Loneliness, pt 1

As I have come into middle age I have begun to realize certain baseline traits in myself which were largely obscure to me earlier in life. This phenomenon, of course, is not newsworthy to most anyone who has reached middle age.

One of the traits I have identified is a mood of soul I'll call loneliness.

I might also call it "orienting towards being by myself". It is a mood of soul which my higher self effectively neutralizes by doing things that are good for me. Like hanging out with my family. Like calling an old friend. Like inviting a friend over for dinner.

My higher self is working on giving me a good and satisfying social life. My lower self would rather be by itself, spinning around and doing meaningless things that are not connected with my purpose in life.

If you've read my blog you'll know that I am married to a fabulous wife and have two amazing step-daughters. I am very happy in my family and feel a great deal of fortune on a regular basis for the fact in my life of my family. They are at the cornerstone of what I find satisfying and enjoyable. My wife and I have a wonderful and close relationship. We are soul-mates and deeply enjoy the time we spend together.

In other words, I do not lack for deep soul connection. For this I feel tremendous gratitude.

And yet, there is a real loneliness that emerges in me.

It's a feeling like I am out on my own, away from everyone else, and that other people are far away. My personality can interact with other people in a perfectly jovial way, while at the same time some important part of me is standing way back. My higher self is back behind me and up from me. What does that feel like to the person I'm talking with? If I am so far "back", what part of me are they meeting and interacting with? What fills the space between "me standing far back" and the person?

I can see my loneliness in terms of my friendships. My connections with friends have become somewhat tenuous over the past several years. It's been difficult for me to make new friends and I am more standoffish than I used to be.

It seems to me that part of it is due to the "hidden" facts of my biography looming steadily larger for me in recent years. Until now, I haven't felt comfortable sharing aspects of my upbringing that involve mental illness, having been sexually assaulted as a child, alcoholism and suicide. Because I have associated those parts of my history with my feeling shame, there is a big part of my personal story which has always been hidden.

Often I feel like I am only sharing a small part of myself with others, even those with whom I would like to become better friends with. It's like I'm standing inside the threshold of a shed, peeking through the door. There's something in the shed which is bad and shameful, and I don't want others to see it. So I try to interact with them by smiling while I have this little dance with the door of the shed which I try to make seem as normal as possible.

In other words it's hard for me to navigate becoming friends with someone. I present pretty well and can chat someone up. I can be superficially friendly and engaging. But who wants to be friends with some guy who is standing in a shed and doesn't come out of it?

On the other end of the spectrum I have a deep and intimate bond with my wife. But there's not a lot in between those two spots on the continuum.

The end result of all this is that I find it exceedingly difficult to cultivate friendships in the "middle level"; where the person is more than an acquaintance but not one's "soul-mate". This leaves me feeling pretty lonely.

I believe that a big part of my loneliness has to do with the time I spent by myself. I was an only child. I learned how to be ok by myself. I estimate that on average I spent at least ten hours per week alone by myself in my house, starting when I was seven years old. As a child I developed a certain baseline of being by myself.

There's also the primary model angle. My dad was a pretty lonely guy. I think he had a few friends, but a big part of their connection seemed to be drinking and smoking pot. My picture of his life between the time when I last saw him and his death is one of a person with few social connections. He lived in the kingdom of alcohol, which apparently made connections with family and friends seem unnecessary, at least until he was sober again.

My mom seems in some ways very sociable, but she too has a lonely streak. She has few close friends and is not very close to her family either, though it might be quite difficult for her to acknowledge that fact. She feels close to me and in many ways I feel the same way to her. But I also feel very conflicted inwardly when I'm around her, and clearly need to work out some issues before I could honestly say that she and I have a strong connection. The person I was closest to in my family of origin was my aunt, who passed away eight months ago..

Another piece is having been molested over several months when I was six years old. This has made it very difficult for me to have conscious control over what I communicate sexually. My boundaries were breached at a formative time. I have made progress in recovery from that trauma but it's a long haul.

So I guess you could say that I've been raised to have something of a lonely streak.

Having a primary model being a lonely guy, feeling ashamed of my family history, being an only child, having been molested, spending a lot of time by myself as a child. These are all factors that lead me towards feelings of loneliness in my baseline personality.

I have in my life people who won't allow me to become the lonely guy those factors would conspire to have me be.

I am very lucky.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben

Friends

This past week I told two old friends of mine about my blog. It made me think that the by-line to the blog should be "OMG TMI!" I really do have some serious over-sharing going on in this blog; but I will continue on because it feels way better to bring all of these "secrets" out into the open than to try to keep them under wraps, where I get to carry them up on my back.

Talking to these two friends made me think about how much they have meant to me; that their friendship at important moments was key to my finding my way in life. My early 20s were a tenuous time for me. I had done well in college but did not have the faintest clue as to what I could do with my life. I knew I had talent but could not find my direction. I didn't really know what to do with myself. I felt not infrequently like I was becoming a failure. I didn't see the point in my life.

These two friends believed in me. They saw my higher nature and offered me encouragement and sweet friendship. When I hear the song by Peter Gabriel, "Don't Give Up", I think of both of them and what their faith in me then means to me now. It brings tears to my eyes. I can really relate to the man in the song as he looks at the river flowing, feels the warmth and support coming from his friends and realizes he can move through the hardships he is enduring.

The lines coming from his friends, so beautifully sung by Kate Bush, are for me quite poignant. They are telling him how important he is to them at a time when he likely finds it hard to see his own worth as a human being.

The last line of the song has been deeply inspirational to me. It told me that though I was very confused and felt directionless, that there was "a place where we belong". The idea that there was such a place helped me to keep my head up and move forward even when I didn't see the purpose to it. To a large degree I was motivated by the simple hope that life would get better and show its meaning to me over time. My motivation in life at that time was the hope that there was, somewhere, a place where I could experience my purpose, where I could belong.

That hope was well-founded. The meaning of my life has continued to show itself to me over the past fifteen years. My life today is not easy but I do see the point to it and am very happy to be alive. The years between high school and my mid-twenties, however, were often much more tenuous.

To these two dear friends--thank you.

"Don't Give Up" by Peter Gabriel

in this proud land we grew up strong

we were wanted all along

I was taught to fight, taught to win

I never thought I could fail

no fight left or so it seems

I am a man whose dreams have all deserted

I've changed my face, I've changed my name

but no one wants you when you lose

don't give up

'cos you have friends

don't give up

you're not beaten yet

don't give up

I know you can make it good

though I saw it all around

never thought I could be affected

thought that we'd be the last to go

it is so strange the way things turn

drove the night toward my home

the place that I was born, on the lakeside

as daylight broke, I saw the earth

the trees had burned down to the ground

don't give up

you still have us

don't give up

we don't need much of anything

don't give up

'cause somewhere there's a place

where we belong

rest your head

you worry too much

it's going to be alright

when times get rough

you can fall back on us

don't give up

please don't give up

'got to walk out of here

I can't take anymore

going to stand on that bridge

keep my eyes down below

whatever may come

and whatever may go

that river's flowing

that river's flowing

moved on to another town

tried hard to settle down

for every job, so many men

so many men no-one needs

don't give up

'cause you have friends

don't give up

you're not the only one

don't give up

no reason to be ashamed

don't give up

you still have us

don't give up now

we're proud of who you are

don't give up

you know it's never been easy

don't give up

'cause I believe there's a place

there's a place where we belong

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiCRZLr9oRw

Biography--Telling our story

The catalyst for this blog was a career counselor I met with several times this spring. I was trying to make sense of my career path in the wake of having resigned from my teaching job mid-year. She had a lot of helpful ideas and advice for me, but the greatest gift she gave me was permission to start telling my story. From early on in our working together she encouraged me to write and to look into career paths which might include writing. I told her I would like to write a blog about my experiences with mental illness in my family but that I couldn't do that because there was too much a chance that my family would read it; and that for them it would be too shocking. Her response was, "Well that's easy--use a pseudonym." Within a month of her saying that I had started my blog.

To this person I say: Thank you for helping me find the key for opening the door to my soul.

Sometimes we need another person to give us permission to do something that will be very good for us. For me, therapy has been immensely helpful, but writing about my experience, writing about my biography and the themes I can tease out of it is a tremendously powerful element of my healing.

And doing a blog is a great place to write. One benefit is that I have committed to posting every Thursday. Whether I feel like it or not, I have made a promise, to myself and to anyone who might be reading this blog, that there will be something arriving each week on that day.

Until now I have been very shy to share elements of my biography to anyone but my wife and my therapist. I felt shame that my mom has had a mental illness; that my dad killed himself. Because of the stigma surrounding mental illness, I also knew that most people would be uncomfortable about me sharing such things. There have been times when I really wanted to share some of the difficult parts of my life with someone and they were not able to hear it. They would change the subject or even pretend they didn't hear what I said. Next subject!

When I was in high school even my closest friends were unaware of some of the "shameful facts" I was dealing with, like my mom being in a mental hospital and having a diagnosis called manic depression. I never talked about my dad's suicide with others. I mean, who would want to talk about something as scary as that? Keep it as far away from our awareness as possible!

Being a teacher I was very aware that some, perhaps many, of the class parents might be freaked out by mental illness in my family. And so I kept quiet about my background around people in the school community. I was able to craft an image of myself that did not acknowledge these basic facts in my biography. What I have come to find out is that we can only keep things hidden for so long before they start pushing against the edges of the container we've put them in.

The hidden parts of us need to come out into the light of day not to haunt us, but to be redeemed. All of the pain of my childhood is inside me every day as I walk around. By giving it attention and working actively to transform that pain, I will gradually and increasingly be free of it. However much pain I am able to transform will then become something which can be in service to me and to others. The transformed suffering can become wisdom, understandings, compassion and capacities which can be put into service.

Telling my story does a number of things. First, it is a pledge I am making to myself that my story is worth spending time to think about and write down. Second, once I have written something down I often realize that I have discovered something about myself or solidified an idea which was only ephemeral until splatting onto the page as my fingers tapped the correct keys in the correct order.

It is tremendously liberating to share my story now. Even if no one else reads it, it will still be there for me to have spent the time and energy to think about, ponder and try to express as best I can. I have never given anything to myself like this. It is a gift from me to me. If anyone else finds it helpful in some way, that is just icing on the cake.

Telling my story is seeming to me more and more like a key aspect of my healing. As long as I can remember I've carried a swirling mass of murky behavior patterns all wrapped up in denial like some sort of birthday present from the Black Lagoon. This mass I've been carrying all these years seems now to be an engine which is driving my weekly blog posts. What was dragging me down is now being turned into fuel. I have been so very needful to tell my story and I never have given myself the chance to do it.

Why is biography a path to healing?

In writing down our biography we articulate the events that have brought us to who we are today. We trace our essential self as it has come into the material world, first as a child, then growing up, then as an adult. Who were our parents? Why did we come to them? Is there an intention greater than we can imagine with our smaller mind, that has directed us to be in this life, with these people?

When we look at our biography with a clear and gentle eye, we can see the patterns which have come around us, which have directed us into having a certain personality, a certain affectation, a certain sense of humor. We see something of the affects our parents and other caregivers have had on us, for good and for ill.

Stepping through the events of my childhood I have begun to address a question I started this blog with: Why am I having career challenges in my forties when both of my parents had similar struggles? How have they imprinted on me? Did they imprint this particular pattern on me, similar to having a similar speech pattern or sense of humor? If so, can I describe this/these pattern(s)? By delving into my childhood experiences, can I come to some clarity on this matter which is of great interest to me today and will have a significant influence on my future?

Writing my biography helps me to be more grounded on the earth. It helps me to see the forces that worked on me. This helps me to forgive myself for my shortcomings, and also to see where their origins lie so that I can work to transform them. For example, I am much more clear since I've begun my blog about what was behind some of the manic behavior I have exhibited in the past.

As long as I was either oblivious to or in denial about important details and themes of my biography, I could act in a manic way at times and not be able to step back and see it for what it was. I can see now that it was a learned behavior. My mom had manic episodes regularly. She was my primary model. It seems very, very simple really, but before I delved into my biography I was only vaguely aware of this fact. Putting it down in black and white, and publishing it on the internet, gives it more solidity for me.

This puts my higher consciousness more in the driver's seat relative to the retrograde patterns which are mucking about in my subconscious. I know this is a long process I'm entering into, but it sure beats being at the butt-end of the critters which are mucking about.

Finally, delving into one's own biography is a way to look at our life from a longer and higher perspective. We can see how the themes in our life at different times are shared by other human beings. There are themes from each decade, from each slice of life, which we all can relate to in some way.

I believe that each of us is a spiritual being moving through life on earth. We are not created when we're born and we're not destroyed when we die. What is eternal in each of us spans the two greatest thresholds of our life. Our biography is what our essential self is writing on the canvas of this lifetime. Each of us is given fairly different kinds of materials to bring to the canvas. Paying attention to our own biography and to those of other people, can be a very satisfying experience.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben

Stages of Development--part 3b

Stages of Development--part 3b

Age seventeen to twenty-one

The year I spent on foreign exchange was an opportunity for me to get myself on a positive track. The family I stayed with was loving, well educated and thrilled to have me there. I basked in the nurturing which infused their home, the likes of which I had never experienced.

We went on a trip before school started. It was all a thousand times more amazing than even the trip to England had been. I was with a real family! I could be a child in the family. The adults were adults and behaved like parents, while also being warm and generous. I was in heaven.

The stability and warmth I was experiencing gave me the space to think of how estranged I had become from my mom. For much of my high school years we were not able to relate to each other. The "team" we had had when it was just the two of us broke up when her future husband moved in. From age fourteen on we ate meals together but I never shared my feelings with her. She was unaware of what was happening in my life beyond a few platitudes at the dinner table to make conversation.

Now, with the host family, I was actually developing relationship with them! I felt like I was the luckiest guy on earth. I wrote an old family friend a letter where I said I had become estranged from my mom and didn't know what to do. He wrote back a very encouraging letter and after a while I wrote my mom a letter stating that I saw we had grown very far apart and that I wanted to work on repairing our relationship. She wrote back encouragingly.

When I left after a year with the family I sobbed uncontrollably as I left on the train. The host mom ran towards the departing train with deep love and compassion in her eyes. I cried for about an hour before I was able to stop. The depth of my crying was because I knew that my life had been transformed by the experience with the family.

As I reflect back today I believe that my life would have unfolded very differently, and with many more negative outcomes, had I not experienced the wonderful model of family during my year as a foreign exchange student. It is not an exaggeration to say that they saved me from a much harder and bumpier life. I now had a model of a healthy family that I could inwardly refer to. Frequently I would ask myself, "What would my host family think of this? What would they do?" when confronted with moral choices.

After nine months overseas I had stopped drinking and doing drugs. I was very careful about who I slept with. And I was eager to get into college and study History and Languages, two subjects I had become interested in during that year.

Before my year abroad I was lost and confused, feeling like I had huge void inside of me. Coming back to the States I had interests, passions and was eager to start college. I had received a platform in those nine months which I could build on. Obviously, it was different than had I been with a solid family my whole life, but I felt I had something to work with.

As I was heading overseas, Mom lost her job and moved back to her childhood home, a five minute drive from her mom. Grandma offered her a job managing the family business and paid for her housing. Mom was in a very difficult situation and her family provided a soft landing for her. Mom was struggling and her marriage was filled with strife, but she was provided a cushion that would help her land on her feet.

An irony about this chapter is that my mom, to this day, sees what I've just described very differently. In her version, she went back home in order to help the family. Grandma was too old to manage the business and my mom was the one who was coming in to save the day. No one has ever challenged her version of it. Grandma felt enormous guilt about my mom's mental illness. Grandma was coming out of a period when even the medical establishment said mental illness in a child was the mother's fault.

It would have been much easier for grandma to hire someone to manage the family business. Having my mom do it was likely a much more challenging choice, but it also allowed the two of them to make significant progress, over the course of the next twenty years, in healing their relationship.

After moving all of our things to the new town, mom asked me where I'd be going to college. It was too much to apply from overseas and here I was a few months away the beginning of the semester. I decided to enroll in the local community college and move into the student dorms. The college was very near my grandparents' house and I started going there regularly to have lunch and spend time with them. I loved being with them.

My grandma was not very good with kids, but she loved spending time with adults. She loved to crack jokes and be the life of the party. Now that I was an adult (or at least I looked like one) we began to develop a close relationship. She had remarried at age seventy and her husband was a wonderful man. They had a great life together and cherished each other. Both of their spouses had died of cancer at the same time. They had been miserable and lonely for some years and then found each other. They experienced each day, and their time together, as a profound gift.

This, like my time overseas, was a wonderful model for me, and I soaked up the time with them like a sponge.

My mom was struggling in her marriage a great deal. She and her husband regularly yelled at each other and seemed to have little regard for each other. It was hard for me to be there when they both were present. Mom was learning a new job in business for which she had almost no background. She was taking lithium which seemed to affect her personality in addition to stabilizing her mood. She blamed grandma for her problems and railed against her regularly.

Mom liked to spend time with me and met my friends. It worked well for us to spend time together when her husband wasn't there and he traveled a lot for work. She was interested in my life, asking who my friends were and which classes I was signed up for. But she didn't really have much to offer in terms of advice or help.

With one major exception: my family, both grandma and mom, were going to pay for my college education. I would graduate and have no debt whatsoever.

My new friends didn't drink. I had one girlfriend. I was getting to know my grandparents in a new and wonderful way. I studied hard and got mostly "A"s. My life was pretty stable.

When I was twenty I transferred to the same University where my parents had met almost thirty years before. I wanted to experience something of the excitement and promise of their lives at the time they met. My dad had killed himself five years previous. My mom had major challenges from her strife-filled home-life and the affects both of her brain disorder and the medication she took to treat it. I felt an existential need to connect with the parts of them that seemed more healthy and hopeful.

I continued to do fairly well in school. I made friends. I enjoyed the big campus opportunities and took advantage of all kinds of lectures and activities in addition to my classes. I stopped by a video arcade from time to time and played a few games. After a while I became more compulsive about it and could drop $15-$20 worth of quarters before I walked out the door. I felt something of what it means to be addicted. I wasn't in control. I felt myself be sucked into the arcade and pile quarter after quarter into the machine. There was a manic edge to it. After I wrenched myself out of the arcade I walked home a little shaken and feeling unsure.

I feel very, very lucky today that my addiction was not to something more serious. My compulsive attraction to video games went on for a few years and then waned on its own accord. I never bought myself a home video game consul because I knew it would be unhealthy for me. A few years ago my wife and I bought a new computer which came bundled with games. I started playing them compulsively to the point that my wife commented on it. I went downstairs and deleted all the games. Addiction is something I know I need to be vigilant about.

I went to a therapist at the college but didn't make much headway. I joined a men's support group and shared a bit of my having been molested. I went to a Speak Out event where people got up and shared their stories of being sexually assaulted. I was way too shy to stand up myself. I realized it was a good thing to tell one's story but was a long way from having the guts to do it myself in such a large forum. I suppose I'm still building towards being able to do it now.

I dated a woman I met in a choir I had joined. We enjoyed each other's company, laughed together and similar cultural interests. Even so, I found myself ping-ponging back and forth between feeling sympathy and antipathy towards her. When I saw her on campus sometimes I could be very cold to her. Then we'd meet up later for a movie and I would be friendly and engaging. Clearly I had some issues.

As I look back I can see that my issues were complex and I had very little perspective on them. I knew that I had some pretty big stuff to work on but I didn't know where to start. I was trying to do well and be a good friend but my issues were frequently sabotaging my efforts. It's only been in the past few years and through taking the NAMI "Family to Family" class that I've been able to bring a lot more clarity to what my issues even are.

At the end of my sophomore year I was doing well in some ways and struggling in others. I missed my grandparents. I missed my host family from my year abroad. By myself I was more than a little lost. The time I had spent with the host family and grandparents had given me a hope of a life that could be stable, warm and wonderful. But I was still very far from having the inner resources to create that life I could imagine.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben