The Descent and the
Demons
I remember it was the dark side of a Scorpio moon when I started my first heavy
bleed. I felt as if I was descending, passing through this dimension into a
subterranean world. I felt underneath life. There was no
pressure from above just a slow, gradual decline into a lifeless underworld
where I could barely function.
The Greeks have a
saying for every possible situation. The one that rang true for me at this
particular juncture of my life was “to take back my blood”. To take back your
blood means to settle the score. I had been bled dry and now my body was
reinforcing this message by actually bleeding out. This is why I shut my gate
and locked my door for the best part on one year so I could take back
my blood.
I am bleeding
feelings, stagnant blood and clots of creative frustration that formed as my
body banged on the door of my mind. My womb is trying to tell me something. My
emotions are trying to tell me something. My body is trying to tell me
something. I am so anemic I can barely get out of bed in the mornings in pools
of blood as the life force continues to gush out between my legs. It is like I
am birthing but there is no baby. There is just loss and hindsight. I slowly
feed myself some food only to feel it rushing out in the form of a huge blood
clot ten minutes later. It is as if life is passing through me. I can no longer
contain it.
I go to the doctor.
She is amazed that I am still functioning and commends me for being one of
life’s strong warrior women when she hears about all I have on my plate. She
also kindly tells me off which gives me permission to relax and let myself off
the hook by going to bed to nap during the day (even if I wanted to I cannot
prevent this happening, I am like a junkie on the nod). She says I can sleep
all day but I will not feel better. I am administered a course of iron shots.
The injections hurt as the liquid iron is quite thick but I feel a rush as it
enters my body. I have to be careful with this new energy as it is precious and
I need to build more iron in my blood. I have to rest and eat spinach and
steak. If I had more energy I could use it to be scared about all the changes,
about feeling betrayed by my body but most of my energy goes into the basic daily
functioning that I previously took for granted. I am devastated.
I go home and
bleed. I bleed all the repressed negative emotions that were pushed down,
parked in an underground chamber. For years I had no control in my life except
to keep my deeper self under lock and key, under house arrest, in that chamber
and now I am in that bloody chamber cleaning up the mess. I am collapsed on the
floor as a furious hag screams at me beating me further into the ground. I am
too tired to fight her.
I bleed all the negative
vulnerable emotions, the wounds, many of which are not mine but emotions I
carried for others; overwhelm, anxiety, shame, despair, loneliness,
powerlessness, guilt, hopelessness, terror, insecurity and I bleed the powerful
fierce emotions, all the “difficult” emotions like frustration, fury,
resentment and all the trapped power thwarted by the internal patterns blocking
my way that have learnt to accommodate others at the expense of myself, passed
down to me, unspoken contracts, blind love and the bonds of intergenerational
trauma.
I disobey my own
culinary rules and do the unthinkable; I buy a microwave. I buy pre-made
dinners when I can drag myself around the supermarket and pop them in the
microwave. My son is delighted by the microwave. I make him popcorn and I heat
up lasagne after lasagne. I let him spend far too much time on Fortnite. My
daughter moves out to live with her father to be nearer her secondary school
and friends. She has state exams and she is hitting the middle teen years so
she is experimenting with life. I feel like a hopeless, weak mother. I have no
energy to meet her rising life force, to be her rock, her safe container so she
can meet the challenges of life, to enjoy her as she embarks on the new stage
of differentiation. The timing is brutal. Just when she needs me to be my
strongest I am at my weakest. I feel bereft. Right now I cannot see beyond a
few hours but I vow to regain my strength for her, to come back stronger so she
can see her mother is a force of nature, someone who can embrace change and
overcome terror, someone strong she can respect so she can respect herself.
My womb is having a
clear out. My womb holds the wisdom and the vision. I feel each emotion in my
body and I realign with her, reunited. The body is amazing. My body knows. My
body holds the score. My body is strong even though right now she cannot get
back up. She has brought me to this place so I can change my life. She is
setting her boundary and this time I have to listen to her if I know what is
good for me.
The mornings are
the worst because I wake up in a new reality, just like I woke up after my
breakdown all those years before, and I don’t recognise anything. This time
there are no concerned relatives and white coats. This time I have pissed
everyone off even more. I am terrorised. Everything is different and for a
split second in the moments between sleep and waking I sometimes forget but
mostly I am awoken with the grip of terror around my throat, be it in the small
hours of the morning or with the dawn.
Psychological
terror is my constant companion. At night I sweat and wriggle with terror. In
the day I strive to keep it at bay. My old familiar reality and coping
mechanisms have been stripped away and all I have is terror. I am not yet used
to this new reality. It is how I imagine a soldier feels back from war with his
limbs blown off. I had wanted to get into the arena of life but many days I had
second thoughts and just wanted relief. I just wanted to go back to my old,
cosy, familiar patterns even though they were killing me. I am not ashamed to
admit my cowardice. My dilemma was to pick a poison; this one will kill you and
this one could also kill you. You may get killed for being yourself but not
being myself could also kill me. Not changing was destroying me but changing
could destroy me too. At least that was how it felt.
There may be a
person, a catalyst or an event that propels you into the Dark Woods. For me it
was my body bleeding, up to fifteen weeks of flooding. The truth for me was that
I had been avoiding going back into the Dark Woods as I had unfinished business
in there. Truth be told, I would have done anything, including sawing off my
own leg or having a series of street fights to avoid going back there. A bit
like Imperator Furiosa in Mad Max Fury Road turning back to the Citadel, I had
to return to the very place I had escaped from in order to reclaim my
sovereignty of self.
When I closed my
gate and started my co-dependency detox I was unprepared for the depth of
despair I would experience. Perhaps subconsciously this was why I had been
avoiding doing this part of the journey. When I stepped out of my assigned
roles of carer, clown, rebel and scapegoat and set my boundaries I experienced
a loss and terror so profound that it kept me awake night after night. Every
morning was a new nightmare as I detoxed from my illusions and bled.
Change is painful.
Change is hard. Change is lonely. Change is the one true constant and true
change is challenging. Changing old patterns requires monumental courage
especially if you have previously struggled with mental health issues (aka
emotional distress).
I would often go
for a shower in some attempt to wash away the fear and sometimes I ended up in
a foetal position, sobbing and wishing I could go down the plughole with the
water that washed over me. I was stripped down to the bare bones and the
process was brutal. Old terrors and voices returned urging me to harm myself,
that I was worthless, unlovable. I fought these terrors daily and nocturnally.
I lashed out at an imaginary enemy and all my demons and the old internal
conflict returned. Luckily for me, I had developed a container in therapy and
strengthened my adult part so to some extent I could hold the turbulence. But
only just. I have worked very hard strengthening my adult and taking charge of
my inner child and all the unhealthy patterns that went along with that part. I
have consciously unearthed the subconscious and confronted the lies and
delusions of my mind. This was terrifying and extremely painful. I have claimed
ownership of myself and taken charge of my real feelings.
The most
troublesome of my inner emotions (by far) was my toxic inner child and my toxic inner
teen (trauma pain bodies). I would define my toxic inner child as overly
accommodating at the expense of myself, overly responsible, selfless with
little to no sense of self in the face of others and very passive. I would
define my inner teen as provocative, uncompromising, stubborn, headstrong, aggressive, avoidant, difficult,
rebellious and self-destructive both sabotaging and shooting myself and
everyone else in the foot. Both were patterns of behaviour that had been
reinforced over many years and both were deep-seated.
Dealing with these
two traumatised emotional pain bodies within was extremely challenging and sometimes
it was a real struggle to take the reins. Quite often I would lose the reins
and these wild horses of emotional turmoil would gallop away dragging me behind
them. This whole process was like being put through a mincemeat machine.
By far the most
difficult was detoxing from the out-of-date accommodating inner child part. I
was like a hardened drug addict chomping at the bit just wanting one more hit.
I was so distressed inside that all I wanted to do was fix myself with fixing
people. I would have sold my body for one more hit of fixing someone, anyone in need, anything rather than this.
I yearned to be
the good girl and when I couldn’t do that I lashed out at myself, howling and
wailing when I was alone in my house. My blind loyalty knew no bounds. My guilt
was vast. I was in a huge grief process. I experienced grief and rage in equal
measure which was almost unbearable. I ricocheted between the two like a
madwoman. It was a full time job along with my physical health and not to mention
my daily responsibilities as a mother. It could be hard to not succumb to
comfortable coping strategies to deal with the overwhelm like freezing,
detaching, escaping into fantasy or acting out and creating more trauma outside
of myself. These are primitive and impulsive, largely unconscious, coping
mechanisms that I was trying to deconstruct. The important thing during all of
this was to address my deeper feelings which ranged from rage to extreme
emotional pain to euphoria to mania to calm and much more in between.
Whilst confronting and shedding the emotional trauma body of my inner
child and inner teen and daring to matter as an individuated, differentiated
and autonomous adult, I changed the habit of a lifetime and stopped minding
everyone’s feelings. I was used to protecting them at the expense of myself and
putting everyone ahead of myself. I used to drop everything for others and keep
myself locked away in a psychological and emotional cage which I called a psychological
staitjacket. I was living an unlived life. Then I would become provocactive
and/or self-destructive as a way to cope with the pain of not living
authentically from my core.
This is when I
discovered I was in between worlds in a kind of no-man’s land, where I could
not go back and I could not go forward. I was stuck. This is what I came to
know as the Dark Woods.
The Dark Woods are
lonely and terrifying. They are a metaphor for psychological terror. They
are your and my own personal, private hell, the no-go zone. It is very easy to
get lost in the Dark Woods, to build a cabin in the woods and stay frozen for
many years or to organise your life in such a way that is very controlled and
limiting because you are living in a constant state of terror. The Dark Woods
are a dangerous place to settle. Seeing as I cannot go back to the old ways,
the old me, I shall stay here, proudly hurting and nursing old wounds in the
shadows. I shall stay sick to punish everyone. I will become that crazy old
lady in the deepest, darkest part of the woods with no teeth and unkempt hair
living in total isolation. This is the siren’s call in the Dark Woods, to stay,
to drown, to dream away my life. But this would mean death. The Dark Woods is
not somewhere to settle. The Dark Woods are somewhere to pass through, a
transition. Transitions can be incredible times for growth and new potential.
What is less talked about though is how incredibly painful and brutal they can
be. Once you find yourself in the Dark Woods your goal is to survive the
experience and find your way out the other side using the tools you have and
the skills you have honed. You have to pass through the Dark Woods but it is
not wise to let the Dark Woods devour or deceive you.
However, as an
aside, if you find a peaceful, gentle bluebell wood with a lovely stream
running by, it is definitely alright to settle there. You deserve to be
surrounded by beauty, safety, joy and love. You absolutely do not deserve to be
surrounded by terror, separation, fear and hatred though which is what the Dark
Woods are.
I entered the Dark
Woods age forty five and I only started emerging out of the Dark Woods, wobbly
and new, shortly before my forty seventh birthday. I had been to the Dark Woods
many years before but against my will. You could say I was abducted and dropped
off in the Dark Woods. Interestingly my nervous breakdown in my late twenties
had also lasted two years. I descended aged twenty seven and emerged aged
twenty nine. Two years seems to be my cut-off point for emotional suffering.
I thought I had hit
rock bottom back then aged 27 when my life came crashing down around me; a
spiritual, emotional and mental fall out which lasted 2 years… 2 years in the
desert, the underworld, the abyss. One year of free falling terror then another
year to climb out of the wreckage. However shortly after my 45th birthday
I had a complete physical breakdown which was just as brutal. In my early
twenties the warning signs were there to herald my being on the wrong path in
the form of a bad premonition nightmare while in my late thirties I was
similarly alerted by my body with a smaller physical burn out which resulted in
me developing asthma and adrenal fatigue. But that didn’t prepare me for the
flooding which was to floor me and leave me barely able to function.
In my twenties my
mind was banging on my door. Now in my forties my body was banging on my door. The body
holds the score and has a way of forcing us to confront issues we have swept
under the carpet. Somehow the mind does not have the same authority as the body.
It is secondary whereas the body is primary and primordial. I see the mind as the
father and the body as the mother. The body runs deep into our tissues, the
issues in our tissues, as my mum used to say! I break the seal on my internal
mother and father’s fear.
Now I am choosing
to go back there because I know I have to go there in order to move forward.
The Dark Woods is what I call them but there are many names; the abyss, the
desert, the underworld, the dark night of the soul. There are many terrors and
traps in the Dark Woods and you will be surrounded by dark magic; demons,
monsters, illusions, nightmares, tricks of the mind all sent to test you,
manipulation, deception, all forms of fear, paranoia, self-hatred, separation,
delusions and the relentless terror of the trauma body. I know one has to be
well prepared to get through the Dark Woods having spent 2 years there before
in my late twenties though nothing really prepares you for it (in this way it
is like childbirth). Transformational healing and renewal is impossible without
passing through the Dark Woods.
Many people find
themselves in the Dark Woods involuntarily as I had done in my late twenties.
Many find themselves there due to sickness or loss, grief or despair. Some cope better than
others in the Dark Woods (and depending on the severity of the situation of course). People who are emotionally resilient and blessed with
inner strength and a secure sense of self will fare better than those who do
not have the inner resources to cope. Some enter the Dark Woods and cannot find
their way out. Some become addicted to the in-between nature of the place,
never beginning or finishing anything, frozen and unable to fully commit to
life. We all have to venture into the Dark Woods and if we don’t do it now
we’ll have to do it when we are dying. If we live well we hope we will die
well. “If you want to stay alive, stay
authentic” says Gabor Maté and this is true. One day we have to do the
difficult work and get real with ourselves. There is no easy way to do this
work. It is hard.
So now I am in the
Dark Woods with just my despair for company. Just me and the very thing I have
been avoiding all my life; the thing I dress up in defences, the thing that had
abducted me in my late twenties, the thing that I deny, the thing that I have
been running from for so many years, the thing that I park, bury, stuff down,
disregard, medicate.
What am I so afraid
of? What is it that makes me feel like I am being strangled and I
cannot breathe? What is so terrified of being seen? Despair heralds the arrival
of the repressed pain body, the trauma, the old wounding. What stands between
me and my deeper self? Despair does. Fear makes me create roles to keep the
uncomfortable truth at bay but dig deeper and I can see that it is in fact
despair that blocks my path. Despair is a land I have to pass through in order
to access the treasure. Despair is the desert before the oasis. Despair is
crossing the abyss. Despair is the layer you shed in the void before you
discover that everything leads to Love.
In many ways my
inner world was not my biggest challenge. Revealing, championing and not
abandoning myself in the outer world was my big issue which is perhaps why I
was sent two supernatural bouncers in the form of the Minoan snake goddess and
Pan. I still had a long way to go but between the two of them they were going
to guide me back to reclaim my power. It was all very Jungian and very Greek! I
was uncomfortable with power and had learnt to repress my own formidable power
which had leaked out as self-destruction in my twenties.
My biggest fear is
to be assertive in a calm and loving way, to be real, to risk being seen with
people I am very close to. When I say being “seen” I do not
mean being seen as a nice accommodating person, I do not mean being seen as an
outrageous, entertaining clown, I do not mean being seen as a ball-breaking
bitch, I do not mean being seen as an aloof outsider, I do not mean being seen
as a contrary teen rebel, I do not mean being seen as a loving, little girl.
Those are all outer planets that orbit around my core planet. Those are all
parts, not the pivot, and those things are easy to play, to act out year after
year. I mean being really seen. I mean when all the parts are
stripped away and there is nowhere to hide. I mean being seen beyond the parts
into my vulnerability and into my core, into the place where that quiet little
voice and that deep calm resides, the place that is both timeless and eternal,
both highly personal and universal. The place that is called Love.
What prevented me
allowing myself to be seen? Emotional pain, shame, anger and fear blocked my
way and prevented me from allowing myself to be seen. This was not conscious.
This was layers of trauma and disconnect. Shame and vulnerability researcher
Brené Brown refers to vulnerability as uncertainty, risk and emotional
exposure. I was unprepared to take that risk around defended people
and so I was at the mercy of many people. In order to survive I ceased to
exist.
One of my fears is
to let down a person who is suffering. I have this ability to feel the person
underneath the defence with my body and my emotional system. The drive to
alleviate this person’s pain and to accommodate their defence is stronger than
the desire to be myself. This was both a blessing and a curse but, in my case,
mostly a curse. I need people to feel a sense of belonging, to feel included.
It is sort of like being a super empath maternal highway. Of course this is
idealism because how can you include a dangerous psychopath or highly toxic
person, for example? Besides “a compulsive and automatic concern for the
needs of others while ignoring your own is a major risk factor for chronic
illness” says Gabor Maté, one of my 21st century go-to sages.
Perhaps the fact
that I scored 87% on agreeableness, 88% on compassion and 96% on openness to
experience on The Big Five personality test was a factor too. It is in my nature to be accommodating despite the fact that I am a highly creative person (creatives can often be labelled selfish and uncompromising which is not always strictly true). In conjunction
with this I did not practice boundaries in my life because then I would have to
operate from my authentic core self. I would have to let people down. I would
have to disappoint others to please myself as Oriah Mountain Dreamer says. In
many ways this meant I was doing a disservice not only to others but also to
myself (not to mention my children) because in the long run it is
counterproductive to accommodate people. I was operating from a place of
desperation and duty because of the stress I experienced rather than coming
from a more grounded place. I could literally feel other people’s fear
and their pain. This ability controlled my life and it had started in my
childhood. Rooting out this pattern was exceptionally painful and I felt torn
apart inside.
The best way to
help someone else is to set loving boundaries, have the courage to be oneself
and to risk being seen. No agenda. This is in fact true power. Not only can
this liberate you but it can also liberate others. By accommodating people’s
defences I allowed them to hurt me, humiliate me, disrespect me, dominate me,
drain me, use me, exploit me and objectify me. I was living proof that if you
give an inch they will take a mile. I learnt this the hard way. How was this
helping them or me? I was enabling them to continue to cross boundaries and to
treat people badly and in the process I was suffering. If you do not set
boundaries it can invite people to disrespect you and your space and
time. Abandoning myself to accommodate others was not working.
Dr Gabor Maté
states “People have two needs, attachment and authenticity. When authenticity
threatens attachment, attachment trumps authenticity.” This quote was a game
changer for me because it made me look at the fact that I had chosen attachment
over authenticity. The only place I could begin to be authentic was in my
creative work which I always put on the back burner. No one really supported
this part of me or took me seriously because I didn’t and so
it was almost like a dirty little secret I had to brush off as something silly
and unimportant. Like me.
We are inherently
complex but our needs are simple; to be seen, to be loved and to be
accepted for who we really are. To both belong to ourselves and to
connect with others. I had the distinct impression, that when it came to
people, rolling out my cardboard cut-out personas of carer, clown, rebel and
scapegoat year after year was not only hurting me and making me unhappy but it
was a deeply unfulfilling existence. I was not existing from my core. I was
hopping out of myself every time I met a person. I was abandoning myself to
accommodate others and it was time to leave the circus and grow up. It was time
to take myself more seriously, to take up more space and to start growing more.
It was to re-evaluate my life, time to stop talking and take action, time to
discard the old ways that were no longer serving me and time to dare to become
more real. If you want to stay alive, stay authentic says Gabor Maté and this
is true. One day we have to do the difficult work and get real with ourselves.
There is no easy
way to do this work. It is hard.
How do I
belong and be true to myself?
For some reason I
never felt I had the same rights as everyone else to be myself. To be honest I
was not sure who “myself” was in the first place. It was quite a fluid
landscape and a complex place once I started looking closer. I knew I felt
things quite acutely and experienced a lot of discomfort due to this
affliction. However I was also aware of a dark side that left unfettered could
turn into a dangerous weapon. I never knew where I began and others ended. I
felt it my duty and responsibility to soothe people, placate people, calm
people, love people, heal people, to be there for people no matter what
regardless of what was going on in my life. This made me push down and park
huge parts of myself and become frustrated and at times like I would break
under the pressure.
When I was
exploring what my needs were with my therapist I was astounded to discover that
I could not identify any need except the need for space. It came above my need
for connection. What was paramount I realised was connection with myself first
and foremost. I needed the time and space to process experiences and to
discover who I am and what I need. I know I need space and time alone to
recharge or I crack up. I really suffer if I do not get this space. In the
maelstrom of meeting other people’s needs in my life I had gone years without
honouring this fundamental need of mine. I had over-functioned. The next need I
discovered that I have is to connect to silence and nature and what I call the
source. The source is a universal energy that is love. I cannot decide if the
source is within me or outside of me. I have come to the conclusion that it is
both. I need to connect to both myself and this source before I can function
well in the world. If I do not do this I will suffer and so will the people in
my life by default.
Of course I long for the day when I could just simply share
with someone and not have such complicated and visceral reactions to other people’s
experiences. I want to be someone who can sit with someone in their pain or joy and just acknowledge it, witness it without losing myself. And the more work I do I have glimpses of this with some people with is lovely.
Since I turned 30 I have been on the path. I started by going to a
self-development class for a year. Then I did some family constellations which
led to Family Systems training focusing on inter-generational trauma which I
took over the course of a year. During my thirties I got heavily involved in
mental health work; going to workshops, seminars and critical psychiatry
conferences mostly in UCC. I gave a keynote on our collective response to
emotional distress, a few talks on routes to recovery and a talk on
co-dependency. I gave interviews on radio, in newspapers and for television.
Many people contacted me privately and I struggled with the demands plus the
practical reality of my life as a single mother of two children. I was involved
on the DCU service improvement course where we worked on the proposal project
to introduce open dialogue to our local mental health unit. And I managed to do
all of this without really understanding or implementing boundaries around my
sense of self.
You know how we often leave the hardest things till last? Well I did
that with boundaries. I cultivated all the other aspects and wondered why my
life was so incredibly exhausting. Wasn’t I doing the work? Like Brené Brown
says in one of her many excellent talks some of us park everything so we either
implode or explode or the body eventually draws attention to the things we do
not want to face (because our bodies hold the score). I did not want to set
boundaries because it brought up so much excruciating discomfort for
me. Also I knew it would open a whole can of worms! Instead I was all things to
all people which was exhausting but much easier. At 38 I collapsed and hit burn
out. I recovered and got back up. At 40 I started therapy in earnest. I did
therapy for 6 years. But it was only at 45 that I started setting boundaries
and I cannot emphasise enough how awful and brutal the process was.
There was a reason I had been avoiding the work. It was, in a word,
BRUTAL. I would take a round in a military zone or have ten street fights
rather than do this work. It is terrifying and long and arduous. You will piss
everyone off, you will have sleepless nights with just terror as your
companion, you will feel unspeakably isolated (because this is part of the
process) and you will have to let go of being “accommodating” which I had been
for most of my adult life in one way or another bar some rebellious periods and
a breakdown when I was so distressed I could not function. Coming off pleasing
and accommodating people is like detoxing from hard drugs (really I should have
been in rehab). Being authentic and setting boundaries sounds like some easy
thing that you go on some fancy spiritual retreat for but it is just sweat,
blood, guts, tears and terror. Personally I think it is worse than childbirth.
At 27 I had a breakdown which took me 2 years to recover from. I thought
a nervous breakdown was hard but in truth, it was much easier for me than
setting boundaries. I know that sounds crazy but it's true. Maybe we leave the
hardest stuff (and the most important stuff) till last because we have to be in
a stronger position to manage the fall out and to tolerate the discomfort. I
cannot overemphasize just how challenging this work is especially for
sensitive, accommodating folks or people struggling with co-dependency issues
or trauma. I know there is not a perfect time to do this work (and sometimes it
is during a desperate time that you are required to do this work in order to
improve or save your life) but it is good if you have done some ground work and
have good, strong support in place, like a good therapist for example.
It may look easy but this work is really hard. It is hard getting real and
getting into the arena but unless you want to watch your life rather than
engage with it you have to do this difficult work. You have to confront some
important matters you have been avoiding in order to live well and from your
authenticity. It is brutal work but the rewards are great (or so I hear... I am
not there yet!) In short I sum the results up as follows;
It took me years to stop taking emotional responsibility for everyone
else and to start taking emotional responsibility for myself.
My greatest desire
in the Dark Woods was to return to the familiar. It took all my courage and
effort to move forward rather than go back, to choose courage over comfort. The
further I ventured in the more terrifying it was and the more lost I felt. Change
is painful. I experienced psychological birth contractions. I have not
experienced so much psychological terror since my breakdown. I hope it ends
soon and I can make my way out of the Dark Woods Part 2. I want to be true to
myself at all costs. I just wish it had not been so painful or difficult and
that I had to deal with so much resistance both within and without. To go through with this process takes guts, stamina and a huge amount of courage.
