A mother’s love

My mother died in June. She was ninety-five years old and died at home—her one wish—after only two days in bed. She had an indomitable spirit.

A friend recently asked if I ever wished for the kind of mother I needed. She knew the complicated relationship I had with my mother and of my years in therapy to overcome my low self-esteem and body dysmorphia.

This friend asked if I ever wished for a mother who would have given me what I would have needed to live a healthier life?

The truth is that God gave me that mother in the form of my friend, Dorothy. We met after I graduated from college and started teaching Sunday school at Dorothy’s church—two of her teen-aged children were in my class.

Our friendship seemed unlikely to me because Dorothy was a proper Southern lady who lived temperately, while I was still in my wild times, trying to find my way in life. We met just a few years after I had been sexually assaulted, and I was still healing from that experience. In that healing process, issues from my childhood had come to light, revealing the depth of my wounds.

Even though I was in intensive therapy, I was still living out of my pain and trying to figure out a path forward.

Dorothy entered my life at the exact moment when I was open to see how a mother could be.

At first, she did not know my mother-history or my self-esteem issues. She only knew what her children told her, and they thought highly of me because I invited them to engage in conversations about their faith. They thought it was amazing that I allowed them to share without censure or judgment, that I gave them space to explore who God was for them at that time in their lives, to question church teachings, to wonder about their faith and to challenge the status quo.

From them, Dorothy learned that I was a good teacher who listened to them and valued their opinions.

As our friendship grew and Dorothy came to understand how damaged my self-image was, she acknowledged what I believed about myself, and then she gently painted a different picture—the image she saw of me. Dorothy affirmed and encouraged me; she did not criticize me or judge me.

Over time, my relationship with Dorothy helped me gain perspective and understanding on my relationship with my mom. Dorothy showed me a mother’s love in a way my own mom was not able to do.

Knowing how complicated and conflicted my relationship was with my mom, Dorothy often commented on how lucky my mom was to have my help in her last years. I don’t know that Dorothy realized that it was her love that had healed what was broken in my mother relationship and made it possible for me to care for my mom at the end of her life. I was twice blessed.

Unpacking the shadow side

One of my earliest memories is from a day when I was four years old and I found a dime in my back yard. A dime in those days was a lot of money; it could buy ten pieces of candy. In my excitement, I shouted my good news, at which point my older brother claimed the dime was his.

I probably chanted, “Finders keepers; losers weepers,” which was something we said to proclaim ownership of found items.

My brother was not easily dissuaded when he wanted something, though, and he came toward me to grab the dime, claiming, “Its mine.” And so I swallowed it. Yep, I just swallowed the dime to make sure my brother could not get it and I could keep it. (Not the smartest move, perhaps, but I was four.)

Twenty-four years later, I was in therapy, and when asked for my earliest memory, I shared this story.

My therapist said, “And you have been swallowing every painful incident ever since.”

What?

His response was unexpected. I thought I had just been sharing an early memory. I had no idea of the significance of that encounter with my brother and the dime, but I could see that it was true.

Every bad thing that had happened to me had been submerged deep inside me, swallowed like the dime, to stop the pain of whatever painful thing was happening.

At twenty-eight, this was my first experience with therapy, and I had not previously examined much from my past, the relationships and events that had shaped me.

We did not go in for therapy in my family, preferring to believe that no one needed help or had any issues. Therapy was for sissies or “crazy” people, and we could be neither. We just kept moving forward, and my way of moving forward was to swallow everything bad in my life.

I suppose all this has resurfaced now because I have been thinking about resiliency and how resiliency has helped me survive the traumatic events of my life.

From therapy, I learned about what Carl Jung called our shadow side, that place inside where I had shoved every painful experience. At twenty-eight, I started to unpack that overstuffed bag, to look at what was there, and to see what I could learn from those experiences that could help me more forward with my life in a healthier way.

Even though my way of coping as a child was not particularly effective for mental health, it was effective for survival. And when I began to unpack what was stored in the darkness, I began to see myself as a survivor and to understand how all those events had shaped me into the person I had become.

Once I brought each event from my past into the light, I could see the lessons I had learned—how they taught me to be more understanding of what others had experienced and more accepting, and how they had made me more resilient.

Feeling safe

My annual retreat was cancelled because of the pandemic. The retreat director, though, is offering an alternative, on-line retreat. Instead of eight days, she is offering eight weeks of virtual retreat.

Every Sunday, she sends prayers, scripture passages, reflection questions and poetry, plus a link to a video with reflections and guided meditations.

Last Sunday, during a guided meditation, the director invited us to recall a time when we felt safe—perhaps a childhood memory or a particular place or person. She gave us a bit of silence to recall.

But the recollection time she allotted was not enough for me, because I could not remember a time when I felt safe.

I had to pause the video, as I flipped through memories of my childhood and came up empty—no places or events when I felt safe for any length of time.

There were moments, glimpses into how safety might feel, but my anxiety and feelings of dread usually rush in before I can hunker down into a deep sense of security.

I am the person who asks, “Is it safe?” when someone tells me she is going for a walk in a park or for a bike ride alone. I am attuned to incidents of unsafety—a runner mugged, someone carjacked, purses snatched, etc. Every incident reinforces my not feeling safe.

Even where I go on retreat is carefully researched. A friend once suggested a place he had gone—”lots of woods nearby for walking,” he said. “I can’t walk through the woods,” I said. I need a retreat center with open grounds.

Eventually, a memory surfaced from when I was thirty-five—a weeklong windjammer cruise off the coast of Maine, my first real vacation.

I grew up in a house where planning a vacation was useless because something always happened to cause plans to be abandoned, or at least changed so dramatically that they bore little resemblance to what had been planned. The lesson was don’t make plans.

But after several years of therapy, I was ready to move against my history and plan a vacation. I loved being on the water and a windjammer cruise sounded like something I could relax into.

A friend agreed to go with me, and we booked our August trip the prior January—eight months of worry about what could go wrong. But, other than a minor traffic delay on the way to Maine, the trip happened as planned.

Every morning, I would wake at my usual 6:00 a.m. and sit in silence on the deck, sipping my coffee and praying in gratitude. Throughout that week, I remember being aware of how relaxed I was, how comfortable I was in my own skin. This is what it is like to feel safe, I remember thinking.

The J&E Riggin Windjammer

Then another memory surfaced: A massage therapist suggesting that every night before I go to sleep, I take a deep breath and say, “I am safe.”

I returned to the retreat video gratefully holding these two memories.

What are your memories of feeling safe?

Wearing masks

We are being told to wear masks in public,

as if I had to be told.

I have been wearing masks all my life.

Not white, medical masks

or home-made calico prints,

but masks that hide who I really am,

that show a me I want you to see.

Stop hiding behind masks, my therapist told me.

Let people know who you are.

Hiding or revealing?

Covering up or displaying? Which is it?

Look into my eyes and see the real me

Developing new habits

“Stop apologizing,” a friend said to me.

“It is a bad habit,” I replied.

She is reading a book about over-apologizing and trying to change her own habit; I am caught in her new-found awareness.

I am grateful for her insight, though, because it is helping to develop my own awareness. When I am with her now, I swallow every “I’m sorry” that attempts to escape my lips.

But, why do I apologize for things over which I have no control?

Bad weather? I’m sorry.

Bad hair day? I’m sorry.

You didn’t see my text? I’m sorry.       

Trouble with your car? I’m sorry.

The store was out of your favorite whatever? I’m sorry.

On and on it goes. At first, I had thought to count the number of times I apologize in a day, but it quickly became apparent that the number was just too many.

So why do I apologize?

I don’t really feel responsible for the weather or car trouble or most of the other inconveniences of life. I know I am not that powerful that I can control any of it.

In the bigger scheme of habits, this one may seem inconsequential, but I am beginning to see how my over-apologizing is connected to my self-image.

I grew up feeling invisible and believing that being invisible was the best I could be. If someone saw me—if I became visible—that was a bad thing, as if I was the inconvenience and I needed to apologize for being a bother. It was as if my very presence was the problem.

Therapy helped me understand the flaws in this belief system. But changing the habits I developed during those early years has taken a lifetime, and obviously, I still have a way to go.

What I need is another way to express my concern that something bad has happened or that someone has been troubled in some way—without taking responsibility for what has happened. I need to develop a new habit that expresses empathy or sympathy.

I hadn’t anticipated this as a New Year’s resolution, but it is the gift that has come to me, and I will try to honor it.

What habits are you trying to change?

Misplaced loyalty

When we were in our mid-thirties, my cousin wrote me and asked if we could get together for dinner the next time I came home for a visit.

We grew up more like sisters than cousins, and as children, she knew me better than anyone else.

Her request to meet seemed a bit odd, though, because we had drifted apart after high school.

Now she was in therapy and had some questions for me. Her childhood memories were fuzzy and had some blank spaces; she hoped I would be able to bring clarity to her murkiness and fill in some of the blanks.

At dinner, she asked about one of our uncles. I shuddered.

“If we had known of ‘good touch’ and ‘bad touch,’” she said, “he would have been a bad-touch uncle.” I agreed.

As far back as I could remember, I had tried to avoid this uncle, who liked to bounce me on his lap and “tickle” my still-undeveloped breasts. She confided that she, too, had learned to give him a wide berth.

Even at a young age we both knew that other adults saw anything wrong in what he did to us, and no one would stop him.

“What about us?” my cousin asked. “Why didn’t anyone protect us? Why were we left to feel shame for something he did?”

The memory of that dinner with my cousin thirty years ago resurfaced recently.

Lately, I seem to be tuned into the secrets people keep. In novels—where more is left unsaid than shared—and television detective stories—where people withhold facts from the police—what goes unsaid has been catching my attention.

Why the hesitation? The resistance? Why not tell all? 

The answer frequently is the desire to protect someone.

Perhaps novelists and screenwriters are emphasizing the things people don’t say as a way of pointing out how common the practice is. Perhaps they are using their craft to nudge people into greater honesty because they know how harmful secrets can be, how damaging it is to protect people who are abusing their power.

Maybe I am more aware of the destructiveness of keeping secrets and protecting people because of what is happening in my church. Those in power seem to be willing to do anything to hold onto their power, covering up egregious acts and maintaining a code of silence. Or maybe it is because of politicians and celebrities demanding loyalty or paying hush money to keep their secrets.

Other than that dinner with my cousin, I have not talked about my uncle and the impact his actions had on me.

One thing I can see clearly, though, is how this early lesson helped shape my sense of “loyalty” and my understanding of the need to protect people who have something to lose—be it their reputation, job or family.  

In the end, the truth usually comes out. And it often turns out that people already knew, or at least had an inkling, of the truth.

Becoming courageous

“I want to be you,” a volunteer at my work recently said to me.

“Me?” I asked incredulously.

I admire your courage and kindness,” she said.

Over the years, I have told other women that I want to be them. These are women who embody the virtues I aspire to—patience, compassion, kindness, wisdom and self-acceptance. I want to embody those same virtues.

So when I heard these words being said to me, I was surprised.

I suppose most of us carry around images of ourselves that focus on our insecurities, where we see ourselves falling short and not living up to our own standards, let alone expectations others might have. I know I do.I used to move a lot and hanging curtains was one of the first things I did to help me feel settled into my new place. I remember after one move, a woman at work asked how I was settling in and I told her I had my curtains up so I was in good shape. “Who hung them for you?” she asked, knowing that I was single. “I did them myself,” I replied with both a tinge of incredulity that she asked the question and also a sense of pride. She considered hanging curtains rods a challenge.

But, I have been in my current house for five years and only last week put up the last of my window treatments. I was nervous about drilling into the plaster wall. Drilling into wooden window frames is easy, but plaster?

I googled installing curtain rods in plaster walls and then I called my brother for further assurance. He concurred with the You Tube video.

So I charged my drill, mustered my courage, measured and began. I even used the level to make sure the rod was straight.

The finished product pleased me.Why had I been so resistant? So fearful?Even though others may see me as courageous, I know my inner fears. I know how I can be paralyzed by the smallest thing (like putting up curtain rods).

When this paralysis strikes, I wonder if it is a matter of accepting my limitations or being challenged to overcome a fear.In my early thirties, my therapist encouraged me to do things scared.

Act as if… my therapist advised me. We had been talking about my fears, and there were many. He suggested I act as if I had no fears, with the idea that acting as if would lead to a change in behavior, that my fears would disappear.

I was doubtful, but it actually worked, and each time I did something that frightened (or even terrified) me, I gain confidence.

From another therapist, I learned is to ask, What is the worst that can happen? In most circumstances, the worst is not so bad. (In the case of curtain rods, it would mean some repair work before reinstalling.)

Doing things scared and weighing possible outcomes have helped me become less fearful and more courageous.

 

Finding my voice

When I approached the presenter at the cancer caregivers workshop to share my reaction to her words about hope, she responded, “I wish you would have said that at the mic.”

At the end of each presentation, we were invited to come to the mic and ask questions or share reflections.

But, I don’t do that; I don’t share in front of groups.

Ironically, I love public speaking and have done a fair amount of it for my nonprofit work. But there is a difference between telling other people’s stories and sharing my personal stories. Other people’s, ok. My own, not so much.

As a child, I was told that what happened in our house stayed in our house. We also did not talk inside our house about anything that happened. I felt invisible, as if no one cared what I was going through—or even noticed that I was there. I didn’t seem to matter.
By my late twenties, I was an emotional mess and started going to therapy to help me process growing up in a chaotic house and to reconcile my past.

However, growing up in a home where I was told never to talk about what happened made sharing extremely stressful. Every time words formed about an experience or feeling, an alarm would sound inside my head. Do not say that!I was incapable of identifying what I was feeling, much less talking about it.

Early on in therapy, I shared one of my earliest memories.

I was four years old, playing in my back yard, when I found a dime. What luck! Even at that young age, I knew a dime could buy me something special. I remember how shiny it was and how fortunate I felt. And then my older brother saw what I had and claimed it was his. “No!” I shouted. “It’s mine!” He tried to take it from me, and I knew he would triumph, so I swallowed it.

My therapist commented, “And you have been swallowing every challenge since them.”

I once heard Fr. Richard Rohr talk about our shadow side, and he described it as a sack where we stuff all the negative things from our lives. The image that popped into my mind was of something like Santa’s bag—this huge sack, dragging behind me. I could feel the weight of it pulling me back.

My shadow bag was filled with twenty-eight years of negative experiences that I had swallowed and tamped down deeper and deeper.

As I began to unpack my shadow bag in therapy and at retreats, and look at my history, I started to realize that surviving those experiences had made me who I was; they had made me strong and resilient. Learning to talk about it—especially at the mic—is still a work in progress.

 

 

Growing in love

Love your neighbor as yourself. Mark 12:31

Whenever I encountered this Scripture passage, I used to think, “Poor neighbors,” what a low bar. Shouldn’t I love my neighbors at least a bit more than I love myself?

I didn’t love myself very much in my young life. I saw myself as lacking in most every way, never quite measuring up, more often messing up.

I might have re-written the passage to read, Love your neighbors as you want to be loved—or possibly Love yourself as you love your neighbors, because I can be much more accepting, compassionate and forgiving of others.

My capacity for self-love was definitely deficient.

Growing up, I knew that God loved me, and it was always a mystery why or how God could love someone I saw as so broken. It was probably my biggest Yes, but, as in “I know God loves me, but…” followed by my litany of deficiencies—all the reasons God must be wrong to love me.

Recently, one of my neighbors ripped out his front lawn. I don’t know why he did it—maybe it was dying or too weedy; maybe he just got tired of it or just did not like it and wanted something new and different.

I walked past his grassless front yard for a few weeks and then one day there was a beautiful new lawn—lush, green and weed-free. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I thought, if I could rip out what is undesirable in me and instantaneously replace it with something new and beautiful, completely erase whatever was old, worn or ugly?But that is not how it has worked in my life. Years of therapy helped me to redefine myself more realistically. Years of prayer helped me to begin to see myself as God sees me.

I had to learn to set good boundaries and practice owning what is mine, figuring out what I believe and reinforcing that—and letting go of negative views. I wrote affirmations on little pieces of paper and taped them to my bathroom mirror, stuck them to my refrigerator with magnets and placed them in small picture frames. Reading these affirmations every day eventually began to push aside negative messages and replace them with God messages.I was restructuring the landscape of my inner self, but it was not as instantaneous as laying sod.

When I was in therapy in my thirties, I used to practice my boundary-setting out loud. When I recognized that I was regurgitating someone else’s negative belief (about myself or anything else), I would identify it. “So and so needs to say…” and then I would say, “But I want to say…” about whatever it was what I believed, or what belief I was growing into.Growing in self-compassion has strengthened my boundaries and improved my self-esteem. To love myself as God loves me is my desire. Only then am I able to truly love others as I love myself—and as God loves them.

 

Moving beyond trauma

In the mid-1980’s, I participated in a clinical trial conducted by the Women’s Hospital in Philadelphia; the goal was to see if the treatment used with Vietnam Veterans to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) would be effective for women who were survivors of sexual assault.

I was recently reminded of this clinical trial when I was cleaning out my file cabinet and found four dog-eared index cards.

Each three-by-five card had a heading, written in someone else’s cursive.

1. Preparing for a stressor
2. Confronting and handling a stressor
3. Coping with feelings of being overwhelmed
4. Reinforcing self-statements

Beneath each heading, in my own writing, are prompts and personal messages.

I don’t remember much about the program—how many weeks or months it lasted, if sessions were once or twice a week—but I do remember driving to North Philadelphia and meeting one-to-one with a therapist.

Reading these messages that I had written to my younger self, I realized that I have internalized many of the practices I was taught in this program.

The treatment focused on modifying behaviors, and one exercise I have practiced over the years is interrupting negative thoughts. The idea is to notice when my thoughts are spiraling downward and I am starting to feel overwhelmed; then I shout STOP.

It does not matter if I shout out loud or in just in my mind, the shouting interrupts the negative thought process and gives me a chance to change direction and regain control. For me, this has been an effective thought-changing process that has helped steer me away from negativity.

On the first card, under the heading Preparing for a stressor, I wrote three questions:

1. What is it I have to do?
2. What am I afraid of?
3. What is the likelihood of anything bad happening?

Beneath those questions, I instructed myself to “get beyond my feelings to do the work that has to be done.” And then I affirmed myself: “I’ve made a lot of progress; I’ve come this far; I can keep going.”

Some of the notes to myself on the other cards include:

“Other people can do this; so can I.”

“Focus on plan of action.”

“There are people involved whom I can trust.”

“It will be over soon.”

“The anxiety (fear) will slow me down but I will not be incapacitated by it.”

The fourth card is a list of affirmations, including:

“Nothing succeeds like success.”

“Good job—pat yourself on the back.”

I don’t know the outcome of that clinical trial, but for me, the treatment was helpful, and over the years, I can see how I have built on what I learned. For example, after accomplishing a task that is particularly stressful, I now say, “Bask in the glow of success” which, to me, is a step beyond patting myself on the back.

I know that my faith was primarily what got me through that trauma, and the clinical trial at Women’s Hospital was a gift. I am grateful.