fear you. How you move in the world echoes back your own energy.   Each moment of today is laying the carpet of tomorrow. There is no vengeful God or evil Universe, there is just you tossing the ball against the wall of the Universe, you will get back what you put out. There are no mistakes.  Truth will reflect back truth. Deceit will conjure up relationships minus the truth. It all begins with you. You are the common denominator in all things.  The world truly does revolve around you. There are a billion places you can find people behaving badly but all that truly matters in your life is you. Victims focus on what others need to do in order for them to find peace. You will know you are no longer a victim when you can find peace in the midst of others behaving badly.   If my happiness depended upon my mother and father healing, I would be a victim of their lives.  Instead, I put my wellness in my own hands.  I looked in my own life and saw combinations of their dysfunction littered everywhere, and that is where I began. In each moment of time, I looked at what I was believing or thinking, and then how I acted....did they match or was I a walking contradiction like them; partly truth and partly fiction? Character can survive any situation if all it wants is truth.

Whatever Reality Serves.

My brother's blog (www.messyguru.typepad.com ) shows the switching characters that a mother often displays when faced with truths that directly oppose her life.  Her life and dream and ideals. I have somehow had this wrong.  I had presumed that my mother lived in truth and slide into unreality when uncomfortable subjects arose, but instead it seems she resides in non-reality and will slip out into reality every now and then. Although this is just hearsay on my part, for she never came out of her camp of denial, pretend, or righteous unknowing for me. She stayed true to the character of my childhood. I can't know what would be more perplexing on a child, to have her step forth in knowing, and the go back to unknowing or to remain steadfast in unknowing? While her actions aluded to the fact that her husband was in jail, for she seen him in an orange jumpsuit behind bars, she never not once spoke to me about why he was there.   This omitance echoes my childhood.  This is what I meant by she never once told me to fear my father, to stand clear, to not trust etc.  Instead it was always me that had issues, not him and certainly not her. However during the early months of this, since she wasn't speaking of this, not available by phone, I made my own conclusions about the lay of the land.  My body and I were in total agreement to who he was as well as to who he was married to and how this was able to continue on for so long. My mother's character never wavered from the mother I knew as a child. My father's character never wavered from the father I knew as a child. My character greatly changed, when I saw them in their true colors. All it took was one look, and my whole world shattered. The character that I had been playing, loving daughter, died. And in its place a new role was born. I gave up all outside roles and stood firmly in the role called me. I moved forward by what I felt inside. I responded in kind to what life served up When it served me a pedophile father, I walked in harmony with that. When it served me up a mother who was unable to step into my world, I accepted that. My new role is to walk in step with whatever reality serves.

Coming From Whence We Came...

Our book club is reading the book, "leaving the Saints" by Martha Beck...this section was particularly affirming to me when I first read her book about five years ago. She recounts how her life began to make sense after getting the first waves of memories... Her memory " I am five years old, my hands are tied, and my father is doing something that feels as though it's ripping me in two.  I am stretched on my back, legs spread like a frog on a dissecting table, unable to see or understand what is happening, focusing as hard as I can on the cord around my hands, because it distracts me from what is happening elsewhere....The first horrific flashback was like a nuclear detonation.  It felt nearly real as if I were actually experiencing the original event, as though the nerve impulses for perceiving it had frozen into the tissues of my body, never reaching the level of conscious awareness, and were now finally completing their long-delayed journey..." She also writes about an extremely painful doctors visit that now made sense. "I am twenty-six, lying in another damned emergency room.  The Doctor has just told me that I waited so long to seek treatment for an abscess in the tissues of my perineum (look it up) that he's afraid infection might enter my bloodstream any minute. There is no time to put me under general anesthesia, so he gives me a shot of novocain in a very private place, then hands me a washcloth and tells me to bite down on it.  "please don't hate me," he says, and starts operating." "Numbed by the local, I don't even feel the first incision. But then he sticks a pair of scissors into it, and the pain is just absolutely incredible.  I've never felt anything this bad, not in childbirth, not when a dentist accidentally drilled right into a nerve.  I am positive that nothing could possibly hurt more than this. Then the Doctor opens up the scissors inside the incision, and I realize I was wrong.  And then, oh Lordy.  Then he starts to cut." "Out of all my medical misadventures, this memory stood out most in my mind the day of my first flashback - not just because the injury was related to those badly healed scars, but because the pain during that surgery was the only thing I could compare to the pain my mind and heart felt when the flashbacks started.  It wasn't simply the agony and degradation of being raped but, more, the absolute horror of a five year old who has just learned that the universe is ruled by an evil god and that this god seems to have commanded the most beloved and powerful figure in her life to destroy her in a manner much more devastating than death.  "We all have our little sorrows," said my Allusion Manager, quoting screenwriter Ronald Harwood even at this awful pass, "and the littler you are, the larger the sorrow."   Martha What I find so remarkable is that the physical pain is of a lesser degree in devastation compared to knowing that your father is capable of doing such awful things. That knowing is by far worse than any bodily discomfort. The body will heal and the pain goes away....but the knowing who your father is and what he is capable of doing does not go away.   No scar will form over this knowing...it stays an open wound. What is also comforting in a very horrific way is how she too experienced the time travelers that brought forth the exact feelings from her childhood. When my niece spoke up stating that my father abused her, my body responded before my mind could comprehend.  It shook and was filled with terror in every cell.  I knew without a shadow of doubt that she spoke the truth.  I too could not stop the mental tumblers from clicking into place and my life began making sense in a horrifying way. Her husband too was seeing her in a new light, she began to make sense to him..."That is why you space out when I touch you," he said.   "That is why you scream in your sleep. That's why you can never really relax." And while her direct honesty and openness about her abuse may be very disturbing, it is very comforting for an abused child of abuse.  It Makes us make sense. We make sense coming from whence we came...

The Principle Won, always.

While reading in "Shattered Dreams" by Irene Spencer, I came upon a paragraph that struck a cord within me. She is describing the polygamy Principle, which is commonly known by Principle. "A teaching that was to have a grave impact on how I lived my life can be summed up quite simply as follows; People may fail the Principle, but the principle itself never fails." This is how many folks look upon religion, as seeing how the people fail IT, and not that IT fails the people. She goes on to write, "My mother lived in a religious no-win situation. She was devoted to a tradition that defeated her." Imagine being devoted to something that defeats you? What struck me as I pictured this girl watching her mother struggle with plural marriage, was in how she didn't see her mother's defeat, but wondered more about her own strength to endure...she never considered breaking the chain of polygamy. My estrangement with my mother happened because I was determined to break the chain of mothering as she mothered.  I believe each of us have either the strength to endure and continue on the chain or legacy....or the strength to break the chain. And there are many women who feel empowered by holding up doctrines and belief systems, while they are defeated by them.  What they see isn't the lack of self, but rather the success of not allowing the belief to die. I had said that my mother's greatest strength, was her blindness.  And now I understand that her blindness was of her self or what the cost had on her family to uphold the doctrine of the Forgiveness of Sins.  That is the Principle of the FALC. As Irene writes, "...when the children of the covenant lacked the courage to live polygamy for themselves, it was always the fault of the human weakness and sin, never a problem with the Principle." My mother never could see any fault with the church and would not hear a word that would go against her Principle Belief.  We became invisible to her.  Her main focus was always to be loyal to what I feel was helping to defeat her.   Putting her Faith in the Principle (forgiveness of sins) was always a higher need than her own childrens or her own.  We came in second, always...and in doing so, it defeated our family from the git go. We were born into a system where we came second from day one...and there was no way to move ahead, if anything we fell lower on the totem pole as the years went by. It is very disheartening to see that in your mother's eyes you stand behind the system that defeated her.  And in order to get along with her, you too have to be defeated. Defeated I left my relationship with her, for she couldn't see how damaging she was to herself, to our family and to me.   Her beliefs destroyed everything...while holding high her faith in the Principle. The Principle won, always.  

Drink In Their Truths

Mark Nepo writes in The Book of Awakening, “The unwavering truth is that when we agree to any demand, request, or condition that is contrary to our soul’s nature, the cost is that precious life force is drained off our core. Despite seeming rewards of compliance, our souls grow weary by engaging in activities that are inherently against their nature.”

In another section he writes, “It’s taken me thirty of my forty-nine years to realize that not being who I am is more deadly, and it has taken the last nineteen years to try and make a practice of this. What this means in a daily way, is that I have to be conscientious about being truthful and resist the urge to accommodate my truth away. It means that being who I really am is not forbidden or muted just because others are uncomfortable or don’t want to hear it.”

His words affirms how I found myself…first I was given the full frontal view of all the things I had said yes to when I should have said no. All the discomforts I had withstood for the sake of getting along, had grown even more uncomfortable and it seemed some discomforts had whole families of uncomfortable feelings.

It is like all the little mole hill choices grew into mountains as the years went past. That one little situation, that I said yes, when my soul wanted to say no, was now way out of control.

We fail to realize what each little tiny decision means in the direction our lives move and how often we neglect our souls to say yes to comply.

In that brief moment we take the road of least resistance and then ‘forget about ‘ or at least try to. But the things we acquiesced to add up and soon there are a pile of misrepresented items of you.

The total balance sheet of you shows columns of mixed up messages. Saying yes when you mean no weakens who you are and your life has no core value to stand up.

The saying, “if you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything,” comes to mind.

Mark Nepo and other masters, authors and teachers are trying to help us find ourselves…and the real self can be found in each authentic response to all of life’s little questions.

What do you want for dinner?

Where do you want to go for a ride?

What movie do you want to watch?

We think we will become enlightened by the deep profound questions, but actually we find ourselves in the small authentic answers.

This also caught my eye…. “Well, it is no secret that slowness remembers and hurry forgets; that softness remembers and hardness forgets; and surrender remembers and fear forgets.”

“It is beautifully difficult to remember who we really are. But we help each other every time we fill up the cup of truth and hold each other up after drinking from it.”

I love beautifully difficult…and holding each other up after drinking our truths.

My life is beautifully difficult and my passion or desire or where I find I am best used is in supporting others as they drink in their truths.

A False Appearance Called You.

Between the comments, a conversation and reading, it came to me that this isn’t unusual this indirect conversations. And in fact, the bigger the ‘secret’ or point the bigger the fear and the consequences or fall out will be.

There is a payoff for not talking directly, it allows you to be in a pretend safe zone. Get that, a pretend safe zone or a pretend friendship, or a pretend relationship, a pretend love.

A pretend love. What is that?

And how is it that we are more comfortable being a pretend self, than being a truthful one.

I know I was fricking inept when it came to being myself. I had no clue. I was frustrated, anxious, nervous, a mess, a total basket case, BEING me.

How is that possible, that we wear the mask of pretend with ease even if it doesn’t cover up the resentment and fear that lies beneath?

What I know for sure is that we fear a big fall out equal to the level of fear we have IF we were to be ourselves and REALLY say what is on our minds…as well as the size or the extent of the secret.

In my family it was gigantic, earth shattering big.

In other families it is huge and life changing for sure.

But we fail to realize is that it will change the pretend fearful weird exchanges we have with each other to truthful ones.

I recall my sister asking to be my friend on face book (after a four year silence and vast differences)…and being this new frank self…I asked, “why do you want to be my friend and told her she may not like the new me and that she best to go to my blog and read.” She came back and said, “Nope, not that interested”.

While that hurt, it also set us both free from pretending. I didn’t want to begin a second time around with her and leave my frankness behind.

Now it seems quite silly and childish or immature to even entertain the idea of pretending to get along…And that whole sentence is wrong for little children are known for their frankness.

So, maybe it is not silly or childish, but just lingering on junior high, where we will do anything to get along, to be liked, to be part of a group. We pretend to get along and in doing so live a pretend life.

That to me is so tragic, that many many people live their whole lives as somebody else…or for somebody else.

Self loving is not ever having to pretend. I LOVE that.

I used to pretend to have no fear of my father.

I used to pretend that I had no resentment against my mother.

I pretended that she made wise choices or that they didn’t bother me.

I pretended and pretended and pretended, until I lost complete sight of who I was.

I looked up the definition of pretend. “To give a false appearance.”

Yes, I was afraid of my father and I acted like I wasn’t.

Each and every time we pretend or cover up a feeling or not speak our truth, we lose a little bit more of ourselves…and gain more and more of a false appearance.

Who knew that by sparing another you would create a false appearance or false self. And here is the deal, you are only fooling your self that if you don’t address each issue, that they fade away and disappear.

They don’t.

They are with you always.

For your feelings can’t be erased by pretending.

Love can’t be formed by pretending. Friendships are not bonded deeply in pretending. All pretending does is pretend that it isn’t so…when it is.

Isn’t it funny, you thought you were fooling another when indeed you were fooling your self, creating a false appearance called you.

Point of Conversation

Martha Beck writes (In Leaving the Saints) about the way she was taught to communicate in the Mormon Church, “through continuous indirect communication, I learned that a good Mormon girl doesn’t travel in the dimension of direct communication.”

This is how I believe most of us are taught and then call people who do talk directly and succinctly… bold, brash, cold and even bitter.

 Direct communication is scary after talking indirectly and around most sensitive issues, to just say what it is you need to say… feels terrifying.

What I know is that there are reasons we are taught indirectness in our speaking. We are told either by words or actions ‘not to go there’ and we don’t, we learn to talk in a pretend roundabout way.

We say things we don’t mean or feel…and instead say things that are not true…out of fear of getting in trouble if we don’t. Mostly we are taught to shut off our feelings and not to be so sassy and say what is on our minds. We are taught that indirect conversations are best for all concerned, it isn’t good to go to the heart of any issue.

What I know for sure, is that I went along with the indirect conversations in my home and it costs me greatly in the end.

Now, direct open frank conversations are the only ones I care to engage in, the others seem like disconnected words. Words that are not attached to the person or their truths.

I had lived for years believing that words alone were powerful that they had this great impact upon the land, until I learned that unless words are with reality and truth, they are simply just words…meaningless.

Minus meaning or meaning less than what needs to be said.

There is no difference between what I say and what I do, they match.

In the past, what I felt and what I said were worlds apart, like the polar opposites in life. I never felt that I could actually say what I feel, let alone act according to my feelings. I was taught to act against my feelings for the sake and happiness of others, out of love.

If you love someone ‘you spare them your true feelings’ is the gist of what I was taught.

And now I have learned if you love someone they above all deserve your truth.

In the end it boils down to you either have a direct meaningful relationship or you have an indirect one.

Indirect, do you care to guess its meaning? “Indirect, diverging from the direct course, roundabout. Not proceeding straight and to the point or object.”

What I have learned in the past six years is that very few speak directly to the point…most are speaking in roundabout ways, they are trying to skirt the mountain of truths, to spare their feelings and the feelings of others.

In fact, when speaking indirectly you will avoid feelings and miss the point of the conversation. 

 

Feeling the Unbounded Heart.

In Martha Beck's book, "Leaving the Saints" she writes,

" I recall its horror and beauty, the enormity of the things I have lost and the incalculable preciousness of the things I have gained. I wouldn't give up the journey - not a moment of it. On the other hand I have no desire to live it again."

My journey from not knowing to knowing has equal parts horror and beauty, for it seemed with each new glimpse into the vestiges of evil sprang a new wondrous insight and freedom…

The dichotomy of the polar opposites and how you are plunged into the horrors that you failed to see and or acknowledge to your self, and then the beautiful release from them into the wide-open space of freedom leaves me breathless.

We somehow believe if we sit smack dab in the middle of the horrors of our lives, we will get left there, that you will sink as if in quick sand, but that isn’t so.

If you don’t go into what frightens and scares you, you will live in the space between.

No terror and then no beauty.

You are in the middle land, the purgatory space, neither heaven nor hell…

When you leave the comfortable space of no feelings and dare to walk fearlessly into the emotions and truths you were too frightened to see as a child, it feels alive, electric and the enormity of it all leaves you overwhelmed.

Fear keeps us out of those dark corridors where our unexpressed, unexamined life lives. And by leaving that door closed you live a life that isn’t alive…in its truest sense.

You are forced to live without feelings and free expressions.

Martha is so right…for I too recall the horror and the beauty, the enormity of the things I have lost and the incalculable preciousness of the things I have gained.

You truly lose the world as you have known it, but you gain a self you have never met.

I lived in this the middle ground for 46 years, where fear kept me motionless, frozen and lifeless. I followed life, but I did not live it freely.

I never wavered from the path of least resistance, I had no individual thoughts and I was not connected to my body and its feelings.

The middle ground certainly will not allow you to see the horrors, but it also keeps from you the intimate beauty of love and freedom.

Stretched into the zone of nothingness…but keeping the static going so you never dip into the terror that lurk at the sidelines of your life... your life’s goal is to remain numb.

You are frozen in place and have no conditions.

No rules of your own, in fact I see this as being a lump, where the dark murky waters can wash over you and you feel not its affect, nor do you try and get out of the way…and sun is shining just above the surface, but you make no move to reach toward it.

It is living and letting all manner of things happen and you don’t move…and the delights of life await and you are unable to reach.

Waking up in this state left me horrified of what I had allowed and how I had not been aware…and as Martha writes about the Lion stage of awakening.

“When we have discovered the hearts capacity to face any situation, the joys and sorrows of existence as they are, we awaken to freedom. Then the Golden Lion speaks with a roar. Out of the mouth of the lion comes the undaunted voice of truth, the liberation of the unbounded heart.”

It is the liberation of the unbounded heart…whereas before it was wrapped up like a mummy unfeeling anything.

And she goes on to say about the third stage of awakening, “In the last stage the lion gives way to the child, to an original innocence. This is the child of the Spirit for who all things are new. For this Divine child there is wonder, ease and a playful heart. The child is at home in reality of the present, able to enjoy, to respond, to forgive, and to share the blessings of being alive.”

(I best give you the first stage as well…”In the camel stage of awakening, we make ourselves available to the Spirit through humility, prayer, repetition, and manual labor)

The first stage was where I spent most of my life, ‘repetition and manual labor…not so much humility or prayer.

The tumultuous unwrapping of going from living life bound up in the beliefs and thoughts and affects of abuse etc, to undoing it all is extremely horrifying and beautiful in equal parts.

Isn’t there a saying from the bible, about ‘what is bound on earth is bound in heaven…? I believe that it is talking about the heart.

There is truly an incalculable preciousness of feeling the unbounded heart.