Stars
When I was a teen, I spoke to the stars.
We had a large trampoline in the backyard, and sometimes I would spend half an hour or more, walking the circumference of the thing, and speaking all my mind and heart to the constellation Orion.
The stars are good listeners.
Book
Around that same time, I read a novel by C.S. Lewis called “Till We Have Faces”.
It is a retelling of Cupid and Psyche… This story had haunted Lewis all his life, because he believed that some of the main characters’ actions were illogical. As a consequence, his retelling of the story is characterized by a highly developed character, the narrator, with the reader being drawn into her reasoning and her emotions.
After we go with the protagonist, Orual, through fully 90% of her story, she has a dream – or a vision. In the vision, after a long journey, she is brought before the gods to read her “complaint”.
The image stuck with me: a stone amphitheater ringed with galleries of shadowy, mostly-unseen figures who listen silently to her lengthy complaint. And it was all in Orual’s head.
Council
At some point, I realized that – although my memory is fleeting and unreliable – I still contain somewhere inside myself the iterations of each and every age I’ve been.
I have been 5, and 11, I have been 19 and 23. (Now, of course, I have been every age up to and including 48.)
And so they combined, the stars and the amphitheater, into a Council of Me-s. I have on many occasions spoken to them, listened to them, consulted with them.
After all, nobody knows me better.
Furious, and Hurt
Recently, a loved one said something that made me moderately bummed.
After about 20 minutes of doing something else entirely, I noticed I was shaking. “Odd. Why am I shaking?” [pause] “Oh. I’m not bummed. I’m furious.”
I’ve got processes now for accepting those feelings, once I notice them. Not just accepting, but welcoming those feelings, and acknowledging out loud that they’re honestly just trying to protect me. (Note that this is a HUGE step forward from my previous strategy, “Let’s pretend really hard that things are okay”. Which was ineffective, to say the very least.)
It helps immensely, too, that I know about all of those ages that I am. Because at 48, I “shouldn’t” be so deeply hurt and furious about, say, a mild rejection.
But I’m not just 48. I’m also 12 years old, hot on the heels of serious abandonment trauma.
I’m also 16 and lonely.
I’m also 25 and heartbroken.
And so on.
Holding space
Welcoming feelings, and holding space for them.
Accepting my self, and holding space for me as I am and as I have been.
Those two skills have already moved the needle toward “being well” more than, well, almost anything else I can think of in my life.