What’s Going On?

I ask myself, “What is it?”  That’s always the question when I’m upset and don’t know why. “What’s going on?”

I ask the deepest part of my brain. I wait for the answer. Sometimes, I have to give that part of my brain a little confidence in my motives. “I’m listening. I’m interested. Let me know what’s going on.”

I don’t know if other people have issues like this with their brain, body, or soul. As I kid, my truth was shut down by my parents.  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s not true. Where did you get a crazy idea like that?”  So, I learned to doubt myself. Some of my most disturbing truths got deeply buried.  As part of my mission to be healthy, I’ve had to learn how to coax out my truth and encourage myself to care enough to want to know what’s buried. 

It hasn’t been easy. I developed complicated coping mechanisms to protect myself from uncomfortable truths. They also worked to protect the adults in my life that should have been held accountable. It’s been a long process of nurturing my inside parts. “I care. I want to know. Tell me what’s going on.”

I’ve had to demonstrate integrity with myself. I’ve had to prove to those buried parts that I will do constructive things with the information and not use it to further hurt myself. The pattern of self harm I’ve lived with was modeled by my being hurt as I kid by those in charge. “Don’t talk back to me!  Who asked you?”  This meant to me, “Don’t say things I don’t want to hear about how you feel. Your feelings don’t matter.”

The first way I discovered I was hiding information from myself was when I felt suicidal and did not know why.  Feeling suicidal has always been a harbinger of hidden secrets for me.  It started when I was twelve.  I’ve had to learn to get to the bottom of it.  It’s pretty much a do or die situation, obviously.

One of the first memories I have of understanding this was when I was 17.  I had been extremely suicidal and had no clue why.  My best friend, Sue, did her best to support me.  At her wit’s end one night while driving me around, she said, “Jo, just tell me what’s going on.”  (All my sports buddies called me “Jo.”)

I had been struggling for weeks with rampant thoughts of suicide.  Sue said, “Just ask yourself what it is.  Notice the first thing that pops in your mind.”  I wanted to know.  I didn’t want to know.  Dare I do this?  Listen to the first thing that pops into my mind?

“Okay,” I said.  I took a deep breath.  I said to myself, “Okay, what is it?  The first thing that pops into my mind.  That’s it.”  I waited.  The sentence came to me, “I’m a lesbian.”  

I nearly choked.  “Oh, god, no,” I thought.  “Anything but that.”  In my upbringing, it was made clear to me that being gay was worse than being dead.  “No, no, no.  It can’t be.”  I kept hearing that terrible sentence repeating in my mind.  “I’m a lesbian.”  It was the worst.

Sue asked me what it was.  I didn’t know how to tell her.  I didn’t want to tell her.  I wanted so bad for it to not be true.  “Okay.  I’ll tell you.  But, you have to tell me right away if you hate me so I can jump out of the car.  Promise?  You’ll just tell me if you hate me?”

“I promise.”

“Okay.  I’m not sure.  I’m hoping it isn’t true.  It really couldn’t be, but I might be a... lesbian.”  I told her and held my breath.

Sue responded with the most perfect message in the world.  “So?”

All that churning inside of me.  All that self hatred came down to one word:  So.  “Do you hate me?”

“No.  Why would I hate you?  I’ve known you loved women.  It’s okay.  It’s not a bad thing.  It doesn’t matter to me if you are a lesbian.”  I was stunned.  I had told my best friend this secret so awful that I was willing to die rather than know, and she said, “So.”

Rebuilding a structure of trust within myself has taken the greatest amount of courage I have ever had to harness. More courage than facing the fact that I had to break up with my child’s other parent because she was untrustworthy and hurtful.  More courage than facing the death of a loved one. More courage than telling my truth to someone of great power in my professional life.  More courage than going out in public in a wheelchair and letting people see me as a chair user.

There have been other issues I’ve had to face that being suicidal brought up.  Later in my twenties, I was struggling, working with my counselor.  I was trying to get more healthy but my system was set on self destruct.  With my counselor’s support, I asked myself what it was.  What was the awful thing that I couldn’t face?  It came to me.  “My father raped me.”  The words echoed in my mind.  My uttering those words aloud gave me the feeling that the whole world

would collapse.

In that sentence, my whole family contorted into this giant collusion of keeping that secret.  When I finally told my mother, her response was, “If you tell anyone, I will tell your grandparents how crazy you are.  How you’ve manipulated your counselors to be against me.”

I was pissed and tired of being threatened.  “Mom, you just do whatever you want.  I’m just going to tell my grandparents first.  I’ll just call them now.  Tell them my father raped me and that they’ll be hearing mean things from you about it.”  I did tell my grandmother about it and what my mother said she would do.  My sweet granny never said more about it to me.  When she died, I found the vilest, cruelest, meanest letter it’s ever been my pleasure to read that my mother had sent my grandparents.  It didn’t work.  My grandparents didn’t reject me.  I moved on with the work I needed to do to recover from knowing what my mind was hiding.  My mother’s response just supported the truth of it.

By working on this internal integrity, I have gained confidence in entering into uncomfortable external dialogues as well.  It helps me tell my favorite coworker how unhappy I was when he did something that I didn’t like.  It helps me have tough conversations with the employees I support that no one else will have with them.  It helps me tell my partner that something she did hurt my feelings.  More importantly, it helps me listen to her tell me how she felt when I hurt her feelings. It helps me listen to my daughter tell me what I did that didn’t work for her when she was growing up without getting defensive. “Ya, that’s what happened. I’m really sorry I made that choice.”

We all have stuff we hide from ourselves because we think it’s not okay.  Mine is just more extreme which can make it easier to spot.

I’m pretty sure this is part of what gets in the way of many of us reconciling our internal worlds with our external ones.  It gets in the way of generations of families not holding themselves accountable for the patterns of abuse, alcohol and drug use, or other bad behavior.  It includes whole countries not listening to each other and failing to create paths for reconciliation.  It includes major corporations doing environmental damage without holding themselves accountable and fearing the accountability brought by the public. If we as humans can’t listen and hold ourselves accountable. How can our organizations from the small and intimate to the large and global do any better?

It’s a small question, full of huge impact. “What’s going on?”  If we don’t ask the question and patiently listen for the answer, we’ll never be better. 

L’Chaim. 

Joceile 

12.11.18

[Picture of woman with partially gray hair wearing white shirt with lavender tie with rimless glasses staring at something away from the camera.]