Sitting With Hot Lonely Pain: It's A Spiritual Journey

So I have been partaking in Internal Family Systems therapy with my longtime therapist for the last few months.  I'm so glad she went to a conference and we began this new journey.  It is awkward, and uncomfortable but throwing me for a loop in the best possible way.  The theory is that we have parts of our personalities that sprang forward to take care of us since we were children (and continue today).  Life happened to us and we were overwhelmed and protective parts arose.  These parts are very connected to our woundings. 

My most active protectors are anxiety, sadness and eating. I know judgment and shame are in the mix but I don't know how they show up.  We begin by seeing which part is showing up in my body at the present time and then we kindly, compassionately, talk to the part and there is always another one waiting in the wings.  I have chest pain that appears as anxiety, I have sensation that starts in my chin and leads to my eyes for sadness.  My therapist tenderly asks questions like how do I feel about the anxiety?  Can sadness go to a a safe spot and let us talk to anxiety?  Does it know Adult Carolyn is here?  What age do you remember this showing up?  Whatever the parts want to do, is okay and met with gratitude and compassion.  With each question, we are teaching the wounded parts that there is an adult core (Self) of confidence, compassion, acceptance, calmness, wisdom, connectedness, and leadership that is in place and is ready to take over.  We are synthesizing the protective wounded parts with the core Self.  

And guess what that core self is?!

God. 

The Divine One.

One That I Want to Get to Know!

IFS therapy at this time in my life amazingly builds on other theories and spirituality that I have been exploring for years. One of my favorite therapist teachers, Mary O'Malley, has advocated for curiosity, compassion and kindness with ourselves. This stands out to stark contrast with the judgement and shame that I have heaped upon myself for decades.  The religion of my youth added to the self-criticism.  God was not a loving being, but a judging Santa Claus in the sky, whom I needed to be saved through Jesus in order not to be punished to Hell.  

I didn't want to get to know that God. Who would want that? 

The judging Santa Claus with a side of Jesus was the message I received and took to heart and it has taken two decades and counting to begin to rewire and transform my image of God. 

My life along with this therapy is a spiritual journey of being in the present moment, and for me to know God is inside each and every one of us.  The love of the Divine One is unconditional, and the Trinity. Oh the trinity!  I continue to heal with the Father, Son and HOLY SPIRIT in the mix.  There is a Divine Flow which has been around from the very beginning of creation of the World. (Thank you Father Richard Rohr!) This flow when I can rest in it, makes me feel connected to the entirety of creation, humans, plants, animals and includes those with whom I utterly politically disagree in our current most divided world.  You know that's some powerful stuff. 

It takes a long time to unlearn what was learned from the very beginning of our lives.   Spirituality is really about unlearning. One of my biggest teachers is emotions. 

Emotions overwhelm me (as they did in extreme form in Postpartum Depression). If I don't identify with them, attach to them, become them, they flow through.  (Different flow though!!)  

I know this mechanism well but I lose sight of it and then I remember again, and then I forget.  In my most recent therapy session earlier this week,  I very unexpectedly was taken back to the postpartum depression I had with my first child.  In past sessions, I have gone back and forth between sensations of anxiety and sadness in mere seconds.  In the last session, holding those two emotions this time, seemingly "out of nowhere," my mind went to my first postpartum experience.   I had fallen into a deep pit of despair, and volleyed back and forth between grief and overwhelming anxiety.  I hit bottom one night after months of struggling, when I finally started an anti-depressant.  That night, it ramped my anxiety up even further.   I did not sleep at all, and my overwhelming fear was that I needed to be carted off to a hospital and that my baby needed to be taken away.   The memory of this night and the postpartum depression, is still present in my body and I can call up the depth of the fear, isolation and utter despair easily.  

I felt so utterly alone and abandoned.  

My therapist and I address the Postpartum Depression experience lovingly and carefully during this session.  I attempt to recognize that my adult self is present.  When I answer the age question, it seems like I'm a teenager.  When finished, she tells me the Postpartum Depression is likely related to feelings of abandonment from early on.  She told me to take special care of myself.  For days afterward, I felt the aftereffects of examining these parts in the form of mental exhaustion, irritability and sadness.  I felt blah, I really wanted comfort.  Not so long ago, my therapist and I had discussed looking at anxiety head on and not avoiding it.  I was having chest pains, with the pandemic and my daughters going back to school.  My therapist would ask, how do I feel about the anxiety?   I began to feel edgy towards her which I have never done.  I'm freaking terrified, of a heart attack right now is how I feel.  After the session,  I did a little research into heart attacks, because you know, I had too(!) and as I had gone through cardiac testing before, I knew the chest pain was anxiety.  I sat with that knowledge and when I began to feel the anxiety again, I thanked it for working to take care of me, for showing up and that Adult Carolyn had this.  

And the chest pain went away.  

I know it will come again, and I will forget but ultimately,  I plant to practice gratitude, kindness and compassion towards the anxiety over and over.     

So, here I was again, days after exploring postpartum in my last session. I don't like it, I want to escape it and I want it to GO AWAY.    I talk to a friend.  I look things up on the internet.   Somehow I come across this video of Glennon Doyle.  It is a 23 minute Master Class in being with the pain while laughing.  She comes on very strong, but hold on for the ride.   

She gets my pain.  She is saying this stuff out loud and people respond to her.  I respond to this. 

She and Pema Chodron both say: "If you can sit with the hot loneliness of pain for 1.6 seconds, when yesterday you could only sit for 1 second, that is the Journey of the Warrior."

Glennon continues: "When we transport ourselves out of our hot loneliness, we miss our transformation. And everything we need to become ourselves is in that hot loneliness".... "the pain teaches us what we need to know."

This is spirituality like I never knew before whereas the judging God of my youth would never evolve to knowing how much I'm loved, how I am at one with the entire universe and knowing the peace that surpasses all understanding. 

With the hot pain, also comes joy.  When you numb pain, you also numb everything else. 

So this crazy therapy is deep, deep spirituality at it's core and coming to know God and myself in ways I never ever dreamed of. 

Namaste.

Here is the Oprah's Super Soul Conversation featuring Glennon Doyle Melton.

One Billion Percent Necessary (It's about Feelings, Middle School & Glennon Doyle Melton)

The last few years, I have been learning to feel my feelings.  I hate writing that, because it sounds wussy.  There must be some part of this magnificent work that I do, that I still don't think is worthy.  But I know one billion percent it is worthy, it is everything.  Sitting still and embracing what hurts the most, brings you to your core, and your core is God.  (or with my fundamental baggage the words higher power is a score!)  The people who may think this is wussy, won't be reading this anyway, so let me let that go.  Feeling my feelings is the most difficult journey in my life to date.  Whatever devastating occurs in one's life, how one thinks about it is how one will work through it and how one processes it.  As a person, who repressed much, especially after postpartum depression, coming out of that is freakishly difficult. (Can you see how I think about it... {smile})

I don't repress anything anymore.  I feel EVERY thing and some days it makes me want to run and hide or better yet, scream. And most days, it's the really ugly cry that is exhausting.  It feels like the uncomfortableness will NEVER go away. Some days I'm pinging all over the place - the Presidential election doesn't help either.  And some days, not at all and other days, the energy flows through within minutes.  When I hear other people speak aloud of this concept, it rocks my world.

One of those speaking is Glennon Doyle Melton.  I recently watched her on Super Soul Sunday. Her second book  is "Love Warrior."   I heard her story of bulimia by age ten, a mental hospital stay in high school, and her addictions.   When a friend summarized her book in a sentence for me it really opened my eyes.  She said Glennon was running from pain the entire time with her addictions.  (This is not a new concept but I was ready to hear it in a different way)   Not namby pamby feelings, but pain.  Pain is something that people can wrap their heads around.

So, it's not feeling my feelings, it is feeling PAIN.  It is the essence of living life.  Life is incredibly difficult AND beautiful, all at the same time   (Glennon calls it Brutiful.  Brutal and Beautiful. Dang it, wish I would have coined that.)   I've read so much about addictions and I see it everywhere now in compulsions both good and bad, in so many different ways.  So much of our society runs from our feelings and that is running from pain.   Glennon reports that she thought of herself as broken.  She thought of herself as someone who could not handle pain. And so she had hid from it with addictions.

What caused her pain? In short, she said she is a sensitive human being: a deeply feeling person in a messy world. There are those of us who respond to energy differently.  Oprah said she learned over the years of her talk show that families have children who are the sensitive ones: the child who absorbs the energy of the family, subconsciously, unconsciously differently from the rest of the family.

I am that one.  It took a while for this aha to sink in.  I thought other people felt things as deeply and as sensitively as I do.  They don't.  But there are plenty of people out there who do.  I have to respect myself and this work because it is what is right for me.  It is who I authentically am.  Finding my authenticity is finding God beneath all those layers.  It is finding the love and the light to take me through the difficult and the beautiful that life is composed of.  And when you taste that expansiveness of love and light, you don't go back.   Sitting through the pain, gets you to the light.

In my house, I have two young ladies.  One just turned eleven and the other is about to turn fourteen.  They are now both in middle school.  Some of the most brutal years of high school.  And we are feeling it.  Really feeling it.

There was one week where both of them were having difficulty and there was much emotion in the house.  I put my big girl mom panties on.  I listened.   I problem solved when necessary and kept my mouth closed when they wanted no advice.  Their emotions and pain pinged me but I carried on.  There were steps I needed to take, and I did.  I wanted them to be heard.  I want them to know they matter.  I want to be their soft place to fall.  (George does to, in his own manly, fatherly way) And after the turmoil of the week passed, I felt it.  I had to have my own meltdown from listening and letting their pain pass through.

I am the sensitive one and that's okay.  That is who I am.  And I know the feelings won't kill me.  I know at my core, there is love and light.  And I know if I feel my own feelings as difficult as it is sometimes, I can show up for my loved ones who need to be heard.

This is my work.  Feeling my feelings.  It is not easy but one billion percent necessary.

Namaste.