last updated 10/2/99

I drew the picture above (larger version) September 15, trying to capture something I had seen in my inside world a few days earlier in therapy. The significance of the image was that I was both the girl standing on the rocks and also the faces in the waves beating furiously on the rocks. I had been working on anger issues, and in some ways the water, the waves, represented anger. But more than that, they represented everything that is not controlled, not organized. I wanted so much to be able to let myself go and be the water.

Yet in the next session, the feelings wouldn't release. I struggled with my therapist about what had happened. We scheduled an extra session and finally I found a way in, though it was different from what I expected. The image I had was of an arm punching out of my belly. I painted that one too and you can see it at 9-25-99 (caution--nudity). What I said was "I am." I meant that I have a right to exist, a right to take up space. I understand that as connecting with my core, not in the sense of meeting a core alter who had previously been hidden, but in the sense of giving a larger role to the place where everything connects.

I walked the labyrinth a few days later. I saw myself, ever since the integration of a year-and-a-half ago, as a flower whose petals merge together at the center. That center is the core, the place in my belly from which the arm came out. And then I saw the divisions between the petals disappearing.

The first integration I had experienced had been a realization that all my different parts were part of me, so the petals did merge at the core. Although I knew it was the same me, I tended to be only one aspect of myself at a time. For one thing, that meant that a lot of the time I didn't feel my feelings, though I might have an awareness they were underneath. And the core was small and weak. I'm still trying to understand how things are different since the divisions disappeared. I find it very confusing and disturbing to feel my feelings all the time. And yet the core is also stronger.

The next therapy session, the reaction hit. I talked about how it is too hard to be that new self, to feel strange and awkward in everything I do. I said that I wanted to go back to the familiar pain and hiding, because at least I know how to live there. Sometimes as I talked I wanted to die, to find that peace instead of trying to do the impossible. And sometimes I just wanted to turn my back on healing and go back to the way things were.

My therapist accepted my turning away and said we should trust it and see where it led us. He said that he would be with me where I was. His acceptance was tremendously powerful. I guess I still believed that I earned his caring about me by doing good work. And here he was still caring about me, still with me, when I turned my back on all the healing work we have done.

Intellectually, I can say that the strength of my pulling back is a sign of the powerful change that I've undergone. However, I still feel the fear and the pulling back and I am trying to trust that, to give it time.

next: Response to The New Yorker