I have just started seeing a therapist again - it made sense really for me to do so since embarking on qualitative research, it can be daunting and it requires the researcher to bracket off their own issues, values, concerns, thoughts etc etc - well how can I do that until I know what these are.
I have chosen an existentialist therapist because the word 'authenticity' has been resonating with me recently and I wonder how authentic I am, I never feel I know really - wondering how authentic we as children were allowed to be. Didn't we all have to be what 'they' wanted us to be? did we develop a kind of proxy self to survive? I certainly dont seem to know when I am being ME - who is this ME? When I am chattering nineteen to the dozen,.... is that ME? When I am being the life and soul of the party ... is that ME? When I am sitting quietly alone ... is that ME? sometimes when I talk a lot, especially when people are really listening (eg students) I wonder... is that ME, It feels sometimes as if I am observing myself and I would much rather stop doing this.
One thing that struck me during this first session was this. I was telling my therapist - I will call him just G - about how I feel sometimes as if my whole history is a large jigsaw puzzle, 5000 pieces, that someone has knocked onto the floor and during my first long bout of therapy I began to put some of the pieces together creating little cameos of memories. But there is still to much fragmentation. Then I said that part of the problem seemed to be that I dont remember much of my childhood (is that so for others?).
G came back with something that really makes sense. He said 'so it's like some of the pieces of the puzzle are blank, they have nothing on them'. I liked that and have been thinking about it since. It isn't so much that they are completely blank but what is on the faces of those pieces is a kind of greyness, an emptiness, a deadness, nothing there but grey colours and swirling blankness. And maybe just maybe that is what my childhood was like - maybe that is why I cant remember because there is nothing to remember and maybe the dead feelings I have when someone asks me what memories stand out for me - emptiness in my head and I have no answer. I had to be dead to survive.
It makes sense to me and maybe means that it is ok to accept this as an explanation of my feeling of nothingness but emotion - emotions of fear mainly. Well emptiness and void and greyness are scary to a child aren't they?
3 comments:
Authenticity... phew, that's a biggie for anyone eh Jill, but especially a child raised in a culture such as EBism, with its unacknowledged "whited sepulchure; inside, ravening wolves" ethos. (Or perhaps I should modernise that to "Windowless shut-others-out halls; inside, Hales-worshippers bereft of love and honesty.)
It was certainly my experience growing up in the peebs, that the default position was Correct Outer Facade to be Maintained at All Cost. If there was dissonance or confusion with inner thoughts and feelings, we were told "It's the natural mind that questions things - the spiritual mind takes it to the Lord and He will give understanding."
Thus when I was six years of age and my EB parents were being disciplined by the church, I was able - with my older siblings - to leave the family home with barely a backward glance, and move in with another EB family for as long as it took my parents to "get right". (What I probably didn't consider at age six, was that that COULD have been FOREVER - luckily, it wasn't.)
Onward and upward... I do remember some comments by the late Roger Stott about the Chinese idea that we all wear five levels of mask - I think he called it the Parade of Masks.
1. The one we wear for strangers
2. The one we wear at work (with colleagues)
3. The one we wear when among family and close friends
4. The one we only occasionally reveal in moments of intimacy and confiding to a very small number of people
5. The final one perhaps appears only a few times in moments of great stress
And if you take the last one off? There is nothing there.
More thoughts from people better at elucidating than I... Charles Finn's poem 'Please Hear What I Am Not Saying' - I find this a comforting and enlightening read, especially when struggling with dodgy levels of honesty and authenticity in myself or others. The original version is at www.poetrybycharlescfinn.com/pleasehear
Oh pomkiwi how I love the way you write - it comes across so honest to me.
And yes authenticity is indeed a BIG one! I am not sure that everyone raised in the EB took this default position that you speak of - I certainly did with knobs on!! but my second brother did not, he was a rebel from the moment he took his first breath! And was always a free thinker. He has incredible memories of our childhood and when I am lucky he fills in my blanks a bit.
And oh yes that downer on the 'natural mind' - i remember my other brother who is still in the EB talking to me (or rather AT me) about that. Every time I asked him something or reasoned something he said "Well that's your university education talking there, you must relinguish your natural mind".
I never had the experience of having to leave my parents and move in with another family - I cannot imagine the turmoil that could have brought, Would love to hear more about that some time
I had forgotten those five masks that Roger referred to- how I miss him still. I am not sure I totally go along with it because even when I am at work I can wear different masks - the same masks I wear at different times. Maybe I am just one muddled up lady!!
I will go take a look at the poem.
i am happy to find it thanks for sharing it here. Nice work.
Post a Comment