Walled

While a common phrase in surfing is "When in doubt, paddle out," there was no doubt the other about the conditions. Water temperature 56 degrees, 0-1 foot waves, and a wind blowing at around 11 knots, making the water super choppy. At around 52 degrees for air temp -- a big "No go today!" came to rest in the group chat. We stayed in our snuggly beds. Another thing you'll hear from surfers that prevents them from going out is, "It's walled here today. Let's go somewhere else." Waves that are walled are like the ones in the video below: the whole top of them dumps over at the same time. A good wave to surf has a nice peak to it; the whitewater tips over the crest of the wave and you surf on the sides, in the pocket or on the shoulder of the wave. There's a nice downward-sloping angle, a taper, to good waves that create big shoulders and better conditions for surfing. If conditions are walled, then they definitely aren't good for beginners like me. More advanced surfers on bigger waves might refer to loving walled conditions -- more space to do turns and tricks if the wave is big and steep and holds its shape. A great big wall of water would be something they can handle and really enjoy. But for me and most of my mates, walled means not good. Also called "close-outs," we are not happy to find them. It's better to wait for better conditions.

Meditating on walls this week, I've been watching with awe as the wildfires in LA have burned down the walls that made homes for people. Whole neighborhoods erased. Walls create places and home, yet amidst the haunting devastation, it was so reassuring and life affirming to see the community and loving support that rose up when the walls fell. Do walls actually make a place? A beautiful lesson from LA this January is that the people are the home and walls might be limiting us, confining us to specific roles and divided spaces. Who are we in a place? How do the walls in which we live impact who we are? I've written about assuming very different identities depending on the places I've lived; I've lived many different lives in many different places, perhaps taking too much of my identity from the particular walls in which I live. So much is set free when walls come down.

Jessica Dore, quoting Freud, recently wrote about place-based identities, why mourning can take so long, and how our identification with "abstractions" or objects in our environments impact us in loss. She says, "It seems that a large part of mourning is reckoning with the revelation of the extraordinary but often invisible extent to which we come to expect specific things of the worlds forged by our attachments, whether to people or nonhuman beings or abstractions." The place where we live affects how we think and feel, what we believe, how we interact with others. In LA, people found their love and attachment to their city when parts of the city itself burned to the ground. Without walls, people found love and belonging. This whole blog has been about how I've been trying to overcome my beliefs about and expectations of the world given to me when younger. How I'm trying to escape these limiting walls, these attachments, and come to terms with them.

Joseph Goldstein wrote about letting go of such attachments in an article published by Tricycle ("Love as the Expression of Emptiness"). He says that a "universal aspiration" of those on the spiritual path manifests "...as love, as peace, as freedom from suffering...a happiness that is fulfilling in the most complete sense." He talks about the things that get in the way of that happiness, "...the afflictive emotions such as fear, greed, jealousy, and hatred, which are all rooted in ignorance and delusion." He says, "Although various paths speak of the afflictive emotions in their own distinct ways, all share the understanding that we need some means to purify the heart and free the mind. While it may be addressed differently in different traditions, on the spiritual path there is really only one issue: extricating ourselves from those forces in the mind by which we are bound. This is not esoteric; it’s not mysterious. It’s simply the challenge of our everyday experience."

Clarifying or purifying the mind of attachments, defilements, or delusions is the point of the spiritual path. Joseph Campbell in his book Hero With a Thousand Faces gives us a map of this path. There is a call to adventure, the crossing of thresholds into unknown realms, supernatural forces of aid, and the road of trials in which one meets the shadow forces threatening the journey. This Hero's Journey applies to everything from literature to movies in the MCU Universe, but also to your own life. Campbell wrote, "This is what Joyce called the monomyth: an archetypal story that springs from the collective unconscious. Its motifs can appear not only in myth and literature, but, if you are sensitive to it, in the working out of the plot of your own life. The basic story of the hero journey involves giving up where you are, going into the realm of adventure, coming to some kind of symbolically rendered realization, and then returning to the field of normal life." Some of the people in LA are now on the path; I have been on the path; sometimes, we don't get to choose. But if you follow it along and pay attention, face your inner demons, then transformation into a new world can be the result.

So what does that epic adventure look like? Facing the shadow means to bring light to the dark parts of our histories and psyches that wall us off from love, peace, and freedom by imprisoning us in fear, hatred, and insecurity. The shadow is comprised of those parts of ourselves that we prefer not to acknowledge. Goldstein might refer to them as the "non-beautiful parts" of ourselves, that which we hide from ourselves and others, those qualities to which we would rather not admit in the bright light of day, but show up in awkward and uncomfortable ways nonetheless with others. Jung wrote, "That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate."

This journey is also referred to as the Dark Night of the Soul in many different texts and traditions. Though "night," I must tell you, is a metaphorical reference to time. It's not one night at all, but takes as long as it takes. I'm in year two this time around. Stephen Cope wrote, "The 'night sea journey' is the journey into the parts of ourselves that are split off, disavowed, unknown, unwanted, cast out, and exiled to the various subterranean worlds of consciousness.... The goal of this journey is to reunite us with ourselves. Such a homecoming can be surprisingly painful, even brutal. In order to undertake it, we must first agree to exile nothing."

Internal Family Systems speaks of the "exiles," the most vulnerable parts of ourselves, harmed in our youth, that our unconscious has been protecting fiercely, preventing us from connecting to the adult world in healthy ways. According to IFS, the exiles are dangerous, because they hold the "memories, sensations, beliefs, and emotions" of trauma. Buddhism refers to the delusions and defilements that veil our true selves. I believe these are the same things. My quest to identify, accept, and integrate my own internal veils has taken another step: releasing the exiles from behind their walls and bringing them home. Removing those walls brings me home to myself. But how do you start on the path in order to do this?

I first moved to California for a new job, and I think I've mentioned before that this job has not worked out the way I thought it would. I quickly found that I was getting really angry that things were not working out the way I wanted or expected them to work out. On a daily basis, I was frustrated, enraged, confused, and resentful. Once, I was so pissed off with something, I stepped away from a meeting to prevent myself from going off on someone in a fit of frustrated rage. For me, in a professional setting, this had never happened before. I knew this wasn't normal behavior for me. I knew it was getting worse and I wasn't getting over it myself, and this was the reason I went into therapy. Jung said, "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves." As James Hollis wrote, "It is not the other, but our relationship to history, to the disabling messages of our dependent past, that is imprisoning." Hollis calls it "history's unmade bed." I recognized something was going on and I asked for help. I sought liberation from my anger.

While the general level of rage at work has lessened as I have processed through stuff, there was still one big source of it that still got my goat every time. Seeing it still there, lingering, I was ready to face it, though anger is a rough emotion for me. Messages from childhood and society said that, as a girl, I wasn't really allowed to show anger. There was a lot of anger and rage in my household growing up, so anger is associated with fear. It's also associated with futility, because that rage never got anyone anywhere, never solved any problems, only made things worse. Sitting in a cesspool of rage growing up, I find that I don't have much stomach for it now. I just have a hard time expressing anger. I don't know how to express anger in a healthy way, see this previous post, so it has been leaking out in fits of rage and resentment. Lots of walls up within me arguing against expressing anger. So it has taken this long in therapy -- over a year -- to really feel safe enough to get into it.

I know that anger is often a cover emotion -- while anger signals danger and boundary violations, it also covers for hurt and fear. Hollis writes that individuation means to have "one's life not governed by fear. Fear is unavoidable, but a life in which fear calls the shots is one that results in terrible malformations of the soul." Awareness of that anger/fear button, a desire to face my shadow, and a willingness to keep looking, to see clearly, clarify my mind, I keep working with these eruptions of my angry soul into my every day life. This latest revelation started with a recent visit from a friend.

My friend is close in age to my mom, and during the visit, she spoke about how she recently separated from her husband. Not really having the choice when she was younger whether to be a wife and mother, she got married and had kids, and recently realized that she maybe never wanted to do that. She did that because society expected her to; she didn't really see many other options at the time. Talking to my friend, I imagined that she was actually my mom sitting there. Same situation. I've written about my mom before, what I think may have happened with her and how it affected me.

Sitting there with my friend, I had nothing but love, compassion, and encouragement for the incredibly brave decision she made on her own behalf, finally, to be on her own. Such courage! I wondered if there was something I could do for my mom, and also my dad, that showed the same love, compassion, and encouragement to them, given the very stressful situation they find themselves in now. Mom: a husband with dementia, the cost of a nursing home, and her own health issues. And then my dad: life transition into a nursing home, losing his memory, and an end of life disease. Could I simply send a card or a note that said, "It must be really hard for you, and I know you are doing your best."

When I had that thought, the entire chorus of my shadow parts rose up in protest. Huge resistance within me. They screamed NO, and I became aware of sensations in my body along with this no. I had the feeling I was holding up a giant brick wall, bracing myself against this weight. I initially thought that the brick wall was the boundary I had erected to hold back my parents, and the feeling stuck with me over several days -- I couldn't shake the feeling of strain.

Bringing this part of the story to BTG, he normalized what I was feeling, told me that extending compassion to my parents wasn't "an appropriate goal." He said, "Of course you can't be compassionate to your parents, because you're angry and younger parts of yourself are afraid of them. The anger says they don't deserve these things. The goal isn't to act on a false sense of compassion, but to understand your anger and allow it to be there." OK. Let's dive into the anger then. Allow it. Understand it. I can't extend genuine compassion to others until I give some to myself, until I face some realities from my past that keep me locked up here behind the walls of anger and fear, so let's go.

I journaled. I read a couple of books about the anger precept in Zen and journaled my thoughts around it. I tried to listen to my little inner parts and the stories they were telling. Parts of my memory have been hiding behind walls, keeping quiet out of fear and the need to function in the wider world. Those walls were protective, but now confine me. Pema Chodron wrote, "We clearly see the barriers we set up to shield us from naked experience. Although we still associate the walls we’ve erected with safety and comfort, we also begin to feel them as a restriction. This claustrophobic situation…marks the beginning of longing for an alternative to our small, familiar world. We begin to look for ventilation. We want to dissolve the barriers between ourselves and others."

Now that I am more trusted by my inner parts, embodying my adult self, my younger parts brought me their memories, seemed to hand them to me one by one, soft pleas to remember what we dealt with and how hard it was. It was so hard to see these memories again -- really feel them -- from my adult perspective. Lots of tears and self-compassion poured out of me. Keeping my feet firmly in the present, I was able to go back into those memories and be with my younger selves experiencing them. I had a number of strategies at the ready to make sure I kept myself safe while remembering.

The interesting thing about trauma and memory is that memories are often disjointed, not coherent. According to the book The Body Keeps the Score, they are encoded in the brain as feelings in the body sometimes, not actual narratives we can reconstruct. Other psychologists might say that difficult memories, those our younger selves found intolerable, get buried in our unconscious, or we might just be too young to construct a cohesive narrative about a traumatic event. So after I remembered all of these different events from my childhood, I was still left with that feeling of holding up, holding back, or bracing myself against this brick wall. I decided to work with that image and feeling. I did it in two ways: first by acting it out, then using active imagination.

BTG suggested enacting that feeling by pushing up against a wall in my house -- actually using my physical body to recreate the feeling in the real world. I was thinking that this was a boundary wall I had erected between me and my parents, and I had to keep holding it up. I was afraid it was going to fall and all my work creating healthy boundaries with my family would be left a pile of rubble. So I reenacted the feeling I was feeling -- the pushing, holding up the wall. I literally pushed up against my front door, then backed away from it to "see" what would happen in my body. The wall "stayed up." Instead of feeling relief, though, I felt like I was missing something. I got no satisfaction or resolution of the feeling, it was still there, so I kept working on it.

I then used my imagination to work with the wall. Like the battlefield dream I talked about awhile ago, I let my imagination run with this image. BTG said, "Very rarely can we work with the unconscious and our conscious minds directly. Images and art speak a language that both our unconscious and conscious minds can interact through. Art pushes past the boundaries of where language can go." Jung formulated the method he called Active Imagination during the difficult period after he broke with Freud. For Jung, Active Imagination was a way for him to engage with the "impulses and images from the unconscious" to "heal himself from within." He returned to the "symbolic play" of his childhood, using writing, drawing, and painting, to "give symbolic form to his experience." He would meditate and allow the fantasies that appeared during that meditation or daydreaming to follow their own path. Joan Chodorow, who edited the collection of essays on Active Imagination, wrote, "These fantasies seemed to personify his fears and other powerful emotions. Over time, he realized that when he managed to translate his emotions into images, he was inwardly calmed and reassured."

So, I let my imagination run. And this is what happened.

I tried again. I pushed against a door in my apartment, trying to match the physical feeling of strain, frustration, and rage that was in my body, then released it, sat down, and closed my eyes. I realized that I wasn't holding up the wall, I was pushing on it. Pushing with all my might. It occurred to me that if I was worried that a wall would fall if I wasn't holding it up, then I thought it was unstable. Why would I push so hard on an unstable wall?

This made no sense. (Keep going, I whispered to myself. Just let it keep going.)

In my imagination, I sat and looked at the wall and really noticed it. First, the wall appeared before me in my mind like the wall of a medieval castle. At the bottom, six-feet thick and curved upwards from the ground. I thought, "That wall ain't falling. What is going on here?" So I decided to walk away from the wall to get a sense of perspective. A broader view of it.

As I walked away from the wall, I saw that it curved away from me. This surprised me. (How can my own imagination surprise me?) When I was talking to BTG about this wall in session, I imagined a long, straight, north-south wall between me and the Midwest. But this wall was curved -- and not curved around me, which would have been my next logical assumption -- but curved away from me. (So confused.) So, I take a look. I walked around this wall and found it to be perfectly circular. A round fortress with no doors or windows, no drawbridge, no arrow slits for archers -- just a solid stone wall in a perfect circle. I couldn't see the top of it.

I realized that the wall wasn't mine.

It was my parents' wall.

They had built this fortress and it kept me out. I couldn't get in.

The feeling of holding up the wall was actually me pushing to get through it. That was the frustration and rage. One one hand, I was trying really hard to get into that fortress. I wanted to be seen and loved. And they would never let me in. They were so enmeshed with each other that no one else could breach that wall.

Heart breaking, I really felt the feeling that they didn't want me. My parents never wanted to be parents, and I felt that as they didn't want me.

I sat there a long time with that feeling. Rode the whole wave of it. It took a long time.

That desire to offer my parents compassion? That small note? That was me, still pushing on that wall, trying to get in. Denying myself, trying to please. And my little inner parts finally said no. Knock it off. Don't set yourself up for the inevitable rejection again.

Sat there a long time and just cried it out.

Then another feeling made itself known. I felt a new feeling on my skin.

The feeling of pushing was internal: muscles flexing, a straining feeling inside my chest. This new feeling was on the outside of my skin -- that feeling you have when you stick your hand in really hot water and you can't tell if it's hot or cold? You know that feeling? Kind of icy, scalding hot? That feeling cascaded over the outside of my arms and down the back of my neck.

I imagined that I was cowering on the outside of the wall, protecting myself with my arms over my head, waves of rage pouring over me, hurting my skin. I was crouching down on the outside of that wall like a WWI soldier in a trench, hiding and protecting myself. I almost felt grateful to the wall for its protection. Against what? I'm not entirely sure. I think my parents fought a lot. There was a lot of big anger in the house, and I was a sensitive little kid. Seeing big rage on television, like the January 6 riot or old film of civil rights activists getting attacked, has the same feeling to me now -- pulses of rage land on my skin like a hot liquid and burn.

I remembered some actual traumatic events from my young life that included rage-fueled actions, but I was a bystander for those. I wasn't physically hurt in these memories, but I also wasn't comforted after they happened. In The Power of Showing Up, Dan Siegel writes that children need to feel safe, seen, and soothed in order to feel secure. He writes that the "single most important thing" parents can do to help their kids "succeed and feel at home in the world" is to simply "show up for your kids." He writes that "the longitudinal research on child development clearly demonstrates that one of the very best predictors for how any child turns out... is whether they developed security from having at least one person who showed up for them." Showing up means simply bringing your attention and your awareness to your child, being "mentally and emotionally present." This is how secure attachment to caregivers forms over time.

In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel Van der Kolk writes, "Associating intense sensations with safety, comfort, and mastery is the foundation of self-regulation, self-soothing, and self-nurture...." Things don't have to be perfect. Big traumas can happen. But if children are helped to re-regulate by being helped to feel safe, seen, and soothed after a traumatic or troubling event, then they will be okay. The event will be integrated. I didn't have that. No one helped me understand what happened or soothed my fears, brought me back to a regulated state. So I didn't learn how to self-regulate effectively, and these events went unprocessed. They've just been hanging around all of this time, tucked into my unconscious. Thus, I was insecurely attached.

As a child, my fear was left to fester, and I was left on my own to deal with it. The feelings were overwhelming and may be the source of this intrusive feeling. It might also be the source of the pushing -- the frustration and rage of a little person asking for help and no one coming. Sue Monk Kidd wrote, “As we attempt to adapt to and protect ourselves from the wounds and realities of life, we each create a unique variety of defense structures – patterns of thinking, behaving, and relating designed to protect the ego.” Walls are built to protect ourselves. I can see how my walls got built. Makes me wonder how bad my parents had it in order to build that fortress. Pain is passed down through the generations.

Van der Kolk goes on to say that children who are securely attached "acquire a sense of agency: that their actions can change how they feel and how others respond... in contrast, children with histories of abuse and neglect learn that their terror, pleasing, and crying do not register with their caregiver. Nothing they can do or say...brings the attention and help." He writes, "If you cannot tolerate what you know or feel what you feel, the only option is denial and dissociation," that "infants who are not truly seen and known by their mothers are at high risk to grow into adolescents who are unable to know and to see." (Why is the blame so squarely on the moms? Dads again get a pass.) Van der Kolk again, "But if your caregivers ignore your needs or resent your very existence, you learn to anticipate rejection and withdrawal. You cope as well as you can by blocking out your mother's hostility or neglect and act as if it doesn't matter, but your body is likely to remain in a state of high alert, prepared to ward off blows, deprivation, or abandonment. Dissociation means simultaneously knowing and not knowing."

Knowing and not knowing. A considerable difficulty to overcome on this journey is my fear of what I do not know, what I am refusing to know. Is there any physical abuse in my history? I have no memory of anything like that. I think there was just a lot of scary anger around and I didn't know how to process it. Denial and dissociation have been my constant companions. Looking back now from the perspective of my adult self, these memories can be more effectively integrated and I can finally move on from them. At least I won't continue to pass on my pain to others.

Ironically, my ability to dissociate may have helped with this imaginative healing exercise and writing about it. I rather love this reframing. In the book What Happened to You? by Bruce Perry and Oprah, Perry said that Oprah's ability to dissociate was a superpower. It allows for creativity and might be an advantage when it comes to meditating. They discuss how trauma can lead to post-traumatic wisdom, though the cost of that wisdom is high. Perry writes, "And for many people, the pain never goes away. The wise learn how to carry their burden with grace, often to protect others from the emotional intensity of their pain." Every painful thing that I remember, honor, respect, and soothe gets integrated into my psyche now. Every painful thing that I can wrap up in the arms of self-compassion moves me toward individuation, wholeness, peace, and equanimity. I can stop being so angry at work. The feelings fade as soon as I deal with the source of the buttons that got pushed.

For now, the pushing and bracing feeling is gone. Recognizing my exiles, hearing their stories, working imaginatively with this wall, has allowed them to relax a little, perhaps. I saw them from a safe place and soothed them. Now perhaps they feel secure. Diana Fosha wrote, "The roots of resilience...are to be found in the sense of being understood by and existing in the mind and heart of a loving, attuned, and self-possessed other." While BTG has been this self-possessed other for awhile now, I wonder if I'm becoming that person, too. Enough of my own interior walls have fallen and my True Self, my Buddha nature, is emerging stronger and stronger with every new bit of understanding. The more meaning I can make of my early experiences, the more they get integrated into my current life, the more I become whole.

I can see this greater wholeness in a couple of ways. First, I realize that the wall had nothing to do with me. My parents didn't actually reject me, they didn't want to be parents. And I always knew that. Like the girl in the battlefield dream, she watched the battle, impatient and annoyed. Nothing had anything to do with her; she was neglected. She hid to get away from the crossfire. That super subtle difference between a personal rejection and an impersonal abandonment might be the key to why I was able to be sort of okay in my life. It could have been so much worse. I never did hard drugs. I didn't become an alcoholic. I held jobs, did well in school. It could have been much worse. A grain of self-esteem survived which allowed me to be a little okay within all this mess, and now may allow a more efficient comeback.

The wall also might be a good way to explain the source of the angst prompted by that last person who pisses me off at work: that person is also an unscalable wall. Walled up people are frustrating to me. Brene Brown wrote, "Armor makes us feel stronger even when we grow weary from dragging the extra weight around. The irony is that when we’re standing across from someone who is hidden or shielded by masks and armor, we feel frustrated and disconnected.” So just like in surfing when faced with a break full of close-outs, I can now turn away from those people. I can say to myself, "It's walled here. Let's go somewhere else."

I also realized that if it's not my wall, I'm actually free. Just like those people in LA who lost everything, they found solace in what arose when the walls fell. Like the hero in Campbell's monomyth, I might have traveled my Road of Trials, met the goddess, and found atonement with the mother and father. I might be ready to reenter the world. There is great relief in knowing that I'm not the one who is walled. I can go visit the fortress like I would a medieval castle in England -- it's now simply a tourist attraction near the Great Lakes. I can rest in a knowing that I’ve been trying so hard to be perfect, to be whatever everyone else wanted me to be, in order to get into this tiny fortress. But the rest of the world, far larger and so imperfect, might just welcome me as I am. That now, I can quit focusing on the wall and simply turn away from it. I can turn away from that place, that practice of perfecting, to a wider, more imperfect world and be in it as my imperfect self. Trying every day to just see more clearly, be more present with what is, not trying to be something I'm not. What a relief. How freeing, to have finally found better conditions.