Little Susie:
I'm not feeling so great. And it's hot. Can we watch a movie?
Capable Susie:
Sure! Movies are like luxurious in the middle of the day. Okay. Well, let's set up the TV so we can watch a movie through the laptop.
Learned Helplessness Susie:
Oh, but I don't know how to do that. What do I do? I'm too hungry to do this. I need food, but I'm feeling too fatigued right now to make any. I can't think straight. What is food. What can we eat? I needed to go supermarket shopping three days ago. And it's so hot!
Capable Susie:
Okay. Well, let's eat this banana then for the moment, shall we? And then we can think about this.
All three Susies eat one large banana.
Learned Helplessness Susie:
I don't know what to do. What do we need to do? There's all these cords. It's so confusing!
Capable Susie:
Well, let's work this out methodically.
Learned Helplessness Susie:
But I don't knwo what to do! Maybe we should wait till Anth comes home and then he can do it.
Capable Susie:
Why? We are perfectly capable of doing it ourselves. Anth has been at work, on a Saturday, in the heat. Do you really reckon he wants to come home and do something you're quite capable of doing?
Learned Helplessness Susie/Little Susie:
But something bad might happen if people with vaginas act like it's not 1952! We might break something! Anth might yell at us for meddling in his cables!
Capable Susie:
Well, we live here too, don't we? When was the last time he yelled at you for meddling? That's right - never.
Learned Helplessness Susie/Little Susie:
Yeah, but even if he just gets annoyed, that's bad! That means something bad is going to happen! That means maybe we don't exist! We can't deal with a person with a penis getting annoyed at us.
And anyway, we don't know what to dooooooo!
Capable Susie:
Well, imagine if Anth wasn't here. Imagine if you were all by yourself in the world and you had to sort it out. What would you do? That's right, you'd look it up online and get someone else to tell you what to do!
And so we did, and so the S-video cable that we were already familiar with but had forgotten because sievememory was connected, and Little Susie and Learned Helplessness Susie did manage to find their way around hooking it all up and yea, it wasn't even that bloody hard, for crying out loud. And though there was still an issue after that, that's not the point. I would have been able to continue ironing out the issues but by this stage I was so bored with the whole bloody thing that I quit. Voluntarily.
See, this is how women collapsing in the face of men's apparent greater knowledge threads down through the ages, way past the time when it's not actually scary for women to take charge in their own minds. Or if not gender stuff, insert class stuff, or culture stuff, or whatever group of humans is disaffected by another so that it inserts itself into their limbic system, where it can stealth virus you undetected.
The first step is acknowledging those fears are there. The second is accommodating them kindly. They didn't show up just for the fun of it. Healing needs a gentle place to land, and children need patient adults to guide them. Even if those children and those adults happen to share the same body :)
Showing posts with label active imagination. Show all posts
Showing posts with label active imagination. Show all posts
"Many adults who were traumatized as
kids have never experienced their Self in consistent control. Such people (i.e. their dominant subselves) are skeptical that they have a gifted, reliable inner team-leader and a more serene and productive way of daily living available to them" - Peter Gerlach
I'm a hearty proponent of what Jung called Active Imagination and what this man here Peter calls Inner-Family Therapy. While my inner skeptic still scoffs at the wankiness of all of this stuff, I've done enough work in this area to know that that is only one part of me, who is in my particular case covering for and trying to protect one of the parts of me that's, well, still a little fucked up.
This process has become sorta precious to me. I've seen in myself the changes that come. I still have a so much understanding and sorting to do, but this type of process is like being my own therapist. It's empowering. I guess it's been a little helpful to me that I have had several people who I have practised this type of therapy with, both beautiful, gorgeous women who have provided a safe space for me to enter into this rather more different form of talk therapy and couch-lying. But I don't think it's necessary to have anyone else but you along for this particular ride. It's the best way I know to enter into myself and to listen to parts of me that are screaming without my ever knowing who they were before. And changes come, too. Not fast enough, that's a given. But they do. Changes come, and growth, and new parts discovered that I have not been conscious of before. New ways of being in the world.
Maybe this whole area of subselves is the story in action of the operation of different parts of our brains in action, as Peter Gerlach hypothesises. Not just the physical brain as a bunch of muscle and neurons. The brain as narrative, the brain as story. Just how I like it.
How about you? Have you ever done any of this kind of work? How did you find it?
Love your enemies, and do good to those who persecute you.
A few years ago when I was doing art therapy once a fortnight, I came to my session with a dream I'd had of an Akubra-wearing archetypal Aussie farmer bloke, old and wrinkly and naked, who came into my bedroom and tried rather unceremoniously to ... well, to put his fingers ... somewhere I had no desire for him to put them. Rather unsurprisingly, my feeling at the time was that he was an evil character. An invader. That was to change in the process of coming to understand him.
At my art therapy session I drew a picture of him, drawn from my dream's eye perspective. In the picture only my legs appear, stretching away from me, lying on the bed. The pine slats at the bed's end are the only thing standing between me and this invader, who can be seen from the waist up.
I still remember that delicious chill when my wonderful art therapist pointed out what was in front of me in my subconscious and which bubbled up right in front of my eyes so that I suddenly saw that the drawing I had done was of half my body and half his body. That if we cut the picture in half, it would make an entire person.
I don't know how to explain that jolt. It was like a bubbling up from a deep part of myself - an experience I have had over and over again since, both in doing active imagination (where you engage in dialogue with different parts of yourself), and in other creative acts. It is a bubbling up of the unfamiliar from that part of yourself which is unfamiliar, hidden, and mysterious, which speaks in the language of dreams so that you have to decipher messages coded. Gifts from yourself to yourself which reverberate for a very long time to come.
And so that's what I did. I cut the picture in half, and attached my legs to his so that he could walk, and I clothed him to give him some dignity, and in that process and over the months ahead as I digested this experience, I realised that this man who I thought was evil and an invader was a part of myself that was so incredibly dry and parched, and that I needed to water him because he was thirsty, and he needed to cry. He had got my attention in the only way he knew how.
What I thought was initially evil was what I had been denying in myself.
I still speak to him sometimes. I have grown fond of him, although I've still been slightly wary. The other day I was walking the dog and I was having a chat to the Cast of Thousands. They are the many and varied parts that make up myself. They are most amenable to conversation when engaged. They materialise in my mind's eye and speak to me in ways that constantly amaze me. My bullshit meter is always fully engaged in these situations. I'm always ready to say, "See, this is crap. I'm just making this up." Which of course on one level I am just making it up. But it is a making up of a character, an inventing something real, a putting form to something formless, materialising it, the way shapes come out of the clay. And afterwards I am always amazed when I realise that yet again, deep has called to deep, and up from I don't know where bubbles ideas and associations, names and inclinations, that once deciphered make so much sense. More gifts from myself to myself.
So I was walking the dog and having a chat to the Cast of Thousands. And I said, "Okay. Is there anybody who would like to look after Little Susie? You know how scared she is with male energy at this stage. So therefore she needs a male on the inside to look after her." Little Susie is about eight, with dark plaits. She is soooooo sensitive, and will run and hide with little provocation. She loves to paint and play with clay and words and has always known that everything is connected.
And I was so surprised when straight away that character put up his hand. It wasn't even like he was feeling like he should put his hand up, like he sighed and thought, "Oh well, guess I should earn my keep." No, he wanted to do it. He was eager. He loves Little Susie!
For reasons best known to a not-conscious part of myself I have begun calling him Max. I have noticed, in the days since Max has taken on the role of looking after Little Susie, that the lines on his face have reversed and he is looking about 20 years younger than when I first met him. It seems that Max's taste in nourishing water is top shelf, straight from the fountain of youth.
A few years ago when I was doing art therapy once a fortnight, I came to my session with a dream I'd had of an Akubra-wearing archetypal Aussie farmer bloke, old and wrinkly and naked, who came into my bedroom and tried rather unceremoniously to ... well, to put his fingers ... somewhere I had no desire for him to put them. Rather unsurprisingly, my feeling at the time was that he was an evil character. An invader. That was to change in the process of coming to understand him.
At my art therapy session I drew a picture of him, drawn from my dream's eye perspective. In the picture only my legs appear, stretching away from me, lying on the bed. The pine slats at the bed's end are the only thing standing between me and this invader, who can be seen from the waist up.
I still remember that delicious chill when my wonderful art therapist pointed out what was in front of me in my subconscious and which bubbled up right in front of my eyes so that I suddenly saw that the drawing I had done was of half my body and half his body. That if we cut the picture in half, it would make an entire person.
I don't know how to explain that jolt. It was like a bubbling up from a deep part of myself - an experience I have had over and over again since, both in doing active imagination (where you engage in dialogue with different parts of yourself), and in other creative acts. It is a bubbling up of the unfamiliar from that part of yourself which is unfamiliar, hidden, and mysterious, which speaks in the language of dreams so that you have to decipher messages coded. Gifts from yourself to yourself which reverberate for a very long time to come.
And so that's what I did. I cut the picture in half, and attached my legs to his so that he could walk, and I clothed him to give him some dignity, and in that process and over the months ahead as I digested this experience, I realised that this man who I thought was evil and an invader was a part of myself that was so incredibly dry and parched, and that I needed to water him because he was thirsty, and he needed to cry. He had got my attention in the only way he knew how.
What I thought was initially evil was what I had been denying in myself.
I still speak to him sometimes. I have grown fond of him, although I've still been slightly wary. The other day I was walking the dog and I was having a chat to the Cast of Thousands. They are the many and varied parts that make up myself. They are most amenable to conversation when engaged. They materialise in my mind's eye and speak to me in ways that constantly amaze me. My bullshit meter is always fully engaged in these situations. I'm always ready to say, "See, this is crap. I'm just making this up." Which of course on one level I am just making it up. But it is a making up of a character, an inventing something real, a putting form to something formless, materialising it, the way shapes come out of the clay. And afterwards I am always amazed when I realise that yet again, deep has called to deep, and up from I don't know where bubbles ideas and associations, names and inclinations, that once deciphered make so much sense. More gifts from myself to myself.
So I was walking the dog and having a chat to the Cast of Thousands. And I said, "Okay. Is there anybody who would like to look after Little Susie? You know how scared she is with male energy at this stage. So therefore she needs a male on the inside to look after her." Little Susie is about eight, with dark plaits. She is soooooo sensitive, and will run and hide with little provocation. She loves to paint and play with clay and words and has always known that everything is connected.
And I was so surprised when straight away that character put up his hand. It wasn't even like he was feeling like he should put his hand up, like he sighed and thought, "Oh well, guess I should earn my keep." No, he wanted to do it. He was eager. He loves Little Susie!
For reasons best known to a not-conscious part of myself I have begun calling him Max. I have noticed, in the days since Max has taken on the role of looking after Little Susie, that the lines on his face have reversed and he is looking about 20 years younger than when I first met him. It seems that Max's taste in nourishing water is top shelf, straight from the fountain of youth.
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