Being Colorblind

I used to say it. I used to think it. I never EVER ONCE, in all my growing-up years and even into adulthood, considered that I might be part of a mindset that unknowingly promotes racism. But I was. And I said it, and thought it.

What did I say? I said that I was colorblind. I said that I didn't see color.

But of course I did. I'd have to be blind not to see color. And what I thought and said about NOT seeing it only further alienated me from the very people I thought I was allying myself with. Because guess what... THEY see it. They see it when they get up in the morning and look at themselves in the mirror. They see it when they try to wait for a bus, reflected in the eyes of those who notice them standing there. They see it when they are outside taking a walk and decide to stand in a building's overhang and wait for a friend to come out.

And for me to say that I don't see color ... discounts and dismisses their experience of the world. It makes them invisible, and let's face it - everyone wants to be seen, to be acknowledged for their existence. The color of their skin is just as much a part of them as having fingers and toes. And their skin color dictates how the world treats them, what kinds of choices they make about everyday things, how they feel about their society, and how they interact with people who are outside of their circle. It is like an insult to them when I say I don't see color.

Photo courtesy of
Alec White at Pixabay

I have learned instead to say, "I see you." I have learned to say, "Teach me about your experience of your culture." I have learned to honestly ask people what it is like to BE them. I have learned to honor the existence and the history of those who are different from me, and to be curious about it, and to celebrate what is different and unique about each individual. I have learned not to assume that just because a person has a particular skin color, that all people who have that skin color feel this or that way, or think this or that way, or act this or that way. They don't. They don't in the same way that not all white people have similar beliefs or lifestyles or political leanings. It does a disservice to everyone to pigeon-hole people based on anything they might hold in common.

While it is true that we all bleed red, that we are all the same underneath, that every life matters, the reality of our society is that people of color are treated and viewed by so many in society as less-than. The reality is that racism is rampant and it runs amok in our world. The fact of the matter is that white people, like myself, have a societal privilege in our western culture that people of color do not. And it is for this reason that I join with thousands and millions of others in saying, "Black Lives Matter."  I don't say "All Lives Matter" because that silences those whose lives don't matter in today's society.

I saw an illustration of equality versus equity a few years ago that has stuck with me. It is a three-part cartoon depicting three people: a tall person, an average-sized person, and a little person, who are trying to watch a ball game from behind a five-foot wall. In the first illustration, the tall person can easily see over the wall. The average person can see but just barely. And the little person cannot see at all. Then there were two illustrations under that one. The one on the left put an equal-sized box under each person. In this illustration, the little person could just barely see over the fence, and the taller ones had an even better view from equally higher-up. This one was labelled "Equality." On the right, in the illustration labelled "Equity," the tall person who did not need a box, was not given one. The average-sized person was given a box tall enough so that he could reach the same height as the tall person, and the little person was also given an even taller box so he could enjoy the game from the same height of the tall person. In this way, each of them could enjoy the game to the same degree.

This is a wonderful illustration of why I believe that those in the dominant culture do not need to be stroked and given special consideration. They already have the privilege of seeing the world without assistance. Those who need help and recognition should get it to the degree that they have been disadvantaged. And the history of white culture has many, many examples of the oppression of other races, especially black people (and yes, this is documented!) throughout the history of our interactions with other people who don't look like us.

From the time I was a little girl of ten years old, when I met a black man for the first time, I have been intrigued by people of color. But what I didn't know then, and what I still didn't know even as recently as ten years ago, was how difficult it was (and is) for those who are not white. We don't even think about the same things as people of color when we think of everyday activities that most of us take for granted. Going for a walk in a quiet neighborhood after dark ... going into a store in broad daylight ... walking the dog ... driving a car with tinted windows ... paying for an item by check ... waiting in the park for a friend ... all of these things we take for granted and never once think that we might not make it home alive. But people of color, and especially black people, do. Every. Day.

If recent events have not highlighted these facts for you, then it might be time to honestly investigate how best to honor people who are targets of racism in your city, in your province or state, in your country. Look for stories told by the actual people themselves, and not by white people telling their story for them.

Listen. And say it with me. Black Lives Matter.

#BLM #ISeeYou

Getting by Letting

The other day the leash attached to our puppy Bullet's harness got wound around a table leg. In trying to free him, I let go of the handle of his leash and concentrated on untangling the knot at its source. Bullet grabbed the leash handle and hung on. Of course, this way, he was stuck and couldn't be released from his predicament. 

It was like he was in one of those tubular finger puzzle traps where the harder you pull against it, the tighter the tube grabs your finger. "If only you'd let go, you'd be instantly free!" I thought. But he was fixated on 'helping' to free himself. 

Image courtesy of pasja1000 at Pixabay.com

The lesson was not lost on me. Sometimes I get into predicaments and I figure I have to free myself (since I was the one who got into the mess in the first place). 

But all I really needed to do was let go.  Let it go, as in quit obsessing, stop trying to make it better, stop trying to explain the reasons why, release the grudge, forgive, accept things, places, and people the way they are, and I'll be free. 

Not free of the leash. Not free of the relationships and linkages in my life. But free of being bound by my own efforts to free myself, to MAKE things happen. 

Free to enJOY the relationships. Free to make mistakes. Free to admit I was wrong. Free to love more unconditionally. Free to let go of the past. Free to embrace the present. Free to look forward to the future without dread. 

Let go of the handle I think I have on things. Give the handling of the handle to the Handler. Quit striving (not in the sense of trying, but in the sense of hanging on to strife). Trust that things can work themselves out WITHOUT my input. That I can be helpless without being hopeless. That I can love without trying to change the opinions or the behaviors of others. That I can respect others' right to be who they are, and expect them to respect my right to be who I am.

Can I do that?

Yes. Yes I can. 

Existence versus Life

As I write this, my mind and heart is a jumble of myriad tangled feelings, thoughts, memories, and pain – each competing with the other and yet co-existing and draining my strength as they fight their constant battle. This battle? This war? This is grief. This is love when arms can no longer hold the loved one.

Less than 48 hours ago, my brother Ben passed away from septic shock combined with pneumonia that he developed from an infection in a tube-site for his gall bladder. The tube was initially inserted in February 2017 and his surgeon hesitated to remove both it and the gall bladder for fear of him experiencing a coronary on the table. He had atherosclerosis (with a total of 3 stents in various heart arteries, for which he was taking a blood-thinner since the last heart attack on February 14, 2019.)  He also had insulin-dependent diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, nephrolithiasis, and chronic renal failure, and he was on dialysis three times a week.

In fact, that’s how I found out that he was in trouble. His dialysis nurse called me and said he didn’t show up for his Monday morning appointment. After trying to reach him, thinking he had overslept, I called a relative and asked them to go check to see if he was at home. His car was, but he didn’t answer. After that, I called 911 who patched me through to the RCMP. They went to his house, saw him awake on his bed through his (main floor) bedroom window, and he was unable to get up. They broke the door down and called the EMT people. That would have been around 3 pm or so. The EMTs came and got an IV started. They took him to the local hospital who assessed him and intubated him as he was having difficulty breathing. Then they ambulanced him to the hospital where he normally did his dialysis. They got him there around 7 p.m.  Three hours after he got there, he took a turn for the worse, and went into septic shock. The nurse called me and asked me or someone to come to the hospital right now. They tried to revive him three times but to no avail. At 10:15 pm, he was pronounced dead.

And that is what the doctor told me ten minutes later, over the phone, as I was getting my coat on to make the two-and-a-half-hour trip to see him. Such pain I had not felt in over six years since my youngest daughter died at the age of 21.

My night-time trip was cancelled, of course. I made plans to pack up the next day, and go to the homestead to assess the damage and the mess. I might have slept four hours that night. The next night, with the help of some Melatonin, I slept for six hours, although there was one interruption at five a.m. when Ben’s alarms went off to remind him to get up for dialysis. Hopefully, tonight will be better.

During my waking hours, I have been doing a lot of thinking about the difference between existing and living. For most of his life, Ben just existed. He grew up thinking that he was a nuisance to his parents. He bore the inner scars of physical and psychological abuse by his mom and abandonment by his dad who never stopped her, and the bruises of an older brother who criticized everything he did and regularly pounded on him. He bore other scars too: a marriage that lasted only 14 years before it ended in divorce, alienation from his sons, rejection from an endless string of women, as well as being used by women who befriended him only for his bank account. His was a lonely life. He battled the loneliness with his art: he could draw landscapes, animals, and people just by looking at pictures of things. He composed so many songs and sang them with me and with that older brother when we were all so young (I was 16 at the time, so he was 22 and the other brother was 26) – gospel songs that were so beautiful you could hear a pin drop when we were done.

Yet he suffered. I remember him coming home from senior high school and sobbing as he begged me never EVER to judge a man just on his appearance. I never EVER forgot his words. 

Yes, most of his life he was a melancholy man. He existed; he created beautiful things and appreciated beauty in nature and in people, but his existence was spent waiting for the next good thing to happen, and being disappointed time after time after time. 

After his divorce in the early 1990s, he moved in with Mom and Dad. He was there for Mom after Dad passed away, and he made sure he was there to look after things for her. Others would come in and see him lazing around, as they called it. He rested because he couldn’t breathe if he got up and moved around. He had so many ailments: his lungs, his kidneys, his heart, his gall bladder, his pancreas,… people didn’t understand and he felt a lot of condemnation come from them. Nobody understood him, he told me, except me. And sometimes even that wasn’t enough to tame the monsters of hatred and bullying that he experienced – whether real or imagined – from others.

Once, he even tried to commit suicide. He had finally learned how to love unconditionally, and his girlfriend stole from him and used the money to get high. 

A few months later that girl died … and it took him months to make peace with that.

Photo "Eye" by graur codrin at www.freedigitalphotos.net

But by that time, he had learned to live. To REALLY LIVE.

You see, in October 2016, Ben had been diagnosed with stage one colon cancer. And in January 2017, he underwent a six-hour procedure to remove the cancer along with a 5-inch section of bowel. And when he woke from that surgery, while he was still recovering in the hospital, he was listening to the radio and a singer Skip Ewing was singing, “How can he be a king? He’s just a kid.” And God spoke to him in his heart, and said, “Are you listening, son?”  And he responded, tears streaming down his face, “Yes, Father. I’m here. I hear You.”

From that moment on, Ben started to really LIVE. He had some setbacks and some heartaches (like the death of that girlfriend). And he was living on a very limited income, never knowing if he would need to starve in order to be warm, or to freeze in order to eat. It was hard. It was REALLY hard. But he was finally LIVING. We would talk on the phone – and I would let him listen to music that he liked – and he would cry tears of beauty and joy. He never forgot how God rescued him, miraculously let him live, and would look after his every need. Even if he misplaced his car keys. Or his needles. Or his wallet.

Last year, on Valentine’s Day 2019, he suffered a major heart attack. The paramedics found him and the emergency team had to put an intravenous shunt through his shin bone to give him liquids. He screamed in pain and then his heart went into atrial fibrillation. They had to use the paddles to get him back – and he was “gone” for a few seconds there.

He remembered those few seconds. He felt completely at peace. He couldn’t see anything, but he knew that he was loved, cared for, and safe. And from that time onward, he lost his fear of death. He lost his fear of living, too. And the living he had been doing up until then just intensified. He could not keep silent about God’s love for him. Anyone who knew him heard him talk about higher things, spiritual things, wonderful things like love and joy and peace and goodness. He touched so many people that way: people in dialysis, people in drug stores, people at church, in grocery store lineups, everywhere.

That’s not to say that he didn’t have questions. We would talk for hours at a time as he tried to understand some spiritual concept or other. We talked almost every day, for up to two or three hours at a time. (It’s a good thing I have such a good cell phone plan that includes free long distance!) But every time we talked, he would not hesitate to tell me what he had been learning, what God showed him or how He helped him find something he needed. Or met a need in his finances. Or let him talk to someone about his experiences in the Lord.

And now this week, I have been living in his house without him here. Memories galore. Yet it feels so surreal: not quite right, like he should be here laughing and joking with us, listening to YouTube videos, or talking about how wonderful Heaven is.

And yes, he could not let a conversation go by before he mentioned how deeply he longed to see his Master’s face, to walk the shores of Glory with Him, to hug Dad, and to jam with friends and family gone ahead.

And now he is there. And he is LIVING beyond his wildest imaginings – and he could imagine a LOT!!

Good night Ben. See you in the Morning. Keep a chair for me by the hearth, and say hi to Dad for me. I love you beyond measure. 

And … I will miss you. I’ll never forget what you taught me about how to live life in a positive way and not just exist expecting the worst.

Thank you. Thank you SO MUCH.

The Long Dark

Ever since I was a child, I have been afraid of the dark. It held unknown things, monsters, the bogey-man, and shapes that in the daylight would never have bothered me. In the dark, though, those familiar shapes transmuted into my deepest fears: being eaten, being buried, being hurt or killed. My dreams haunted me, and when I awoke there was nothing in the dark but those fears. My heart thumped in my chest like a caged animal trying to get out. 

The band-aid solution when I was a child was to leave one of the lights on outside my room (usually the bathroom light), with the door ajar to let everyone else sleep. Yet the fear of the dark followed me into adulthood. 

As I have been "growing up on the inside" the last year or so, one of the things that has been coming to the fore is this fear. I'm finding that somehow, unbidden, it is less than it was. I awaken in the middle of the night and listen - not for monsters anymore, but for the gentle sound of people sleeping, for the furnace coming on to warm up the water in the pipes, and other 'normal' noises in the house. 

Free Image "Northern Lights Aurora"
by Hans Braxmeier at Pixabay

Plus, I am beginning to notice the things that can only be seen in the dark. The stars, the moon, the Northern Lights, these are all invisible at noon in full sun. Slowly I am arriving - I know not how - at the notion that instead of running from or railing at the darkness, I can appreciate the gifts that are available to me at night: the heavenly lights, the odd meteor shower, even the space station if it is overhead. 

I can remind myself that the morning comes. It always comes - whether gray and misty or bright and sunny - the day follows the night.  Being in an atmosphere of acceptance and love, as I have been lately, has a way of bringing with it clarity, purpose, and confidence. And the dark ... doesn't seem so bad now, even if (in the winter) it lasts longer than I would like. I just settle myself down and focus on some small thing - the ticking of the clock, the sound of my husband's breathing as he sleeps, or even my own breath - and before I know it, I'm waking up again, morning has come and the sun is not far from rising. 

Such an attitude helps me when I am waiting for some much-anticipated thing, or when I am undergoing some difficult experience, or when I am sick or lonely. The morning always comes. There is hope. There is something positive even IN the experience, even if I don't know what that is at the time. And I focus on my breath, and I am grateful for the things and the people that are in my life, and the darkness passes. It just does. 

Funny how that happens.

Keeping Christmas

"And it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us!" - A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

I know, I know. It's too soon to talk about Christmas for most of my readers. Notable exceptions exist of course (Anne, Stephanie, I'm talking to you wonderful ladies!)

I used the above quote because when people refer to someone as a Scrooge, they mean the miserly old skin-flint in the "before" picture and not of the "after." In the same way, a "Grinch" is a mean-spirited, selfish person who hates Christmas. Yet in the story by Dr. Seuss, "the Grinch's small heart grew three sizes that day" and he ended up being sweet and generous! 

Christmas 2014 - everyone gets in on the fun!

When I was a little kid, I heard stories of my dad waking my mom up at 3:30 a.m. just because it was Christmas. He couldn't wait to see our faces when we opened our presents, to see the wonder and hear the laughter of that day. It was his favorite day of the year. And he didn't get anything else out of the day. We had no money to give him a present. His joy, his Christmas spirit, came from giving to those who had no way to return the favor. 

What a wonderful feeling that is! I've had occasion - here and there - to experience that kind of excitement in anticipation of someone opening a gift that I have made or bought for them. It is truly magical. And it doesn't matter if it's for Christmas, or their birthday, or even "just because." I don't expect anything in return. It just blesses me to bits to be able to give to them something that they need or want - that they like - and that they will cherish and use. 

So, perhaps we can "keep Christmas" all year round. Wouldn't that be great? If everyone had that spirit of gratitude, generosity and goodwill all year, how much sweeter life would be! Folks would be much easier to get along with ... as long as there was no trace of obligation or duty involved ... and therefore, no mad rushing about in the stores, no impatience in parking lots, or any of that. 

How much fuller life would feel with that kind of attitude - to give is better than to receive - present not just at Christmas but every day? How it would transform each of us to find joy in giving to those who have no hope of ever paying us back (which isn't the point anyway)!! Hungry, homeless people, people with hardly two nickels (or tuppence) to rub together, could eat, be warm, and have their daily needs met through the generosity of those who love to give! 

Isn't that worth more than getting the latest gadget for ourselves? 
I'll leave that thought with you, as it has been burning in me. 

And happy Christmas to you!

September green

Looking out the window, I see our largest maple tree dancing in the wind, its green leaves reflecting the sunlight and casting shimmers of verdure toward all who watch. Patches of sunlight on the green lawn celebrate the wind and the trees with a shadow puppet show, ever changing with the wind speed and direction. 

In the final days of summer, there is a crispness to the air and a sense of waiting, of hesitation, as if the world of green is not quite ready to admit to the changing of the seasons. My soul echoes that hesitation with a sense of urgency: I want to get out in the sunshine and experience its warmth before the world leans into winter. 

Free Image by PublicDomainPictures
at Pixabay.com

I do so love the autumn (fewer bugs and more colours!), but these last valiant days of summer inspire me to be true to myself to the end, to give of myself and to enjoy each day as a gift - the present, as someone said once - and I find myself reflecting on how to best let that enjoyment play out. 

Truly, I don't know what the next season in my life will hold. However, I can hold onto the image of September green in my mind as I make each choice each day. I can be grateful and make music in my heart for the wonderful gifts the Great Maestro has allowed me to experience: love, friendship, and so much more. I can enjoy those gifts and invest myself in them even more deeply. I can spend quality time with loved ones. I can calm my soul and relax in the goodness of the Creator. I can be inspired to pay forward to the world the light I have received. 

In tender moments like this, I perceive a sense of real communion with creation and with the Creator who has given to me all things to enjoy. It quiets me. I feel peaceful, grateful, blessed, and rejuvenated. 

And somehow, today, I wanted to share that with you.
 

Time To Retire

I have a countdown on my computer. Currently, it says 414 days until I retire. And I remember a time when that number was over double that ... not all that long ago. 

As the weeks and months wind down toward that magical date, I am working hard at keeping my stress in check, because that day also marks for me a day when I can devote more time toward my second career. From the looks of the way things are going right now, that second career may be starting only eight short months after that.  

Free Image by Mabel Amber from Pixabay

And then I might have more say over when I take days off, or how much (or little) I work. I will be able to schedule time for things that - until then - will have been on hold for a very long time. Too long, actually. Horseback riding, golfing, traveling for fun, reading for pleasure, and (best of all) spending time with family and friends will all be possible again. That's the dream, at least. I've missed all of those things, and those who know love me have been very patient with me. VERY. PATIENT. Sometimes I am not sure how they put up with me always looking to dive into my next assignment for school, or with me having to work when their schedule frees up time for them, or with me nodding off when we do occasionally have a visit. What amazing people I have in my life!

It's getting within sight now, this finish line. But it's not really a finish line ... it's more of a starting line where I can walk (or ride, haha) and not run. That will be nice!! 

In the meantime, I need to remind myself frequently that it is time to retire: that is, it is time to schedule regular rest stops on my journey. I have been going at such a break-neck pace, especially since 2013, that burnout is never very far off, and perhaps I need to slow down a bit more. Sometimes, it takes the harsh reality of circumstance to bring me to that place of rest and re-creation.  I hope that I can learn to take the hint sooner rather than later that I need to make time for me and for the things (and people) that/who are important to me. I'm not thirty anymore. Nearly twice that now!!  I need to cut myself some slack!! 

I am so grateful for the ones who know me best and who love me anyway, who take the time to gently suggest that I take the time to look after myself and not run myself ragged. Such friends are hard to come by; I am very blessed to have more than one. 

So - in this time between semesters, I may be looking to reconnect with a few people, and take the time to do things that I like doing. After all, I am the only me that I have. :) 

Saplings

I helped my family plant a couple of saplings today in our back yard. They were special saplings ... two different types of apple trees. One was a Honeycrisp and the other was a Red Nova (kind of like a cross between a Cortland and a McIntosh).

They came to us in a box, perfectly packed for shipment, with the root ball protected in a plastic bag with slightly moist compost around it.  And the saplings themselves looked to be little more than sticks. Long, bumpy sticks with a few tiny buds starting to poke through the tender bark. Below these tiny shoots, on each "tree", you could just barely make out the place where the grower had grafted the fruit-bearing portion of the tree onto the original sapling (the one attached to the root ball). That graft, apparently, was our guarantee that the tree would produce the type of apples for which we had ordered the trees... if that makes any sense. 

It will take a couple of years for these little sticks to resemble trees, and to produce blossoms in the spring. They will need to be staked before this fall to grow straight and tall, and they will need to be covered in burlap before the snow falls this year to protect them from the howling winds and deep snow. They have already undergone quite a process to get to the point they were when we received them, and they will need to be carefully tended until they can stand against whatever Mother Nature throws at them. 

Photo by Matthias Cooper from Pexels

I kind of feel like I am at that stage as a budding counselor. I feel bare, but I am showing growth; most of the growth is underneath, and I feel quite vulnerable.

To continue the analogy, even though I have not graduated from my Master's program, I have already done some growing and have experienced some cutting and healing - just like the graft that guarantees success - and I have started to send out a few tentative leaf-tips. I feel as though I've been planted in fresh soil, and part of me feels like I need to have support as I face the next year of my life when I will do the most growing I will have ever done. Hands-on experience is far superior to book learning - and I sure feel like I have done enough reading and studying to last me a while! So now it is time to move onward and put what I have learned into practice (pun intended.) 

My practicum has been approved, and I will be working on my Learning Plan over the next month or so with my future supervisor, in order to start my hands-on work in September. It is so surreal to realize that a year from now, I will have finished my practicum and will be taking my final course in the program. What an amazing ride it's going to be! 

There are still a few things to iron out between now and September, but these will fall into place as time goes on. I am looking forward to continuing my studies, to the helping hands and hearts of those who will be my "stakes" throughout the growing process, and to new growth in the meantime. 

The blossoms will come soon enough. I'm just taking it one day at a time. :)

That first dip

I have aquaphobia. I've had it ever since I almost drowned in a pool incident when I was 13. The feeling of panic of those moments was something I am highly motivated not to repeat. It was the loss of control, the feeling I could do nothing to save myself, that made the experience so terrifying. I have since learned to go into a pool, and although I don't call myself a swimmer, I can at least go into the water - even though I don't volunteer to go.

Photo free, CC0 Commons license from Pexels

It took me many years to realize that I had the same kind of traumatic experience (although much more drawn out over years) growing up in the home that I did. My mother's temper was like this giant wave of unpredictable outcomes for me, and I learned a deeply-ingrained belief that people were going to hurt me. I therefore began to fear them. Especially women. 

So now I am in therapy for the trauma that those years brought into my thinking and feeling, affecting the way I interact with people, how I think about my role and the role of other people in my daily life. And a couple of weeks ago, I took my first dip off the side of that pool into the traumatic memory that has become the signature experience of my childhood, the one that represents all the other traumas I went through. 

I will not lie. It was intense. It was scary. It was uncomfortable. It was a whole host of other things that I can't even begin to name. But my therapist walked me through it and allowed me to keep control of the experience at all times. And I was able to go into that memory and interact with the people in it, especially my child-self, in a way that was healing for me. 

I'm not saying that this one time was a cure-all. It wasn't. But it was a good first step, a way to know that I could bring myself into other incidents, other traumas, and process those things over time with self-compassion and self-care. 

And it was a reminder that change can and does happen. Slowly. 

Whenever I need reminding of that in the every-day, I look at our feral rescue cat, Callum. Cal came to us after having been caught inside the fan-belt of a snowmobile as it sat in someone's field during the summer. That traumatic incident, as well as the traumatizing efforts to rescue him from it, happened to him when he was only about 8 weeks old. He came to us at about 4 months old, after having spent some time at a foster-home. He was still very skittish, sometimes hissing, mostly running away at the first sign that we wanted to touch him or go near him when we were wearing footwear of any kind (especially boots). That was in October 2014. Today, baby step by baby step, he has been learning to trust. And earlier today, for the first time, I saw him close his eyes and lean into my husband petting his head - a huge difference from when he first came to us.

It gives me hope. Hope is such a powerful thing.

My counsellor tells me that as I bring these traumas to the surface and deal with them, I may experience times when the memories come back to me between visits to her office. My job, she tells me, is to be kind to myself when that happens, to use my breathing exercises and my other self-care tools so that I can get myself through these moments, and to not try to go farther on my own.

I can get behind that. I like it that she hasn't thrown me into the deep end of the pool, but has taken it in small steps so that I am more comfortable with the process as we get deeper and deeper in. That's a positive for me. 

I'm even sort of looking forward to my next dip, in that nervous, half-panicked way, because I know she'll be there to steady me. That's a good feeling. 

A Moving Target

Back in 2009 when I first got into therapy and I was learning a whole new (well, new to ME) way of living, I'm afraid I was a little arrogant about it. I thought that I had arrived. How very wrong I was. I had a LOT to learn!

And when my husband and I decided in 2015 to leave the organized church and seek relationships with God and others without the structure of a church family, again, I was pretty "my way or the highway" about it... at least for a while. One would think I would have learned by that time. But no.

Now that I'm in therapy again for something I thought was dealt with (aka buried), I'm not so cocky. Things I thought I knew, I am learning that I have only paid lip service to (plus there were some things that I was completely oblivious to!) And when it comes right down to it, when push comes to shove (so to speak), I revert to the old way of reacting to things that happen, and then I wonder why some people feel uncomfortable around me (or I feel uncomfortable around them). According to my therapist, that's common with people who have experienced trauma such as long-standing child abuse. (Huh. Who knew.)

I want to put that trauma in its proper place instead of being trapped in the patterns of behavior that the trauma has caused. I will need to not only address the abuse, but I will need to learn new skills, like (for example) how to behave in a normal social setting (!!) without appearing aloof, ungrateful, insecure, or not completely present. Old habits will have to die. New ones will have to form.

Clip-art free from http://clipart-library.com/clipart/8c6ozLEri.htm

But the "normal" I thought I was in 2009 and again in 2015 isn't the normal that I hope to be now. 

And more and more I am realizing that normal, as I used to tell my kids, is just a setting on the washing machine. The real "normal" is a moving target. It changes with the situation and with one's level of emotional maturity, which can be at different levels in different situations. Quite confusing! In many ways I feel like poor Wile E. Coyote, trying to catch the Road Runner. There's no catching him. He comes out of nowhere, disappears in a flash of flames, and leaves Wile E. Coyote slack-jawed (and usually injured.) Many times, I am bewildered and overwhelmed by the sheer size of the task ahead.

What is so confusing is the idea that in order to move on, I must "integrate" my experience of abuse into me, make it a part of me, but not be overcome or overwhelmed by it. It seems impossible. All those hurtful words and blows ... well, they are not going to go away. But somehow I need to make meaning (to use a psychotherapy term) out of those experiences and use them and the lessons learned from them to not only get some closure, but also to be able to use them to help others to heal. And that is my goal in this process.

And even though I know a lot about therapy as a grad student studying counseling, I find that as a client, I am just as vulnerable and just as fearful as any client would be about that process. Going through this really gives me an appreciation of how there absolutely needs to be an atmosphere of trust between client and therapist before progress can happen. This is private stuff ... and if I don't feel totally accepted, there is no way I can open up the starting gate and get into specifics. 

But my therapist is doing all the right things to create that atmosphere, to help me look after myself, and to help me find ways to ground myself when I'm stressed. And the next time I see her, she tells me, we will start opening that gate. It won't be for another couple of weeks... but that's okay. Slow and steady is the best way. Which makes me think that if just I sit still and accept what comes, maybe the Road Runner will stop running so fast and come pay me a visit.