I had one of ‘those’ kinds of days today. The kind of days I used to have a lot of, and the kind of days I never used to notice.
Today I had one of those days when I just felt a bit ‘meh’ a bit ‘unsettled’ a bit ‘I had expectations to try and do a bit of writing and creative thinking and it didnt quite happen and so I was a bit frustrated’ days.. and then I got frustrated, because I was frustrated….
I sometimes call them ‘treacle days’ – just a bit stodgy, for no real reason, when nothing happens, just that there’s an inner fight.
But I realise, that I dont get them very often. Which is a nice thing to be reminded of..and thats why they’re unusual and help me stay a little in check, a little moment to remember my vulnerable new humanness with all its emotions having space to play.
But the reason I get them at all, is that I realise that I am in a good place generally, and that not quite every day can feel calm, can feel easy – especially creatively easy, not every day feels like flow. But thats the thing. Its because I now I feel more feelings, that I can sense that there’s something not quite right.
It may be absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things, not a big problem, but thats not what my inner critic wants to hear…… and when it starts to latch onto the tiniest of anxieties, or self doubts, or moments…
The everyday ‘recovery’ from childhood trauma, and the associated behaviours, continues to be a daily, ongoing piece by piece listening, attending and loving these wounded parts, even if they might just be a bit of frustration……unsettled……
And so, in a way I realise that I am grateful for the treacle days or treacles moments, because its a part of me thats alive, its apart of me thats allowed and safe to be wanting to tell me something, or do something.
What I used to have was continual un-dealt with bottled up emotions so that every day was painted in survival stony grey. No treacle days as there was no contrast, just stoic grey, avoidance and dissociation and self soothing one day to the next.
And back today, what I stopped myself from doing, which I have done in the past is attach the frustration with negative self shame talk like this:
‘Ive done all this therapy and healing, I shouldn’t feel like this’
but thats not the reality is it. Most days are good, most days I feel alive, whole and in the main secure.
But there are treacle days. Even, actually especially in the process of learning to be our loving whole selves….
And treacle days or hours that require a little attention, a little love, and little bit of gratefulness, for the feelings, and thoughts themselves.
So , instead of continuing the inner self fight, I moved, I went out, and I took myself off out for a walk instead, breathed windy air and sunshine, watched ospreys land, and watched as the lizards moved around my feet.
Ive been on what I call ‘Project James’ for over 6 years now, and in that time to heal from 40 years of manipulative abuse since childhood, including recovering from unemployment and homelessness.
Internally, breaking down behind the ‘I’m doing ok’ facade, pretend strength but hollow and hurting inside, that had been my survival strategy since childhood, one that I thought was normal, a lifetime of running, avoiding or soothing, in a variety of destructive ways, oh and hoping that Jesus would deal with it, fix it and that ‘church’ would be my saviour.
And thats just a summary.
In summary, then, the last six years has included
4 different bouts of therapy, including trauma therapy
Pages of journalling, raging and writing
Reading an extensive amount of self help books that encompassed:
Undertstanding narcissim, psychopathy and emotionally immature parents
Codependency
Self Understanding on Enneagram
Self compassion
Inner child work
Trauma – including Edith Eger, Victor Frankl, The Body keeps the score etc…
Spirituality, including Eckhart Tolle, John O Donohue and others.
Personal freedom, such as The four/five agreements, and The Untethered Soul
It’s been a lot. A lot to try and understand myself, alot to be able to become more and more safe for me on the inside to be able to feel emotions, to be able to regulate and to face the pains and damage from my abusers, and also how I internalised and survived it all, and at the same time, work, earn, live and exist.
Yet, when I think about it, it’s been a long journey, to make a small distance considerably more healthy and whole.
It has been a long journey, in thinking, feeling and experiencing.
To build connections where there once was fracture.
To heal the holes, brokenness and wounded-ness between my head, my heart, and my soul.
The distance from I to myself.
An extensive work to heal a small amount of space.
A journey I was putting off taking for far too long
A journey I invalidated and avoided
My thoughts that I believed, told me that I was too broken, too beaten, too frightened, to guilty, to shameful, too small, too weak, to make, and the journey
Too big, too exposing, too tiring, too massive, too encompassing, too hard, too challenging and was also too invalidated by those around me, or my own beliefs ( I needed more of Jesus, and not anything of myself….)
And a journey that didnt promise any outcome.
Didnt shout its reward.
Didnt have a map, or compass
Or sometimes any directions
It just needed to start.
And it started from being broken, started from the place of nothing.
‘For when she had nothing to lose, then she was free’ (Paulo Coelho)
It started as I changed, slowly, trusting in a moment of vulnerability,
‘I have no home, will you look after me’
When for so long I couldnt articulate weakness, vulnerability or be anything other than ‘the strong one for others’ …
The longest journey of the smallest distance started with being broken.
Started as my mind had run out of resources.
Coping wasnt living, especially wasnt coping in survival mode.
The packaging of life hadn’t fulfilled its ‘James hoped for’ expectations.
Because the landscape on the inside was a barren mine- filled land of fear, terror, a landscape I was afraid of, that was dominating every action, every moment.
What I was afraid of held power over me.
I couldnt go there.
And yet…. as soon as I started the walk….. the universe provided…. angels in the form of spare bedrooms, kind words, walks, safety… beyond anything… safety.
And slowly, slowly I began to tentatively see, feel, walk in the landscape.
It was and is the journey of a lifetime, for it has been a journey of life.
Maybe the longest journey is the shortest distance, and how this is navigated shapes so much of our lives.
There are times of deep searching, deep disconnection, emotions and fear, yet I have been open to the possibility of healing and growth within it all, for nearly all of the time, yes some resistance… but old habits change hard….
It was only the gap of the thoughts,
It was only the gap between heart and soul,
No distance at all…..
Yet an ongoing journey of love, of life and gratitude
I realised something today in doing a Mental Health Awareness course with work. It was that I am so proud and pleased with the journey I have been on When in the past suicidal thoughts were common from the age of 9 When negative thoughts crowded my mind, constantly When I gave in to self soothing behaviours When I felt shame When I disconnected from feelings When I couldn’t look anyone in the eye – when they asked.. ‘Are you ok?’ When I lacked any joy, dreams, or self worth When I was in survival mode When I travelled through life sacred, bruised and with a lingering depressive state.
So…as I sat in the room, I realised the extent to which I have dug deep, how much I have faced fears and inner demons and stood up for myself, how I’ve sought professional help. Sometimes it’s just important to be grateful for the journey…the one before ..and the one emerging …..
As I stood and looked at this scene just before Christmas, the thing I noticed was the gaps.
Gaps.
Intentional spaces between a barrier, or border, space left open.
A navigation tool, and opening to see from distance to walk towards.
To follow.
To trust.
To know that you are on a path (though might not always be the right one ;-) )
And at the start of the new year, the year starts with the gap of opportunity. The gap of unlived promise, desires to be awakened, space to be filled.
Yet…
What, if I’m honest, do I struggle with most?
Often it’s the gap between expectation and reality, the expectations in my thoughts, and the reality of the experiences, what actually is happening, or going to and being unable to have open acceptance. Too little a gap between them, to much mind going on in the swirl of the every experience.
Or the noise in my mind when I think I’m in trouble, or upset someone , or not done enough, or guilt about any of these things and the filling of the space happens….yet….
Or even deciding to make that gap, because it’s sometimes so much more comfortable to fill it, even when that inner discomfort is saying otherwise. Because, I can decide, I have more power than I realise.
What space might we make for the gap, that space between things and no-things.
To sense and make a space between expectations and realities, and not feel disappointment, but to notice that what is as a gift.
The gap is open, it is air.
It may be time to breathe in the gap.
To make space to dwell in presence, and not productivity.
The Slow time of betweenness where silence calls its disturbing, and also peaceful voice.
Space for Space itself
The invitational promise of the gap
That focussed the mind on consciousness itself
To wonder
To be
To imagine
The gap between thought and feeling
Between longing and belonging
Where we find God, being, freedom or Love
Where we sense that mystical indescribable something, close.
Just there.
Always.
Like the empty pages of this years diary, or the gaps between the notes in a music score.
Notice.
The Gap.
And, let the Gap call you forward.
Take your time this year.
Move slowly.
And decide to go there.
To give that energy inwards
And let it find you.
Because it’s there.
And there may you be embraced by peace.
Time, to be, time to sit,
stay there…as long as you can dwell.
This has been inspired by my current reading which is ‘Living Untethered’ by Michael A Singer, his previous book ‘The Untethered Soul’ is one I highly recommend, on seeing, feeling and noticing the mind, and how to live in personal freedom.
I have written before about a certain pink coloured book (link here to that post) that I consider to have changed my life, in terms of how I could see what had happened to me, and the behaviours of others.
However.
There was another book that I had read 6 months previously that had as profound an importance.
At the time, my bookshelf was a mixture of Youth work, Theology, Mission and Social Justice books.
My head was full of ideas.
My life, however, was, and had been falling apart and I was in denial.
I felt completely alone, no where to go, emotionally or physically.
With no one to talk about what was going on.
I was already unemployed at the time, what I didnt know was that I was about to be out of the family home, with no family support, and about to battle to save a marriage. I had barely any friends, and had at least 1 breakdown in that summer.
I have no idea when I bought it, or how it got there, but there was a copy of Richard Rohr’s book ‘Falling Upwards’ on my bookshelf. I may have read 1 RR book previously, but I can not for the life of me remember when I bought it. However, I do remember picking it up to read from my bookshelf in about the April of that year (2018), and thinking to myself that it was a bit ‘woolly’ , a bit not ‘academic’ enough, for the James that wrote blogs on books and theology, this wouldn’t cut it.
In August of that same year, with cracks opening wide, beginning to expose the fragility of my situation, I noticed it on the bookshelf. It was more that likely that with no money I could only read the books I had, so it was this books turn.
To Summarise, Rohr outlined the two halves of life. The first he said was about achievement, making it, ego, and accomplishments. The second, he said was about becoming real, about to being true to the person who was actually inside, and not the masks, identities created for those accomplishments.
He said that to get from one to the other, there is often something seismic, the wake up call, the breakdown, and this could appear/be in a number of ways.
It all depended on how we responded to it.
If I’m honest, I didn’t recognise the first part of what he described, even if I did see bits of me ‘being an internationally known youth worker’ or ‘well known for writing’ all of these things seemed even at the time, I didnt feel like I had achieved, or made it, or anything, I was full of shame, fear, self doubt, and emptiness, trauma I hadn’t dealt with and running away from and bottled up for a day I never wanted to arrive.
But.
I could recognise the middle bit.
The breakdown. The situation of desperation. The need to be vulnerable. When everything that I even thought I had did begin to be stripped away.
And as I picked up the phone to a friend to ask for a place to stay, and cried in relief when he said yes, I kind of knew.
I knew that I was now in the beginning of this phase. I knew, and I could choose how I would respond to what was going on.
I knew it was time.
I said to myself on that very day of that very call,
‘I do not know what is going to happen now, but I am going to learn, I am going to face it’
It may well have been the words from a book.
(and there’s tears in my eyes today as I write this, recognising my journey in all this)
It didnt matter. Because, ‘Falling Upward’ gave me a roadmap, it gave me something to cling to, it gave me a sense that it will be ok, and a sense that what I was about to go through wouldn’t destroy everything (and at that point I needed to know that there was something theological/spiritual about whatever was going to happen). I could hang what was about to happen on a process, (which has subsequently included amongst other things, 4 separate sessions of therapy, a considerable amount of time seeing, understanding and processing and healing from deep psychological childhood trauma, my own coping mechanisms from this, and facing the inner demons, all over the last 6 years). In short, it gave me a structure, and it gave me hope.
Hope because at that moment, and had been for a considerably very long time, life had been dark, shadowed, avoided and I was in perpetual survival mode feeling trapped. But now I had hope. Hope that there might something beyond what I was about to start the process of going through.
Hope because I knew of no one, and heard of no one who had walked a similar path, yes I had heard of ‘mid-life crises’ but I was already in crisis, but no one who shared their story, it felt as though I could hope because the path wasnt completely unheard of, tiny, frightened alone me, walking, falling, held with hope from a book. But it was hope none the less.
Hope, because at that point no one had told me I was going to be ok. I just had to believe it for myself, and now this book shone a light on the possible future.
But that I had to face, encounter, deal with, and not avoid everything that was about to arrive. For though much was taken, and I had to cling on at times, in a way, I started from a very low point already.
And as I walked on the top of Roker cliffs a few weeks later, having received two weeks of safety, and care, that learning process was starting. It would do, and continues to this day.
Where did that resilience come from James?
Asked a friend of mine a few weeks ago when I was telling them this story.
I think it came from when I was 12.
When I told myself the same thing.
I knew that that point that if I am going to make it in life I am going to have to do it on my own. I could not ask for help, have needs, have dreams, ask for money even, or support, I was alone and had to make it. 28 years later, and with the framework of a Richard Rohr book and a safe place to sleep in I dug deep into that survival and determined resolve, the lowest point had been reached already. I was broken, but not beaten, and that moment of vulnerability and seeing the path, was already a very small, but significant positive fall upwards.
Richard Rohr, Falling Upwards, Thank you. Actually, you probably did save my life. You were probably my first Angel on this path.
James Ballantyne 