I woke up late today. Felt unprepared for my first session. Found myself doing the thing that I was complaining about in the last post (the therapist/speakers sharing their own stuff).
Felt weird about it, but reminded myself I am not responsible for others, that things are not up to me, and that sometimes I am just a cog in the universal machine.
Later it occurred to me that this is what it feels like when I am looking for the adult. I am waiting for someone to be the guide... because I feel young. I want someone to help me through the experience, or tell me what to do. I want to trust in the adults around me, but instead of just seeing them as they are, I have this expectation that they be better... that I be better. And that if they can't be, then I cannot trust them and need to pull away.
Last session was difficult. People wrestling with their core wounds, lashing out, defensive, reactive, desiring nothing more than to be told they are ok, loveable, good, capable, but instead wounding one another and reinforcing the wounds in themselves.
-I am overly reminded of all my relationships. My mom says she would stop them, ask them how they get back to their vulnerable self, to make it safe again in the room. It's hard for me to say, actually mom I think they are being honest in the room because they are being so dishonest outside of it.
Last night, I had this weird anxiety dream. It was something like my office, or home, and there were people around and everyone was talking about a mistake I had made. It might have been a tragic mistake even. The people -who were all my friends and family, were talking about it, kind of, not talking to me, not talking about me necessarily. To some extent, I felt like a ghost in their presence. In some ways it actually felt like that -that I was attending the gathering in my space after the tragedy. So I wasn't part of the conversation or defending myself to them, though I may have been internally. Instead, I just noticed that every surface of the space was covered in this deep dust... inches thick, like the volcano had gone off... like there were years of neglect that had led to this. It wasn't described by others, it was like everyone could see it, but no one would name it. Like "duh." But no one was talking about what could have caused me to neglect this space that I should have been able to keep up, no one was acknowledging their role in it either.
When I woke up, I just had these images of the dust, almost like decaying skin, decaying flesh. The inevitable accumulation of time and neglect. There was a tragedy unnamed. It didn't have to be this way. Not that decay isn't inevitable, but that this was supposed to be a life giving space, and it was let go of... where was the attention and energy turned to? Where was the support that would have imposed a different way? Why didn't anyone know?
My mom shared a video with me, an interview with Parker Palmer. They are talking about depression, regret, social cruelty. He shares his poem (Harrowing) in which the narrator talks about pulling up the weeds "Looking for the roots of what went wrong" and plowing the fields every year "to unearth last year's reasons..." and realizing that this process is actually scarring, painful, not helpful... acceptance of what is, and letting things grow is ultimately the healing/growth etc. "The farmer plows to plant a greening season." (as opposed to what he'd been doing which is just scarring the land).
Do I just focus on what is wrong all the time, rather than plowing to plant a greening season?
Or am I trying to keep things from going to dust, so I stir them up because no one else will?
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