James Coleman
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An Unhealable Wound, An Alright Life12/28/2019 "How much aliveness can one take?" -Michael Eigen For much of my life I have felt an intractable sense of inner deadness, a stuck point, where the uncomfortability of the wound does not necessarily make leaving the grounds of the wound any easier. Therapy, over the years, has helped the dead thing to come alive and to light, but inevitably it persists in the background of my life, this feeling of nowhere and everywhere, a hum, a buzzing, that no matter how much I may want more of life, more life just will not do the trick. Are there such unfortunates? Are we all, in one way or another, one foot in and one foot out of life? I remember being distinctly moved (and a bit horrified, because there I was) reading R.D. Lang's account of the person who can only take little nibbles of life, but never the whole thing. A few bites and then a retreat. For those of us whose lives were not pleasant or safe I think it's probably a form of reality testing that never goes away. And yet, we can and do live okay lives, not great lives, not the one's we would have wanted, but lives nonetheless. It wasn't until I found the work of Michael Eigen that I began to feel my life make sense. It can be horrifying to think that one will never turn out the way one would have hoped. Yet it is not hopeless. Not entirely. "A little bit of anything goes a long way", a phrase Eigen uses repeatedly, feels very true for me. Growth happens, even if I feel dead inside, I don't just feel dead inside, no one living does. Yet to deny the reality of deadness won't make it go away. There are people for whom what happened early in their lives was simply too much to bear. A kind of on-pause but a yearning forward, risking and opening happens, it happens for me now in ways it never did before I was 30. Eigen's tenderness with people for whom what happened simply will not go away or be ignored has helped me to feel less alone. I read his words and almost feel him in the room with me, and who's to say he's not. I've often thought of trying to set up an appointment to see him, but his words have felt like more than enough for me. Contact with the depths, from afar. Holding the pages in my hand, feeling my heart press forward. I've been helped immensely by my therapist of the past decade. Unfortunately, there have also been many painful abandonments and ruptures in our work together. It's a not often talked about phenomenon in therapy; the ghosting of a patient by their therapist. We survived two of those, which lasted for almost a year and a half, and now we are there again. I imagine it can be overwhelming, at times, to think that the progress we are making with somebody inevitably gets swallowed up again and again by an unforeseeable, inner black tide. I know how hard the work is and I imagine my therapist has often felt overwhelmed by where we are and aren't able to go in our work together. Or by how undone our steps sometimes become by the lashing of the tide. I don't blame her, she has gotten me this far, I am still here because of her and I am certain I would not have been otherwise. I am only sharing this because I think it might help, in some small way others, who've experienced these kinds of ruptures with their therapists also. It's confusing. Very confusing. It takes us right back to our early and very real repeated abandonments. But unlike those early abandonments, we know we were really seen and held this time around, many of us, for the first time in our lives. More good than bad has happened. A good-enough therapist says, without words, "take me there" and stays the course even when the story is so dark and frightening it seems it could annihilate the very room in which it is being told. Sometimes we come up against our own limitations and we are stopped from going any further than we can in that or in any moment, we have to, it's the psyches road sign. A moment can be forever. Eigen says that "patients and therapists who must deal with persistent deadness are partners in a psychic evolution that is very much alive." We go through many deaths in a lifetime, internal funerals. Something happens when we stay with something, Eigen says. Even the deadness one feels inside. If one can feel their dead insides, one is feeling something more than death itself. Life gets mixed in with death and much as we'd like to separate the two, their roots will not come apart. Can I live with my dead spots? Do dead spots sometimes also glow? Recently I spent some time with a person who's own story, very much like my own, (poverty, abuse, trauma, transfiguration) ignited a spark of something (I want to call it recognition) for when we feel really seen it's because we are also really seeing another. I think that is the root part of therapy work, of healing work in general; the ways in which we see the there there, where before, we knew only numb. Dead spots do in fact glow. Two people who've both known what it's like to be buried alive also have known what it's like to dig one's way out. We sometimes find each other, and that finding, however briefly, brings a glow to what has died in us, is always dying in us in immeasurable measure. We aren't saved in those moments, we're just sharing a glow, dead spot to dead spot, yet alive. It must be said. We are alive in our dead spots. There are things I've managed to do with my life that was unimaginable ten years ago. I joined a revolutionary movement and was able to do good things in it, to help people, who, like me, were at the very bottom. I went to college, however briefly. I published a book of poems. I started a literary journal which has kept me and many others alive for nearly five years. I was able to provide end of life care for my Grandmother, helping to ease her suffering and guide her gently into death, the most difficult and daunting experience of my life. I made peace with my parents who had both abused me horribly and I've been in touch with more of myself than ever before. Risking more skin than I thought I had on bones that have been, and still are, broken. I know the roads by which I travel. No small feat, to learn how to drive through the dark country of ourselves. Parts of me will always be dead, I know that now. I'm making peace with that now. I'll never stop wanting or reaching for more of life, but I'll also never stop drawing back when the black tide in me rises. I make due with the life I have and I am grateful that it is not just death. I feel that I've been able to make some small bit of difference in people's lives, despite my psychic disabilities. Making a space for those who have nowhere to go - to go, when they need it, a place to process and share their traumas and their emotional corpses; it feels very much like a healer's work. I may never be a therapist, (or live the life I would have imagined) but in some small way, I'd like to think that I've helped others, stranded along the road, find some safe ground. And that draws me into life alongside the tide of death. The water doesn't discriminate, it's all one thing. But there are moments, and they are precious, when we sometimes rise above, just long enough, to catch a glimmer (the way a dead spot glows) and we are grateful for that small bit of joy.
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