Once upon a time there was a little boy. He lived with his family but he was lonely and afraid much of the time. One day a chocolate rabbit who dreamed of being real entered the boy and became his companion. The boy didn't know that he had a chocolate rabbit living inside him but he knew that he was no longer alone. The boy's family left an empty chair at meals for the unseen guest and the boy spoke to his new friend and reported his friend's responses to his family.
The rabbit spoke to the boy in the language of emotions saying: "Don't rock the boat." or "Just keep quiet." or "Whatever you do don't care about it.." and the boy listened and learned. The rabbit showed the boy ways around his fear and loneliness. Ways like; To Avoid Disappointment Expect Nothing and If You Don't Try You Can't Fail and the rabbit's favorite which the boy's father often said aloud: Better to Remain Quiet and Be Thought A Fool Than To Open Your Mouth and Remove All Doubt. The boy put these sayings into his heart and held them as solemn truths.
The boy grew and forgot his invisible companion but the chocolate rabbit thrived in the darkness. He continued to comfort the boy telling him beautiful lies.
The boy felt distant from other boys even from his own brothers. This suited the rabbit just fine and he encouraged it telling the boy that those other boys, those rough boys, those athletic boys weren't Special. "You're Special when you're alone with me." said the rabbit and the boy thrived in his chocolate world.
One day the rabbit stumbled upon a large asshole inside the boy. "What are you doing here?" asked the rabbit. At first the asshole ignored the rabbit. Finally she turned slowly and replied that she controlled the boy by making him feel guilty. The rabbit felt threatened, he thought the boy was his alone. But he saw that this was a very powerful asshole so he proceeded cautiously. "How do you do that?" asked the rabbit.
The asshole looked at the rabbit until he became uncomfortable then continued sullenly "I squeeze myself over the boy's head, that way he can't see anything clearly and he believes that everything is stinky. Then I tell him that this is all his fault and he just better feel bad and do as he's told. His mother is very helpful. She says things like. 'Do you know how much it hurts me when you lie to me?' and 'I'm so disappointed in you.' and the boy becomes twisted with guilt. She bent very close to the rabbit and hissed, "That's the way I like it"
The rabbit was fearful and suspicious. He controlled the boy by comforting him with beautiful lies and making him feel proud and good. Now here was this asshole controlling the boy by making him feel guilty and bad. The rabbit knew that his true enemy was The Truth and that as long as he kept the boy from The Truth he was secure. But what was up with this asshole? Clearly this asshole had nothing to do with the truth but... And then it dawned on him, the asshole was on his side, they could work together.
"Hey!" said the chocolate rabbit jumping up and down with excitement. "We can play good pathology, bad pathology with the boy for the rest of his life. He'll never see The Truth. We'll have him coming and going!"
"Precisely" said the asshole and they sealed their pact.
One day the boy was playing alone. Some rough boys ran up all excited. "Hey there's a pond over at the new school and it's full of tadpoles." They held up their glass jars full of swimming tadpoles. "A pond?" The boy asked. There had never been a pond in the neighborhood before. "Yeah, from the rain." said the big rough boys. The boy grew excited. He ran inside and asked his mother if he could get a glass jar and go with the rough boys. The boy's mother said, "Okay but promise me you won't go in the water." "Okay." said the boy feeling that something was being taken from him. "Promise." said the mother. "I promise" said the deflated boy.
Sure enough a large depression at the construction site had filled with water and there were tadpoles galore. It was a sunny summer day and the water was warm like a bath tub and rich with mud. They caught a few tadpoles then one by one the bigger boys went in. "It's so warm." they said. Soon the boy was standing alone on the shore. "Come on!" said the boys and he did, he went in, into the thick, warm, luscious water.
Afterwards the boy was terrified that his mother would find out. "Don't tell." he asked his friends but they told their mother. Their mother didn't mind but she told the boy's mother that night in passing and the boy's mother called the boy to her and hooked him by his guilt, reeled him in and took away the fun he'd enjoyed with the rough boys. The rabbit and the asshole danced with joy that night as the boy tossed and turned in bed unable to sleep.
In this simple way and in many simple ways like it the rabbit and the asshole shaped the boy and kept him from the truth of his boyish passions.
One day the rabbit saw something move deep within the sleeping asshole. Without giving it a second thought he reached deep inside and pulled out a shivering girl.
"What the hell?!" squawked the startled asshole.
"I can't quite tell." said the rabbit holding the stinking mess of a girl at arm's length.
"Give me that!" cried the asshole and thrust the girl back inside.
"No!" wailed the rabbit and dove in after her and brought her out again.
"She's mine!" insisted the asshole.
"I'm not taking her for myself." said the rabbit, "It's for the boy." and he cleaned the girl up, did her hair and makeup, dressed her in fine clothes and put her in a corner lit only by candlelight.
"Ta Da!" he said presenting his handiwork to the asshole.
"Hmmm" said the asshole, still a bit peeved. "Remarkable."
And indeed it was for that mess of a girl now looked quite sexy.
"I'll make him want her." said the rabbit.
"But what will I do?" scowled the asshole.
"Make him feel unworthy of her."
"Oh yes, of course" sighed the asshole warming to the idea.
"I'll make him want me." said the girl in a low voice crossing her legs. "I'll exact his worship and I'll demean him."
"We've created a monster." said the asshole.
"No" said the rabbit. "We've created the Seductress."
The boy was soon infatuated with girls. At an age when most boys saw girls as cootie bait the boy imagined holding hands and kissing and touching and sharing deep feelings and thoughts that he was yet unaware of. He imagined, through them, his salvation.
The three amigos worked well within him. The seductress made him want the girls, the rabbit taught him to put himself aside and try to charm the girls and the asshole kept him feeling unworthy.
The boy grew into a man yet remained within the man as the rabbit, asshole and seductress had been within him. The three amigos prospered and occupied all the best parts of the man so the boy was forced back into a small damp, dark cave and was soon forgotten by the man who had his hands full with hopeless desires and self doubt.
Then the man began to share his dreams with his teacher and he began to see the world within not as the three amigos had described it to him but in quite another way and everything began to change.
The first time I saw the chocolate rabbit in a dream he was standing on the rear surface of a hot wood burning cook stove surrounded by smaller chocolate rabbits.
And so the rabbit that has lived in me since my boyhood is revealed. The pathology hates being seen. Hates it. This is a great gift which dreams offer us. They catch our demons, our pathologies in the act of betraying us, lying to us, deceiving us. Our dreams also show us how we believe and accept the pathologies' lies, how we're seduced. And our dreams show us how the archetypes are fighting the pathology in order to reach us. The hot stove in this dream is the dream work and it is melting the pathology. In the dream I feel compassion for the rabbit's predicament, hopping about on that hot stove. As he dies that final time the dark mother comes to him. I believe in her love. I believe in the worthiness of her pain and sadness as she reaches out for the evaporating bunny. Though the pathology is dying I am hooked because I feel sorry for it. Though this chocolate rabbit has died there are a dozen or more smaller rabbits still up on the stovetop, we know how quickly they reproduce. Over the years hidden chocolate rabbits have fooled me, then been revealed and then killed again and again. I'm quicker to spot them now. Ellen has become a very good rabbit hunter. Marc can now tell by the look on my face when I walk into his office if there's another one to knock off. At times the supply seems endless. But I'm spending less and less time believing their lies.
I don't recall exactly how "chocolate rabbit" became the name for this insidious pathology. Mark brought it up somehow in later sessions; "it's like the chocolate rabbit" he would say describing some new dream figure or something I had done in the world and it just sort of stuck. The chocolate rabbit is my pride. Pride is a sin, one of the seven deadlies. Pride is the king of sins, at least in this American world where pride can lead to great material rewards, and ever new vistas of excellence and accomplishment. These things in and of themselves are not bad, in fact what I perceive in someone else as pride may in fact be passion or enthusiasm and these things are good. But the belief that my accomplishments and failures are entirely of my own doing and carry greater importance than my relationship to God is wrong. This belief is a sin. My prideful sin has for the most part been to believe that I'm a failure. This too is a separation from God. A lack of trust. And then my pride tells me that the world is wrong and I become the fox proclaiming that the grapes, the rewards of this world are sour. Again this keeps me from God.
My understanding of sin has been altered through doing this work. I used to think that sin was anything I did that offended a judgmental God. I used to think that sinning was a brave thing to do because it demonstrated that I was strong and unafraid of God. I used to think that sinning was like breaking free of my mother and father. I used to think that being concerned with sin was something only boring people did. I used to believe that at my best I was free to do whatever I wanted as long as it didn't hurt others. Now I find it helpful to think of sin as anything that keeps me from God and His love. It's not that God is this pompous, judgmental, hard assed ruler just looking for opportunities to penalize me. Not at all. What is true is that God's love needs and yearns for a yielding heart to receive it and sin keeps my heart from yielding. It's like throwing seeds on frozen ground, nothing happens. There's nothing evil about frozen ground it just won't bear life. So too my proud heart.
When I Bached several years after the rabbit dream and revealed the rabbit to my compatriots, several wished that they too could have pet names for their pathologies. It is handy. But it was painful at first for me to acknowledge my pathologies to others. I wanted to tell everyone how high up the mountain I had come. I was willing to reveal dark feelings but I resisted exposing my pathologies as if they were my fault. I also resisted because they were still a big part of my daily life and as I said they hate being seen. I mentioned the Bache (pronounced "bosh") earlier in the book. It's the annual gathering of dream workers. To Bache is to share ones journey in the work. I'll write a chapter on the Bache. It's a great event. I think I'll wait until the next one rolls around in a few months then give you a first hand account.
During one of my early sessions with Marc I was describing a situation in my life that had me twisted up with guilt and disempowerment, Marc looked at me and said: "It's like there's a two hundred pound asshole sitting on you, you can't do anything." Again the term stuck. The image of the asshole came to Marc before it appeared in a dream. Once mentioned the asshole began to grow. Next time he brought it up it was a five hundred pound asshole, then a thousand pounds, then more. It got up to nine thousand pounds at one point then settled in at around three thousand. "It's the three thousand pound asshole" he says after I tell him about some fearful and guilty response I made to scoldings, criticism and forceful demands from superiors at my job.
This asshole is guilt. The Bible seems to treat guilt as a wage of sin, not as sin itself, though as I said I find it helpful to think of sin as anything that keeps me from God and guilt fits that criterion. In the Bible it seems that someone sins, then they feel guilty and that guilt runs interference on their relationship with God. Adam and Eve's first sin is pride. "We can do this thing that God told us not to do." Then they feel guilt and shame when they gain awareness of good and evil. It is this guilt that urges them to hide from God when He next strolls through Eden. It is the guilt that keeps them from God. I feel guilty when I know I do something wrong, something I shouldn't do. But guilt and shame can become a hiding place from God even when I don't do anything wrong. Was this true in the days of the Patriarchs or in Christ's time? I wonder. It seems to me that guilt has taken on a life of its own. I sometimes feel guilty when I take time for lunch during a busy work day. There's nothing wrong with eating lunch. There is something wrong about feeling guilty about it. This guilt keeps me from God as surely as guilt over something I know is wrong.
The asshole did finally show up in a dream. It was this awful rubbery, hairy flying thing that kept attaching itself to my head. I'd peel it off, stomp on it, smash it with a bat, throw it away and it would fly right back and tight as a second skin wrap itself around my head. I was trying to describe the damn thing to Marc so he could visualize it and we could figure out what it was when it struck me. "Hey, it's the asshole!" I said. Marc nodded. "It's the asshole." It only weighed a few pounds but it could fly.
The grandmother spirit in the rabbit dream is the dark mother. The dark mother is the asshole. Dark mother is a term in the dream work for figures in dreams and in our psyches that amplify pathological responses we had to our biological mothers, and by so doing manipulate us. Some dream workers struggle more with dark fathers than with dark mothers. As I said in the last chapter I cut away from my father at an early age. I was afraid of him and of God but there was no seduction, no hidden incest with him and so no dark father for me to work out. Not so with my mother.
The first time Mark used the word incest to refer to my relationship with my mother I was a bit taken aback. "You mean emotional incest." I clarified. "Yeah." and on he went as if it were a small distinction. Does the use of the word "incest" to describe an emotional tie seem jarring to you? What if a boy feels responsible for his mother's tears? What if she's complicit, even unconsciously, in maintaining that perception or worse what if she actually believes he is responsible? What if he tells her he'll never transgress in such and such a way again even if he knows in his heart that he really should be allowed to do this thing? What if she uses his promise against him next time he does the something because she knows it will weaken his resistance by making him feel bad? What if he begins to believe that her feelings are more important than his own? What if boy and mother feel something special, unique, painful and unspoken for each other? What if the part of her that is angry at men and yearning for a man finds congress with the boy's desire for identity, love and acceptance? Does this emotional version seem so very different in quality from the sexual?
As with my father I don't blame my mother. I suspect she was so deeply engaged with the struggle to make a living and raise three boys by herself that these incestual dynamics didn't even occur to her. She was just trying to get by, pay the bills and love us the best she could.
Writing about my father was thick and painful. Writing about my mother is slippery and unnerving. I was her little man. She dated for awhile after the divorce but they were all pretty awful men except for one. A Korean man, I've forgotten his name. We all really liked him and he's the only one my mother said she loved. He cooked great meals for us and taught me some martial arts. He was attentive, gentle, passionate and strong but he moved away quickly and unexpectedly to Florida. A career opportunity he said. She never dated again.
In junior high I sat with her once a month at the dinner table as she wrote the bills. I did the math in the check book and felt proud to be a part of the financial decisions we made. Each month after paying the bills we had less than a hundred dollars left for a month of food, clothing, gas, car repairs and everything else. Dad wasn't helping at all. I learned to stop wanting much. I was proud of that too.
One night when I was in sixth grade, shortly after they divorced, we saw a couple mice in our kitchen. My mom freaked out. She crawled up on the kitchen table and cried violently. This scared my younger brothers who joined her. It was pretty loud with all of them bawling up there. The table wasn't all that sturdy either. I felt proud, strong and in charge. I called Dad who had taken a dreary apartment out by the airport. He came over with some traps, we set them then went outside and I held a flashlight while he shoveled dirt around the foundation to keep others out.
On the face of it this doesn't sound all that bad and my mother became much stronger and more capable with time. I think her freak out must have been because other things had gone wrong that day, and she was having a hard time without a man around even though she hated him. I think my brothers may have been feeling something similar. I, on the other hand, felt proud and capable and therein lay the trap. I was becoming the little man when I needed to be a boy. It was good that I called my father, good that I felt a need for him, good that I could work with him to solve the problem. What was bad was that I don't ever recall asking for his help after that time. He began fading away as I learned to manipulate tools and figure things out on my own. Oedipal-like I was glad to see him go.
But let's get back to this vein of guilt and my mother. Just up the block from our house was a small apple orchard, maybe twelve, sixteen trees. We knew we weren't supposed to go in there but we did from time to time. One afternoon Brad Johnson and I climbed a beautiful tree in the middle of the orchard and rested in the boughs as we ate the not quite ripe apples. The owner, Mr. Makepeace, found us and chased us out of the orchard then called our mothers. Brad Johnson was one of the rough boys I went swimming with in the pond earlier in this chapter. Mr. Makepeace told our mothers that he had intended to give the apples from this tree to his sister for pies but that now he couldn't because we had ruined things. We had eaten maybe six apples between us shoved another half dozen in our pockets and knocked three or four onto the ground. This left a hundred or more apples on this healthy tree and well over a thousand on the others. Mr. Makepeace lived alone in a big house. He didn't sell the apples and had more money than most folks in the neighborhood. Brad's mother saw that Mr. Makepeace was full of shit and told him so. But when Mr. Makepeace spoke to my mother on the phone she believed him. He hooked her guilt and she in turn hooked mine.
My grandmother figures in here too. My father's mother. Another dark mother of my boyhood. Ah, my grandmother. She outlived my mother. She was 101 when she died. I flew back to her funeral though I couldn't afford it. She was a dark mother if ever there was one but I still love her and don't at all regret going back for her funeral or knowing her. Remember, remember this is not about my grandmother it's about a part of me that is sick, that has been sick since birth or shortly thereafter. A part of me that got hooked by my grandmother and unconsciously allowed her to manipulate me.
All the grandkids, sons and daughters in law for that matter, hated working for my grandmother. I mean helping her out around the house. I say working because for the most part she did pay us kids. But it wasn't really worth it. She was just too damn picky. We'd go outside to clean her windows and she'd stand inside, wrinkle her nose in disgust and tap at the spots that weren't clean enough. Half the time the spots were inside or a flaw in the glass. It was exhausting to be around her. She used to pay me what? - seventy five cents an hour to clean her ceilings. Who cleans their ceilings for Pete's sake? And she'd stand right there telling me exactly how to do it. And I'll tell you something, ceilings aren't flat they just look flat if you don't pay them any more attention then they deserve but if you start scrutinizing the things under low angle lighting you see all sorts of shadows that can look like dirt but aren't. And I'd scrub and scrub telling her it was a shadow and she'd say "No, no not there over there." and she'd direct me to another shadow three inches away and finally I just gave in to her and quit trying to reason with her and became her little drone. I felt guilty (dark mother, asshole) and thought I should help out this old woman. Other old women thought I was a saint and I fed off that but of course I was just a dweeb.
It was a real eye opener when my slightly younger cousin came back for a visit. I think it was vacation during my freshman year of college so I was back in town too. Steve and I went over to help her with some silly project and he was hilarious. She'd ask us to do such and such a task in such and such a way and Steve would smile his beautiful toothy grin (he's one of the most charming people I've ever met) and say just below her ability to hear. "Of course you old windbag. Anything you say Sarge. How else can I demean myself for you, you old windbag?" "What?" she'd ask, not understanding him and I'd laugh and she'd laugh just to join in, she did have a sense of humor and knew she was being teased. I'd always liked my cousin Steve but he became a hero for me that day. She was a pain in the butt for him just like she was for me, just like she was for all of us but he wasn't going to deny his response to her, he wasn't going to be a drone.
I've had many dreams that take place in and around her old house. Most of them full of pathology.
I once dreamt that I was with my mother and grandmother in a mall. It was dark and crowded and I didn't want to be there but I felt I had to stay with them. I felt I had no choice. I felt so angry when we worked this dream. All that unexpressed rage. All that unlived life.
Now I'm twenty one, sitting on the floor of an apartment in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco holding two younger roommates as they bawl uncontrollably and claw at me like small children wondering why they'd left their homes in New Jersey. I just sit there with a stupid beatific smile stroking their heads encouraging them to cry filled with a sense that I'm an amazing guy, so compassionate, so gentle and loving.
Another time a few years later at the University of Iowa an actress in the graduate acting program with me comes to me very upset. She's been rehearsing a play written and directed by a very promising playwright in the program. She wants out of the play. It's very dark material and she just doesn't want to go there. But she's afraid to approach the playwright on her own, afraid she won't be able to say no to him. He very much wants her to do the part. He's spoken to me before this. He thinks she's great, just afraid. I go with her to the playwright. The three of us talk. She's very upset. Shem really wants her to do the play. I want her to be heard and understood. We go around in circles Finally all three of us end up going to the department head's house. It's late at night now. The head of the department talks to her privately for a long time then comes back to Shem and me saying "She's really a mess." The next day she withdraws from the program. Shem is pissed at me for interfering. He thought he was pushing her towards a blow away performance. Maybe he was. I thought I was being a hero, saving the girl from the machinations of the over ambitious theatre artist. That's the crux. I believed I was being the hero. I believed I was better than Shem. I believed I occupied a moral high ground. Like the scene in San Francisco I was filled with a sense that I was an amazing guy. Like the scene in San Francisco I was full of shit.
I thought for a while that I might become a therapist or a minister because I was so good at eliciting and making room for others' pain. But Shem was right to suspect me in spite of his own shortcomings. I though I was helping these poor people in pain and it felt so good. The truth is I was like a vampire, suavely, lovingly hungering for other's pain because I couldn't feel my own. I didn't even know I was hurting. I knew I was lonely but figured the right girlfriend would take care of that. What I really wanted was an endless series of increasingly sexy bed partners. And for a while as a graduate acting student I had something like my wish though I always wanted more. More women. Sexier women. All that and love too. To hide from my pain I smoked, drank, did drugs.
I had myself convinced that things were going pretty well. Sure I felt unhappy a good deal of the time but I also had a lot of fun. I thought pain was a weakness I had to do something about. The chocolate rabbit loves that take: "Keep doing things; drugs, sex, exercise, reading, meditation, anything to avoid feeling pain." Such was his game plan. And if things broke down the asshole took over and I just felt shitty and depressed. It never occurred to me that feeling my pain could open me to a love that can melt depression.
The seductress has been the most persistent of my pathologies. She cuts very close to the natural desire most men have to spread their sperm around. It's all tied up with natural selection and survival of the fittest. It's a part of our nature. We want to fuck anything we're attracted to. We want to become a part of it, know it, have it, split it wide open and rest secure within it. Look at the old Testament, all those promises of multitudinous progeny, all those multiple wives, concubines and servant lovers. This wild promiscuity isn't the answer or the ideal, don't get me wrong, but it is the basic building block of male sexuality. What did I do with this beast? I let the dog out with many women before I was married. Sometimes I feel guilty and try to starve the boy and sometimes I take matters into my own hand. None of these responses are even vaguely healthy, especially now that I'm married. So what do I do? I'm surrounded by views of sexy women. Women I meet or just see during my day, women on and in the catalogs that pour in like water addressed to Ellen. I used to tell her to please throw them out or hide them but it's been awhile and she's forgotten and I'm embarrassed to ask again and sometimes, though I fight against it, when she's away I go digging through the recycling for a furtive, guilty date. Guilt seems to increase my desire, another unconscious bargain with the devil. The icing on this nasty cake is projection. This is where the seductress steps in, promising me meaning, satisfaction and fulfillment beyond what most humping mammals seem to want or need. Marc says we poor saps have basically three choices, take a lover, close up shop or learn a new sexuality, one based in intimacy. Well, I pick door number three but it's a long, slow, painful haul for this contestant.
I suppose if I had known only these pathologies all my life I would never have begun this work. I would never have let Marc and the Archetypes tear into me and dismember me. I would have run from his office screaming "Bullshit!" The reason I stayed was that I knew somehow from the start that he was right about me. I had caught glimpses of the light before I met Marc. The seeds were there, inside me, waiting.