Altered states have to get in somehow
Yesterday afternoon I had a mild sore throat and felt a bit fragile. Yesterday evening my throat was worse and my emotional pain was steadily intensifying. By midnight, the two came together in a full-on Sylvia Plath style spiritually cleansing fever:
I am a lantern——
My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.
Does not my heat astound you! And my light!
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.
I think I am going up,
I think I may rise——
The beads of hot metal fly
I love that poem. We did it at school. Anyway, I didn't rise to Paradise on the wings of my fever but - as last time - I did learn something important about how to care for my inner child in navigating adult relationships.
Realising how often I get in my own way as an adult due to unhealed childhood wounding has been a leitmotif in recent months. I've been learning about how the feelings and beliefs of my hurt inner child have sent me hacking and chopping my way along a lot of thorny and overgrown dead-end paths in misguided search of happiness. And how, through not being able to listen to her or care for her skilfully enough, I have contributed to her ongoing pain. We have been locked together in some unhelpful patterns, she and I.
But we're doing the work to heal. This is happening fairly rapidly, has various kooky spiritual elements, and is transformative in ways I can’t convey; the ultimate IYKYK. It's also full of contrasts. It's often blissful, and it really hurts. (Like, really hurts.) It's energising and it can be to-the-bone exhausting. It sometimes feels connective in a way I didn't even know was possible, and at other times it feels like my sense of loneliness is plumbing new and disastrous depths.
And it's hard to write about without being really cringe! So it's lucky that I am SO DONE trying to be cool. Here goes.
Yesterday evening, to distract myself from feeling sick and miserable, I tidied up my Google Docs. I found myself rereading brief notes I'd made about an intense experience I'd had in bed with someone a few months back. Amongst other things, I'd said: "I was mostly overwhelmed, but I remember one moment when suddenly his lovely hair was in my face and it was startling and wonderful and like waking up". Awwwww. I remembered how happy I felt both in that moment and, especially, when I made the note.
Later, as I tried to soothe myself to sleep in the face of fever and sadness, I brought the memory of that felt sense of comfort and happiness to mind. And immediately I felt this internal assault on my attempt at wellbeing, this immense anger from inside me, yelling NO! YOU CAN'T HAVE THAT! Not as in, "You can't have him", which I already knew. But as in, "You can't have that kind of happiness, ever. You may not access that comfort."
I've heard that voice before and I've disregarded it as unhelpful and malevolent. A dark part of myself that doesn't think I deserve nice things, and which should be ignored and shoved away.
And I don't know if it's greater wisdom or the fever or a lucky chance, but this time, I heard it for what it was - not a malign spirit but my child self. She was maybe 15 years old this time, and she was angry. Not in the powerful, directed way as an adult might be angry, but the flailing helpless anger of a tearful child. YOU CAN'T HAVE THAT, YOU CAN'T HAVE THAT, she was yelling.
And when I asked why she thought that, she said (or rather, yelled - sorry for the all-caps but I gotta do her justice): IF I CAN'T THEN YOU CAN'T. And she cried and cried like her poor little heart would break.
And I was like woaaaaahhhhhh okay. You poor darling! But also, inside my head, that familiar sense of exhilaration: This is fantastic. Here comes some healing. I mentally rolled up my sleeves and stepped in to it.
Friends, this part of me had so much pain and anger and desolation to express. So much! Even in her mid teens, she had had years of trying to hold feelings of sadness and hopelessness that were just too big for her, often with quite intense suicidality. And she felt very alone with those feelings. Not unloved - she knew she was loved - but unseen and unprotected and really unsafe, because she often feared for her life. I guess living with someone you know is young and unstable and who might tip over the edge and kill you at some point is bound to be a traumatic experience, even if that person is you.
She felt like it was on her to somehow get through alone, I think in large part because by that time the adults around her treated her like she was one of them. One of the world's team of adult responsibility-takers. When a decade later she first heard the incantation beloved of self-helpers, "No one is coming to save you", she thought, well of course, I've known that forever. It didn't occur to her it isn't meant to apply to children.
And this kid really needed someone to save her, ay, or at least to help her save herself. She needed a responsible, caring adult to sit with her and witness all her pain, and to tell her that it was real and awful, and it wasn't okay for her to be trying to manage it alone, and to help her shoulder it.
Well, better late than never. Here I am.
I held space for this hurt child inside me and let her tell me everything she needed to say. And when she was a little calmer and it felt like we were ready to move into a more hopeful emotional space (inner children being no exception to the rule that people can't listen until they feel heard), I told her: It will never be okay that you were alone without an adult to care for you. But that will never happen again, my love. I am committed to caring for you. I am not perfect, I will make mistakes. But I will not abandon you or turn away from you or be overwhelmed by your needs. You will never be alone in your pain again.
And I also said: I have so much love and goodness in my life, so many wonderful people around me, so many resources of all kinds. I have strength and courage and power and agency. I am intuitive and clever and kind. The universe loves me. And I can deploy all of that in service of our wellbeing! Including by letting my adult self be seen and loved and held safe by the right people. That feeling of comfort and happiness that you said I couldn't have because you can't have it? We can both have it, my darling.
But I also thought to myself: If one of us is furious at the sheer injustice of that, if she resents the idea that I can be happy when she can't? Or if she's afraid that I will abandon her for whoever it is I've fallen in love with, leaving her alone and desperate? Then she'll be undermining me every step of the way. She'll be pushing me to fall in love with people who are unavailable to me. She'll be directing my attention away from anyone who has the ability to show me consistent, healthy, loving care.
And she's me, so she can do this pretty effectively. As the last couple of decades attests.
Until she feels safe with me, she isn't going to let me find safety with anyone else.
More generally: until all parts of me trust me to see them and hold them and love them and treat them as though they really matter, they will not let me access all the power they can give me. Or, to put it more positively, the more I heal, the more unstoppably kickass I will become.
So yeah, last night was a trip. In the morning my sheets were soaked with sweat and I was exhausted, dizzy, sore, headachy and still running a fever. Then my period started, another pebble chucked in the already rippling pond.
These experiences are deeply weird (obviously) and there's such a lot I don't know. I don't know if I got sick because I had this work to do (as a friend put it, "altered states have to get in somehow, so if you don't take drugs..."), or if I was just able to do the work because I got sick. I don't know how much the healing that happened last night will free me from the patterns that have been keeping me from finding the connection I want. I don't know if 15 year old me trusts me to show up for her yet. I don't even know for sure what she will experience as betrayal - which actions of mine will feel to her like I'm choosing someone else at her expense. If there will come a time when I need to be firm with her and say, actually, you're okay now - I'm allowed to put my energy somewhere else. Or if that'll be a natural shift as she integrates into me.
My commitment to myself is that I will ask often, listen carefully, try my best, and apologise to myself when I get it wrong. In other words, to love myself like I love other people - arguably my theme for 2025. On we go.