To this I add my inner activation work, and Saturday I got “flooded”, to use the term psychotherapists use. It’s not where you want to be. It’s where a shitload of stuff comes up at once and you feel like you are going crazy. Driving for some reason seems to be a sort of trance state conducive to allowing feelings up.
Anyway, I activated my social support network on Facebook, and they came through. That made me feel good, or at least as good as I am capable of feeling deep inside.
Whatever the horror was that I went through, I have now touched it. The thing about being capable of dissociation, though, is that you can let it go back into its cave, and bring it out when you want to. It takes balls to do this–you are knowingly activating awful, awful feelings, knowing they will come through, knowing they will hurt; but also knowing they have a finite extent. The lesson does not last forever.
I can do this. Sometimes I use a technique my last therapist taught me, which is to look in one direction, and imagine safety, calm, love, beauty; and then put all the ugly stuff in another direction, say looking to the left in the one case and the right in the other. I can pull up feelings so deep that I involuntarily scream. The word is horror, absolute, abject horror. Then I pendulate back, and it goes away. Over time you dip your feet in there enough, and the feeling fades.
I can’t do this today. I am too spent. But I will be at it again soon.
I really, really want to live a life of purpose, where I choose what I am going to do and why; and where I am able to take deep meaning and pleasure from my work, and all my relationships with everyone I know and value and love. I want to build more structure both for my work and for my social web.
And the only way out is through. This is why this work must be done. I refuse to accept anything less than a life of excellence and beauty.