HelenzArt-life-musings

Category: beginnings

  • Well, here I am!

    The beginning of 2025, a new year, not a new me.  A different me? Perhaps yes. Physically, there has been a renewing and replacing of the biological cells, so yes, in a way. There’s certainly changes in perspectives.

    Integrations of that which has gone before. Mulling over ones personal history. Even considerations of ones parents’ histories, ancestral history too, if known or surmised. 

    Partaking in therapy with Chris was to be an adventuring into history.  Now history can be taken as that which has been recorded.  That often assumes that to be a written record.  Yet there is arguably an authors perspective in that. It is said that battles will only be written about by the Victor’s rather than the losers.  Not entirely true perhaps, but discernable differences in accounts may be seen.

    There is an accounting in the body, too, though.  To read ‘The body keeps the score’ by Bessel van de Kolk can be helpful when the time is right to find an understanding of this.  And what I was to bring to my therapy sessions was my inner coded history. Written indelibly with invisible ink, where the light needed to be shone on it in a particular way.  There were also multiple layers where the light needed to come from one way and then another. 

    That first discovery session was an easing into a new way, learning how to read myself. To not take others’ narrations and perspectives to adopt as my own. 

    Admittedly, after that first session  and the overwhelm of emotion, to then actual partake in a finding of a potential source for those in the second session was to teeter on the edge of considered madness.  Yet that strangeness of feeling that all ‘felt’ right and sound was to feel how sane it was. 

    Now, having arrived home, with a relief of spent emotions, to be with my hubby, I could be an observer for a while. Bring a distancing to that which I had experienced, or rather re-experienced with Chris.  To be honest, and in retrospect, I have always had an ability to compartmentalise, segregate, and isolate.  Part of my genetic makeup both known and unknown, its my innate survivor mode, as well as, perhaps, a cultivated coping mechanism. To feel deeply and compassionately, but without ‘falling apart’.  I can be moved to tears, emotionally engaged,  yet with an engaged resilience too. 

    OK, it still felt like a bomb had blasted my world apart. Not dissimilar to my grief at the loss of our son. There was also a disbelief that these things could have occurred and not been recalled at the surface of memory. Yet, in that observational space where I could monitor that response, it felt an absolute truth of my experiencing.  Non deniability.  It actually made sense of other events.

    Yes, the questioning in and of myself was…  ‘Am I fantasising, or deluded, or insane?’ And I kept coming back to the absolute certainty of ‘this happened to me’. 

    As the following day dawned, I had things, well, images and suggestions of happenings,  arise in my mind.  Not thoughts as much as feelings. Echoes of events and occurrences that did add to actual thinking of ‘I’m going insane’ yet these too were simply those encoded writings held deep within. Held within my subconscious, in the phenomena of being a bodied person. 

    These etched moments were to be followed as I continued into finding me and another session with Chris.

  • I Take a Deep Breath.

    So the wanting to stop smoking is a by me, for me. In the past it’s always been tried for the sake of others. That wasn’t wrong it was simply perhaps not heart felt enough. I have tried gums and patches. Herbal cigarette substitutes and vapes not like the real thing and I crave the real thing. It was a deep need that isn’t really rational when, as a well informed and intelligent woman, I know the harm it can do to my body and to others around me. I can visualise the money going up in smoke but that makes no difference to the drive to smoke. I wanted a quick fix, little effort required. Find a hypnotist in the hope and expectation that with a seeming magic wand and an ‘abra cadabra’ they would make that drive disappear. Vanish in the proverbial puff of smoke! An ‘on stage’ like hypnotic implanted suggestion to be averse to cigarettes. A Derran Brown type that would click their fingers and ‘ta dah’ it’s gone. I’m sure there are those around, a friend of mine did that decades ago. One session and a tape to reinforce that if needed.

    It took a lot of courage to even dial the number for the researched and chosen Hypnotherapist. Even more to accept an appointment, then, at the appointed time, to climb the stairs to his office. I didn’t know what to expect but I walked in and felt at ease, most of me wanted to be there. To make changes to how I was. The man I met was calm and friendly, non clinical and although I know they are likely to develop skills to put people at ease this was all so comfortable. With little prompting I began setting out the where’s of when I started smoking. Accessing those known ‘facts’ of my life. He talked me through the process and took me on my first journey to meeting me. I recall revisiting that 8 year old who made a choice with what she thought she knew. Brought to see an alternative of how life would look without the smoking. Though I don’t recall all the session, I walked out of there and felt invincible. This was it, I was no longer going to be a smoker. No urge to light up, buoyant in step. That evening no drive to smoke, no antsy feeling. He did it. I seemed to have got what I wanted.

    The next morning I was in floods of tears. Totally bewildered about what was happening to me. That was scary. I was awash in emotion that seemingly had no focus. I was just adrift in an ocean of nothing that I could, nor still can, give words to. I called Chris, the hypnotherapist, and asked what was all this about. He said that in all likelihood there was a lot more to the need to smoke than I had ever assumed. That it wasn’t simply a ‘habit’ to be changed. This was my next choice, and it was a no brainer. I was going to peep into the crack and see what was there. An appointment was made for a week later and in the intervening days see what arose.

    I lit up a cigarette after the phone call, it’s a soother, and a deeply rooted identifier, and although it was a key to suppression it was also going to be a key to opening too. Life’s full of paradoxes. I seemingly knew I was going to radically change and that was going to rock the foundations of my relationships. Relationships with me and with those around me. As both me, and they, were going to have to get used to the shifts, it could make the transitions easier if somethings were obviously the same.

    Perhaps it’s just as well that I didn’t foresee the pain that this was going to bring. Though with the seeing that I now have, deep within it was known. I was more than ready to face the intensity of feeling that meeting my past would raise, otherwise I wouldn’t have had the invitation, and I wouldn’t have done it. I would have been able to continue in a denial that anything had ever been other than I knew on the surface.

    So though I didn’t initially get what I wanted, which was to stop smoking, I got what I innately needed. A crack in the shell, a ladder into the void. Wings to lift me up.

    So what arose in those intervening days will be in my next post, which, now I’ve found the will to write of my experiences again, shouldn’t be as long to wait for.

  • On a path of self neglect.

    So between leaving junior school and going to secondary school, we were supposed to move so dad could start a new job with more responsibility and better pay. That didn’t happen, his boss found a way to keep us in the same place. He was where he wanted to be I suppose, I was just a kid that wasn’t told anything, which was simply the way it always was. My mum had been through various jobs from shop work to barmaid, trying out nursing was the next thing. My parents developed a social life, they started playing darts for a pub team in town. New friendships for them and I was often included in the extra social events that happened. So for me pubs were simply another place to be, part of growing up, talking to strangers or half familiar faces. Nothing felt as threatening in that environment. Rarely were there other children around, if there were then I played with them. If not, I wasn’t bothered as I would talk to the other people if they started to chat. Some did their best to include me.

    My brother was never with us, he was already going his own way. Sometimes in trouble, so the police would visit but he was often just a passing body.

    My mum left home for awhile when I was 13. Stayed with some female friends, I suppose she was trying to sort out her life. She came home. Within a year she was gone. In town for 3 weeks at a friends flat and then, poof! Gone. My summer of being 13.

    Now, I will admit that although I was probably seen as a ‘daddies’ girl, that was more because I spent most of my free time out in the fields and sheds where he was working. Yet, she was my mum. She bought me my first pair of ‘grown up’ shoes, small platforms that were the trend in the ‘70’s. We weren’t best friends nor was she someone to take into ones confidence. Yet she vanished off the face of my world. Never to be heard from again until I was married and had a girl of my own. I went back to school with that, my best friend knew. Huh! my only friend knew.

    To be brutally honest I wasn’t actually that bothered. Yes, it hurt, yet I wasn’t outwardly emotional. It certainly stung when my 14th birthday came round and there wasn’t even a card from her. Yet even then I had a matter of factness to it. A ‘that’s the way it is-ness’. Practical acceptance. My dad and me just got on with running our home together. He didn’t talk to me about her leaving, and I never asked. My brother wasn’t really home much so we didn’t talk about it either. A big, non-event. That unknowingly shaped my behaviour.

    I say unknowingly because I didn’t consciously think I would become a searcher of tender touches from where ever I could. It wasn’t promiscuity to start with. As I have said before I lost my virginity very early, to a semi stranger. Since then I had a couple of boyfriends at school, one was physically very mature, as was I, and we did take things all the way. The summer of being 14, I began a relationship with someone older by a few years. I didn’t disabuse him of what he thought my age was, though he knew I was still at school. Our school had sixth form years, to do ‘A’ levels, as they were then, so it was an easy assumption to make on his part.

    I sank into the fact that he was wanting to be with me, even if it did seem that there was always an expectation of sex on his part, and I willingly obliged. Why? Because that’s what I did, I never said no. Yes, on reflection the relationship wasn’t healthy. But I had someone who seemed to want me. He wasn’t keen on me being with my friend, or doing my own thing. I was to be with him and his friends. And yes, sex was an expectation no matter how I felt. I did what he wanted, that was how I thought things were meant to be. Our sex was unprotected so the inevitable happened. I was pregnant just after turning 15. I knew fairly quickly and went to my GP. I also knew that I couldn’t have a child and bring it up myself so I chose to have an abortion. The Doc called my dad to the surgery and the arrangements made. All very matter of fact. No, histrionics, little emotion shown. Again we had no discussions, I went to hospital, had the procedure spoke to a Doctor before discharge. Refused contraception and left. Did I feel guilty? Honestly? Not on the surface, but I did feel that I had done the right thing in that moment. It was just another thing that happened, was dealt with and then sank to some underworld beyond caring. Never raised as a subject between me and my dad ever again. No social workers came to talk to me nor any police. That my dad spoke to the police I did discover a few months later when the ex boyfriend caught up with me outside the school gates and began to make my life miserable!

  • An idyllic start?

    The loss of a loved one causes a reflection on the past.  For me that was my relationship with Gavin and family interactions. Laughter, tears, hopes and wishes, his and mine.  When that has settled, and it does settle. That looking for purpose, arises again. Looking back over ones own life, my own relationship as daughter to parents and being a sister. Perhaps even trying to see where those influences of my childhood reflected in my own parenting of Gavin. 

    So what did I recall of my childhood. From my recollections, it’s wide open spaces, in a rural setting.  Playing outside for hours. Ditches and streams to build dams in. Clay delved out with a toy spade or simply my hands to craft mini cups and plates for the fairies and creatures that were my heart felt companions.    Living in a home that came with my dad’s job, mum worked for a while at the same place.  A plant nursery.  Summers of blue skies, tall grasses. The scent and sight of a rainbow coloured field of roses. Stretching row upon row along the fields. The out-buildings, old pigstyes, that now smelt of flowers and earth, derv and oil from the old tractor.  Echoing with the Swallows that nested through the heat and Robins that sang in the winter.  A short walk to the village school with my older brother.  Sunday roasts round the kitchen table.  No other children nearby, no play dates only birthday parties with school friends.  Idyllic!? Yes, in its way.  Dad, quiet and a dry sense of humour. His smell,  of earth and tobacco in a woollen jumper that itched a bit when he gave a hug.  Mum loud, long nails that she filed and painted. over powering perfume.  Occassional seamstress or knitter.  Smoker and failed dieter.  Brother who is 4 years older.  Clever, had a spiteful streak. Chinese burns. Dropped me once when giving a piggy back! Cracked my head on the hearth.  Yet I still looked up to him.  I love them all. They were family, I knew no different, I didn’t know any other families to compare them to,  even if I had a notion  that comparisons were to be had.  So I read my books, an avid reader, and those famous fives and faraway trees of fiction were the fiction of different lives to mine. I didn’t want to be like them. I just wanted to be in the adventures with them. Crayons and colouring, crafting and glueing.  Life was good, at least I felt so in those early, seemingly care free years of not knowing anything other than this was being loved. The safety of a bed in a room of my own, a toy or two, food on  the table, clothes, even if hand me downs.  Mum, dad, brother, dog, and other pets all as it ought to be for a young girl.  Things changed a bit when I got to 8. That is for my next instalment…..

  • Taking that step.

    Its odd when there has been such turmoil of emotion that there comes  a time where that flattens out.  The peaks and troughs of storm tossed seas lessen to swells. Not a calm but a bobbing up and down where ones  less likely to be swamped, still the occasional push under by a rogue wave that blindsides the heart. 

    In that calming, one rests,  as high emotions are tiring and perhaps to start wondering what is there to do, or be!  Where are the next steps in this life to head towards?  Because loss does that. It asked me to look at me and what I want.  I wanted Gavin to walk through the door and smile, and in a way he did.  I felt that his leaving was an invitation to walk through a door that his transition had opened within me. Could I take that first step? What was to change?

    The biggest habit in my life is being a smoker.  Never stopped when being pregnant, and yes, I know all the reasons why it’s not good for me, but that doesn’t seem to matter. Rationally, I know I shouldn’t do it, yet I’ve tried many times and not succeeded.  Perhaps it was time to give it a try in a different way.  I felt now was the time for a different approach. One not tried before.  Hypnotherapy.

    It wasn’t going to be easy yet somehow, I sort of felt that I had done the hardest thing ever in my life, and that was to say farewell to Gavin.  Now, given what I could recall of my early life, that’s saying something! I needed help, not pills or patches or replacements but a person who could help, and I happened to find one. Serendipity, Universal coincidence, Fate, Luck, Magic, call it what you like but I found who  I needed to, when I needed too and I’m most grateful.  

    So, in my coming writings, I’m going to share my experiences of what I thought I knew and what came to be rediscovered.  A voyage to the weird and scary, fantastical imagination or deep disturbance, yet simply my truth.

    I choose to share my experiences and my perspectives.  Feel free to judge them or not, comment or not, its always your choice. Share them with others if that feels right.

    My next blog will be what I thought I knew before therapy! 

  • Where am I going!?

    When I was made redundant from work 6 months after our son died, I was in a better position to help my husband yet I intuitively knew I wasn’t there to rescue him or divert him from his grief.  I wasn’t going to be able to drag or bully him out of his depression or helplessness or any other feeling that he was having, regardless of whether he was intent on denying them or not.   I could only help myself. To carry on embracing my emotions, and to share that, or rather my,  way of being in his environment.  To share that it’s OK to feel helpless, lost, floundering in a sea of what’s the point. 

    So, I cried when I needed to cry, and I still do that. Its not often but I do have the heaving sobs and snotty nosed cries and always feel better after.  Emotion is energy in motion, it needs to be helped in moving through.  That’s perhaps why laughter is good for you, it moves all of the body with joy. 

    Obviously I wasn’t going to hang around my hubby waiting for his next time of needed solace. So where was I going, there’s only so much busy-ness a body can do, house clean, laundry done, dogs walked etc.

    I began sitting, looking at a golden soul thread that was pulled by my sons departure. I didn’t know that I was pondering on that, but in hindsight, that’s what it was. An invitation to find a different path. To perhaps weave a different cloth in what may remain of my life.  To step out of being daughter, sister, wife, mother, all those facets that have kept me in a seeming place. Doing what I have always done, try to fit in to what I thought others wanted or needed, ‘people please’, so as to find worth from others as I had none in and of myself. Though that too is an hindsight.   How can loss shape such thoughts? Grief,  tears one apart, dismantles a lot of what one thought one knew, opens up those darkened and hidden spaces where we have hidden from ourselves.  That is an opportunity to reorganise, to fling wide the doors and windows and really have a good look into those shadows, and maybe shine a little light.  Maybe with the loss of one purpose perhaps one looks for another and at my age, the patterns can change. Survival needs change. There is a roof over head, money available, children grown.  There is less wanting to climb the social ladder,  seeing that we have enough stuff and perhaps it’s time to gather up the inner treasure and make more or better use of what is already here.

    So,  where was I going? I was going to begin finding me.