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A Mother Daughter Relationship ~ Part Six
Posted by: | CommentsIn this conclusion of our series “A Mother Daughter Relationship ~ From Broken to Whole” my Mom, Debbie Dippel, describes what our enmeshed relationship felt like for her, how she started making changes, and what things are like now. We thank you so much for following this series and for sharing your heart-felt responses with us along the way.
I used to describe the relationship I had with Carla as “very close”, which sounds so warm and desirable. But it was not a healthy “close”. She needed me to be her sounding board, comforter, advisor and rescuer. I needed her to live her life a certain way so that I would feel fulfilled and happy. This enmeshment felt as if I carried Carla around in an emotional backpack everywhere I went. My mood would be determined by her mood. If her day started out well, I would prefer not to hear from her in case it went downhill. I wanted to stay at that level of contentment and if she called to say something happened to cause her upset, then my day would take a downturn. She carried my level of well being around with her. When I worried about her weight I wished I could get inside Carla’s skin and manage how she ate, exercised, dressed, and took care of herself. I saw her as a naturally beautiful person with many talents and reasons to be happy. I felt sure I would be a better caretaker of all those attributes since she didn’t seem to appreciate them. I tried to live my life through her and it was doing damage to both of us.
When Carla started seeing a counselor changes began in her. She stopped sharing every thought with me. She became stronger and started to draw boundaries. She made some decisions that were hard for me to handle. I often crossed the line with prying questions or statements that I knew were subtle hints in order to control. But now Carla responded to these in a way that said, “I will decide for myself”. I knew that I was obsessed with Carla but I felt helpless to break free from it. This was when I decided to begin counseling for myself. What surprised me was that we didn’t spend much time at all talking about Carla. I learned that I needed to become emotionally healthy myself in order to have a healthy relationship with my daughter. My marriage came under the spotlight and I started to pay attention to what my relationship was like with my husband. The more I learned about the lacking I felt in my marriage, the more I realized that I had channeled my desire for relational intimacy through Carla, hoping that she would find what I was missing and be happy enough for both of us. As I continued to grow, I started to see myself as a person who deserved to live in freedom and wholeness all on my own, not depending on someone else for my identity. Having a better understanding of all these things empowered me to begin making changes in my own life. I gained a new sense of confidence and clarity and began to value myself as a person. I started to believe that I deserved a meaningful relationship in my marriage and began making changes in that area. I started taking pottery lessons, a delightful new experience for me, which has opened up new possibilities and enriched my life.
Carla and I enjoy a much more fulfilling relationship today. I still feel empathy for her when she struggles but I know that she is strong and will work them out as they come along. We are both continually growing in better ways of relating to one another, experiencing both the joys of our successes and learning from our mistakes. This is the new essence of our relationship. Carla is a wonderful encouragement to me as I grow independently from her and find interests that are truly my own. She inspires me to look for what is true and good in myself. I am so grateful for what we have learned and that our relationship has become what it is today.
One of my favorite movies is “Yentl” with Barbara Streisand. She sings one of my favorite songs at the end of the movie and these words have often come to mind and brought me inspiration:
“What’s wrong with wanting more? If you can fly then soar! Why settle for just a piece of ground?”
~Debbie Dippel~
A Mother Daughter Relationship ~ Part 5
Posted by: | Comments~By Carla Dippel~
The last few posts written by my Mom and I have been focusing on how my Mom’s belief system impacted me and molded our relationship with each other. To wrap up this series, we will each share one more post describing what our relationship had become with each other, what it took to break free from this “enmeshment”, and what our relationship is like today.
My Mom and I grew to be very inter-dependent with each other. For me, it almost felt like I had never left the womb- I was so tangled up between wanting to be free as an individual but not knowing how because my actions/moods/feelings had such a strong impact on my Mom. We were not separate people. My life was my Mom’s life… Even though a part of me was fiercely fighting to be separate, her belief system permeated mine. I tried to live out her dreams for me because I didn’t know how to follow my own. I didn’t date many guys, but in social situations this possibility was always on my mind and caused me great anxiety. I hated myself if I gained too much weight. I went to Bible College (SURELY I would fall in love and marry someone there!) I was very active in my church. Marriage, college, church- these things weren’t “bad” things in themselves. But I pursued them with this unconscious drive, believing that they would make me happy and help my Mom to be happy too. I was so afraid to live my life on my own two feet. Depending on my Mom to help me through my life came to feel uncomfortably safe, but also suffocating and inhibiting. Every step I took was gauged with how it would affect her.
I started seeing a counselor in the middle of one of my deepest struggles. My counselor introduced me to individual freedom. He didn’t try to control me or lead me in one specific direction. He taught me certain principles that would help me make my own decisions in my own best interest. In the course of my counseling, I came to know that my Mom’s happiness could not depend on me anymore. Our tightly spun web of interdependence was killing me. I needed to know that just because she was my Mom, it didn’t mean that I had to sacrifice my own individuality to help her be “ok”. I had to know that her happiness was not my responsibility. It wasn’t in her best interest to glean her identity from me and vice versa. For the first time, I saw our interdependence as a kind of umbilical cord that was keeping us alive in some ways, but ultimately robbing us of the real life we each deserved to have. It had to go. Hacking away at this umbilical cord was painful and unpredictable. I started drawing stronger lines between my Mom and I. In the past, I would have shared every bit of my life with her. I started giving myself freedom to have my own secrets, to take actions that she might disagree with, to live my life for myself. I told myself, “You don’t have to get married if you don’t want to! You are just as valuable single. You don’t have to go to church or play the piano if you don’t want to either. You are free to make your own choices.” I knew this new way of thinking caused my Mom a lot of angst, but I forged ahead anyways. I learned that it wasn’t all up to me to help my Mom feel better. She was her own individual person, capable of taking care of her own heart and mind. These were new beliefs for me about what love really was all about- I used to believe that if I loved my Mom I would live my life in such a way to make her happy, I would give her access to every part of me so we could be “close”. Now I believe that love means having the freedom to pursue my own individuality. It means sharing when I want to share, not because I have to share. It means valuing my Mom for the person that she is instead of me trying to be the person she wanted me to be so she could feel valuable…
Today there is new respect within our relationship. My Mom respects boundaries I put up when I feel I need to. She is seeking to build her own life and her own identity. This has had a huge impact on the health in our relationship. Because she is open to learning and growing, I have a growing trust that I can be honest with her. There are still remnants of our past enmeshment that show up from time to time, both in her trying to sway me to her way of thinking or in me over-depending on her to solve my own problems. But we are both aware of these tendencies. Many times I have had to correct myself and not call my Mom to “help” me or make a decision for me. Or I have had to reinforce the line between us that says, “Mom, this is my life, not yours.” These are growing pains that always help to make our relationship better, and I am thankful that I can now know my Mom as one of my true friends.
A Mother Daughter Relationship ~ Part Four
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~By Debbie Dippel~
In my first post I mentioned that I didn’t want Carla to struggle with the same fears that I did. As a child I had many fears that I kept hidden inside and carried these into my adulthood. I won’t list them here but will focus on the one that I believe most impacted my relationship with Carla, which was the fear of being single.
Some words/phrases that pop into my mind regarding singleness are: “old maid”, “spinster”, “she never married” (which sounded to me like a tragedy) I once had a family member ask me the question regarding my children who are still unmarried: “What’s wrong with them?” Another comment that stands out in my memory during a family get together is “Life doesn’t begin until you are married!” I remember hearing comments about single women like, “She is being too choosy” and “What is she looking for?” I felt afraid of what people would think about Carla and how she was raised.
I believe that being the youngest in the family contributed to my desire to “keep up” with my siblings. They all married very young, from the age of 17 to 20. I was married just before my 22nd birthday and often said “I was the old maid in the family by the time I got married”. This sounds ridiculous to me now but it was a huge deal to me then. The need for me to “keep up” carried on with our children. As their children dated, married and had children, I felt the anxiety that my daughter keep up with them. We had children close together and so the weddings should also occur close together, followed by grandchildren.
Being slim was also very important to the women in my family. In my mind, this was connected to the possibility of attracting a man. So for Carla, the pressure was on to be slim. I was concerned for her happiness but my fears clouded my ability to see her as an individual person who had every right to live her life as she was created to live. I thought I knew what was best for her and what would make her happy.
I had a different relationship with my son. By the time I had him I had dealt with some of my fears about parenting and was more relaxed. In my mind there was no stigma attached to being a single man, in fact, there was something attractive in being a bachelor. I enjoyed our relationship and was not eager for him to have a girlfriend. When he had a girlfriend, (which he usually did) I didn’t have much time with him and may have felt replaced. I did not dislike his girlfriends, they were nice girls, but when they broke up, I felt relief. I feel ashamed to admit this and want to say that this has changed and I am very happy with the relationship he now has and am excited for their future together.
I am certain that my marriage played a large part in the dynamics that occurred between me and my children. I may expand on this in a later post.
This blog has been an excellent platform for the truth to be told, and along with the truth, freedom. I am in the process of learning to live free and allowing my children to live in freedom as well. I am getting to know Carla as a beautiful woman inside and out and I love spending time with her. It is a work in progress and backslides occur, but we are moving forward in the right direction.
~Debbie
A Mother Daughter Relationship ~ Part Three
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How I had been devalued, the root causes of my struggle with depression and anxiety, was hard to see for the longest time. It was like trying to see through a window with shimmery curtains waving back and forth. There were good things in my childhood too. Those things would wisp across my vision and confuse the painful feelings that I had at the same time. I would change my stance to see from a different view but the curtains were still there, still rippling across the window. I had to focus my vision closer and look at the curtains, see them for what they truly were, before I could pull them back and see through the window to freedom.
My Mom had very clear visions of how she thought my life should look (she talks about these in Part Two of this series). She had specific ideas about what would make me happy. I described my Dad as being the Unengaged Gardener in an earlier post. His belief system about himself held him back from cultivating my individuality, from emotional involvement and interaction with me. My Mom was a much more active gardener. In many ways, I am thankful for the work that she did in trying to help me be a happy member of our family and of society. She took the risk of getting her hands dirty in the soil and because of that I had a lot more material to work with as I sorted through her belief system’s impact on me. But my Dad still had a huge role in how my own belief system developed, whether he meant to or not. Together, my parent’s belief systems merged to create what I believe is a very common and often misunderstood inner “tornado” effect: My Dad’s passivity left a huge hungry hole that I was desperate to fill. My Mom’s belief system taught me to try and fill that hole with the wrong soil, soil that couldn’t sustain deep and fulfilling life. The problem was that her ideas of what would make me happy were too shallow and skewed. They weren’t bad things in and of themselves, but they were not the things that would really help me thrive. She planted a false belief system.
My Mom never told me that I had to get married to be happy. She never told me to be thin so I could attract a man. She didn’t actually say that I would only be valuable if I was married and had children. But I saw her belief system lived out in her own life. I saw how she served my Dad, how she made it a priority to teach me how to clean and cook and sew, how she watched her own weight, how she didn’t find her own happiness outside of these enclosing borders. I knew very well the look of concern that would cross her face when I would take a second helping at dinner. I knew that she was very pleased whenever I had a boyfriend or did something good at church or performed well at my piano recitals. I knew she was proud of me, in a sense… But here’s the twist: she was proud of me when I fulfilled her own visions. She was pleased when I lived out her dreams for me. No attention was paid to whether or not Carla herself was really happy in doing these things. And the things that I did enjoy doing were not investigated. In my play, my parents didn’t join in to find out about me. When I would wake up in the early hours of a Saturday morning to prepare a huge spread of food for my family (food is one of my passions) their subtle response was that I had wasted food and made a mess. The things that really made me tick were overlooked. So I learned to overlook them too.
The roots of my own happiness, the deep underpinnings that made me me were not nurtured. The voices that I was born with, deep in my heart, that held the key to what would create a truly fulfilling life for Carla were not given a chance. They were overpowered by the voices from my Mom’s belief system (and eventually, they would come under direct fire within the religious system I became immersed in).
This was the heart of the devaluing that happened to me. The pain of this devaluing was very real and set me up as an easy candidate for depression, anxiety, fear, and abuse of other kinds. My own pleasure, my ability to listen to my own heart, was disconnected from within myself (where it belonged) and implanted into someone else. I was maniuplated to survive by pleasing someone else, by fulfilling someone else’s dreams. Until now, I didn’t know how to live any other way.
Working to part the curtains!….
~Carla
A Mother Daughter Relationship~ Part Two
Posted by: | CommentsIn my last post “A Mother Daughter Relationship~ From Broken to Whole” I began a series on how my Mom’s belief system impacted me. Today, I welcome my Mom, Debbie, as she describes her dreams for our relationship and her belief system as a young mother.
By Debbie Dippel
When considering Carla and my relationship, I think it may be helpful to look back at the relationship between myself and my Mom and the impact that my upbringing had on my belief system.
I was the youngest of 6 children. My mother was widowed when she was 38 and I was 6 years old. She re-married shortly after and that marriage ended in divorce. She had a difficult life and very poor health. At a young age I felt like her caretaker. She didn’t have the energy to invest in my life. I was given free reign, never had a curfew and wasn’t questioned much about my comings and goings. I pitied my mother and carried a sense of guilt when I left her alone. I had fears that I would become like her, especially regarding her illness. Her fears were passed on to me, the fear of being alone and single very intensely. There were positive interactions between us as well. I always knew I could talk with her and share my fears. She would listen. She once answered my question regarding my feelings of guilt with, “You are a child. You should be carefree.” Those words lifted my guilt and I came away relieved. This caused me to realize how much impact words can have on a child. She died 2 months after I was married. I loved my mother but her illness, emotional and physical, prevented us from having a healthy relationship. I would have liked to know her the way she was created to be as a healthy and emotionally whole person.
I had a strong desire to be married, have children and be in a happy and stable family. I had opinions on how children should be raised which I learned from my older siblings. I believed that as long as my children were raised properly, with love and discipline, everything would work out well. I wanted my daughter and me to be close, and enjoy each other’s company. I wanted her to be happy, well behaved, popular, have a good self esteem and know that she was loved. I didn’t want her to struggle with the same fears that I did. I wanted her to be a Christian and belong to a church where she felt a sense of belonging. I wanted her to have a good relationship with her Dad and brother. I envisioned her doing well in school, graduating, having friends, learning music, getting married and having a family. The main goal I envisioned for her was that she find a good man to marry. Therefore, I worried over her appearance. I watched her weight, encouraged her to wear makeup and do her hair, and socialize as much as possible.
I saw myself as being her confidante, role model, and encourager. I always looked down the road and thought that whatever actions I took now would affect her as an adult. I also believed that my husband and I needed to be a loving couple who modeled real love to their children. But this was not something I could do on my own.
~Debbie~
A Mother Daughter Relationship ~ From Broken to Whole
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When I first began sorting out the kind of impact my parents had had in forming what I believed about myself, I was certain that my Mom had done more damage to me than my Dad. I felt my anger mostly towards her (I was aware of very little anger towards my Dad). When I considered my relationship with my Mom, even though I knew there were good things there, I felt this guilty, restless frustration. I had this feeling of wanting to break free from something but I didn’t know what. I felt hurt and protective but I didn’t exactly know why.
I know now that my anger was there for a variety of reasons. Even though I was a very shy and sensitive child, obedient and well-behaved, my anger came out towards my Mom in fitful fights. It was easiest for me to show my anger to my Mom. However, my anger was treated as disobedience and disrespect; our fights would resolve when I apologized for “getting mad.” I learned that showing my emotions were somehow bad. I also grew extremely observant of my Mom’s reactions to me and instinctively came to know that my strong emotions really unsettled her. Without the words being spoken, I learned very early on that I had to be “okay” in order for my Mom to be “okay.” This was a heavy burden of responsibility, but as a child I didn’t know that. I just didn’t want my Mom to be sad, and I truly wanted to be the good girl that she wanted me to be. As I grew older, I stuffed my hurt and anger away. I didn’t understand why it was there and assumed that I was ungrateful and at fault for even having it. I felt guilty about it. My Mom was a very nice woman, consistent and always there for me. What right did I have to feel dissatisfied or upset? Sometimes what seemed to be an unimportant issue between us would cause my anger to flare up, but I would apologize and we would continue on.
My Dad’s passivity and emotional uninvolvement plugged the belief into my earliest foundations that I was not worth being pursued, not worth being known for who I really was. My Mom was more proactive as a parent in teaching me why I was valuable; but she unintentionally taught me that I was “valuable because”, that I would be good enough “if”… There were burdensome realities in what I learned from her about my value that held me back from getting where I wanted to go. I knew that she desperately wanted me to be happy; I tried very hard to be happy by seeking to fulfill these value requirements. I also knew that my Mom wanted us to be close and I wanted us to be close too; we did grow close, in a very intertwined kind of way. But even our closeness had rules that made me feel confined. My depression only got worse. Here I was, a beautiful, talented woman from what appeared to be a very healthy family- what was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I get it together?
The next few posts are all about the belief system I received from my Mom. They are also about our mother daughter relationship- how it was broken before and how it is healing now. My Mom, Debbie, will be joining me in writing this series, and I am excited to welcome her here. It is our hope that through our honesty and candid sharing, hope and healing will be inspired in any number of ways for your own story.
~Carla
Darlene and Carla ~ How it All Began
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(Darlene) I remember meeting Carla that first time. She was really shy and she didn’t actually talk to me until I met her when I was speaking in another seminar several months later. I was drawn to her determination to get over the struggles that she was having with depression. I gave her my phone number and encouraged her to call me if she ever wanted to talk.
She did call me and over the next 2 years we would meet for lunch or dinner about once every three or four months. Due to the circumstances of how I met Carla, my role in her life was one of support as she was a client of the counselling firm that I worked for. Having said that, even after the first three or four times we met, I really wasn’t sure why Carla was in therapy.
(Carla) When Darlene and I started meeting for lunch or dinner, I always felt excited to get to know her more. Honestly, I was hungry to learn how she had recovered from her depression and was now living so fully alive. At that point, I was still struggling to understand my own story. I felt afraid to tell her too much about own struggles because my story didn’t seem to have much to it. It felt vague. And I was afraid that to just tell Darlene about my depression with no big events to back it up would expose me as a fake. Nevertheless, I always left our visits feeling encouraged and inspired. The more Darlene told me about the reasons for her depression, the more I was able to piece together the reasons for my own.
(Darlene) In the second year of our friendship, I started to realize that although Carla had none of the traumatic events in her life that I had had in mine we had some very similar damage. At the same time in speaking with other clients through the seminars, I noticed that it didn’t seem to matter what the diagnosis was. I realized it didn’t matter what age differences there were, (Carla and I are 19 years apart), whether male or female, married or single, religious or not- there was a commonality that we all shared. In each of us something was missing. The roots seemed to be formed in childhood, and we all seemed to have a skewed understanding of the truth.
(Carla) What motivated my healing and recovery more than anything else was to know that my depression had real causes and to be validated that my struggles were real and could be figured out. As Darlene shared more and more of her story with me, and as I continued in my own therapy, I put the new truths I was learning into practice. Today, even though our lives still have dramatic differences and our life purposes are unique, I am walking in the same kind of freedom as Darlene.
(Darlene) I knew about 3 years ago that I wanted to share this message with the world, and as I thought about how I would do that, and thought about starting a new blog, Carla approached me about writing a book about my life and recovery. This blog evolved naturally out of that meeting. And here we are!
The photo was taken in the 5th wheel that we used as an office on Darlene’s farmland. We hope that you have enjoyed our first joint post!
Hugs, Darlene and Carla
The Nature of Personal Growth
Posted by: | CommentsThere is beauty of all kinds in each stage of our growth. Whether we are courageously turning towards our pain or celebrating a truth that has sunk that much deeper, our personal growth happens uniquely and surely through all the ins and outs of our path. All these ins and outs serve us as we move through them, empowering us along our way, giving light for the next step before us. Ins and outs such as…
Confusion~ Our hungry hearts feel lost, frightened, hopeless yet hoping… We are drawn to sort through our realities to find the answers. We feel the angst of not knowing but we also feel that there is an answer we can find…
Rest~ To grow at one speed all the time would exhaust us. Here and there we take a breath, 
draw from self-compassion, be gracious with ourselves and say, “It’s okay. I can rest for awhile and no ground will be lost.”
Anger~ This surge of feeling that says, “This or that is not right.” It’s a profound knowing that things were not as they should have been. We allow ourselves to feel ripped off. Sometimes anger gets stored up for a long time and surprises/scares us when we first let it have some space. The more we honor it, the more we will be able to understand where it comes from and we can let it pass through.
Fear~ Because we don’t know everything… The journey is a “one step at a time” thing into brand new territory. We don’t have previous experience, so how can we know exactly what to expect? Fear is always one of the doorways at the threshold to a new phase of growth.
Joy~ A deep re-awakening of our worth and value that we never knew before or had lost along the way. A bubbling kind of peace that feels light and deeply satisfying at the same time… That unstoppable feeling that works its way to the place between our ears and our cheeks and urges a smile.
Excitement~ which may feel uncomfortable and freak us out! I have long been wary, doubtful and afraid of my excitement because I had never learned how good it actually was. I doubted so much about myself that I often linked excitement to some kind of selfishness or a misguided way to make myself more important than I really was. I had learned to “temper” my excitement so that it wouldn’t intimidate others or get me “carried away”. As we heal, excitement is reborn. It’s a whole new energy inside, connected to our purpose, that celebrates what is happening and looks forward to what will come.
Disappointment~ Because nothing is ever perfect. Disappointment is something we pass through. It’s normal. Without letting it evolve into guilt, shame or beating ourselves up, disappointment can help us become more successful at getting what we really want next time.
Observation~ of ourselves, of how things “work”, of how far we have come. Observation means I don’t have to figure it all out at once. I can let my eyes do some work for me and let time sort out the puzzle pieces as they come into focus.
Action~ For when we feel ready or sometimes just before we feel ready… We put shoes on our new truth. We want to try it out, test it out, go somewhere with it, build new and fulfilling things on our new foundation. Our new understandings on the inside take shape on the outside. Action works best from the inside out.
Patience~ Truth plants the seeds in our souls. Sometimes these seeds blossom quickly. Others require more time to take root and flourish. There are no rules or timelines when it comes to our growth. Each of us will own a unique story.
To you as you move along your journey. Please feel free to expand on my list from your own experience!
~Carla~
Getting Beyond Overwhelmed
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I’ve just come through a time of feeling really overwhelmed. Living full and free in my wholeness doesn’t always come easy to me. Sometimes I come up against these big “piles” that seem to be blocking my way- challenges, new things that I don’t know how to do, things I don’t understand. In the foundation of my old belief system, there was a lot of self doubt, a lot of confusion about who I really was. Coming up against these piles when I felt so doubtful that I even deserved to be pursuing a fulfilling life was just too overwhelming. Even though I doubted my worth and my ability, I still pressured myself to be some kind of perfect superwoman. I worked hard to fulfill an impossible task with faulty tools and when I failed to overcome the pile, I really believed it was because there was something wrong with me. Each failure validated my self-doubting belief system, and the next time I encountered a pile in my way, it was that much harder to work through it.
It’s okay to be afraid and to feel overwhelmed. Fear is something I will feel often as I pursue new things and new ways of living. But similar to my thoughts on pain, I believed that if I felt afraid, there was something wrong with me too. My fear somehow made me less deserving of the journey.
I recently finished reading hockey player Theo Fleury’s book “Playing With Fire”, the incredible story of his life and his recovery from abuse. In the process of seeing the truth, connecting his pain and anger with what had been done to him in his early life and realizing how he was coping with this pain, he wanted to move forward in new and better ways. After some intense times of hashing all this out, his girlfriend Jenn (who is now his wife) said to him, “Let’s just take this big pile of shit and chip away at it.” Theo says, “So we would do one thing and realize, ‘Oh, that wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.’ And then we would tackle the next thing. We are still working on that pile.” (Playing with Fire, pg 303)
Their mindset moved and inspired me. As I worked through my most recent “overwhelmed pile” I gave myself the space to take one thing at a time from it; I believed that I was worth taking the time to spread all the parts of the pile out and see them for what they were. What was most powerful for me as I sorted through the parts was this voice within me that is gaining more and more life. It’s a voice that comes from the foundations of my new belief system about who I am. It said, “Remember who you are. The Real You is not a loser, not just a quitter or a failure or a coward.” I connected my motivation for working through the pile with what makes up the Real Me. I believed that it was worthwhile for me to go through the pain and the fear involved. I could bear it because of the fulfillment that was waiting in the midst of it and at the other end. As I work the work, I gain confidence that I can go through it and continue on this journey of an increasingly fulfilling life.
~Carla
Pain in the Process of Recovery
Posted by: | Comments“And a woman spoke, saying, ‘Tell us of Pain.’ And he said: Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain….” ~ Kahlil Gibran
"Glass Art" by Robert Kraft
We are learning to struggle well. Our desire speaks to us of a new place, a place we have belonged all along but for so long believed we didn’t… Wholeness. A place of validity, entirety, freedom, fulfillment, excitement, promise, purpose.
People and events told us we didn’t belong in this place, we didn’t deserve to go there, we weren’t good enough for it, we had to work harder to earn the right to be there. We got broken. And then we got tangled up in trying so hard to make ourselves “righter”, make ourselves more worthy so we could get there. We got sidetracked on our way in all kinds of other places that promised peace but only delivered disappointment and anxiety. We doubted ourselves. We questioned if we should keep trying to get there…But continually burning deep deep down inside, we knew that we belonged there; we wanted to belong there… Even if at first all we heard was a whisper, a longing, a puzzled feeling, the “click” of a moment when we realized, “hey, this and this and this that I’ve believed all along about myself doesn’t really make sense…”
A dawning starts to happen. And the light draws us toward it. The warmth we feel says, “Yes, this is the right direction. You do belong here. You are stepping in the right tracks.”
The tracks are not always easy. Some feel very painful.
Pain feels like something is wrong, and if something feels wrong our old belief system tells us that we are wrong. We try to avoid the pain because of this misconception, one we have suffered under for so long. We avoid the pain because we are afraid that it will tell us that we really are mistakes after all… But now we see the misconception for what it is. We connect with the new truth about ourselves that is gaining life deep down inside. We see the lies woven into the misconception that fuels our fear and we decide that we don’t want to agree with those lies anymore.
Pain invites us to look deeper, to look through. It is not telling us that we are wrong, just that something is wrong. It draws our hands to feel around us, to feel at what confines us. It draws us to open more windows, to let in more light here, then more light there, so we can see more clearly, bit by bit. It says to us with matter-of-fact assurance, “I can’t leave until you really pay attention to me.” It wasn’t our brokenness that was the problem; the real problem was what caused the brokenness. And what caused the brokenness was not of our making.
We work to understand this. We peel back the layers of our past, we uncover the lies that were whispered or shouted to us. We learn the truth. We realize that all the work we have done to earn our worthiness, the crawling and striving we have done towards feigned acceptance, was not required of us. It was work done for other people’s benefit, not our own. We feel the pain of being deceived, of being discounted, being taken advantage of. We feel the pain of disbelief, of sorrow and grief. And sometimes after we have gotten to this new place of wholeness, we feel the pain of learning. We feel uncomfortable because it is so new. We sometimes still slip into those redeemable ruts. And we are invited into one journey after another of rebirth.
Our pain is a corridor. A place of deep movement towards where we truly belong. It is the breaking with the past, the hope of new growth and new life, the acceptance of reality all rolled into one. It is part of the process that helps us to keep moving forward.
Courage and love to you on your journey…
~Carla~
