Posts from — October 2008

I had a really moving session with Andrea this afternoon with a bunch of pieces to it.

First of all I feel really good and decent emotionally even though physically I don’t feel so good with a minor cold and an infection. Sometimes in the past when I have felt physically awful it’s been hard to have any sense that I could feel emotionally well. It’s been different today and my physical and emotional selves feel more differentiated from one another.

While I do feel very good and decent, we talked about a feeling I’ve been having this week that has been very subtle. I could say during our session that it feels like a good bit of me feels really lit up, meaning there is light now in places that were very dark, but that there are also parts of me that still feel dark, places where the light has not reached.

Talking about this I cried a bit because I have also been more aware lately of the impact of my mother’s neglect. I don’t know exactly how to say this but after her e-mail to me taking responsibility for not giving me what I needed as a child what I experienced then but also the after effects have been settling into me. Now is time for another level of mourning. As I said to Andrea, I am angry and I am not angry, and she said back to me that I was entering mourning at a place deeper than anger. And so that’s where the tears were coming from, that kind of mourning.

Specifically today I was in mourning for the parts of me that have had to be dark, that don’t know any other way to be. These are the parts trying to get my attention this week ever so subtly. Once as I was choosing a shirt to wear this part of me just gave me a flash of a feeling of potential. Another time I worried for a few minutes about how easy it could be to go forward with just the good feelings I have right now but never fully experience all I suspect I can experience. Just today I realized that I was happy reading and writing but that I was alone in a way that just didn’t have to be true.

I could articulate to Andrea that it feels like I have this lovely, strong and sturdy foundation but that it can go deeper and broader. It wants to keep going deeper and broader with all the parts of me reachable with light. Not light meaning always happy. Just light meaning that what is there, good or bad, can be seen because I am not facing it alone.

At one point Andrea said something about how if she were to hold me that all of my parts, light and dark, would be held by her. Immediately, the parts felt like they were saying – too close, too close, let me go. So obviously it’s not time yet to be embraced but it feels like really truthful noticing.

We talked about how a lot of things, this included, feel inevitable, like I have set things in motion that have a force within them that has to unfold.