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The Ocean #gooutside

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~do you feel like letting go? I wonder how far down it is~

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On the body; lack vs desire

I finally get it!!! We all have different aspects of self (mental, emotional, psychical, spiritual), but we all connect to these in different ways. When I am in my body, and I’m truly connected to my physical self is when I’m in the 'desire' and not in the 'lack' and everything feels fucking amazing! (See Lacan 'Lack and Desire'). It’s like the feeling of being high without actually being high; like when you listen to music and it feels like it’s moving through every part of you. The intensity of the experience feels fulfilling on more than a physical level, it connects to a sense of spirit within. Smoking a joint does something similar, it connects you to your body in a way that you don’t connect to normally because you’re too busy being stuck in your head; it allows you to feel everything sensory with a heightened intensity, it allows you to have a sense of presence, an awareness of your own physical 'beingness'. . 

When I sit in the lack however, is when I’m stuck in my head, the ‘I can’t” and the “I don’t have space” vs. the “I want” space. Essentially two sides of the same coin. I can sit in the lack to remember the desire, and I can also be in the desire whilst remembering the lack. The more we dance in between the two the more the distance between them reduces, and then we can do the dance more fluidly without sitting in the one for days and then finally getting to the other - which will potentially feel impossible to do. Perhaps in this space we create what is necessary for the existential turn; that if I allow moments where I am not oscillating between what I want and what I don’t have, then where do I turn? What is my life, what is my beingness, and what is all of this for? (etc etc.). That’s when Jung comes in and says; libidinal drives yes, oscilation from lack and desire yes, but there is more to humanness and beingness than just our drives, we are spiritual beings and this all connects to something higher in man (existential turn). I’ve completely crucified and massacred Freud, Lacan and Jung for the purpose of this post, but let’s just say I did it all in the name of self discovery and embracing the self, all of it as it is. 

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Vibe.

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Dusk.

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On Vulnerability; acceptance and connectedness

When you open your heart and push yourself to be vulnerable you give yourself the chance to feel at a deeper level. You care more than you generally would, are a lot more easily affected than is usual for you, hurt more, and I guess are all round more sensitive to people’s energy. It’s a beautiful thing. We all have had moments where we find ourselves deeply moved by the smallest of things. In that moment you don’t particularly know where it came from. All you know is that you have allowed something to move you to the core of your being. A deep sense of connectedness has taken place within. 

Opening your heart in such a way takes a lot of work. Our bodies are designed by nature to protect themselves. In essence it is a practice of creating space for the heart, and turning down the noise in our mind. We ask clients to challenge this part of their psyche all the time. To push themselves to be vulnerable and feel their feelings. To care more. And in turn allow themselves to be cared for.  

There is a huge sense of freedom in choosing vulnerability (’risk + emotional exposure + uncertainty’ - Brene Browne)) over fear. On some level you decide within yourself that regardless of the risk or outcome of things going awry, you still value the courage it takes to show your authentic self, unarmoured, exposed, over pretending like things don’t affect you, or that you don’t care. We all walk around with shields every day. Oscillating between denying what we actually want and sitting in the lack; too afraid of acknowledging our humanness, our human need and desire to connect, to be met physically, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, to be nourished and replenished. Learning to deal with this vulnerable state means holding yourself in a position of value when you are in it; not hating the part of yourself that makes you aware of your own fragility and your own needs, (especially the need for other people).

Physical hunger does that. A month of fasting for example makes you aware of our natural state, which is one of never ending need. It forces you to acknowledge your own mortality and hence your own vulnerability. Stress, tiredness, lack of rest, all heighten the vulnerable self. But there are also moments and opportunities when we have the choice to actively push ourselves to be in such a state. Having been in the client chair myself I know exactly what it is that I'm asking my clients to do is. I'm asking them to go through a painful and difficult journey all the while trusting that the process will bring them to a better place. It's the reason I feel now more than ever the desire to challenge myself to walk the talk. On one level this means actually showing that I care, letting myself feel what I don’t want to feel, and face the parts of myself that make me feel ‘weak’. It’s incredibly discomforting, but it is also the space from which I am able to do some of my best work with clients, because it opens me to their pain in a way that I haven’t felt before, and really be right there alongside them. When I work from this space I come away from sessions feeling raw and open. Having given so much of myself in session, I am left with an intense need to be physically held, and it takes me just a little bit longer to recover. Over time I have had to acknowledge and accept my own process; that when I open myself up to my own vulnerability, and it connects with the vulnerability of others, there is a heightened awareness of my own needs. This includes but isn't limited to the need for food, water, sex, physical affection, attention, play, time in nature, exercise, all things that replenish the different aspects of ‘the self’ (i.e. mental, emotional, spiritual, physical). 

Often times we learn to push various parts of ourselves aside because not having any one of these needs met is a painful experience. We learn to adapt and survive without, we learn to deny the need in the first place. Not being able to acknowledge and accept our own needs and limitations however, not only inhibits personal agency (the ability to find our own solutions and make choices that are good for us) but also inhibits our ability to accept others as they are, not as WE want them to be (eg. Parents who constantly project their own desires and needs on their children).

They say acceptance is key to transformation and that Love is essentially acceptance. I hate the word ‘self love’ but I like the idea that if you can come to accept the parts of yourself you really hate, then you can begin to love yourself and what makes you You. It then also enables you to invite, accept, acknowledge, and express gratitude for all the ways in which your needs are met, or what others do offer you (regardless of their limitations), as well as what you bring to others. On some level I have to accept the parts of myself that feel deeply and care more than I would care to admit (pardon the pun!). Because it is this part of me that is affected to the core not just by pain, but is also the entry point for all the beautiful things I get to experience every day; like the lyrics and beat of an amazing song, the sound of birds very close to my window, the sight of trees as I’m driving up my street, the warmth from a hug, the taste of coffee! As corny and cheesy as all of this sounds, these things fill me with a sense of wholehearted gratitude, a strong sense of self and a feeling of aliveness, all of which at this point feel irreplaceable.

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Patience feels like the nemesis. But things take time to shift. To accumulate. To gather the right energy. To gain enough momentum. To become an impregnable force. So engage in the process. Keep riding on the slow and steady tides of change, even when it feels like nothing is moving. Things are shifting. When you’re ready, they will fall.

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On Being Triggered; dealing with the Trauma space

The Trigger can be the smallest thing, and before you know it you can tumble down a gaping, black spiral of Shame in to your Trauma space. It’s a space of incredible pain and deep wounding. It’s a space that feels like it could envelop you whole. The inner child feels this with such intensity. Like there is no remedy for the anguish that comes from the physical pain of being in this space. As though you have been stabbed or had a bullet go through your body. It’s the rude, unexpected, unwelcome awakening that reminds you of what you’ve been carrying around. It’s a reminder of how deep the wound actually is.

And the only way through it is to allow yourself to feel it. All of it. No matter how much it hurts. Purge. Let the inner child say what it needs to say. Let it be angry. Let it howl. Let it cry. Give it the space to feel all of those feelings. Everything that in the past wasn't ok for it to do.

There’s a part of you that knows when you will be done. When you’ve purged enough. Exhausted from the rawness. That’s when you can find the part of yourself that is hurting and give it the compassion it deserves. Hold it. Hug it. Love it. Shower it with empathy. Tend to the ache. Give it what it needs; whether that’s a hug from someone, a bath, your favourite music, movie. Nourish it.

Remind yourself that you are loveable and that no one can take that away from you. As Brene Brown says, pull yourself back out of the Shame with Gratitude.

It’s much easier to hold others with compassion than it is to give it to ourselves. It is a lot easier to give love than it is to let love in. But wounds need healing. They need the Love, Compassion, and Gratitude that exists within you, and have always been the souls remedy.

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On Yearning; walls we create

People create and recreate relational patterns based on early childhood experiences and call this fate. There's a great quote by Jung about this and it refers to the ways our subconscious works, which when unbeknownst to us, seems like it is a matter that was 'meant to be'. Which is why Jung strongly encouraged delving in to ones inner world. The past few weeks my mind has been brewing on the the individual choosing to sit in the space of yearning for Love and yet actively avoiding. It has been through my work with clients, as well as my own personal journey, that I have gained an awareness around the state of ‘unavailability’. 

We all seek and yearn for connection. We all want to be cared for and loved. Despite this very human need we often find ourselves behaving in ways that actively rejects love and connection from entering our lives; we seek connection with the wrong people, we have massive walls that prevent anyone from getting in, we don’t make ourselves open to receiving love. Ironically people who would consider themselves to be emotionally available find that they seem to only attract ‘unavailable’ people. People who can’t meet them where they need to be met on an emotional level. And they do this not realising that they’re actively participating in denying their needs to be met. What happens here? What makes a person stay in this space when they seem to want to get out of it? What if there is a part of their psyche that is so used to not having their emotional needs met that they don’t actually know what they’re looking for? It’s like having a personal blind spot. Not seeing that pehaps you yourself don’t know what you’re looking for because its something you’ve never experienced. It’s like asking someone to find an iPhone when they don’t know what an iPhone is (although that can be hard to imagine in this day an age, it does happen). Human beings are creatures of comfort and in seeking comfort we look for what is familiar to us. We can only seek what we know. Some only know what it feels like to not have their emotional needs matter, not have them be met and find themselves drawn to other people who reinforce this way of being and relating. 

Being available and being able to allow someone to be there for us is what he learn from our primary caregivers. For many this is an area of childhood neglect. Which is where the familiarity, comfort and safety of sitting in this space comes from. But also means that learning how to do this for yourself, how to be there for yourself, and hold your own emotions can be a really difficult thing to do. Imagine what being available looks, feels, sounds like to you? If you don’t have a sense of it perhaps that is your starting point. 

Rumi says, ‘your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it’. Being unavailable and hence not really knowing what you’re looking for is an internal barrier. Love and connection require vulnerability. But if you can’t hold yourself with value when you are vulnerable because it feels too unsafe or too scary, then it’s hard to find the courage to stay in your vulnerability and not disconnect, or shut down, or even be there for someone else. This causes us to behave in self sabotaging ways; pushing love and connection even further away.

It’s a lot easier to love people from a distance and bypass being vulnerable. It can feel safe to sit in the lack of intimacy, because intimacy is the uncertain space.  But if you want true ‘connectedness’ you have to allow yourself to be vulnerable and be available to hold yourself in that space. 

Sometimes we think we want something on a conscious level but our subconscious actually draws us to the opposite. We don’t have to repeat childhood patterns, or our family histories. Acknowledging and owning your own projections lies at the crux of changing where you are; physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally. The awareness of our own unavailability, and how this affects who and what we are drawn to in our lives gives us choice, i.e. the choice to do it differently. 

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On Availability; emotions and holding the space

What does it take for a person to be emotionally available?  Consider the woman who thinks that is what she wants and yet is entirely emotionally unavailable herself, or the man who is emotionally unavailable but is content in staying this way. When I think about disconnect and the block; the block is the wall that prevents you from connecting with your inner self. And in turn fully holding your own feelings, thoughts and lets say even neurosis with compassion. And if you can’t do this for yourself how then can you hold the space for someone else? There is an unwillingness to be that vulnerable. To be that exposed and naked. Which is where the block comes in, that stops the connection of the self with the self, and in turn the self with the other. If a person is engaging with another with constant monitoring and an agenda then vulnerability is completely bypassed. 

So then what does it take for a person to become emotionally available, or rather what does being emotionally available look like?

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On Home; return back to self

It feels incredibly strange to go from a house of chaos (emotional, physical, mental and spiritual) to one of absolute silence. I am both struggling with it and also bathing in the sweetness that it has to offer. It feels like I have gone from the emotional roller-coaster and severe preoccupation with my family, my family life, the drama to one where it is just me and only me that I now have to deal with. It feels like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders and I can breathe, but at the same time also feels like an incredible loss; an emptiness, that I can’t escape from. The emptiness is coming to terms with the loss of self which comes as a consequence of being in an enmeshed family structure. Now that a physical boundary has been reestablished between myself and the family; I am coming to realize the extent of the enmeshment, how much it consumed my psychic space and how much of that has contributed to a disconnection from self. It is like I have to start from scratch to connect back to me. It feels like I have a long way to go but at least I am on this path.

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On the self; knowledge, knowing

“If you don’t work on yourself, then much of your politics is merely projections. We have to walk our talk and do our inner work that allows the outer work to be authentic and also effective.”Matthew Fox

It’s interesting because counselling is one of those jobs where if you’re not actively working on yourself there really is no point in calling yourself a counsellor or a therapist. There’s a lot of people out there who call themselves counsellor’s but end up doing a lot damage because of a lack of insight in to their own world. In the beginning of my relatively new career I had a habit of constantly wondering what else I could do aside from counselling that might suit me better, or I may be better at. It’s only recently that I have come to understand that this tendency to ‘escape’ or ‘run away’ falls in line with my very active fantasy world which allows me to suspend dealing with my feelings of inadequacy and never feeling ‘good enough’. My first job was a primary school teacher and I remember feeling like that every single day. And I dealt with it mostly by telling myself I would stop teaching at the end of the year but also regularly disconnecting from myself and the whole world through watching movies and tv series episode after episode long in to the hours of the night. I notice the same tendency with my dad, and it may be that this is partly a learnt behaviour. Every time things don’t go according to the way my dad wants them to he pulls out the “I’m moving back to Pakistan” card. We often learn from our parents/primary caregivers from a very young age what is of value and what isn’t. I learnt from a young age, that you have to avoid being criticized at any cost because critiscism is linked to not being good enough, and that you must make sure you do everything right. It’s a pretty benchmark to have to try and reach every single day. The irony of it all is that it’s the perfect way to set yourself up for the very thing you are trying very hard to avoid. I am only now learning to deal with all of that stuff that goes in my head about how I think I should be, and realising that a lot of the discomfort that arises which makes it so unbearable for me to sit in, comes as a consequence of my own internal structure around my self concept; how fragile it is, how easily my sense of self falls apart because I’m not doing things as perfectly as they “ought to be done”. I’ve learnt more about myself and continue to do so more now as a counsellor than I ever have. There is an intrinsic desire to know, my inner world, my outer experiences and how the two interact not just for the sake of getting closer to the self, but also because that’s the pact that you make when you choose to honor those who come to see me for help. It’s me walking the talk, doing the work on myself, because I know that that’s the only way I can help someone else. 

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The Distancer and the Pursuer by Thomas F. Fogarty, M.D.

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‘anxiety is love’s greatest killer’

 This quote by Anais Nin couldn’t ring more true. Fear of not having one’s needs met can often bring on an insanely debilitating panic and anxiety and then the accompanying desire to muffle that fear; either through reaching out for connection or having someone reassure you that you are loved (in other words a ‘neediness’). It’s interesting though how none of those things actually work because the underlying emotion is not desire for connection or love, but rather fear that one’s needs won’t be met. To add to this mind fuck of an experience we tend to seek avoidant types aka the very people that increase the wariness and hyper vigilance around rejection (rejection sensitivity) and are constantly on the lookout for signs that someone is either loosing interest or is not paying attention, thereby setting oneself up to actualise (making it come in to fruition) the fear.  

“Attachment researchers, who also examine needy behavior, have arrived at a similar conclusion. At the heart of attachment theory is the assumption that we all — all of us — have a basic, primal drive to connect. It’s wired into us, after millions of years of evolution, because on our own, we humans are weak, relatively defenseless creatures. That’s why emotional isolation registers in one of the most primitive areas of our brain — the amygdala — as a life-and-death situation (scientists call this the “primal panic”). The anxiously attached lack any faith that emotional closeness will endure because they were often abandoned or neglected as children, and now, as adults, they frantically attempt to silence the “primal panic” in their brain by doing anything it takes to keep connection. In short, they become needy. (The avoidantly attached shut their dependency needs and feelings off altogether to escape the pain of having their longings ignored or rejected.)” -  Dr. Craig Malkin

It’s not always easy to recognise what’s going on behind the restlessness. Emotional intimacy is something that people with an anxious attachment style struggle with because it is something they avoid within themselves. Looking back now - so often in these past few weeks I have felt the lack of presence - of actually not being present to another; which is a huge indication that I’m not actually present to myself and my own needs. It’s pretty confronting to ask yourself; what do I need? Because that actually means shifting the attention from the outer to the inner; which when you have spent much of your childhood fixated on fulfilling your caregivers’ needs is a really difficult thing to do and often draws a mental blank. Turning towards the self; is actually sitting through the restlessness and impatience that is a defense against facing the fear. 

Talking to a colleague I realised that the question is not one of survival as the initial panic response would suggest, but rather one of deepening the experience of fulfillment to address the need. On a primal level if you can self-soothe then you are already addressing the fear. Go deeper in to that and you then ask what is it that will feel more fulfilling (i.e. not survival but deepening of).  I think the answer sits somewhere in between meaningful connectedness with the self and then allowing someone else to be a part of that. But its still a question mark in my books at the moment. 

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All black everything.

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Good intentions

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