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I can’t do grateful. “Grateful” seems to
describe a condition - and I have no idea how to "be" grateful,
positive or normal or whatever. I don't even know if it's possible. The only
thing I can "be" is me. Yet I can do thanks very easily, as that is
an action.
Thank you for understanding when I say
things like this ... and for asking when you didn't understand. I am heavily
scarred from earlier experiences, when professional helpers treated what they
didn't understand as symptoms instead of asking me to clarify, so this has been
extremely important to me.
I have told you that I am writing this, so
you know who you are, and this is for you. It is also for all the other helpers
in the world who genuinely help people in non-physical distress … I hope that
you know who you are, every single one of you; the people who are genuinely
helped certainly do.
I wish it were possible to teach
"helping that helps" theoretically ... and I think it is not
something we can learn from the eyebrows up.
Neither
is it necessarily something we can do ... we can often help our fellow humans
more by being. The unspoken, and maybe even unthought, question of many who
need help, is this:
You showed me that you can. And that was an
indescribable relief after years of so-called mental health care where pain was
wrong or crazy or inappropriate or faded or mystified or invisible or taboo or
just plain unacceptable.
After all the years of harmful help, I have
learned another important question that a customer of help should ask:
"Is
it possible to own responsibility for my life within the helper's cognitive
frames?"
Too
often there will be direct or indirect demands for subservience and obedience
instead:
"To
heal/to learn to live with your unhealable disorder you have to ..."
Thank you for having room for
responsibility in your space and within your frames.
How do you help? Not with compassion or
sympathy, which can "tear down a banner bravely borne".
Not
only with empathy, which can be extremely harmful if it comes from the wrong
place within the empathizer, as in: "I feel this, therefore it is the
truth about you."
And
certainly not only with expertise, which, like empathy, can be extremely
harmful if it comes from the wrong place within the helper ...
You help with support. The best description
I've seen was this, by Irene Claremont de Castillejo:
“The
first step is to disentangle ourselves and our personal wishes from the problem
and, having done so, become as conscious as possible of where we ourselves
stand. Then we may provide a fixed point of reference, a post as it were stuck
firmly into the sand around which a rope can be thrown from the little barques
being tossed helplessly by waves of emotion. If several friends can offer firm
posts, though the posts may stand for different points of view, they may yet
provide some strength and stability which will help the storm tossed people to
find their own solution. Not our solution, theirs.”
I
don't have the words to describe my relief at finally having firm support from
someone within the health care system. At finally being encouraged to take the
time I needed and clear the space I needed to find my own solutions. Mine. Not
someone else's.
And
in writing this slowly through a mist of tears, I realize that I am not done
with grieving over years of harmful mental health care. But that is another
story.
Thank you for not trying to squeeze me into
a "positive" not-a-victim cage. Thank you for supporting me in the
choice I had made so many years ago: to see what had happened to me, heal the
wounds and reach out to others who, like me, have been "The Loneliest One":
There is in certain living souls
A quality of loneliness unspeakable,
So great it must be shared
As company is shared by lesser beings.
Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this
That in immensity
There is one lonelier than you.
— Theodore Sturgeon
Thank you for propelling me into blogging
NOW ... Instead of in 3-4 years' time, "when I am ready", as I had
planned.
Thank you for integrity. I've never found a
good description of integrity as I see it, so I made one in 1987:
Integrity is our
mental skin.
When
we are good at suppressing integrity damage,
our
tattered skin is replaced with a mental armour.
Behind
this armour we do not notice if our integrity is being harmed,
and
we do not notice if we harm the integrity of others.
There is a huge difference between a helper
with a whole skin and a helper who is encased in armour. When we (and yes, I do
include myself) are hiding behind armour, we have no realistic concept of
integrity … or borders. And we have a regrettable tendency to assume that we
are objective when we let our reptile brain do the thinking.
Thank you for being there for me in your
own integrity, firmly rooted in your own skin, standing in your own shoes and in
your own life. By being there in this way, you were an anchor for me.
A
fixed point. When I badly needed one.
And
this gave me a place to stand in my own life. Like Archimedes, I needed a fixed
point ... not to move the world ... But to move myself out of the morass of confusion,
stress and exhaustion I had been stuck in so long, and with your support I
managed to do so.
Thank you for not trying to fix me by
pushing bullshit which
would have shoved me back into the morass.
Thank you for letting me get on with the
detangling that I had begun many years ago, because you could see that it
worked ... and thank you for having an open mind about what I was thinking and
doing.
Thank you for saying that I had “an
interesting skewed way of looking at things”, instead of treating what I said
as fantasies, emotions and psychiatric symptoms.
Thank you for being a sounding board that helped
me regain the belief that I could think - a belief that I had lost through
years of legal and correct mental health care.
This
you accomplished not by doing anything, just by listening and responding, just
by being you - in your skin, in your life … being there for me as a separate
entity.
Because you were honest with yourself,
within your skin and within your life ( which I still know nothing about, and
that's completely ok with me,) you could give me honest feedback, often
nonverbal, on what I said.
I've
been trying to understand the mechanisms of this, and the closest I've come is Ali Gs ubiquitous and
untranslatable "Keep it real".
When
I kept it real, what I said resonated with you, when you were centred and in
your own skin.
When I got tangled, you
did not have to say anything - what I said just klonked to the ground because
you did not have receptors for it.
A complicating factor here is that true and
real and important information can also klonk to the ground ... when said to a helper
in reptile brain mode who is encased in armour and has no receptors for
"real".
My heart aches for
everyone who has been misled into thinking they were safe in a psychotherapeutic
setting - and who were let down by specialists in armour who had no receptors
for integrity damage.
I
have been one of them, and my heart aches for me, too, and for the years of
thinking that societal wounds were my private defect ... Proof that there was
something wrong with me.
Thank you for accepting the term societal
wounds, and my reasons for using this term.
Thank you for giving me in 2010 what I
asked for in 1988:
Support
in the process of taking responsibility for my own life.
What I got in 1988 is another story
entirely, the short version is that I allowed my wings to grow and had started
to fly when they were plucked off because there was no room for wings and
flying within psychiatric realities about "incest victims".
Thank
you for not using imagery like this to prove that I'm crazy
Thank you for never demanding or expecting
trust from me, and for giving me clear and verifiable reasons to trust you
instead ... mainly by having clear borders yourself and respecting my borders.
In a
toxic family there are no clear borders.
I
have also experienced this lack in mental health care: How does one protect
integrity and borders when it is correct and legal to treat disagreement and
border protection as psychiatric symptoms?
Thank
you for recognising standpoints like this.
Thank you for knowing that there is
a whole elephant, even if you do not see all of it. I have seen your
confusion when you saw only an ear or a leg, and your face showed the mental
shift when you chose to know that this is not the whole of the thing.
And that brings me to something very
important ...
Thank
you for asking good questions. Questions that helped me clarify a statement, or
questions that show me new doors I could open, new directions I could go.
There
is a huge difference between constructive and destructive questions, as can be
seen in many descriptions of harmful help.
And
that is another story, to be told at another time, so I won't go into details
here, except to say this, categorically: All questions that start with
"why" are destructive when we are with pain.
I don't think there is any way of defining
helpful or harmful questions, except by looking at where the questions come
from within ourselves. Do they come from our integrity, our mental skin, or
from armour that we have developed to replace our mental skin?
Finally, and certainly not least, I want to
thank you for having the guts to assess situations that I have described.
"This is rude.” “This is a violation of your integrity."
Thank you for guts and logic. For being
able to think independently instead of blindly following the bullshit of psychiatric
expertise. Thank you for offering to watch my back and be an objective witness
for me in a specific situation, and for saying that if I need someone to assert
that I am sane, you will do so.
Writing this last paragraph was so painful,
and is so painful to reread. It has opened the door to a reservoir of anguish
that I thought was emptied.
It
has also triggered my old backache, which shows that I need to move - once
again - through fear of helplessness and vulnerability to flashbacks of being a
child and knowing that no one is protecting me, and there is nothing I can do
to protect myself. Knowing that protecting myself is baaaaad, because the Powers
That Be that harm me know that They are protecting me ... and that I have no need
for protection from Them.
Thank you for making it possible for me to
reopen this door, to accept and respect and learn from the tears and backache
yet again, and to accept that I need to continue to explore what I had hidden
so well from myself so many years ago.
I know that I can go in there alone now,
and I know that I can handle whatever I find there, because this is my stuff,
and I have years of experience in connecting with my inner child.
I
also know that this would not have been possible without the support you gave
me ... I needed to detangle years of harmful mental health care before I could
get back to
where I wrote this in 1986.
Whenever I come here in editing this, I am
blinded by tears. It has been excruciatingly difficult to write this, and I
finally realize why: For every thank you, lies years of harmful help. And that
brings me to a conclusion:
In 1988 I gave myself the right to be
vulnerable with dignity, to be helpless and wretched with dignity. Thank you
for recognising and respecting this right ... It was what I needed to get on
with my healing process.
As I see it, we can
only heal our non-physical wounds when we have this right ... and the only
people who can recognize and respect this right, are people who have given it
to themselves.
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