Tag Archives: love

Dec3

30 Days of Brené Brown — Day 2: #trust #respect #love #spirit #kindness

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Welcome to Day 2 of my new series, “30 Days of Brené Brown” wherein I will take the top 30 quotes as determined by Goodreads. Who is Brené Brown you ask? She is a research professor at the University of Houston, author of several books on emotional health and authenticity and all-around bad-ass when it comes to shame and vulnerability research. But more importantly, she is my “if you could have dinner / evening out with anyone you don’t know who would it be…” -person. Go here to learn more about her. In each post I will try to limit myself to 1,200 words.

Today’s quote… ahh, if it were that simple. Somehow, today’s quote is three excerpts. I will share them as they are and write briefly (God willing) about each one.

Here we go. Inhale:

We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness and affection.

Trust. Huge.

I can say yes to this. I know that when I let my guard down and when I release my deepest fears either on the internet in this blog or in person to a … person, that I feel better even though I’m wincing for a lashback. (Is that a word?) ahh, backlash. Anyway… Brené actually had a wonderful image on her facebook page about the recoil she would feel from oversharing. I’ll go look for it. Hang on… Here it is:

"I found the perfect image for "the vulnerability hangover" - you know that feeling when you share too much and the next hour/day/week you feel like you're wearing the emotional lampshade? I hate that feeling." -BB

“I found the perfect image for “the vulnerability hangover” – you know that feeling when you share too much and the next hour/day/week you feel like you’re wearing the emotional lampshade? I hate that feeling.” -BB

Isn’t it great? I get that feeling, I know that feeling and I often exist in that feeling: walking jell-o. Just this past weekend, Thanksgiving, I’m pretty sure I walked around and into things with that lampshade on my head. I have a member of my family who is very much in touch with who s/he is and another member who I believe literally Can’t Stand It when other people are. I know this is all about that person and its attendant vulnerability fears.

When my mom died (recently, for those who are new here — just on Labor Day — and I’ve written plenty about it, just enter “grief:” in the search field to the right), I knew who would rise to the occasion and who wouldn’t. It was not a contest, but I knew that all the work I’d done for the last decade about looking inward, learning who I was, being ok with who I wasn’t and trying desperately EVERY DAY to be as authentic as possible would enable me to be real with the reality: Mom was dead and she wasn’t coming back and arrangements had to be made. Being that open with myself helped me be with others who were able to help me. It’s that simple.

I also have to be careful: I feel myself dialing back from people a bit these days. I learned at a young age to not rely on my mom so much. If when you’re a kid you determine you can’t rely on your mom, you basically end up trusting no one… I see that’s how I’ve become recently. I’m kind to others but don’t get too close these days. I think it’s a reaction from her death. I feel myself pulling back from things and people… calcifying a bit. Hmm. I suspect I’m not honoring the spiritual connection that grows from offering my trust. I know it’s trust. I think it will come back in a bit; I’m just feeling a bit tender and protective is all.

Next:

Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them – we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.

You can’t give what you don’t have.

“You can’t get candy from a hardware store.” My cousin told me this about six years ago when we were talking about family and our similarities and shared chaoseses…es. Turns out she’s wrong though — I was just at an ACE-True Value hardware store and they had those awesome bags of Olde Tyme Hard Candies in a barrel by the register and I had to buy the lemon drops and the cherry drops. Then my kids found them and they were gone.

I digress.

The point is that yes … and no. I was pontificating in our hot tub to one of my boys last month and we were talking about love, the love I have for my mother and father (as irrational as it is) and the love I have for them and the love I have for their father and the love I have for my brothers, friends, and BILs and SILs and cousins and other extended and vital people in my life.

I explained that TO ME, love is not a choice. Like is a choice. Love is a chemical thing that happens to you that while it should be absent of fear, there (for me anyway) is a fear component in that I love that person so much I am afraid to lose them. It doesn’t mean I won’t go on, it’s not some sort of wacky codependence; it’s just that my love is super strong and that I adore those people. But it is not just given. Yes, it is something that grows from a place of our own love inside. You can’t grow / give / share what you don’t have already, otherwise it is an unknown and you’re all, “what the hell is this emotion? it makes me all soupy and kind and want to shout from the rooftops with joy and whatnot. eww.” You have to have it to feel it and then give it.

I don’t know what was in my mother; I want to say it was love, but I think it was mostly fear and attachment, that is why –no matter WHAT anyone says– I can’t ever truly say, as if my life depended on it, if she actually loved me. I think she tried. I know that I had an attachment / survivalist relationship with her, but I don’t know (still in these early months of grief, so cut me some slack) what the true relationship was. I tried hard though.

Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows. Love can only survive these injuries if they are acknowledged, healed and rare.”
― Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

Yikes. Yes. I just wrote about withholding love and connection in another post about the Ultimate Withholding: the Silent Treatment. This post is not just about the Silent Treatment, it’s about a few other things too, but the bottom line is this: When you withhold, it’s awful for everyone. Withholding creates these little pockets of borderline personality disorder (BPD) … I know, that sounds so simplistic, yet here’s why: when people with BPD are in their BPD zone, it goes like this: “I will do all I can to make everyone as miserable as I am.” Pat Conroy put it brilliantly in South of Broad (which you really must read — he’s such a fantastic writer) when a psychiatrist character explains BPD to his protagonist:

… a shrink in Miami once diagnosed [her] with borderline personality disorder. When I asked what that meant, the doctor told me, “It means you’re fucked. She’s fucked. I’ll load her up with drugs, that that’s about all I can do. The borderlines are mean, egomaniacal, relentless. Their job is to make everybody around them miserable. In my experience they perform their jobs very well.”

And that’s how it is for people who are around people who withhold their love, their relationships, their attention, their courtesy, their awareness that you even exist… why? Because you have Somehow Not Met Their Standards and that means you are bad. Bad person and everyone who is savvy must agree or they get the treatment too. And who loses in this game of all games? Everyone. But most of all the withholder. Eventually, the other person wises up and walks away. That’s when you can’t get candy from that hardware store…. and by the time that happens, you don’t want candy anymore, salt will do.

I grew up with all sorts of blame, shame, disrespect, tacit responsibility, deflection, denial and subterfuge. It’s not right. It’s a horrible way to raise a family. Anyway, back to Brené. If one acknowledges the pain inflicted then the love can grow and a relationship can be had. Saying, “I’m sorry for whatever it is you say I did or didn’t do for you” doesn’t quite cut it. Trust me on that. I also wrote about those fun kinds of atonements in a post about Perfect Apologies.

I hope I did these three quote justice.

Thank you.

Oct23

Grief: In Conclusion, Lessons from Mom, Acceptance

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Eight days have passed since I last wrote. For a “blogger” this is akin to obscurity. For a writer, which I believe know I am, eight days is almost like torture.

I wanted the lesson I learned from the ether, the one about forgiveness, to gel. I considered it as though it were a soufflé: Shh! Don’t make noises around it, step gently, don’t disturb it.

Of my grief the other day, I wrote to a friend, “I think when my mom died I literally lost time and data. I am encountering things now that I don’t remember forgetting… If that makes any sense. It’s like some of them are totally new.”

. . . . .

CS Lewis was right when he wrote that when we love our departed and don’t feel grief about them, that they feel more near. I was in a place last week, true acceptance — and I am still there, although with occasional tears — that allowed her or my memory of her, or something real and true of hers to come to me. I let it feel safe. I let it know, without any specter or sliver of judgement or regret or resistance, that I am ready:

In yoga last week, the very next day after I appealed for forgiveness, I was in child’s pose, at the end of a vinyasa series, and I smelled her twice. The first for about six bewildering seconds and then >poof!< it was gone and then a few seconds later, it came back for about another three seconds. An incarnation of my mother’s earthly spirit as only I could relate to it was with me. I didn’t court it, I didn’t beg for it to stay, I just … accepted it. I didn’t believe it at first. I sniffed my clothes, my hands, my skin to debunk it; I must’ve looked like a lunatic: they’re all in child’s pose, face down, chest to thighs, shins to earth and I’m acting like a bloodhound. Nothing around me that smelled like her. I smelled of my laundry detergent and my hair conditioner. I nodded in gratitude. She felt safe; that was cool.

A friend just messaged me about the significance of that moment. Child’s pose is one we do to come down or cool down or relax from a series. That we are at peace, submission, when we do it. My friend said, “She was at peace and wants it too for you; the fact that you were in child’s pose, is a big deal too.” 

A few readers have lovingly appealed to me that I accept that my pre-Labor Day world is gone. I appreciate their guidance, and I agree that I have been reluctant to accept that truth. Who could blame me? No one I know. No one else is in my skin. But it is with heavy emotion imbued with truth that I accept it now. I will never be ‘over’ her death. I don’t think anyone ever expects me to be. My life has changed forever. The woman who bore me has left forever.

Mom used to speak all the time about acceptance. I suspect that some of it was a lecture for herself. She meant, despite my rigid assertions that she lived in the ether, reality. “You can’t change reality, or people,” she used to say.

The reality is that she has gone to God and is no more a living being on this earth. I know now, the deep and profound love I had for her was primal and true. How could it not be?

She used to say that about me all the time, “Maally, you are so true. True blue and loyal to the end!” she would exclaim, almost as a cheer, and I would recoil with embarrassment and pride; I guess that’s what we refer to as “sheepishly” now.

Those exchanges in my memory now are threatening my soufflé. They tread very close to evoking how I felt at the time she said such things, as though I was being teased. Right now, my gut is telling me to be careful not to lionize her for if I do, I disavow and invalidate the crushing challenges I endured as her child; to accept this entire thing means I must accept all of it: her perspective and limitations, and all of mine as well.

I feel her on my left side right now. Or something like her.

It’s gone.

. . . . .

It occurred to me, in this grief-inspired, post-guilt haze that I still have a lot of life to live. That I have other things to write about and that I need to assimilate the reality that Mom has died and is never ever >gulp< coming back, into my life because this is how all life goes. Eventually: it ends!

Most of us come into this world, meeting them for the first time and expecting them to always be there. Even as her health declined and I witnessed her truly staggeringly precipitous aging, and I rationally knew that her time was short, I was not at all accepting of it on an emotional level.

My ongoing break wall graffiti, “Pfft. We had barely known each other when I was growing up… it won’t be so hard to adjust to when she dies…” is total garbage. Her loss has been profound. Her personality was massive. She. Was. My. Mom. It doesn’t matter if the relationship was gossamer-strong or plutonium-fragile.

The fact is that she was always on my mind whether I own it or not. We shared cells, DNA … we were connected. Tragically, we both wanted acceptance from one another — constantly.

But that forgiveness and grace I experienced last week has ushered in a new space where I am allowed to matter to myself. I can write about other things and it’s not to spite her. For me to continually and actively devote this space to the void her death created and my grief from it is to feed a vacuum of self-indulgence.

While I will continue to write, the underlying truth is that I now write in the aftermath of her death. Just as I write in the aftermath of any other experience, of the first day of fall, of 9/11, of ten five two minutes ago.

Of course her loss will color my writing. I can hear her now, “Stop using parenthesis! You’re better than that! If you’re going to say it, Say It!” She was a very strong formidable editor.

Part of my quandary is that I want to move on from this publicly and I don’t know how. This is all new to me. I started this situation, by blogging about my grief, now I must clean it up. “You need to lighten up, Maally…” I can hear her.

Yes, I suppose she was mostly right. I was the Felix Unger to her Oscar Madison. Part of that entreaty was to get me to leave her alone, to let her be, and in my German shepherd mind, to let her continue with her self-indulgence. She won. She always did, and finally, I’m ok with it. I also win too — I don’t feel guilty about it not working out because it was never mine to fix.

So that is the deal here, the final lesson: you can’t change a damned thing about anyone else. All you can do is change your reaction to other people. It’s been the message of this earth and all its conflicts since the beginning of time. It is the mother of all realities. Once we accept it, truly, it colors our lives. Everything becomes less stressful.

We are not as separate as we once believed. When we let go, we let in.

This was a disjointed post because I cut a lot out. I found myself breaking my objective, to not blog so obviously about my grief. I just remembered that one of Kubler-Ross’s stages is “Acceptance.”

Thanks for sticking around. I’ll be back to new normal soon.

So I’m going to wrap it up with a quote from a movie that Mom loved,

Thank you.

Oct15

Grief: Forgiveness, Grace

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I’m Catholic on paper. Which means that I’m not a very “good” Catholic. What it also means is that I’m very educated on matters of guilt and how to beat myself up.

The guilt I’ve felt, over my relationship with my mother — all my life — and more recently since any chance of improvement on this earth with her has been vigorously snatched from my hands, has been unbearable.

I have heard from people privately: “Thank you for your blog; thank you for helping me find a little broken part of me…” I have also heard from others privately, “Be careful of what you share. Some of it is very private, and it fans the flames … it mightn’t help you… it keeps it out there… ” and I could not agree more.

I have vacillated: Keep a post up? Take it down?

It doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, I remember this one truth: this is the Internet age. Where ADHD reigns and YouTube seems to hold the reins. I am old school and I can promise you this: I don’t share everything. I share what suits me.

But the days of late have been hard. I would say that I’ve spent a good two weeks in guilt stew. The last week has been uniquely painful.

So I spoke with a wise cousin last week; and I spoke with a wise friend. I went to dinner with wise women and I have basically immersed myself in a wonderful soup of women and the one thing that keeps coming at me — from all these walks of life, from all these wonderfully strong, vibrant, sagacious and heartfelt women is this: forgiveness.

Because I am Catholic, I don’t really pray-pray. My personal brand of Catholicism has been such that I don’t like to call in the “big guns” until I simply can’t take it anymore. Until I am at my personal rock bottom. I can likely count on one hand the number of times I have actually prostrated myself in prayer and each time, I have been gloriously answered.

As much as I say that I get things, prayer, on an intellectual level, I don’t get them on an emotional level. Or I get them on an emotional level, but not on an intellectual level. It’s not always balanced.

I am by default and practice a thinker. I learned as a child to trust the concrete, that the abstract was a gamble and that whatever I didn’t see couldn’t be relied upon. The moments when I know what I saw but was convinced otherwise were also less reliable. So, it took me a long time to get to feeling or at least allowing feeling. Trust a feeling? Greek.

I’m also big on repression when I can’t or don’t have the time to deal with something. (That’s usually when you absolutely MUST deal with something, but you know: driving, going out to dinner, in a meeting… those are not the best times, so when those feelings come up, I push them back down. I do deal with them eventually, and I have no intention of forgetting about them, it’s just that sometimes I can’t help it — they simply fade away or drop into a cup of ice cream.)

But this past weekend, when I simply COULD NOT shake the guilt, no matter how much I tried, I basically heard all the fantastic voices in my head, including my mother’s (her voice was really lovely, actually, a little like Jessica Lange’s) that kept saying, “Let it go…” and “Pray on it…” and “Talk to your mother…”

On FB chat yesterday, I asked a friend while waiting for my son, “When you say ‘talk to her‘ do you mean really, ‘talk to her’ as in verbally with the voice and vocally and all that? out loud?”

My friend said, “Yeah. Or write to her, or in your head…”

And I squirmed.

I can’t remember if I wrote or thought, “That’s not crazy? It sounds a little crazy. I mean, she’s not there…”

My friend said, “It’s not. But do what works for you.”

I thought or replied, “I’ve done everything but that. I’ve written, I’ve silently prayed, I’ve had the conversation in my head and I’ve talked about it with others… but you’re talking about out-loud talking; audible words coming from my mouth.”

And I think that’s the point of it. I think that we must get to a point where we are so humbled, so tired, so ready and so woeful or motivated or whatever to allow ourselves that “eff it” mentality where we’re going rip off the band-aid and spill our guts. It was like that time when I got really mad (the rage post) and I said aloud what I needed to get off my heart.

I have a notion that it’s not God who separates us from Him, but rather we who do the separating. He’s always there. It’s up to us to open the door or look out the window.

I also have another notion that when I can feel the tapping at the door, when I can hear His breath of peace, but I don’t allow it to wash over me, that it’s really my fault… it’s not His.

My mother was like that. She was patient and always wondering, ‘When are you coming back to me, Molly?’ and I have to say that I had a screen door that was locked because I was terrified of being hurt again, or a half-door like a country house that allowed her into my heart only so much because I was terrified of being hurt again. I had to erect my boundaries. I had to do what I could to feel safe.

But I know now, that was ok. Here’s how.

So, last night… after my famous grilled chicken and sweet potato dinner that my boys simply can’t get enough of, I went upstairs to my room to prepare for our family hot tub date.

I heard my friend in my head, “Out loud. To Mom.” So I basically said out loud to the Archangels and saints and to God and to Mom, to intercede on my behalf and to help me with the guilt.

I said,

“Mom, I know we’ve got our stuff. Or we had it. And I’m sorry about it. I really am, but you’re gone now and maybe we can have a relationship … y’know, now? I’ll take your comfort. I’ll take your love. I’ll take your protection because in my head now, you’re nothing but love and energy and light. You’re not a personality, you’re not your illnesses, or your fears. You’re nothing but love and I need it. I’ll take it now. I forgive you for all your stuff; I did the best I could and I know I KNOW that in your heart if you could’ve been better, you would’ve been better. No one wants to be unwell. No one wants to hurt others — it’s a sickness — and I release you. I release you from my anger; I wish you were here now, because I was ready Mom, I really was… but now I will take you any way I can get you and so, Mom, if you have an ounce of fierce and protective maternal love in you for me, as I know you did on earth but you couldn’t share it for whatever reason there was, I am asking you now, Mom: to get this monkey off my back. I am asking you and God and the angels, Mom, the big guns, to release this guilt and shame and keep it away and to remind me you are near and watching over me and to keep that off me. I was just your kid, Mom, and as I’ve said, with all due respect: you set the tone, Mom. I just fell in line… and as I matured, I simply kept it going because it was all I knew. You did your best and I did mine, but I always loved the essence of you and the glimpses of love that you shared with me, I will cherish forever, but ya gotta help me out here… Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us…“

Or something like that.

And after about three minutes of it, my crying subdued and my breathing started to regulate and this odd feeling of “Why am I so upset?” came over me. I felt lighter, and I couldn’t get as upset as I was; I couldn’t usher guilt if I tried and even now, as I recount it, I get weepy because I miss Mom and the glimpses she gave me, but I wonder if this isn’t the beginning of a new stage of relationship with her… in that I can appeal to her pure side, that I can have her with me energetically because she is free of her body and as much as I wish I could have her here to talk to, I can have her energetically to think of and be with.

Sounds crazy? I don’t know. I believe in energy healing; I believe in God and the Angels and all that stuff. I have no doubt that I will be sad and will mourn her. My physical energy is still quite low. I absolutely must be patient with myself and this process, so I get that for sure. I must have no expectations and I can not do this alone. Ironically, as I’ve matured, I’ve come to believe in the not-so-concrete; the stuff in front of us all the time is too simplistic. There has to be a better way. It takes guts and humility to do it, but I have no doubt it’s real.

Forgiveness is two-sided. I understood it intellectually but I get it emotionally now for sure. I have no doubt. When we forgive, we lose a lot of weight. Grace is weightless and it’s waiting for us all.

Thank you.

Jul12

30 Days of Jung — Day 26: #Anxiety, #Christianity, #Denial, #Faith, #Forgiveness, #Love, #Morality, #Psychology

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Ooofda. When I compiled these quotes almost a month ago, I saw this one, this big, huge, chunky one and I thought, “aw, hell.”

Welcome to Day 26 of “30 Days of Jung,” my series, wherein (soon, I will start repeating myself, like now) I take a famous quote of Carl G. Jung‘s and try to make sense or refute or invert or disembowel it or where I turn into a heaping pile of mush because of it in 1,000 words or less.

If you don’t know who Jung is, he formulated the theories of introverted and extroverted personalities, the stages of individuation, the basis of the “Meyers-Briggs” personality (INFJ / ESFJ, etc.) tests. He’s the “father” of modern-day psychoanalysis. In short, he’s a badass. But he’s dead, so he can’t be with us today.

Here is today’s:

“The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ — all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself — that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness — that I myself am the enemy who must be loved — what then? As a rule, the Christian’s attitude is then reversed; there is no longer any question of love or long-suffering; we say to the brother within us “Raca,” and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide it from the world; we refuse to admit ever having met this ‘least among the lowly’ in ourselves.”

― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Yesterday, I rephrased his quote. Today, I’m going to blow it off altogether and try to get to the nut of it.

Amazingly, it threads a lot of what we’ve talked about this week. Well, since I began this, really. It is so rich, really. There are many fantastic elements for me.

Once I get past all the hyperbole and comparisons, to me, the essence of this quote is in the first sentence and the final clause:  “we refuse to admit ever having met this ‘least among the lowly’ in ourselves.” (I added the single quotes in the original and the excerpt for context and emphasis.)

When he says “whole outlook on life” I think he’s meaning Whole-whole as in entire-self, self-aware, self-actualized.

He’s talking about self-love. He’s talking about deep self-love and more likely, craven, feral self-loathing. I’ve seen that self-loathing in people I used to know; it makes their eyes as black as pitch and their voices thunderous and coarse and nothing is safe.

The timing of this is interesting. Preparing this post, I was trying to figure out my approach and then I happened up on the YouTube video of Dustin Hoffman talking about the making of “Tootsie” and a revelation he had while in make-up before the production went underway. Go ahead, watch it if you haven’t seen it already.

Here: 

Now someone pick my face up out of the toilet from barfing too much and get me a washcloth to wipe off my mouth.

I read some of the comments on the video and one struck me most (paraphrasing): when women say this about each other, we get crickets. When a man says, it, we get applause.

Here’s me:

When an academy-award winning, classicly trained, stage, film, audio, musical ACTOR says it, up go my flags. Is this an anniversary for “Tootsie” or something? Has Hoffman, whom I respect greatly, not gotten enough love lately? (Don’t worry, I’ll get to Jung in a sec, like now, like I have been….) Hoffman IS showing us that darker, ‘least among the lowly’ in all of us; he described it in the retrospective and I dare say it that he’s doing it again IN THAT VIDEO. I’ll be a jerk and say it. I’m calling him out a little. The pauses and chokes were just … so nice. Couldn’t get the tears to roll though… he blew it on that one… he should’ve thought of puppies dying. 

I grew up with An Act-ress! She could man-i-pulllll-ate like a pack of wild dogs (a seemingly weak metaphor, but not really if you know what I’m talking about); I’d see her coming and I’d drop the steak, drop the toy, drop the candy…

It was folly trying to predict one moment from the next. In a comedic way, it was like living with Doug Henning, that weird 80s magician with the buck teeth and the long hair. As I aged, I really had no clue about anything she was involved in regarding my safety and operated at a DefCon 2 (code orange) at all times. I was locked and loaded, just not trained on my sight yet. After a while I eventually gave up trying to understand or trying to believe.

Those were moments of the ‘least among the lowly’ in my life. I refer to Hoffman because I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d like to believe him, and I might NOW rather than how he states it was then. Maybe he’s more evolved and I should be less least lowly; if what he’s saying is true, about his reactions and sadnesses and cutting out people (not just women — this is gender neutral to me) based on appearances, then it’s more than the OTHER people he’s talking about but not talking about. He’s NOT talking about his least lowly self, his arrogance, his perception that he was better than they were. His disconnection…. with this video clip, I believe we’re just getting to the proverbial tip of the iceberg in human relations. It’s not how OTHER people look/behave/say/do, it’s what’s WE, the receivers of that information, that intangible sensory data, do with the data.

Again, with emphasis, chins up: It’s not just because Hoffman didn’t notice women who were what he found to be considered beneath his view, it’s because Hoffman didn’t stop there. It’s not about women, it’s not about men and it’s not about OTHERS. It’s about us. The least among the lowly of us all — that arrogance, that belittling, that other stuff that prevents us all from self-love and thus from loving others. It’s not what he failed to see in others, it’s what he failed to see in himself which prevented him from seeing others. 

Wayne, I’m not done yet, so I sense you right now…

Jung uses “Raca” as a self-admonition and self-reproach. Raca is Aramaic for “worthless” and “vain”  and “empty.” It’s a derivation of “to spit.”

Pretty heavy stuff. What else can generate a sense of raca in others, than a sense of raca for ourselves? Jung is ALL OVER this concept — you can’t give what you don’t have.

How many among us can easily refer to ourselves as raca without daring to consider it about another person — we’d have to be really pushed very hard to say that about someone else. Personally, I have found myself saying raca about myself regardless of how much I do for others. How much I volunteer my time, how much I do for my family, how much I do for my community and for others.

Why, just the other day in therapy I was talking about my feelings of worthlessness which are based on fears of scarcity and lashing verbal threats of poverty that I endured as a child (please don’t shriek discuss dire matters of finance in front of your young children). And it was just yesterday I felt like I was “a suckhole” (my word, get your own) on my family because I do not earn income and I spend our assets on things (clothes, food, gas, entertainment). That despite all I have done in my life, all I have accomplished, all I have contributed and all I have yet to contribute and to serve, that I feel worthless, like a suckhole, like raca. That raca builds on itself.

Jung asserts that the reversal of the Christian attitude is a “rule” — that we say raca and condemn our darker selves from the world; we hide our suffering and our needs and refuse to admit — not even reject, but to repel! — that ‘brother’ in ourselves. That feels a lot like self-rejection to me.

I don’t know what to do with that, really. Is he suggesting that we are in denial of our self-condemnation or that we are silently suffering? “That which we resist, persists” – CGJ. If we hide our darker side and we act as if we don’t possess it…

Gah, I wish he weren’t dead.

I know that every one of us possesses a darker side and I know that I don’t repel mine, but I don’t like it; I try to work with it, soften it. But there is part of us that is pure animal, irrational, primitive and horrific. How do you tame that? Somehow most of us manage every day. In our American, civilized society we have laws, rights, rules, liberties, codes and mandates. They help a ton! Do they repress us? I don’t know. Could we be like The Wild Things without the rules? Even when King Max arrived, they bent to his laws. Is it our nature to need boundaries and guidelines? I think so. But I know that’s not real; if that little boy Max really went to an island with those creatures he’d be toast.

My session ended well, we talked about how my feelings of being a suckhole are steeped deeply in concerns dumped on me by my parents and their irrationality and their lack of control of their adult situations. That’s not my issue to carry anymore. I am trying actively to shed it; it’s a matter of getting my emotions to sync up with my intellect and it takes some time and some practice. Maybe I’ll spend money irrationally on something one of these days… 😉

 — that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness — that I myself am the enemy who must be loved —

…Stand in need of the alms of my own kindness.

Sigh.

Jeezus, yes. Hell yes. Arms outstretched, palms up, wide open, face up, tears streaming, vulnerable, waiting… for ourselves to be kind to ourselves. Yes, Jung is talking about a very deep part of ourselves that we at times seem unwilling to face or change. How wonderful would it be for us to release feelings of raca. How wonderful and how amazing we could be. How wonderful and amazing we already are.

This was almost 1800 words; this was a long quote and I don’t think I’m nearly done with it yet. I’ll let you guys take it from here…

Thank you.

ps —

when i saw that quote a while ago, i was struck by its size; it’s so much longer than all the others. but its length belies is intention which is quite simple but so hard to accomplish: love yourself too.