HelenzArt-life-musings

Tag: finding my way

  • To sit in the cool of late winter….

    To sit in the cool of late Winter, seeing miniscule signs of the Spring to come.  A leaf bud, a nodding Snowdrop is to feel a hopefulness.

    I want signs of hopefulness as I  feel that this work with Chris is going to plunge me deep within.  To take me beneath my surface of understanding and perhaps unmade what I think I am.

    Why would I feel that?  Because I have felt a depth of my world where there is no bottom, that walk to the deepening slope of a swimming pool where you begin to float. Where only you can save yourself by starting to swim.  Yet all I actually have to do is surrender to the water, allow myself to enter the flow and trust that by relaxing into that I will float or atleast not sink. 

    That’s a scary moment.  Can I trust myself with this?  I feel  that I can, and that is a hope. 

    I’m still edging round emotions  about my mother and brother.  Perhaps a way of becoming accustomed to seeing them in other ways. 

    I’m brought to memories of the split with my husband.  The lonely, desperate race through the streets to reach a shelter that may give me a room to stay in.  Trying to get to the office so I can get social help to feed myself.  Adamant that my husband has done the right thing to protect our children and himself.  Such overwhelming feelings of total loss of all I knew.

    The body can only sustain such feelings for so long.  Become exhausted and shut off or down. Yet the thinking in the head can be so continuous that there feels little respite.

    Once I had a room and a little money.  I started to sort through things, and I was drawn to journal for awhile.  In that, I returned to what I surfacely remembered of my brother.  That was as far as that went yet it was like an invitation to feel deeper which I denied as I was so consumed with setting things right for my family.  I’ll admit that suicide was considered, and strangely it came quite easily to make those considerations of How’s and where’s.  That too was denied. I needed to take the consequences of my actions of fraud. Stand up and be the right person.  In that fraud I did have sensation s that this was being done by a different me.  Of being in a sealed room whilst another signed the papers. Lied and made false bank statements to show my husband.  A more remoteness of action. 

    In my next session with Chris,  I took me to this time of my life, or rather my subconsciousness did. This time, Chris asked whether my subconscious has a name.  He said it didn’t matter if it did or not, but she does. Eileen, it’s good to know that.  It allows a familiarity.  She shows me how things then might well have surfaced, yet I hadn’t been ready then, but seeds had been planted that are pertinent to what arises next. 

    So in that session I revisited those feelings of having lost it all. The overwhelming substance of having nothing.  Tears and sobs. The shame and guilt for having done that to my world of family. To hear the disappointment in my father’s voice. The pain in my mother in laws words.  The husband that can’t bear to look at you. 

    So much pain. Yet survived. Perhaps that was the purpose of the session to see what one survives.  Preparing me to revisit so much and yet understand that it was survived then, and will be again in any revisiting. 

    Again, the utter relief of spent emotions when returning from inner world to Chris and his safe and comfortable room.  It’s a lot to take in and needs time to sift and sort.  The skipping in time frames was surprising, though necessary to my inner world and I will go with that. I trust that.

  • 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.

  • When I was just a little girl.

    There’s a Doris Day song, ‘Que sera sera‘, (‘what ever will be will be’) that, though written back in 1956 when my mum was 21 years old, fits with these retrospective views. I’m going to share my first experiencing of a therapy session with Chris so as to give an insight as to how there can be an opening up to what lies beneath.

    I was walking into the realm of what ever will be, will be. I had no preconceived notions about where this next meeting with Chris would take me.

    As I walked up the stairs to his office, there was trepidation for sure. A small knot of not wanting this in my chest and a clenching of muscles. Tension. Yet my intuition was saying ‘go for it’. It’s hard to explain that ‘gut’ feeling’ when you haven’t really listened to it much before. Yet I felt it and heeded it, just as I had when I traversed the terrain of grief, I was listening to that guidance.

    Chris has a wonderful warmth to him and as he took my jacket and invited me to sit in the squishy, comfy, reclinable chair. I had no doubt that I was where I needed to be. We chatted around my experiences through my week. The sadness and tears, the presence of my mother. He shared how hypnotherapy may work by allowing a quietening of the known consciousness., the working, accessible, memory. To perhaps let my subconscious show me what needed to be seen. I start to relax and as the session begins the chair is reclined, my shoes are kicked off and he counts me under.

    I hear his voice, I can hear other noises that come through the window or movement in the building but they aren’t diverting. My breathing deepens, he asks for communication with my subconscious through my right hand. An index finger raise for yes, a little finger for no, they signal appropriately. It’s strange, as it’s like a tic which is involuntary, yet it is voluntary. Yet it’s not a thinking and doing voluntary though, by which I mean that if we played a game requiring those movements when either yes or no was called out there would be a small lag while the response was processed. This was instantaneous. It’s a suspension of what I have come to call a ‘surface thinking’ or ‘head mind’, perhaps even ‘working mind/memory suffices.

    Chris then asks if there is something that needs to be seen and if so to review it. The need to sob is irresistible, it’s a scary moment as there is little control, as there was none in the prior days. It’s an out pouring of feeling of being harmed, certainly emotionally. Not understanding why, when I was only playing. Chris guides me through a tapping exercise that starts with the side of my left hand, moves to above the eye, repeating after him that the feelings are welcome, that we are open to feel this strong emotion. To accept that it’s here and that it can move through, tap to the side of the eye, under the eye. That the pain can be released and the causes seen clearer. Tap above the lip, under the lip. To the centre of the collar bone. The sobbing subsides and as I move the tapping to the thumb there comes a sensing of a source. Chris then asks if it’s ok for subconscious me to share this with the knowing me and it is. Another reviewing happens. There’s a pause in me to see. It’s strange seeing, re-experiencing these things. Seeing what I’ve always known, yet hidden all the detail, suppressed so much.

    A reintroduction to the mother I didn’t know I knew. Survival mode for a young girl. My mother writ large. A tall woman who carried more weight than she wished for. To a young girl she appears monstrously looming.

    Had I not heard her call? Probably not, as I’d be caught up in something interesting, like ants moving eggs or the way the ditch water burbled. Had I caused offence somehow? For her, yes I had. She was a harsh handler. I was scared of her, I had always been wary of her, her long sharp finger nails of which she took great care of.

    Chris asks few questions and those he does are generally along the lines of how my body is feeling. What am I seeing, sensing? What I’m feeling. Where any feelings of tension may be? I can respond to these queries though some consideration is often required before answering. If there is a particular tension or concern with a sensed place then that can be investigated or tapped into a welcoming. Eventually there comes a sense of relief. That what was needed to be seen, heard, acknowledged and accepted has been reached for this particular session. That I have been given enough for now.

    The seeing is done, the emotion is spent , Chris counts me brings me back to the chair and the room. I am feeling at peace, even though the seeing was not pleasant, it feels right to have brought this out. It’s a lot to take into my ‘normal’ world. To ‘get my head round’ as the phrase goes.

    Chris says to allow this to integrate. Wasn’t sure what that actually meant. Though I now see that as a means of reshaping the unknowing to knowing, become more whole, accepting of one’s past to inform the now of me but not define it the same.

    I went home feeling a little different. Achy eyes, but with a sense of serenity. Little did I know that this was the beginning of revelations that would turn me inside out. Bring doubt, shame, guilt, questioning sanity, veracity and who I am.