November 1994. My first session with Marc. He wants to know why I have come, what I am looking for if I become his client. I feel irked by his question but I do my best with it. I tell him I loved my first husband, Gary, but I left him after 10 years because I fell in love with another man, Michael. We are now engaged and I’m afraid the same thing will happen to Michael and I. I’m afraid the love will go away.
Marc wants to know why I left Gary. I try to tell him all the things about Gary that I had trouble with but Marc doesn’t want to hear about that, he wants to know what I felt. I felt that I had retired at 35. That my life was over, I was so depressed. We had moved to Vermont from New York City to go “back to the land” in June of 1991 and by the winter of 1993 I was miserable. In my despair I would sit naked and alone in the wood fired sauna, crying and when I stepped out into the freezing air to pour cold water on myself, I would hold up the water like a supplicant and through my tears I would pray for God to please help me, show me the way, lead me where I am to go. I was so lost and unhappy. I knew I needed help. I told all this to Marc.
Then Marc asked me for a dream: I am in a car. Gary is driving and I am in the front seat white-knuckling it because it’s pitch black out and Gary is driving so fast on a dock that juts way out into the ocean. I see the end of the dock ahead. Just before we sail out into the water a mechanical arm stops the car in mid air. I climb out and a sea captain is standing there and he tells me we have to sail when the wind is good.
And Marc said, “The Sea Captain? That’s who I work for. He‘s the Animus. I do what he tells me to.” Then he had me gestalt the Sea Captain and ask him, “Why have you come for me?” When I switched into the chair to speak as the Sea Captain I didn’t know what to say, I only experienced confusion. But Marc heard the Sea Captain’s answer and had me respond to myself in the empty chair, “Because you asked me to come.”
And I didn’t understand. What was Marc talking about? I never asked the sea captain for anything. Then Marc reminded me how all winter I had prayed and asked God to show me the way. Well, God had answered. And thus I began my journey.
One of the first issues I had to deal with was how I blamed men for my problems, something I had probably learned from my mother. In my dream I was being chased by a shadowy man and I was running. I was sure he was bad. Marc said it was probably the Animus. I got pissed. How dare the good guys trick me like that. Marc suspected I blamed men and it probably came from my mother. He said a lot that went right over my head. I was rip shit! I turned it on Marc, “How do you know this is true!” That was a cover for what I really wanted to say which was, who the hell do you think you are? What right do you have to tell me these things about myself! I haven’t given you permission to talk to me like that! Marc knew I was reacting, he said don’t quit the work. “I’m too smart to quit the work now!” I shouted at him, “If I can’t let you see my anger then who can I?” I left that session in a rage, self-righteous and proud. I would stay in the dreamwork just to prove I wasn’t a quitter.
But that night I dreamt I saw a photograph of my father from an album my mother had never let me see. In the picture my father is young and handsome and he looks at me with eyes that are filled with the pain of having been misunderstood. When I woke up I knew what Marc had seen about me was true. I could feel the truth of it from the dream. It cut me to the core. The truth might be painful but I wanted more.
Actually, I was scared by what Marc was saying but I didn‘t know it, though I think Marc knew. I reacted in anger and that was a pattern for me. Nasty anger and judgment. I got caught red-handed in his office doing my thing! And he was right about me. I had bought into a certain feminist perspective that men were to blame. I did harbor an ugly distain that went back to my mother’s view of my father. He was never good enough for her. He was blue collar and she wanted him to be white collar. He was a failure as a provider. She was cold, controlling, aloof, judgmental and narcissistic. Competitive. Angry. I had become just like her.
And I hated myself. I don’t ever remember a time when I didn’t hate myself. My mother didn’t have the love to give. She couldn’t love me and she was unfulfilled by motherhood. She wondered what was wrong with me that I didn’t satisfy her? I wondered too. What’s wrong with me? Fat ugly kid no one liked. “Ellie Elephant in an elevator ready to fight: boom, boom.” That was a taunt from my best friend in 3rd grade. I was angry and unhappy, it became self directed, self inflicted.
I can feel it now as I write this...just recalling this place in me. I lived in this lie my whole life. I was steeped in self hate. I saw it reflected everywhere in the outer world as confirmation that I was detestable. Now it feels like a stab in my heart. I don’t remember when I took over stabbing myself in the heart but I did. Over and over until that became how I knew myself. If I didn’t have that feeling of cutting at my own heart, who was I? I was lost.
All my self hate made it hard for me to face into my part in my suffering, how I was complicit. Wasn’t I a victim? That was how I justified my behavior. If I wasn’t a victim then I was the biggest piece of shit that ever existed. That justified my behavior too. Every time I was shown my pathology, every time my icky behavior was exposed I felt it proved I was icky. Marc called it nihilism, which he said was pain perverted through shame. Something would happen in the world and I would get stuck in nihilism for days and weeks. If given a reprieve through a dream, like an experience of the archetypes trying to love me, it wasn’t long before I would seek out my nihilism again. I was so identified with it. I wanted to annihilate myself and would feel emotional pain in a cycle of suffering that was endless.
It took a long time for me to get that I wasn’t the pathology.
Meanwhile, Michael and I married in May of 1995 and started trying to have a baby. I had 2 miscarriages then got pregnant with our daughter Zoe Maria. When I was 29 weeks pregnant my placenta tore and Zoe was born November 29, 1997 by emergency cesarean. She had lost so much blood that they had to milk the umbilical cord to get enough blood in her veins to save her life. But she had severe brain damage and only lived until December 28th, 1997 when she died in my arms.
At first I was thrust into the deep well of my pain and feeling and it was pure grief. But it wasn’t long after her death that pathology used my loss as nihilistic proof that I was abhorrent even to God. I was being punished. I wasn't good enough. All my issues were projected onto my longing and loss. It was a terrible time. If I hadn’t been working my dreams with Marc, if I hadn’t been held by the church that Marc’s wife Dianne is pastor of, I would never have survived. I would have drank myself to death.
After another miscarriage, I gave birth to our healthy son Ian on August 8th, 2000. Marc and others in the dreamwork community gave a collective sigh of relief. Finally! Marc said now I could get on with my work and see that my suffering never was about whether I had a child or not. I began a new phase in my process that was all about uncovering my shame. I was a presenter at the Bache Alone in 2001. The title of my bache was, “How My Pathology Makes Me Feel Like Shit.”
(To be continued)
September 2007
Dearest Beloved, early on in my work with Marc you gave me a dream. In it I am trying to walk across a railroad track. Suddenly a man is there helping me. It was you. You looked at me and I felt your love for me...love like I’ve never known before. Not for anything I did or earned or proved but an experience of being loved that was so profound, I have sought you ever since. Living in the truth of your love is the promise of this work. Your love is a gift I work hard to actualize. It is a gift my pathology works hard to destroy. That is the field of my battle.
My journey into relationship with you began right then, crossing that railroad track. I felt you with all my heart and soul, so delicious from my head to my toes. Your love indescribably sweet and fierce, touching the deepest part of me. No matter how hard my journey has been I have put my faith in your promise. No matter how hard my journey will become, there is nothing else for me.
Now I know what ails me. Without your love, I am in Hell. I am in Hell and I know it. I know my Hell so well. I recognize its seduction, the well worn grooves of thought that lead me into self hate and suffering. I recognize the resulting tightness around my mouth, the hardness in my heart, the angry words that lash out of me and all the ways I behave because I am outside of your love. All the ways I have learned to survive in this world have only compounded my lost-ness. I get so lost in this world. Lost in the world looking for love that I must earn and worth that I must prove. Caught up in the clenched fist rather than resting in the peace of your open hand.
The promise of love as approval is ever out of reach or if approval is achieved, it lacks the power to satisfy my hunger and need. In my starvation I search endlessly in a trap of my own making. But it is you I hunger for.
You found me on the railroad track and the course of my life was altered forever. In dream after dream you show me the way to find you and exactly where I get lost. Like my habit of being overly responsible and narcissistic and how it takes me away from you. In the dream I put my car into park and run into the church to lock the doors. I think it is my responsibility to close them. I want the approval of doing a good job. I want to avoid the pain of doing something wrong. But inside the church is full of people who have wandered in. I am so lost in responsibility that I am yelling at the people to get out. Then I am looking at a man with violet eyes. I am distracted by those eyes, I half remember something and say, “Your eyes are like your son’s...” The man is you, of course. Then I am with my ex-husband in a store and you come to me with a sharp knife and cut, slice, flay open my left arm at the bend. I am afraid I will bleed to death.
In my session, Marc told me to close my eyes and let the cutting happen. Surrender to the bleeding.
And so I close my eyes and watch the blood flow out. There is nothing to do. No responsibility. Just the crystal clear beauty of the present moment. Suddenly I feel so alive, so freed from the day to day responsibilities I get lost in and the thoughts about what I have to do next and orienting myself towards approval. I feel the sensation of being cut and the warmth of my blood flowing out as I bleed to death. The field of my projection drops like a curtain and the present is so moving. In the poignancy of the moment I feel such love. I feel it as I walk with Deb, as I work with a client, as I listen to a co-worker talk at the restaurant, as I converse with my husband Michael, as I meet with my Noe colleagues, as I get my son Ian to school or to bed...I feel such love and it hurts. I feel so much pain.
And I feel so much pain I want my husband to meet me there. To meet me in my pain and need for love. I don’t want to be alone in the pain. But it comes out all wrong because it is wrong. What I hunger for only you, whom I call the Beloved, the Divine, the Animus, only you can satisfy me. So my desire for my husband carries a sting in it, a judgment, a shaming because I have projected my need for your love onto Michael. And he will disappoint me because he can’t be you. He is himself. He is human. As I am human. Full of failings. In the world of approval I can’t have failings. I have shame. Michael can’t have failings. I am shaming. Now I have shame because I am shaming. I am in Hell. I am taken out. I don’t want to be in the present moment of the cutting and bleeding with you because I am in my suffering.
So I enter the field of battle. I have to fight.
And I go out in the rain. I sit alone in my car and close my eyes. I feel so bad and that’s where I have to start. I cry and I scream. I am riding the feeling down and in. It starts with shame...and I am going down into the deep well. I am riding my separation down to the point it first occured.
At some point I see Arlis from the dream you gave me. (Arlis is a character from the movie, Flesh and Bone.) In the dream I am holding him, I feel so close to him, so much love for him. He is the boy underneath his trauma. Unlike the movie, in my dream he has come through his trauma to forgiveness, love and acceptance. Kay, is there and I cover her face with kisses. When it's time to go I call Arlis, “Nedlis." Then the dream ends and I wake up with the awareness that Arlis in his trauma could not have needs.
And this all comes to me as I spiral down into the well because Arlis is me, the traumatized me and Kay is me, the innocent me. And I remember that I am not bad, I am hurt. I am feeling the truth of this. I am innocent and I just want to be loved. I am not need-less, I am not without need, I need love. I need YOUR love. I want your love and oh how it hurts to be separated from you. I don’t want to be here without your love. And I can feel the pain of separation, the trauma of having known your love and in the next moment being born into the separateness of this life here on earth and I feel stunned and then the terror comes in. I feel so scared.
And I am in my car, and the sound of the rain is pounding and I’m deep in feeling and sometimes I disassociate...some part of me separates from the pain and is looking at the tree or thinking what if anyone saw me now...and then I am separate from you and I hurt. And that pain brings me back to you and I am clinging to you as I did in the dream where you came as The Man in Black, remember? Where I tell you I never want to leave you and you said I was the truth and the way for you and I cleaved myself to you as we sank under the water?
And I feel my need for you now...how I never want to be in this world without you, how your love satisfies my longing and how the pain of separation brings me to you. Because that is my work, to keep feeling my way to you. When I trip and fall, when I am lost, when others trip and fall, when they are lost. Teach me to see with your eyes, your violet eyes of love. And through me, your truth and your way will manifest. Into me and through me, your love will shine like a beacon into the dark places.