Sorry, it has been too long since I posted and there are a lot of stories that I wanted to tell. I don’t know how many I will get to today, but I will start in reverse order with the most recent which I am titling above.
Last Sunday, I had a visitor, my dear collaborator Tondi. She was here for a conference and stayed with me an extra day to do some HRV work with me. I picked her up at her hotel and brought her here. What I noticed was that once we were at the house, I was completely unable to settle down. I have been in this space before with a guest, bouncing off the walls energetically, hyper without understanding why. Ironically I was busy showing her videos about and talking about trauma and attachment repair, but I knew, and found it funny, that I was completely unable to really be with her.
I was actually thrilled, in a way, because I knew I had a session with Alicen coming up on Wednesday where I could explore what happened with Tondi and I had no idea where it was going to lead.
We started with an image of what I was feeling, which was, not surprisingly considering the title, like a trapped bird bouncing off the walls. Alicen asked me what the bird needed, and really I was kind of puzzled. With a real trapped bird, it is clear the bird needs someone to open a door or window so that it can fly free, but the idea of flying out a window did not feel good at all. I did not actually want to leave. Finally, as I stayed with the image, I thought of a very large mother bird who could be sitting in the corner of the room. Having the mother bird around was a relief, but it did not change the trapped bird flying around feeling, just made it safer to be in that room.
I was really baffled. Did the bird need the mother bird to attune to its energy and fly around with it? That might have nice and I tried it out, but no, that was not it either. Nor could I imagine the bird landing and being comforted by the mother bird. Too much activation there, the energy needed to go somewhere.
Then Alicen asked a brilliant question. “When did you feel the most settled when you where around Tondi?” And the answer came immediately, “When I was helping her with her study. When I knew what she needed from me.” And then the light of realization came on, and I saw that the trapped bird was my little girl and that she was bouncing off the walls because she had no idea what to do to make her mother happy, that my mother would never make it clear or maybe did not know what she wanted. And the bird landed then, relieved, because it too had no idea why it was bouncing off the walls.
In my mother’s family, I realize as I write this, there was something vaguely wrong about asking for something, from someone else unless you absolutely could not do it for yourself. So you asked only in an emergency. I was surprised to realize how important it is to me for people to ask me for what they want from me. I love giving them what will make them happy if I can. It is total joy. I remembered later, in one of the few personal conversations that I had with my mother, in the last year of her life, I asked her about her relationship with her own mother and she said “She always wanted something from me and I could never give it to her.”
When Tondi, at my house, was being totally accommodating and low maintenance, that was a big trigger. She was not going to be unhappy no matter what, but I could not settle until I could find out what she wanted. Luckily, my router stopped working and my car battery died during her visit, so I also got a chance to feel her support and steadiness when things did not go they way we (or I) wanted them to go. I realize, as I am writing this, that I sometimes put people in the same situation, thinking that if I have no particular choice that will just give them a chance to get what they want and that will make them happy. I was bent on being accommodating, and until this happened I truly never realized what being on the other end of that accommodation could be like.
I remembered that my mother was only able to tell me what she did not want but never what she did. She could order me around for sure, but there was never anything I (or anyone else) could do that actually would please her. When I was 11, I remember coming back from summer camp excited that I finally understood how to fold clothes and stack them so that the stack looked neat. No one had ever told me that all you have to do is make the folded side visible. I loved the neat look and I applied my new knowledge to the clothes in my room. I did not expect any acknowledgment, nor was I actually doing it for my mother. But, one day after a couple of weeks, for some reason, I did not get around to doing the neat thing. That night my mother said: “I see you are back to your old ways.” I remember thinking “I am done trying to please you!”
So this little trapped bird was really saying “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.” She was flying around waiting for Tondi to give her clear directions so she would know what to do to have a happy mother. And now, writing this, I can complete the story with the large mother bird. I did not need to in that session. But now the mother bird is there, and in this version she is simply a happy mother bird and now, instead of frantically bouncing off the walls, the little bird has the freedom to come and be with her mother when she wants to or to fly around when she wants to do that.
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