I Wrote a Song

I wrote a song. Not too surprising, I’ve written many. But was one of the better ones. I know that because I was inspired by a combination of something I’d read and something I heard. What I read was a poem Voices by Diana DeLuca, about women’s struggles with abuse and our misogynistic, patriarchal, culture. I don’t remember what the song was, but immediately afterward I heard the first verse of a song, based on Diana’s poem, in my head. Over the next few weeks, I wrote the two verses, set them to music, then got the full text of the poem and wrote more verses, added a bridge and finished the whole thing up. That’s the way it seems to work for me, music I have to work hard on turns out forgettable, while the stuff that just “comes to me” is by far the best.

Ah, but that’s not the whole story. You see, something about those words really got under my skin. While I was writing it, I started feeling off, but I really know something was wrong when it seemed that I couldn’t feel any emotions at all! It was like my brain was covered with a thick, white, blanket, and everything was numbed out. It was pretty weird. I knew that my emotions were there, I just couldn’t feel them, and that had me worried. I spent some time in meditation, trying to understand what was going on, but it wasn’t until a couple of days later that it hit me: Working and performing that song had triggered unconscious memories of my own abuse and my automatic defense mechanisms had kicked in. I had detached completely and numbed out all emotions.

Friends tried to help me “cheer up,” but it didn’t make any difference. I wanted to care, I did! But feelings just wouldn’t come. I was torn between wanting them to just give up and go away, and a tiny fear that they actually would. The logical part of my mind knew that this was really messed up, but I didn’t know what was going on. Nothing undermines your sense of self like having your feelings betray you! I’m on the upside now, but I have a ways to go. The key seemed to be the realization, once that happened, the blanket began to lift.

This whole episode was a real surprise, and, maybe, a gift. The process was uncomfortable and a bit frightening, but it had given me an enormous respect for how far I’ve come over the past 50+ years! My friends are fond of telling me how much I’ve changed in just the past couple of years, but that’s nothing compared to what it was like to be nearly emotionless, as I was in my twenties! At the time, of course, I had no idea what I was doing. I had shut things down so early that I had no memory of any other way to be.

Looking back on it now, it looks like a kind of hell: A place where you can’t allow yourself to feel anything but fear, fear of being caught caring about something that could be turned against you. You can’t be passionate about anything, or anyone, and you have to watch people who might want to care for you, get frustrated and walk away, because you won’t ever respond with honest love or affection.

This is a situation, writ large, that happens to all of us, all the time, in the small. It happens to all of us every day, and we are so used to it that we don’t even notice. We hear a snatch of song that makes us happy, or sentimental, or we see a face that makes us nervous or afraid, and we accept those feelings without a second thought. Those feelings are real, they are never questioned! But what if we did? What if we stopped assuming that feelings have any kind of reality to them? What if a feeling was just a feeling, and not a fact? How many times have you had a feeling about something that turned out to be wrong? What would our world be like, if we didn’t allow every person with a scary story, tell us who to love, who to hate, who to trust, who to betray, what to do, what to think? I imagine it would be a very different world, wouldn’t you?

As always, I welcome your questions and comments.

Take care.

In search of roots

Yesterday’s meditation led to some surprises that allowed me to “connect the dots” between things that I had no idea were related, and gave me a major Ah Ha, about my life.

Last Sunday was the last day of level I of my hypnotherapy training, and I volunteered to be the client in a demonstration of interview technique. I needed an issue to be interviewed about. Nothing much was going on with me at the time, so I just picked “stomach discomfort.” (It was bothering my very slightly at the time.) To give you a little background, my stomach has be bothering me, on and off, for years. It comes and goes. Occasionally, usually when I under stress, it flairs up into a hard knot, but much of the time it’s not particularly noticeable. Sometimes it becomes a heavy, bloated feeling that can last for weeks and completely erases my appetite. Despite all the years I have been doing this stuff and the work I have done on myself, I have never been able to get a handle on what was going on. In terms of body issues, it has been the oddest duck of all. I could never so much get so much as the tinniest hint about what was behind it. It was just *there,* seemingly without cause or roots.

In the interview process the teacher probed enough to give me some new insights into how it behaved and when it started. I hadn’t really thought about that before. When asked, it seemed to me that I first noticed it when I was 18 or 19 and going to community college. Then I would often get a knot in my stomach sitting in class and heartburn during tests. At the time, I figured that it was caused by having to hunch over in those small chair/desk combination things that schools use. Being six feet tall and left handed, the 4 inch different in height between my elbow and desk caused me to hunch over quite a bit to write notes or take a test. And that’s where we left it, it was just a demonstration after all. I made a mental note to look into it when I got home.

Yesterday I had my chance. Once I was relaxed and in the zone, I was quickly shown that it went back quite a bit further than I thought. I was insistently presented with an incident happened when I was about five years old, even though I thought it had nothing to do with it. I believe I’ve written about it before: it involved me taking a toy from some other yard in the neighborhood, my parents finding out and punishing me while I refused to tell them where I got it from, and my going to considerable lengths to sneak it from my parents return the toy without my parents knowing about it. This incident has been on my mind lately, partly because it seems to me that I behaved rather oddly, almost like a robot, in a way. The more I thought about it, the less sense it made, and, yesterday, I made have discovered why.

With enough digging, I uncovered, what appears to be, a case of sexual abuse involving me, a neighbor girl about the same age and a grown man. Pictures might have been involved. I say maybe because it’s really not clear and I don’t really see a need to make the events clear, what I think is most important is how they effected me.

What I see now is that something happened that I felt really bad about, and I decided that the whole thing was my fault, (there might have been threats involved) especially what happened to the girl. Though it only happened to me once, I suspect now that she had been suffering under it for quite some time. I had wanted to, or liked it, at first, I think, so afterward I decided that emotions were bad, desire was bad, and did my best to I shut off all those emotions from that day forward. Hence that robot-like way I felt during the toy incident. Which, I believe, took place right after the abuse incident.

Other things that came up. One was a disgust of naked bodies, especially young ones. Another was the distrust, fear and/or significant discomfort I had felt around any girl that got close to me while growing up. I suspect that, if it wasn’t for the overwhelming influence of male hormones, I probably would have steered clear of all girls, forever. Though, oddly, I have always felt more comfortable around women than men. On some level, men have always felt threatening to me. It’s not a huge deal, just a vague unease that I don’t have when I’m just around women. This also explains why my relationships have been so dysfunctional for most of my life.

I’m sure that there’s more to discover about this, my stomach is acting up even as I write this. That said, I have since felt a subtle sense of peace in my soul, and getting to sleep last night was noticeably less troubled than I can ever remember it being. So I accomplished something.

As hypnotherapy students, we are warned to never use our skills to attempt to recover lost memories, for good reason. That is why I have worked to steer clear of as much of what happened as possible. I truly only what to know enough to uncover what decisions I made and why I made them so I can process them out, and, at the very least, to get my stomach to stop bothering me.