Soul Mosaic

“Life presents you with a text, but it is your meditation upon that text which gives it meaning and relevance.”
2 Tishrei – Meaningful Meditation – 350 Healing Light Meditations book

The previous post was all about asking questions. Especially the ones that will help me understand, learn, and heal. If I am going to pose questions, there is a rule that has to go with that effort: Honest self-reflection.

Reflections in regular life

Now, before I get into self-reflection as it relates to abuse, let me speak of how I use it in the ordinary places of life. These are the places I look back to see what happened and what insights I can glean.

Reviewing past interactions, I ask myself things like:
What was my part in things?
What choices have I made in that situation, or repeatedly over the years?
Even if my intentions were good, did my actions result in harm?
What could I do differently or better the next time?

And as I look over the choices I’ve made or the decisions I tended to repeat even if they weren’t healthy, I look for:
Emotions I never felt or allowed before
Behavior patterns through life
My stress style when triggered
My thinking style and attitudes
How all of these have affected me…and others

I look hard now into my soul and try to observe everything now. Because there were so many small details about me that I refused to look at or accept. And when you deny a part of yourself, you deny that ultimate place of healing: INTEGRATION – the reuniting of all the broken pieces you lost along the way. How can you be whole if you wall off part of yourself? That is the ultimate self-hating act, and I’ve been guilty of it.

Now, this is not about self-flagellation or declaring me a horrible person. It’s also not about denial or refusing to look myself in the eye in the mirror when asking myself some direct questions. None of us is perfect in life, even when we set out to do the right thing.

“The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers; he’s one who asks the right questions.”
Claude Levi-Strauss

Questions, questions, questions….

When people hear of my background, the first and most common questions they ask are:
How did I survive it?
Why did I stay so long?
How did I finally get out?

For that matter, those are three of the big questions I’ve asked myself for years. And that second one in particular, I’ve used as a weapon.

I’ve bludgeoned myself with it, adding in judgment statements to go along with it like: How could I have been so stupid to believe that all his brainwashing was the truth? Or that our house was a loving, generally good one? Or, worst of all, “How could I have been so passive as to stay so long?”

These would then be garnished with another round of “How could I have been so stupid?” So, I doused myself in shame.

I know now that all of that bludgeoning was undeserved self-hate. But it took quite a while to realize that, and to start asking questions that took a hard look at all those years and the facts of how abusive households work.

Questions are key to healing. But it is not just about asking any old questions…but the RIGHT ones. And I’ve learned that the questions are even more important than the actual answers. They are the engines that push you to slog through the mud and fog to find understanding. The questions are the “meat of the work,” what you chew on to digest and get to the nutrition of answers. Before you extract insight, you have to wrestle.

Occasionally, there have been times I already knew the answer but had been either running from it or had just been blind to it. But then, pinned down by a finely focused question that wouldn’t let me off the hook, or one that swiped away the fog, I would finally come face to face with a truth I could no longer avoid.

For all of my life, aside from the above three questions, there has been one other unrelenting one. And no, it’s not: “Why me?” Frankly, that one has never haunted me. The real question dogging me all my life has been:

An escape hatch for trauma

One of the answers to “How did I survive?” was: Moment-to-moment. One second, by one minute, by one hour, by one day. Some days, it was all I could do to just make it to bedtime and have a break from the violence. Never, never, never did I look too far down the road. THAT would have crushed me.

The other crucial item I used during those trauma times was a mental force field that I call “Moments of Respite.” Moments of Respite  were for the many times when my world was being torn apart. They were the pain-relieving medicine that made enduring his torment possible. And they let me shield my nervous system by giving it a momentary distraction.

Moments of Respite were ALWAYS found in the details, whether sensory or physical. Details give the world its special beauty, and beauty is the perfect antidote to horror. Details are life’s adornments that bring order, calm, awe, mystery, and tranquility.

If you question whether overlooked tiny things have such power, consider this. You can draw a circle with a line sticking out of it and call it an apple with a stem. Or you can underpaint the circle with burnt umber, then add successive layers of cadmium red, cinnabar green, some titanium white, and Naples yellow. Suddenly, the depth, intensity, and richness explode on the page, and that image of the apple is like holding an entire world in the palm of your hand. I’ll expand on the apple example at the bottom of this post.

Suffice it to say that in the depths of my abandonment, all of those tiny aspects of life would call out to me. They were like friends racing up in a getaway car and yelling for me to jump in. They taught me to look for the beauty in the smallest of things and to see it no matter how bad the bigger picture was.

Even when I could count on no one or nothing else, the details in those Moments of Respite offered that intricate deeper dimension, right at my fingertips, always available…unlike the people in my life.

Moments of respite were my reminder that, even in the midst of chaos and horror, life possessed infinite little worlds of richness and beauty. They were my steadfast companions, offering sensory retreats — a “breath in between moments” — where my overwrought, throbbing, nervous system could escape and rest. If I focused on them, I could tune him out, even momentarily. And by doing that, I could withstand the next moment’s onslaught.

So, always, Moments of Respite, dosed moment-to-moment. And NEVER think further ahead than that.

What kinds of things am I talking about?

Summer, 1965

It was a FULL-SIZED, Louisville Hillerich & Bradsby, Little League-approved baseball bat…1965…brand new…and BEST of all – inscribed with Mickey Mantle’s name at the end. Anyone who followed New York baseball in 1965 knew that Mickey Mantle was the ultimate batter. So, of course, that bat was my absolute pride and joy.

I suspect I was a rarity, as I was probably one of the rare girls at Yankee Stadium that day. It was the very first “Bat Day!” and anyone who had a child and a ticket to the game got a free, official Little League bat. Since all I remember seeing around us were boys and their dads, AND given it was 1965, the idea of a GIRL coming to bat day would have been unusual.

My two friends (both boys) from our neighborhood were going to this event with their dads, friends of our family. They must have invited my dad to join them, and since he only had daughters, and since, in a lot of ways, as the oldest, I was the replacement son, I got to go.

I remember bits of it. An exciting drive to New York City. Walking in and being handed THAT bat. Clutching it to my chest as we pushed our way through packed stairwells to get to our seats, and gripping it tightly the whole day. Stopping at a hot-dog stand for dinner on the ride home.

The entire day was heaven, with even my dad being in a good mood. And…that bat. I was going to treasure it forever. But sometimes forever isn’t very long.