In the series on recovering from traumatic relationships, this is the third article on grieving and letting go. It is an extension of the last one, which discussed exploring the past to understand our patterns of belief and behavior. This is about how we do it and what we find. Or rather about how I did it, and what I found
Unpacking frozen memories
This week I reached out to someone whose name is part of my history. She was once the lover of a man I regarded as the great love of my life. He was an alcoholic poet who died when I was 23. She is a poet too. I found her web site, read a poem about the first time they made love, and wrote her an e-mail to introduce myself.
She wrote back, asking about his life and how he died. I tried to answer her factually, but found myself drifting over and over into how I felt about it all.
She asked if I ever wrote about him. I told her that, when he died, it was as thought my memory was wiped. I couldn’t remember his voice or the joking banter that was part of our everyday conversations. Except for photos, I couldn’t remember what he looked like. I was so angry, it took me four years to finally grieve him and let him go. At that time, I dreamed about him, and those memories are more vivid than our life together. If I could write anything, it would be only my story. I couldn’t reproduce him in prose. I wish I could.
I wrote a second letter, apologizing for going on and on about my feelings. I tried to tell her more about our life together, getting lost again in telling her about how it was for me as more and more memories returned. Then, within the same day, I wrote her a third letter. Apologizing once again for dumping all this me, me, me on her, a stranger. Telling her it wasn’t my conscious intention when I wrote her, but I was using her to unpack those frozen memories. That’s what she was seeing in these letters.
It wasn’t the first time I’ve done this. Through the years of recovery, I’ve reached out several times to lost people in my history. Always thinking I was just writing to say hi, and then finding memories flooding me. The one the sticks in my mind was an e-mail exchange with my high-school boyfriend, who broke up with me after we begin attending different colleges. It happened at the same time that my mother threw me out, because I’d tried to tell her what my father had done to me and was about to do to my younger sister. My mother accepted my father’s lies about a 13-year-old seducing him. Before this boy broke up with me, I finally told him the truth about me. Then he told me he wanted to date someone else at his new school.
He remembers only the sensible break-up of two teenagers going to schools in different states. But talking to him reopened what I was living through. I was at the edge of adulthood, abandoned by everyone who cared about me. Until then, I survived on an illusion that I could have a “regular life” by pretending it never happened. Now I saw that I was going to pay over and over. I felt how my personality tightened around fear, determination to ward off new monsters, and a hunger for something I called love, but now think was simply safety.
This was one of the foundations of behavior and belief I described in the last article. These events shaped much of what happened later. I didn’t have to think about it intellectually. I felt it. The insight shined like a light on the future of that young adult.
I had to stop talking to him. I was starting to say cruel and provocative things to him, sniping he didn’t deserve. Because in insight, I also saw him as he was, as well as my mother as she was, from the vantage point of the distant future. He too was entering his adulthood, actively shaping his future. How much of his potential could I expect him to sacrifice for a girl who was truly messed up? Would he fight my father? Was there anything fair about expecting him to take care of me, when he never would have gotten involved with me if he’d known the truth? Likewise, my mother, what did I expect from her? She was beaten down, trying to survive with her three younger children, and she was afraid of my father and afraid to leave him. She chose their survival.
I could see how my father’s behavior had damaged me and how my damage burdened other people. It wasn’t my fault or theirs. Whether they took on my burden was a decision about their lives, their resources, what they could handle. I had no choice, but they did. And they had more than me to consider.
I could see how it all came together. Without thinking about the word, I forgave my boyfriend and my mother. Instead of being angry, I mourned for myself, that young girl with no one but herself to depend on. It could have been different. But it was what it was. She had to move on, wounded but with no time or place to heal. She would create a life that reflected the reality of those unhealed wounds. And in understanding this, I forgave myself too. I stopped thinking I was stupid or selfish or incompetent or lazy or anything else. I was someone who lacked the resources that a lot of people took for granted, and I did the best I could.
Inside the myths
The more I crack open the “truths” of my life to discover what is really inside them, the more I come to realize that luck is a big factor. Perhaps that is too light a word for what I mean — the random way that events coalesce at a moment in time.
The great learning of the angry phase is that we are not responsible for what we cannot control. Our traumatic encounters begin with location and timing. If things had been a little different, we would not have been there. Beyond that, we did not want to be hurt or ask for it. Other people have their own histories and structures of behavior and belief. We did not create them and we cannot control them. If they had been different, it would have come out differently.
In the angry phase, we spend time dissecting what happened, finding what to blame on the circumstances and on the people who hurt us. We look outside ourselves for the reasons our good intentions attracted such bad results.
Twenty-five years after this husband died, another man drove me into healing myself. I believe he is a sociopath. In getting over him, one of the things that moved me from anger into grieving and letting go was a jarring realization that there was nothing I could blame on the sociopath that didn’t seem to be equally true of me. He was using me and he didn’t care about my feelings. True, but I also wanted him to be what I wanted him to be. And though my methods of coercion were more socially acceptable as “expressions of love,” their intention was to persuade him or guilt-trip him into giving me what I wanted.
The same was true for lying or obfuscation. Whatever he hid from me, I hid as much from him. I didn’t share what I really felt or wanted. I kept posing as an adult when I had a wounded child’s needs for unconditional love and complete safety. The same was true for being selfishly uncaring about what I wanted. I claimed to be committed to making him happy, but what I really meant by “happy” was him loving me and making a forever commitment. .
If I had accepted what his words and behavior were telling me about his capacity to give me what I wanted, that would have been the time to decide whether I liked or loved him. No blame. No fault. He fit or he didn’t. The truth was he didn’t. I wasn’t lucky that way with him. His life might have been improved by me, but the opposite wasn’t true. This was a frog, not a prince. It was that simple.
Luck turned on its head
As I get older, and keep cracking open the bits of mythology that make up my beliefs about my own life. I sometimes find surprises.
Writing the former lover of my dead husband, my memories opened up. Because I read her poetry and remember a few things he told me, I knew that she wasn’t certain about him and ultimately sent him away. She knew he was an ex-con. She knew he always had a bottle of beer in his hand. She knew he was seductive and smooth. I understand why she passed on him. She had professional stature, life equity, something to lose.
It was different for me. I was barely 20, desperate for a new life. Equally desperate for acceptance, because I felt like a freak. I had a soul-killing clerical job, no money, no clue of what to do next. I had heard things about him.That he had stocked the library shelves in a brand-new prison and was literate, had read everything. He was already a published poet, and people spoke of him with awe and affection.
When I met him, I saw a big handsome man with a background as bad as mine who had made something extraordinary of himself. The booze and drugs, the terminal liver disease, our shared ability to ignore the fact that he was engaged to another woman somehow just added to the mystique. I looked at him and saw a future that was better than anything I could create alone. That night I stayed with him and never left.
I told her how it began. And then I told her about the end. Watching his character and intellect deteriorate as his liver failed, the blessing of his death in a car accident, my angry refusal to grieve him until I had a psychotic break four years later. But, by the time he died, I had a profession. I was a writer. He fed me books, taught me to edit, gave me rules of writing and thinking which serve me to this day. He left this girl, 13 years younger than him, a new future.
That’s the mythology. In the first letter, I wrote “I was lucky.” I meant lucky to find him, but the words stayed with me after I sent the letter. As I told her more in the second letter, I found myself looking at me through her eyes. My myth of a great romance began to shrivel to the story of a vulnerable child-woman and the out-of-control addict she had chosen as a replacement daddy. I would do anything, accept any treatment or circumstance, as long as he would stay alive and keep convincing me that he loved me. Yes, he was charismatic and funny, brilliant and talented, and probably more tolerant of my childish neediness than almost anyone else might have been. But it was a dead-end ride and I wouldn’t get out of it without more damage.
By the time I was writing the third letter, I was not telling her about the times he had hit me. The ways he made me carry his grass, because he was already a three-time loser. How, when we were broke, he wanted me to start whoring. How our open marriage was a license for him, not me. How when he became too bored writing the trash novels that supported us, I did it alone. Or how, at the end, he kept getting into serious accidents with other women, until he eventually died in a car with a woman who barely survived it.
In the myth, these were blips in a mostly charmed life with someone who understood me and who my horrible life into something interesting and glamorous. But now I remembered that the last time he went to prison, it was because of a tip by a woman he was living with, who was supposedly working her way through college as a prostitute. I thought about how people with my background make up the majority of prostitutes. The woman who tipped the police about the suitcase of grass in his trunk had gotten rid of him, like the woman poet, like the wife before her, another beautiful and gifted woman who fell in love with him, corresponding while he was still in prison, but gave up on him after his drinking created grief, chaos and endless expense. Like me, they probably all loved him after he was gone, but they got rid of him, because he was dangerous to them and himself.
Looking back at him, another damaged child with a terrible background, and me, who was hungry and bright but with no boundaries or any idea of what a good relationship looked like, I realized that I was luckier than I knew. Lucky that he wasn’t well and needed someone to take care of him. Lucky that, except for a brief scary period, we made enough money writing that he didn’t go back to dealing or trying to turn me out. Lucky that he was probably more kind than he would have been under other circumstances, and that I had the opportunity to see the best more than the worst of him. Lucky that I came out of it with a way to support myself so I didn’t have to submit to the next “rescuer” that came along.
Like the situation with the man who couldn’t be what I wanted him to be, this was a confluence of circumstances. If I hadn’t been so hungry, I wouldn’t have seen him as I did. Nor loved him and mourned him as the soul mate whose good influence stays with me to this day. If he hadn’t been too broke to escape from Albany, I never would have met him. If either of us had more resources, it never would have happened. But I was lucky. He was what I needed him to be, and I was that for him.
Who is under those sacks of cement?
Writers treasure people’s peculiarities. Stories would be boring without them. But, to write well, it is also necessary to dig under the stereotypes of good and evil. My husband’s story didn’t begin with prison, or the dope-dealing or pimping. I knew a few things about his early life, but in retrospect I know more from just seeing how he responded to trauma. He refused to be broken. It was something I loved about him, but it also spoke of entrenched habits of trying to ignore or bury pain. We had this in common.
We thought we were brave, but I’ve come to think it’s braver to face the truth. Which, in our case, was a dance of the walking wounded. Facing truth can take romance out of a story, but facts may be more nourishing. Truth may lead to spontaneous forgiveness, as I forgave my old boyfriend and my mother. It also can show us that we did the best we could. We see the burdens we are carrying and the innocent and good soul who is trying to bear them.
Blaming ourselves is a function of anger. Realizing that we are not perfect, that we live with handicaps, is part of grieving and letting go. Facing it doesn’t mean we give up trying to heal. And forgiveness has nothing to do, ultimately, with the people we are forgiving. It is a choice of what we want to care about, what burdens we decide not to carry. Being mad at a sociopath for being a sociopath and exploiting or hurting us is like hating the sun for shining and giving us sunburn. Facing reality empowers us to deal with it. Wear sunscreen. Trust conditionally.
The best reason to invest in healing from unresolved trauma is because it is crippling. It blocks our ability to mature through experience. It constricts personality structure with fear-based blinders and self-limiting rules that should only be interim strategies, rough protections until we see through what happened. The more we understand the confluence of events, most of which had nothing to do with us, the more trauma tends to lose its glamour and terror. It becomes simply a variety of human experience that we integrate into our knowledge of the world. When we stop mistaking a snake for a goose, because we now know that snakes exist, life becomes that much easier, safer and richer.
In the next piece, we will talk more about the relationship of fear and forgiveness. Until then
Namaste, the unchangeably innocent spirit in me salutes the unchangeably innocent spirit in you.
Kathy
Stargazer,
“He is married with two teenage children and living in California. I dumped him … I don’t even know why he still wants to see me.”
Call me jaded, but usually there is just one reason a married man wants to see an old girlfriend…and you can guess what it is.
My old boyfriend was married, 4 kids, teenagers and beyond and in another state. I later found out he was contacting LOTS of old high school friends, girlfriends. Everything he said was a well-rehearsed line, tested many times, especially in the last 10 years.
Be careful.
It’s possible, JAH, but I think it’s more out of nostalgia and curiosity. He did carry a torch for me for a long time. It was I who, on a whim, looked up all my old exes 2 years ago just to see what they were up to. I found his website on a google search and contacted him just to say a friendly hello. We corresponded briefly, sending pictures of kids/pets, then lost contact. He recently emailed me because he just had a book published and will be in my town for some book-related thingie. So I’m hoping it’s just an innocent catch-up. Imagine all the fun things I have to catch him up on–foreclosures, sociopaths….. Our lives are so very different, and I am so guarded, I can’t imagine that he would even want to connect in that way.
Stargazer,
Anger is totally related to feelings of powerless. And my opinion is that it’s primarily about our relationship with ourselves, whether we trust ourselves to take care of ourselves. There is nothing worse that feeling like we are unable to do that. It took me a long time to realize proving to myself that I was not a weenie was my core issue.
Matt writes about what he’s doing with helping other people chase down his ex. He knows this is anger-driven stuff, and continuing emotional involvement with the guy. But it’s also action, and in taking action, he’s telling himself something about who he is. And it supports his larger issues about his ability to build a life he wants. He’s being a bad-ass, practicing not caring about people who don’t care about him, seeing how mean and tough he can be, which will ultimately give him more confidence about actually imagining and creating a life that really matches who he is and what he wants.
(And you can boink me, Matt, if you want for all this imaginary analysis of your inner workings. I just love to watch you process.)
So Stargazer, I hear you talking about all the things that are being forced upon you that you don’t like, and all your possible options being eaten up in the fact that nobody listens or cares. And I agree this is about old stuff, because it’s a state of mind, one of those fugue states, that directly reflects some old business. Or that’s what it seems like to me.
I have a theory about the “devil” showing up to tempt me back to my old patterns every time I get ready to take a serious positive step. Like, for quite a while after I got rid of the ex-S, there was a stream of would-be boyfriends showing up to help me out with my heartbreak. And oh by the way, they weren’t employed or they had ex-wives who despised them or they tended to lay around waiting to be served. And I could use hear the universe saying to me, “So how desperate are you for a shoulder to cry on and warm body in your bed.” Believe me, I was desperate at the time. But I knew what was going on, that this was the equivalent of a pusher offering one last fix to a recovering addict. I told the universe “f**k you,” and went back to the slower business of figuring out what was wrong with me and fixing it.
So maybe you’re not quite ready to go to massage school. Maybe you need to have another round with the feelings of powerless. It’s better you’re doing it now, than after you’ve got more to lose. Better you take a hard look at those monsters that make you feel like a weenie, and see if they’re really that scary or if you’re just having a visit with your younger self who didn’t have any choices.
You may have to have a chat with her, give her a hug, and say, “Don’t worry, kiddo. You’ve got me now, and I’m a lot bigger than you and smarter. And hey look at how old you’ve gotten, and we’re about to go another big adventure. You want to be a massage therapist? Think about all the cool people we’ll meet, and the things we’ll do with the money.” Maybe you’ll have to ask her what it’s going to take for her to trust you. Maybe you’ll have to go have a hard conversation with someone out of your past and tell them you didn’t like what they did to you and you don’t like them for doing it.
And meanwhile, maybe bring some homemade cookies to the pool and offer one to the cell phone people if they’ll take their conversation to the other end of the pool, because you’re getting over a really bad relationship and being around cell phones makes you cry. And offer some cookies to the kids in your patio if they’ll go play somewhere else, because you’re trying to write a TV pilot for the Comedy Channel and you need to concentrate. It might not work, but it will make you smile and maybe them too. Because you’re doing something about it, but you’re being good-natured about it, recognizing that they have rights too, but you’re making an effort to make room for everyone’s entitlements.
Just act. It’s the temptation to wallow in lugubriousness that is the enemy. Do something for yourself. Even if it’s just putting a few flowers in a glass on your kitchen table as an “I love you” message to yourself. Everything thing we do to serve our best idea of what’s good right now makes a little change in our future.
And try not to be mad at your anger. It’s telling you something. You’re back in that place, because you have some unfinished business there. Find out what it wants, and act.
Massage school is waiting.
Namaste.
Kathy
I read your post several times, Kathleen. I got frustrated reading it because I know you are right, but I cannot quite grasp what to do or what action to take to stop feeling fear and helplessness along with the anger. I’m thinking if I can’t even deal with the little stressors of daily life, how in the hell will I be able to handle massage school? Not to mention the $12,000 in debt I’ll be when I get out and no guarantee of more income. You’re right. I don’t have much faith in my abilities right now. My track record with school has been spotty. I made it through college and massage school once before. But I dropped out of grad school as well. I don’t know whether going to school is a step forward or a set up to fail.
I don’t even have much faith in my ability to have a pleasant visit with the ex tomorrow and to keep the depression/anger at bay. The old pull of depression/desire to isolate seems to get stronger as I try and venture more into the world. I am not sure how I will get through this.
Thanks for taking the time to post your thoughtful comments, as always.
Star – Dont meet the X – nada zilch – if you are that stressed ALREADY – then listen to your intuition – BOINK~! – and why do u have to take massage school a second time? Here in Oklahoma folks just hang up “massage sign” and seem to get business…Star stop focusing on the negative – lifes a bitch if we let it be – my suggestion – get away from the puter for awhile – I bet I get boinked for that…………….
Kathy, reading ur story i just felt an urge to hug u and hold u, like mother is holding a baby 🙂
I wanted to take massage school a second time to learn more, increase my skills, and reignite my passion in it. I thought it might be good to take out the loan before the short sale/foreclosure wrecks my credit. I liked the curriculum this school has to offer. But it’s okay to boink me. I do feel out of sorts. I planned a pool party for Saturday but I might cancel that as well. Too bad. It’s my vacation. I should be having fun.
star – this is your vacation – have some fun for me – i am going to colorado for a week of vacation – and no puter this time – smile and shake your booty STAR
Star, I’m sorry I’m so slow to respond. The clients keep dragging me away.
I’m listening to what you say. Forgive me for sounding like one of those computer therapists, but in your last post, this is what I read. You feel fear and helplessness, along with the anger. Which makes sense to me. You’re worried about the future, and the worries seem to get larger as you get ready to take a step forward.
I wish I could tell you what to do. I’m good at theoretic constructs, but I can’t get into your shoes. But here’s the way I think about what you’re saying.
Maybe you’ve got two issues going here. One is the primary issue of anger-and-fear that’s about what’s going in in your life right now or in the past (which is about stuff outside of you). The secondary issue is that you don’t like your feelings (which is about not liking part of you). This second thing is kind of nasty, because we hate ourselves for something about ourselves, and that gives us more reason to be afraid and angry, and it just goes around and around.
This is the kind of double-whammy that tends to send us to the anti-depressant bottle. Because as long as we’re beating ourselves up, it’s kind of hard to process the external stuff. Most of my writing is about anger is about sorting out the external stuff. But let’s look at the second issue.
How do you get out of this secondary thing? If it were me, I really think I’d try to change the channel. Take a break from the fear-and-anger thing, so the hating how you feel has nothing to eat for a bit.
How do you do that? Well, go do something else. I know you don’t feel like it, but drag yourself up and go take a walk. Or better put some music on and dance. Or call up someone who has more problems than you and give them some support. Or do some volunteer work. Or paint a room. Or go outside and pull weeds. Or make a list of what you’re going to do when the loan money comes in. Or do what I do, get in the car, and drive in the mountains with the stereo blaring something that I can sing along.
That isn’t to say that at some point in these exercises, you’re not going to remember that your angry-and-afraid, but there’s a certain amount of time that you won’t. And that’s what you need, to take a break. Give the part of you that hates all the angry-and-afraid stuff some evidence that you are not a one-trick-dog. I know you’re not. You actually know you’re not, but there’s a part of you that’s worried.
The other thing that I would do — and this is only me — is dig into it. What I do is pay attention to whatever’s making the most noise. You can do it by writing (which is easiest for me) or just thinking about it.
So what’s making the most noise with you? The angry-and-afraid thing, or the hating-how-you-feel thing? Let’s say it’s the hating-how-you-feel thing. I know that one really well.
Maybe if I didn’t feel like writing, I’d lie down with some nice meditation music on ear phones and just let it have its space in my mind. Give it all the attention it wants. My theory is that if I hate it, the feeling is mutual. So let’s find out why this noise is beating me up.
Do I have an embedded belief that I have to be happy and competent and totally organized all the time?
Do I hate the fact that I make mistakes?
Do I think that miserable people are unattractive, and I don’t care why they’re unhappy?
Do I think that being angry-and-afraid is a sign of weakness?
Do I think that if I that if I’m not making money or writing poetry or cleaning house or chopping down trees or checking around for some opportunity I might be missing, because I’m busy with my feelings that I’m wasting my life and probably God won’t send me anymore opportunities because I’m clearly a wastrel and not worth bothering with?
Do I think that if I let myself be angry-and-afraid, my face is going get frozen in that expression and no one will ever want to talk with me again, because I look like the meanest person in the world? Or worse, dozens of sociopaths will slither up and say, “Let me make you feel better, little girl?”
Do I think I don’t deserve to be angry and afraid, because it’s all my own damned fault, and I’m just making it worse by my stupid feelings?
Okay, by this time, I’m getting a pattern. I’m not ALLOWED to be angry and afraid. There is something in me that thinks I should be something else. And until I stop being angry and afraid, it’s going keep beating me up. BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO HAVE YOUR FEELINGS, YOU SELFISH, USELESS, SELF-INDULGENT, LAZY, BORING, UNPRODUCTIVE, SCRUNCHY-FACED LITTLE MORON.
Whew. Who is that?
Good question. Who talks to me like that? Or who did? Who ever made me feel guilty about being sad or angry? Or beat me up about it. Because this voice is not part of me. This is some “training” voice that got stuck in my head. Who tried to train me to not feel? And more important, who profited from my not feeling? Because I sure don’t profit from all this stuff going on about whether I’m allowed to feel or not.
And then I’d try to remember the first time I ever felt like I wasn’t allowed to be sad or angry. Because these fugue states, these familiar and recurring feelings, always started somewhere. And oddly enough, when you ask yourself this question, often your mind pops up with an answer, more times than not. And I’d suddenly find myself in long-forgotten memories, everyday stuff that probably I didn’t interpret as that important at the time, but that really taught me a hard lesson about what I lost if I dared feel angry or afraid.
And for me, there would be — guess who? — dear old Dad. Yelling at me, pushing me around, hitting me, taking away my allowance or making me pack a paper bag with my underwear and socks. Because I’d dared to talk back. Or because I was crying because someone bullied me or hurt me. Either way, I got the same treatment. He wanted me to be a bully to everyone but him, and with him I was supposed to be the subservient little yes-person. And here I was, today, trying to bully myself.
Ah, the emotional vocabulary of childhood. It’s always amazing how it just keeps reverberating through our lives.
So if it were me, I’d go back to that memory time and say what I never said at the time, “Bugger off, you old blowhard” or “If you won’t help me, I’ll just find someone who will. (Insert Bronx cheer.)” And then open my eyes and make up my mind to stop giving myself a hard time about having my feelings. They’re my feelings, and no one else’s business, included whatever residue of dear old emotionally-retarded Dad was still inside my head spouting off his toxic nonsense.
I don’t know if this helps, Star. But it’s what I’d do. And if I did this, I would feel pretty good about sorting it out (and booting the old man in the butt), and give myself a present like going to a funny movie with my kid or a friend. (And I highly recommend “Hangover,” which made me laugh so hard I thought I’d break something.)
And then I’d be free to go back to work on why I felt fear an anger another day, without all that other noise interrupting me.
Kathy
P.S. And if all this still doesn’t sound helpful, maybe you don’t process the way I do, and someone else could make better suggestions. But even if you don’t want to have that kind of conversation with yourself, I do think taking a vacation from all the doom-and-gloom thinking is a good idea. Go have some fun, even if you don’t want to. It’s good for you.
ThornBud, that’s sweet of you and a welcome thought. I’ll keep in my heart for the next time, I wish I had someone to rock me like a baby. Knowing that you’d volunteer will make me feel better.
Maybe you should tell Stargazer that, too. It might be just what she needs.