Trailing Clouds of Glory

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature's priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

Excerpt from "Intimations of Immortality"

by William Wordsworth

I believe that, like Wordsworth so beautifully describes, babies are the most in touch with the spirituality which is, for each of us, our human inheritance. The "prison-house" he speaks of gradually descends around our consciousness until, by the time we are adults, we have the freedom to completely deny the truth of who we are.

As Joseph Chilton Pearce describes, how we are able to come to express our self in the world, even at a cellular level, depends to a very great degree on the models we have as children. Our primary models show us what it means to live in the world and they mirror back to us our identity. We see ourselves as those closest to us have seen us over time. It is a rare and wonderful thing when a child can grow up with models who perceive the "clouds of glory" and help her keep in contact with her own essential self.

When this can happen, the developing person's spiritual identity is very closely aligned with his/her human identity. Such a person is much more likely to have thoughts and make decisions out of his/her highest nature.

For the vast majority of us, however, we have to deal with the apparent fact that there are significant gaps between the ideal and the reality. Gaps between the radiance of us before we were born and the smaller self which is created as a denizen of planet earth. We have to revisit the places in our biography where the "prison-house" came down with particular force, and jolted us out of seeing ourselves as reflection of the divine.

The posts I have made so far describe aspects of the "shades of the prison-house" that formed around me and shaped my lower identity. I've talked about both the shocks of sexual abuse and of my dad leaving. I've spoken of the bipolar atmosphere which was my basic mental environment as a child and young adult. These influences are powerful forces in my life today. I need to understand them in greater detail than I do now so that they are not running my life. For they have the power to ruin my life. But I won't let them.

One aspect of the prison-house I am acutely aware of right now relates to my identity as a professional wage-earner.

My parents both had career challenges in their forties. I am in my forties and am having career challenges. It seems like a certain kind of echo, a trace of the experience of my parents which I seem to be caught in. The model I received from them contained something about hitting serious career bumps at about the age I find myself now. It seems we humans may have a tendency to "do it the way our parents did it" unless we can actively cognize what's going on and find a different way.

It's kind of like being in whirlpool, very slowly being drawn into the same field that I watched them be drawn into. Writing about this helps me to wake up to the experience in order to keep the affects of it from hitting me like it did them.

When he was my age, it is likely that my dad experienced something similar to what I feel now. When my dad was a kid, his dad became ill at about age forty and died before the age of fifty. My dad may have reflected his own father's experience in suffering from severe alcoholism by the time he was in his forties and taking his own life before he reached fifty. My dad may have fallen into the whirlpool created by the trauma of his father withering away and dying from a degenerative disease before his eight, nine and ten-year-old eyes. His model of what it meant to be a man was his dad.

As far as I can tell, neither of my parents were able to be particularly honest about their situation. They were both very smart but were unwilling to look at their own thoughts and behaviors particularly well. My dad, having been a Marine, was likely extremely adverse to admitting weakness. My mom has had bipolar as an obstacle to clear thinking her whole life. And she has a mental habit of blaming other people for her troubles. I believe that honesty about where I am will help me to navigate this place and come through the other side.

Because I see myself as essentially a spiritual being, I am more willing to be brutally honest about my earthly expression without becoming overly depressed about what I see. I do not fundamentally identify my essence with my personality. This gives me a little wiggle room to analyze my situation and see what I need to work on. I find it to be very helpful.

When my dad came up against addiction I think it meant he was out of touch with what was essential in him. The layers of worldly burden piled up on him and he lost sight of his true nature as a reflection of the divine. In addiction he was trying to fill the empty space inside. He had been trained to ignore his beautiful self and so was not aware of the glorious reflection of God that is, for each of us, our basic inheritance as humans.

Addiction is a sign that our true self was not encouraged to develop and so the mundane, or lower part of us took a larger and larger role. Experiencing significant separation from our higher self can be cause for despair. No matter how low we get we are still "trailing clouds of glory" because the truth of our spiritual nature is no different than it was when we were born. Even at the moment my dad pulled the trigger he was as innocent and holy as he was as a newborn baby. The problem was he didn't have the consciousness to perceive the truth of that statement. He was awash in booze and his own pain and couldn't see a path out of it.

The only difference between a man pulling the trigger of the gun to his head and a man who is actively seeking his recovery is perception. Perception is very powerful at the level of our experience.

One of the great aspects of AA and related programs is that they give us permission to see ourselves as having an identity beyond our mundane one. Beyond the shame and pain and suffering and crushing burdens we can experience in life, we can see that there an essence of us, an archetype, which we can begin to focus on and acknowledge.

It can seem like a very, very small light in the darkness, but it is a light we can follow into healing ourselves. The light will steadily grow in our awareness as we allow it to. Spirit is always present to us to the degree we can make ourselves open to it.

I believe that the process of forgetting our glorious archetype is, to some degree, lawful. We are called to actively remember it to whatever degree we are able. We are called to dig into the pain and suffering of the world and seek for the the little flame that reminds of our true inheritance. And we must cultivate that flame.

My dad had a beautiful spark of the divine that I deeply connected with and loved as a child. But he doused his own connection with it by pickling his consciousness in booze. He could have entered recovery and changed his life. AA was available at that time. But he didn't. I am very, very sad about that. It makes me wonder if he loved me.

I think we all choose to forget who we are (by being born) so we can learn lessons and grow. The thing is, the modeling our caregivers show us, and how they treat us make a huge difference in the depth of our forgetfulness. If my dad had been able to get into recovery and reclaim his life from addiction, he would have shown a powerful example to me. His example could have been like a beacon to me and been tremendous comfort at times when I felt sadness and despair.

But he, my primary model of what it means to be a man, chose suicide. It makes my road a lot harder. I have no doubt that I will steadily transform my pain in the years to come. I am tuned into the spark which points to my archetype and have no incentive to let go of it.

I just wish he had made a different choice.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben

Stages of Development, pt 3a

Stages of Development--part 3a

Age fourteen to seventeen

The teenager is on a quest, and deeply wishes to find some basic understandings relative to the riddles of life. He has an emerging sense of self that is interfacing with the world. He is trying to birth what is most individual, most essential about himself, and find the earthly path which is best suited to that essence.

I did find myself on a quest as a teenager, but my base coming out of early and middle childhood was so wobbly that in many ways I was just swimming and looking for the least bit of solid land to hold onto. My path was still very much about how to survive.

My previous biographical cycle (7-14) began with shocks (being molested and having my father exit my life). My fourteenth and fifteenth years would also bring events which were shocking, disturbing and destabilizing.

As I turned fourteen I felt pretty good about some parts of my life. Things were looking up in at least one important way. I had just recovered from pneumonia. Perhaps that doesn't sound so great, but the upside was that I lost twenty pounds and so all of a sudden the girls were much more interested in me.

My mom's new boyfriend had also moved into our house. I had mixed feelings about this. I didn't particularly like the guy and I had also become accustomed to being the man of the house.

Soon after he moved in my mom was telling me I couldn't do something that I really wanted to do. I was feeling sullen. The boyfriend was taking sides with her and lecturing me a bit about why hers was the best decision. I muttered, "F-you" under my breath.

All of a sudden he was up and on me, slapping me down repeatedly to the ground. "Don't you EVER say that to me, do you hear?" I was shocked, crying and ran from the house. I never called him a name to his face again. My mom stood by and supported his action. She thought I was unruly and that such measures as hitting were justified. In the past year she had begun slapping me from time to time when I defied her. Mom had previously prided herself on never using corporal punishment with me. She seemed now to be changing her mind on the matter.

In March, mom went on a trip to the British Isles and took me along. She was singing with a community chorus which had found a great excuse, a few concerts, to travel to a really cool place.

I was totally caught up in the experience. Just being there was the coolest thing I could have imagined. Even though I was only fourteen I could go into pubs while mom and the others were singing. I also stayed up late drinking with other singers and locals. I looked older than I was and was taking full advantage of the fact. Mom either wasn't aware of my drinking (when she was practicing with her choir) or wasn't able to stop me from doing what I wanted (a few late nights where I defied her and she gave up trying to control me).

Mom and I went to museums and plays in London and went to Stratford to see "Twelfth Night" at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Just walking around in London and other English towns was VERY cool to me.

As I came back I felt like a changed person, like my horizons had just been widened. My eyes had been opened to a world beyond the sights and attitudes of the small city where I lived. I went to school the next day, dressed in some clothes mom bought for me on the trip, and I could tell people were looking at me differently. I went over to a friend's house after school and was hanging out, quietly marveling at how things had changed and how a new cosmopolitan me was emerging.

"Phone for you." I went to the phone. It was my mom. She told me that my dad had died. I asked how. She told me she would tell me when I got home. It had happened while we were on the trip. Mom's boyfriend had gotten the call but waited to tell mom until she got home. When I got home mom told me he had killed himself.

We got on a plane the next morning and were off to the funeral. Dad had a relative who lived near to him even though he almost never saw him. The relative said dad had almost nothing in the apartment where he lived and his bank account was empty. They showed me the suicide note. It read, "I have found life to be utterly meaningless." It wasn't addressed to anyone. The few things he had reeked of pipe tobacco and pot. Like many suicidal men he had used a gun so the casket was closed.

As I returned again back home I felt like the space around me had drawn in and that my personal space was much smaller than it been a few days earlier. I was curled up in a ball even though I was walking around, doing the things I was supposed to. Life went on.

I previously had a hope regarding me and my dad. It was that, even though I didn't get to grow up with him, that some day I would go and live with him and get to know him. In my mind that would happen after I was done with high school. For several years I spoke openly of this with my mom and she usually cautiously agreed that such a thing might happen. It was an important dream of mine from the time I was seven to the moment I learned of his death.

That summer we moved to a more upscale neighborhood which was closer to my friends. Mom and boyfriend announced they would be married the following spring. I was playing sports, doing reasonably well in school. I was also sexually active, drinking fairly regularly, smoking pot, chewing tobacco and occasionally smoking cigarettes. These were all normal things for the crowd I was hanging out with. Mom was only vaguely aware of what I was up to.

When I was fifteen mom got married. I wasn't at all enthused about the wedding but went through the motions. They went on their honeymoon and soon after their return mom had a vision of guns going off. She was taken to the local psychiatric hospital in a psychotic state.

I went to see her a few times during the week or so she was there. The doctors and staff at the hospital never said a word to me. My mom told me on my first visit that she had been diagnosed as being schizophrenic; that she had, according to the doctors, two personalities: one which was an adult and the other which was a child. I was very numb during the visit. I went home and tried to forget what she had told me. Mom's husband was very freaked out and in shock himself. We pretty much avoided each other and didn't exchange more than a few words while mom was in the hospital.

The next visit, a few days later, mom told me that the doctors had changed the diagnosis. The new one was manic depression. She seemed to feel more hopeful about that diagnosis so I did too. Mom started taking lithium, came home and soon returned to work. It seemed like everything went back to what had passed as normal.

I got my driver's license on my sixteenth birthday. I had been driving for three or four years already, so I passed it easily. When I was twelve I would practice in the driveway, going forward, backing up, over and over. At thirteen I would take the car out for a spin in the neighborhood when mom was gone. At fourteen I got my permit and would then drive all over town in mom's car when she was gone. She never had (and doesn't today) any idea I was doing this.

A few months after she got out of the hospital, mom proposed a "youth group" she would facilitate for my cohort along with the mom of a friend of mine. They thought that having some spiritual guidance would be helpful for us and wanted to show us they cared about our moral development. Attendance for us was not optional. The group met once a month at my friend's house. We giggled all the way through the sessions that involved reading from the bible mostly. A few times we even got stoned before the group met. Today I can appreciate the effort the two moms made to some degree. Back then it was just a joke to all of us. I think both my mom and the other mom were in deep denial about the affects on their families of their "wanting to have it all".

My mom was not the only mother who had a demanding professional life and did not give much direction to her children's lives. All of my friends and I were suffering the affects of moms entering the workplace en masse. We called each others mother "mom" because we were each trying to get the nurturing none of us were getting at home. Maybe if we cobbled together all the mothering from all of the moms in our cohort, we could have more of our needs met.

The results of this seem clear to me today. All of our parents were professionals who gained status in their careers and succeeded beyond what their parents had done. In terms of career success, my childhood cohort and I have all done less well than our parents, in many cases achieving at a much lower level. None of us really had the platform, the structure to reach up from. The moms went to work and the dads did not pick up any of the slack. All the slack was absorbed by the kids.

We were all semi-orphans in a way and all of our parents required us to behave as if it were all fine. It's not that our parents didn't love us. They just didn't give us the parenting we needed and seemed to use the credos, "Kids raise themselves" and "Try to be your kid's friend". We weren't able to raise ourselves very well and we didn't need them to be our friends. We needed them to be our parents.

Professional parents give a lot of their sparkle at work and come home tired. The TV and the neighborhood kids end up giving a lot of the life lessons. In our case this became increasingly: tobacco, beer, pot, pornographic movies and before long experimenting in other drugs. And we all knew how to put on a great face for all of our "moms" so that they wouldn't worry about us. Now that we were getting into things they wouldn't want to us to partake in, we had to apply a tad bit of slyness. The moms seemed eager to take the bait and give us more freedom.

When I was sixteen a new drug was introduced into my cohort: LSD. It began to be a fairly regular part of my friends and my recreational activities. My mom had a pot pipe in her dresser (she said she hadn't used it for years) that we used on occasion to get high. One evening when I was sixteen a group of friends and I were at my house and I mentioned the pipe. She got a big smile on her face and started telling us about the times she smoked pot with her friends. Part of me thought it was cool and another part of me wished she would disapprove of our recreational drug use. I knew it wasn't healthy, even though it was fun. I had a friend the same age as me who had become a heroin addict and was living with her boyfriend who was in his twenties and a drug dealer. I could see she looked really bad and had changed a lot.

I was still doing reasonably well in school. In fact, the first thing I did when I got home was my math homework and then any other assignments that were due. One action of my mom that I still resent to this day was when she announced that she was going to start tutoring a friend of mine who was struggling in school. Like with the pot pipe, part of me thought it was a cool gesture. But a larger part of me felt deep resentment, because I had made myself independent of her help in terms of homework and many other aspects of life. I had experienced so much neglect from her over the years, and here she was showering attention on my friend. I can understand it in terms of her illness but it still makes me mad.

That year I made the varsity soccer team. I had friends encouraging me to go out for the varsity basketball team. I had girlfriends and was well liked at school. Everything looked fine.

As a senior I had two girlfriends and went to two schools. I had two girlfriends because it seemed I was able to do it; and went to a second school in the afternoon to take a math class I couldn't get at the other school.

A teacher at one of the schools I went to, who was also the head football coach, invited male students over to his house. He was single and would make coffee with a touch of Irish cream for his teenage guests. He would read our fortune in Tarot cards and talked about Jung, spirituality and other things that were very cool to me. I went with a friend of mine and after a while started going by myself. As I look back, I can see now that it wasn't that I was gay, just that I deeply longed for attention from a man I admired. This guy was one of the "cool teachers" in the school and the football program was doing pretty well.

As you readers will find as no surprise, he started making passes at me. I deflected his actions but continued to come to his house. The last time I ever went I let him kiss me. It wasn't my cup of tea. I just wanted his kindness and attention. I realized that if I went back he would expect more so I didn't. About two months later he was fired from his teaching job and left the state. Like a number of other things, this is something my mom has never been aware of.

During my senior year mom went on a two week trip to China with a group wanting to promote goodwill between the two countries. She was very excited about the trip for weeks before and after, and brought back a large quantity of goods she'd bought in the markets there. A few months after she got back she resigned from her job just as she was about to be fired.

Graduation was coming up. My class was talking about the ceremony and who would organize it. No one else volunteered so I raised my hand. I don't know what I was thinking! Anyway, it went off well, probably because a teacher or two worked behind the scenes in a major way to make sure it didn't flop. Each graduating senior (in a class of 30 students) was expected to give a brief speech as they stood up I was so caught up in the logistics of the event that I forgot to plan what I was going to say when I got up. I kind of stumbled and said something random as I came up. I remember looking at a video of me; I seemed pretty manic.

Life was very confusing to me. The one bright spot I saw was my pending departure to go on a foreign exchange and live overseas for a year. It became what I lived for.

That summer I was almost responsible for a head-on collision between my car and another, both of us going well over the speed limit. I was passing a car and did not see the car approaching in my lane. The on-coming car had to go fully onto the shoulder of the highway in order to save both of our lives. I wasn't trying to end my life. I truly just didn't see the other car coming.

I was going through the motions of my life as it was. I was deeply in need of a change of environment.

As it would turn out, the following nine months would be something akin to a miracle for me, and would help me find a positive footing in my life.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben

Relating the Past to Present Day, part 2

Relating the Past to Present Day, part 2

Notes on Seven to Fourteen

I have been invested for most of my life in the image of my mom as the "heroic single mom". She moved mountains in order to get me to a good school. She went beyond the call of duty every day to get food on the table and read me a bed time story.

There is a deep desire within me to buy into the myth my mom has been spinning about me most of my life. Her myth makes me look really good: well adjusted, successful, a fine specimen of humanity. The myth naturally traces said success back to how she battled long odds to nurture me into the fabulous person I am today.

The problem is, it's a myth.

The reality can be much more painful to look at. The thing is, parenting really matters. You can't just neglect the kid and then expect good results. If parents feel they must do certain things in order for the family to make it, they should at least be honest about the effects on the kids. Creating an alternate mythical reality just adds insult to injury. From the kid's perspective, first comes the hit of the initial neglect or other damage; and second the much longer term process of untangling the myth that the adult put in place around the damage.

The discrepancy between myth and reality is something the kids have to bear into adulthood. If they're lucky they get some therapy help and sort out what actually happened. Not very efficient, really. Much better to acknowledge what's happening at the time so that at least there's clarity. It's really hard to heal something when the whole area is obscure.

It's hard for me to criticize my mom. Like her, I am also invested in "everything being just fine." There is a big part of me which would be happy to limp along and cover up all the messy bits. Perhaps luckily, life doesn't allow an infinite amount of that. The piper gets paid one way or another. And personally, I'd rather pay him consciously than unconsciously. The former is painful but the latter is far more so.

I believe that focussing on one's painful past without clear purpose, though understandable, is of questionable value. Looking at the past traumas of one's life should be done with a clear eye to understanding and transforming them. If we are just bathing ourselves over and over in painful experiences we're pulling ourselves out of the present time and what we are called to do out of our essential self. If we are focussed on the past we are much less likely to be helpful to either ourselves or anyone else at the time when life takes place, the present.

So part of my healing is being honest about the mistakes my parents made. Not in order to skewer them, but in order to cognize the damage I'm dealing with on the way to healing it. I'm not a moral relativist. I believe there is a sort of natural law in the universe which encompasses all of our thoughts, feelings and actions; while at the same time leaving us free. The law has a fundamental relationship with Love. Situations where any of us act lovelessly create a relational space which requires healing in some way.

Nelson Mandela seems to me a person who understood this at a very deep level. The Truth and Reconciliation Committees in South Africa in the nineties had a lofty goal in mind. It was to list the crimes of individuals during the apartheid era, to come to a level of clarity of what the person had done, and then to grant amnesty. One could see the crime and also the context in which it was committed. People were acting under orders, within a given system, and may have made different choices given different circumstances.

I can see the context of my mom. And my dad. I see where the choices they made came from, both in terms of their brain disorders and family backgrounds. But I guess I am not yet ready to truly forgive either one of them. I have to come to clarity first. My own personal "truth and reconciliation" process is obviously quite different from the context of post-apartheid South Africa. Neither of my parents committed crimes that would be punished in a court of law. I don't need to expose their deeds in public, just to myself. I need to acknowledge the individual pieces of my own pain and the actions to which it is connected.

I must be truthful in order to reconcile with my own self. If I can do that, whatever healing needs to happen between my mom and I (and my dad, for that matter) can unfold in its proper way. A major stumbling block for my healing is that I have bought into my mom's myth about what life was like for me as a child.

So here are some truths which need to be told:

First let's talk about my mom's actions around the pets I had between the ages of seven and fourteen. Unless you count a pair of lizards, there were two during that seven year period: a dog and a rabbit. The dog was named Amanda and I don't remember the rabbit's name.

And secondly, let's say a few words about dad.

Amanda was a little dog my mom got at the pound when my cousins were visiting. It was at a time right after I had been molested and right before my dad was leaving. She was a small, white, high strung mixed breed who was also very sweet and affectionate. Amanda would watch our cat jump out of a second story window and go off into the trees nearby. One day, while we were out somewhere, the dog followed the cat out the window and broke three legs. Very expensive free dog.

We moved to the new neighborhood and the dog, after several weeks, got the casts off. We settled into our new home and Amanda seemed to as well. It was, undeniably a lot for my mom to meet Amanda's needs in addition to all she was doing. Amanda's barking sometimes put mom on edge. She had a pretty high pitched yap.

I was seven, mom had her demanding professional job. The situation looked pretty challenging for pet ownership. Yet mom was the one who chose to get the dog.

Years later, when I was in my twenties, I had some friends over at my mom's house. It was summer and we were relaxing. Somehow the topic of Amanda came up. My mom said in a loud and enthusiastic voice, "I hated that dog. I took her to the pound and had her put down as soon as I had the chance." Then she laughed. I said, "No, you didn't...Amanda got lost in the neighborhood and we searched for her and couldn't find her" Mom got a playful look on her face that said that her version of the story was the correct one. I was appalled and expressed that. She brushed it off and didn't feel the need to say any more about it.

The next pet we had was a rabbit. We kept it in a smallish cage in the (unheated) and dark garage. I was nine. We got the rabbit in the fall and got everything set up for it. In retrospect it was a terrible life for the little creature. It was alone in a cage all day in a dark and cold room. Then, for a short while a boy would come and feed it and let it out. It's no wonder the little guy bit me every time I tried to hold it. This went on for several weeks. I don't remember mom really shepherding the process much. She told me what was needed and it was up to me to meet the creature's needs.

One day at school I was sharing with my teacher and classmates about how the rabbit always bit me when I tried to hold it and that I was sad about that. My teacher, who stressed outdoors survival skills at every turn, made a bold suggestion: Why don't you bring the rabbit into class and I will show the kids how to dress an animal and make soup.

I was shocked by the idea and didn't quite know what to say. I said I could talk to my mom and let him know. That night I told mom what the proposal was. She asked me if I still wanted to take care of the rabbit and if I was prepared to follow through over the months and years to come. I said probably not. At the same time the little creature was my pet. So I went to school the next day and told my teacher that they could kill and eat my rabbit but that I didn't want to be there while they did it. So I went to the library while the whole thing took place.

I was pretty numb to the whole process, to be honest. Today it seems to me appalling that 1) a teacher would propose such a thing and that 2) a parent would go along with it.

Initially, my mom was excited about the idea of having a cute little rabbit for her boy, the life lessons he could gain from caring for another creature. Then she facilitated how the little creature's life ended, as lunch for a bunch of fifth graders. All this happened over a span of about four months.

Essentially the primary experiences I had with pets in the central part of my childhood, the time when I was most a "kid", involved killing the creature because it was becoming a nuisance. Granted, I didn't know about about Amanda until I was an adult. Still, I am trying to get a handle on what the atmosphere was that I imprinted on.

What does it mean to me that my mom behaved in that way? That she had such a callous attitude about the lives of my pets?

"Hi Peter, this is your dad."

One phone call per year on my birthday. To this day I feel a sense of stress and antipathy as my birthday approaches.

"Have you been laid yet?" This is what he asked me on my thirteenth birthday phone call. I could have said "Yes, as a matter of fact a few months ago I met a girl on the city bus who was very drunk. We happened to get off a the same stop and as I was walking home she started throwing herself at me. Her house was on the way to mine and we went inside and had sex. I have never seen her since and I don't really expect to, and anyway she probably wouldn't recognize or remember me." "Oh yeah, and by the way, I got laid when you were still around, back when I was six years old. Although I'm not sure if I'd exactly call that 'getting laid'". More like "rape", really.

What I want to say to both of my parents at this moment is, "What the F**K were you thinking?" The obvious answer is that whatever they were thinking about, it wasn't me or my welfare.

Joseph Chilton Pearce speaks of the "model imperative" as a primary driver of neural development. The role models, ie parents/caregivers we have show us how to be human and facilitate our brains to develop in one way or another. There are aspects of my self which I highly value and which come from my parents in some way. There are also major deficits in my family inheritance.

These deficits create something like a large, dark vacuum in my soul. So far, I have been able to largely skirt this dark area, perhaps due to youthful energy and naivete. Well, like I said in my first post, I am now past the age when NBA players retire. And I am done being naive about who I am.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben

Stages of Development, pt 2

Stages of Development--Part Two

Age Seven to Fourteen

So why do I call myself an "ACMI Spelunker"? As noted in my first post, ACMI stands for "Adult Child of Mentally Ill". A spelunker is someone who explores caves. The cave I am spelunking in is my own psyche and I am trying to find as many useful tools as I can to make it a successful journey.

I hope to learn something in this cave that will help me succeed in the rest of my life. Just as I did when I was a teenager, I have at age forty-one a sense that I have potential well beyond what I am currently able to manifest. There is a transformation of self that I hope to accomplish in the cave. It's going to take work. And time.

One of the key tools I have in the cave is honesty. About myself and about others. I trust in two things here: first, that my intentions are to heal and not to harm anyone; and second, that human beings have an essential aspect which lives at a place beyond notions of "damage". Nevertheless, the damage is very much part of my current experience and so that is where I feel I must start.

In his book, The Biology of Transcendence, JC Pearce speaks about what he calls the "model imperative" in human development. He says that we need healthy models provided by our caregivers in order to develop.

"Someone who is fully able to do something or behave in a certain way must perform the role of model if a similar ability is to be awakened in that child."

In other words, the way we successfully develop any kind of capacity is by being in the presence, when we are a child, of someone who is doing it well.

My parents were, in some ways, very talented and highly intelligent. They both had advanced degrees from reputable Universities. They were interested in the world and drawn to service. They had ideals, education. In some ways their prospects were outstanding.

They also have had significant challenges in terms of illness, self-defeating behaviors, poor life and social skills, and flawed understandings which have held them both back considerably from achieving the hopes they both held as a newly married couple in their mid-twenties.

The acorn does not fall far from the tree. I have enough intelligence both to work with the ideas in this blog and to see that I have to transform a fair amount in myself in order to move forward in my life. I sense that if I don't tackle these issues now I will regret it.

What I think of now as my family's version of "normal life" started when I was seven and lasted until I was about thirteen. There was a lot more stability during those six years than during those bumpy years between four and seven, or the bumpy years from fourteen to seventeen. When I think of a "normal" day in my childhood I picture something from that time period.

During this time there were dynamics in play that took advantage of the traumas I had experienced and cemented the "bubble" I refer to in other posts. The "bubble" is my own personal survival mechanism I created as a child which was successful then but very problematic now.

My dad was essentially out of the picture from the time I was seven. He sent the occasional letter and called me on my birthday to chat for fifteen minutes and hear how the previous year had gone.

At this time I developed a strong feeling connection to my mom, influenced naturally by the context of survival instinct. The deeper love and connection I felt for her likely came from my early years, ages 0-4, when she was much more present, loving and tuned into my needs. It's not that she didn't love me later. It's just that she was frequently overwhelmed by being a single mom, a professional woman, and suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder, of which she was entirely unaware.

From when I was age four and a half on she and I were both focussed on survival. I think the reason I still have a loving connection with my mom today comes from what was built in those first four years.

From age five to fourteen our household was just mom and me. We formed something of a team. We were looking out for each other in our own way. She earned a living, shopped for groceries, cooked and made sure my clothes were clean, and I listened to what her life was like. We'd go out to dinner, see concerts and go to church on Sundays.

Soon after my dad moved out of state, my mom arranged for me to be at an in-home daycare near our house after school every day. Mom and I had recently moved to a new neighborhood where my babysitter seemed a million miles away. It really did feel like a safer place to live.

After about three months at the daycare, my mom asked me if I would rather just come home after school. I didn't think much of the daycare so I said sure. So about the time I turned eight I would walk home to an empty house and do whatever I felt like.

I got home from school every day around 3:30. I would get a snack; there was always enough food. Maybe I would play with other kids in the neighborhood. Maybe I'd shoot baskets in the driveway. Maybe I'd watch TV or play Atari. We had a record player with albums by the Beatles, James Taylor and The Moody Blues I loved to listen to and sing aloud. It was up to me. I never remember feeling a sense of freedom, however. I never rejoiced and said to myself, "I can do whatever I want!" I knew that I had to keep myself busy, do things that wouldn't get me into trouble, and not add any stress at all to my mom's load. If I'd had I much of an inkling of getting into trouble, it would have, even in our safer neighborhood, been easy to find.

My mom got off from work at 5pm and would be home at 5:30, unless she stopped at the store, in which case it was 6pm. Then she would be busy making dinner. It was best I stay out of the way because she was stressed and needed to focus on physical sustenance for us both. Sometimes she would come home and be exhausted. She would have a beer and lie down on the plaid white and brown couch in the living room. After a half hour or 45 minutes of rest then she'd get up and fix dinner. Other times she would be full of energy and restless, put on her running shoes and do a few laps around the neighborhood soon after she arrived home.

Whichever one it was, I had the things I would do to pass the time, so that when she did arrive and could talk to me I would be ready. At dinner time I would set the table and help with the dishes. She would ask me how my day was and I would answer fine. I am sure she'd have liked me to say more, but she liked to talk and always had plenty to share. For a while she would read to me before bedtime from the "Chronicles of Narnia" or "James and the Giant Peach". She remembers the time she spent reading to me fondly but I think it only happened for a year or so before either she was too busy to do it or I said I wasn't interested.

When mom was out on evenings I'd usually have a babysitter. Maybe she was at a board meeting, a bible group, choir practice or a date. She wasn't really into "hanging out" with me. We had a house that was big enough that I essentially had the whole downstairs to myself. I think that from her perspective I was pretty well occupied and if she could have dinner for me and read me a bed-time story from time to time that was doing pretty good. She didn't have a model of good mothering from her mom and she had the extra impediment of bipolar.

So in her view things were going pretty well. Life was stable, I seemed okay, was doing reasonably well in school, and wasn't lashing out at her. She didn't see the fact that I was sucking it up as a way of life. And that my doing so was shaping me in an unhealthy way. I made it all okay. In a previous post I mentioned that "optimism" is a symptom of bipolar. In the case of our family life, my mom seemed very "optimistic" about how things were going. I was being neglected but in my mind I just assumed that was normal. Being neglected felt a lot less bad than the shocks I experienced between the ages of four and seven.

To say my basic self-esteem took a sustained hit during this time would be pretty accurate.

Because my mom has likely always lived to a large degree in the moment, what's happening outside of "her moment" is largely out of her consciousness. This basic narcissism, which is a symptom of her illness, meant that she experienced my growing up in terms of her experiences when she was actively engaged in being with me. We'd occasionally go to concerts or eat out at restaurants. Her memory of being a mom is connected to all of those things. She remembers that she spent time finding a school for me which she liked and moving us to the the school's neighborhood so I could attend. She remembers getting me into sports like basketball, a good outlet for all of the energy I had to let out somehow. She remembers coming to my games and cheering me on.

She doesn't really have any sense of all the time I spent by myself waiting for her to arrive. Or the time when she was present when she wasn't able to relate to me but rather needed me to relate to her. She didn't, and doesn't today have the ability to imagine into my reality to a very high degree.

Ironically, her being retired means she has a lot more time on her hands and imagines into my life much more than when I was a kid. And I am certain that the medication she is taking now helps her enormously, including making her less narcissistic now than she was when she was untreated.

From age seven on I focussed more and more of my attention on my mom's experience. I began to tune into where she was emotionally and adjust my own behavior to compensate. If she was manic, I needed to be very calm and centered. If she was low-energy, I should be cheerful and upbeat. If she said things that were strange or if she was very irritable or unreasonable and demanding, I should be quiet, go along, and wait for the storm to pass.

The primary way I dealt with this way of living was to reduce my own needs (the ones that she would need to fill) to as close to zero as I could. I felt instinctively that too much stress on her might make her go away like my dad had. When we talked at the dinner table it was mostly her talking and me listening.

In many ways I was an extension of her. Much of my energy was directed on helping her navigate daily life. My sense of self was very slow to develop. And my boundaries were very weak due to the sexual abuse and my mom's own poor boundaries because of her bipolar. There was not a person in my life, basically ever, who was really tuned into what my thoughts and feelings were. Someone who could help me, day by day, to see what my strengths and challenges were, to orient me to the world.

I know that under it all I have a beautiful and radiant self that wants to be always present in my experience. In this cave I hope to uncover all of the masks I've placed on myself that have shielded that self. The "bubble" helped me to cope with difficult situations but it created layers of personality, infused with pain, which now I need to shed. I hope to have the courage to do it.

By the time I was twelve I realized that my mom was not going to be able to parent me in the way that I needed, and so I had to grow up and take charge of my own needs. I started learning how to drive, spending more and more time at friends' houses, and keeping my expectations of my mom very low. I was already versed with the bus system, I had a bike, and could reduce my dependence on mom to a very low level.

I was also becoming sexually active, drank beer with my friends on the weekends, occasionally smoked pot, and chewed tobacco.

I listened to my mom's problems at the dinner table but shared almost nothing of my own. By this time my mom would refer to me as the "strong silent type" which she has thought of me ever since. I think my real nature is not silent (judging from this blog it appears I have something to say). it's just that I didn't have adults in my life who could listen to me and be interested in what my thoughts were.

This was the trajectory we were on from the time I was 6 to age 14; me the only child and she, the single mom. I had worked out the niche for myself that seemed to help her be on an even keel most of the time. I did well enough in school and all seemed to be fine.

Except that I never really got to be a kid. To satisfy the deviant sexual urges of a babysitter meant that I was very aware of sex from age six on. And I had to assume a quasi adult role with my mom which would reduce the stress on her and make her survival in middle class life, as well as mine, more likely.

I am having trouble being an adult today because when I needed to be, I wasn't able to be a child.

I find myself in my life today struggling for purpose. My purpose as a child was to make sure that my mom stayed "afloat". Now that she is doing okay and has a stable life there is part of me that feels intense resentment. I have given so much of my own substance to her. Substance that children should not be required to give because they can't get it back later. It's taken out of the bank and the funds are not paid back. They're just gone.

I formed my sense of self in such a way as to ensure my survival and hers. We both survived. Maybe I should throw a party. Somehow in the thick of all this anger and resentment and wondering where my true self lies I don't feel all that celebratory.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben