Transcript: Episode 2
2. Soulskin
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[Short piano piece is played, lasting about 20 seconds]
My therapist has been so helpful as I've grieved the loss of my previous therapist or Kellys, one from COVID and one from boundary issues when we lived in the same rural area and shared friends unintentionally. It was difficult losing a therapist because our worlds collided, and difficult losing friends when we realized we had invaded. All of those losses brought up other losses that felt like they would drown us. They were hard years. And that's what we sat with during the pandemic in quarantine, where we were even more isolated from people because of being safe for our daughter.
On top of that, the husband had to leave to go care for his parents, which is good and right and as it should be, but was another loss. He left on Valentine's Day and this weekend is our anniversary, which means he's been gone for eight months. And numbers here for COVID peaked again in July, so we have been under shelter in place orders since then, where he could not even come home for a visit. So eight months gone and three months not visiting has been a long time to be on our own with six children. Our foster has come and gone back to the hospital for his transplant, and that means that it's just us again, still alone in this world of quarantine, even though there is hope inside as they announced vaccinations for little ones will be coming soon. That's what we've been waiting on for 20 months now. Having been in quarantine before COVID ever happened as we prepared her for a surgery to reconstruct her airway. All of this is trauma, my therapist says.
But she has helped us grieve, and helped us untangle, and helped us get away. Not from quarantine, but from the intrusions of the big feelings and the getting sucked back in to how we wish things were, to how we thought things would unfold, to what we wanted to happen that didn't. Acceptance. You might call it a radical acceptance of our situation here in quarantine, of our situation with the loss of our Kelly, of our situation with these six children in our house on a hill in the country during quarantine. We are getting better at it, this acceptance.
I think that it's actually been good for us being stuck here without distractions or being able to flight away, without being able to run away, without being able to fill our days with busyness or work. We did lots of new things, and we try lots of new projects, and we did fun activities with the children, and we passed our days with homeschool and chickens and camping in our own yard. But we could not get away from what we were feeling. And there was no way to escape the painful emotion that threatened to drown us last year. We almost did not survive it. But we did. And that's where our healing began.
Learning to sit with our feelings and learning to tolerate our feelings is maybe one of the biggest pieces of progress that we have made in years, that we have made ever. For the first time we were the ones that were awake and not dissociating, not like before. We spoke truth and we felt the consequences of it. And we felt all of the feelings that bubbled up with it. It was unpleasant. It was difficult. It was hell. But we did it. And now we have muscles—I have muscles—that I never had before.
My therapist calls this seeing the gray. It's not just about black or white thinking, as they say. It's about both-and. It can be true that in my brain the neural pathways for bonding are stronger than any other. And so it's hard to let go of a previous Kelly. And it can also be true that waiting for someone to pay attention to me is not good for me. It can be true that my needs for care are valid, and it also be true that I don't have to seek out care where it's not coming. It can be true that I am a really good mother. And it also be true that sometimes I am tired or overstimulated or out of spoons or energy.
It takes ovaries to speak truth like this, even if they're small truths, to see what there is to see and know what there is to know, to feel what there is to feel and to do something about it, to respond to it, to respond to myself. I am happy that the husband is safe with his parents in a way that I never was with mine, and also, I don't understand it. I am happy he is doing the right thing and proud of him for caring for his parents, and also miss him while he's gone. I can want to do a good job with my work and also need breaks, or for people to be kind, or to ask for help.
It can be true that I don't know or remember what was so awful as a child. And it can be also true that parts of me do, that my body does. It can be valid that I don't want to know at all, and also valid that our memoir is now an outline of the pieces even if they're not in order yet, and even if we've not talked about it yet. That's another one. It can be true that we haven't processed yet what happened to us, and have never told anyone the details, and also true that now we've told the world. Sometimes it's just both-and.
It can be true that my therapist is good and helpful and kind, and has helped me grieve my previous Kelly and work through the entanglement of that and how it kept me prisoner inside myself, and also true that she's going on maternity leave. It can be true that she still cares and has a good plan for us, for me, and also true that I still need support even when she's gone.
We will have a second therapist for a season who can do some EMDR, carefully, considering both dissociation and trauma, both our relationship and the specificity with which I'm asking to work on a specific thing so that I can move on and move forward in my life, giving my brain the help that it needs.
If I think of my emerging self, it's as if the world has been a dark, dark place. And people tried to turn the lights on too bright, too fast. And now I have found a way to wear my sunglasses to make the light just right. That's what it's like when you have a good therapist. You can open your eyes again and see the world but still be protected. It's not too bright, and things appear softer, not as sharp, and not as bright. Enough light that I can see, but not so much that it burns me.
So in coming months, when I share about therapy or talk about my therapist or my Kelly, I'll just reference one, but I mean both. We also have the peer support of the Community. So for the first time we're not alone, even while feeling so alone. Which really is so ironic anyway, with six children in the house, and 100 knees on the inside. Not really 100. Just metaphorically speaking.
It's been a long time since we, since I, felt like therapy was going right, since I felt like therapy was going well. These baby steps are not just about safety for me, like knowing grounding skills or coping skills and all of those early stage therapy things. It's about feeling safe with my therapist, specifically. She doesn't push me, and we talk about it every week because she knows that's where we have trauma—therapy trauma—and that we can't heal relational trauma from the past until first we tend to this piece. So we check in about how I am feeling about her, and about what she is doing for me. And we're very clear about those things. She is very responsive to me, but I still ask for nothing. Part of that is because right now I don't know that we could tolerate anything going wrong if we did ask for something. Part of that is being a clinician and knowing how hard it can be when the hours get long, or sessions go over. Even when that's the right thing. And part of it's just fawning, being good to be safe, making sure they feel safe, so that I feel safe. I don't want to be a bad client because I don't want to be bad. I don't complain about the husband being gone because I don't want to be a bad spouse, because I don't want to be bad. I reassure him so that I am reassured. I reassure her so that I am reassured. But I do not ever ask for reassurance.
Something has shifted in me, something has changed in me with us, through all of this that we have been through the last two years. It does not undo our progress from the five years, before but it changes things. I am older somehow. And not just because of parts or alters that are little, and not just because of growing up, but in a kronish way of having sat in the ugly, of having endured the painful, and having stayed aware of it through the process. Maybe that is credit to our previous Kelly. To be safe enough to grieve. To be safe enough to stay for the grieving. And it has aged to me.
Our therapist, the one about to leave on maternity leave, has been very reassuring and very careful with us, very gentle and very safe, but also very direct. She has proven herself strong enough. She is sassy and wise. And we share the love for the same book. And so it's given us a safe framework without having to look at me directly.
When I described how I was feeling, she referenced my favorite book, Woman Who Run With the Wolves, that I mentioned last time, but specifically the Sealskin Soulskin chapter, which is about being away from yourself for too long. And I thought have I always been away from myself? How do I come home to myself? What happened in therapy that took me further away?
I got a new copy of the book, as I mentioned, and in that chapter I underlined the first line of that story where it said, “During a time that once was is now gone forever and we'll come back again soon.” I underlined it because that described for me what I had been feeling about therapy. Good Memory Time with that Kelly was gone. It once was, and I agree that it is now gone forever. There is no reclaiming it. It is not a space or a time I can return back to you. It is lost. It is gone. And it hurt my heart. But my own time will come back again soon. And part of my time coming back is realizing why grief hurts so much, because this was not the only grief I carry.
It says in the same paragraph, “Here words freeze in the open air and whole sentences must be broken from the speaker's lips, and thought at the fire so people can see what has been said.” That bit of poetry, that poetic prose, describes for me what it's like to be in therapy. To have tears carve chasms into my cheeks. To try to smile and be happy, but to feel trapped. To want human company and be connected, but not knowing or remembering how to notice those wise and wild and loving looks of care, but to be overcome by them. To feel a pain of loneliness and realizing that it is a feeling we have carried so long that being known and seen is not something we have felt before or have gotten to keep.
I turned the page and I read, “So beautiful where they that the man sat stunned in his boat, that the water lapping taking him closer and closer to the rock. He could hear the magnificent woman laughing, at least they seem to laugh. Or was it the water laughing at the edge of the rock?” That's basically how I see people in general. As if I am on the outside of it, as if I don't belong in the world, as if I'm not a part of the world. And despite all of our work over the last five years, it was only this morning that I learned that that's actually part of the dissociative experience. That that's what derealization means.
This story says, “the man was confused for he was so dazzled, but somehow the loneliness that had weighed on his chest like wet hide was lifted away, and almost without thinking he jumped up on the rock and stole one of the seal skins lying there.” This gave us words for the first time for what we had experienced in therapy, for what we had experienced before, with littles reaching out in ways we were not ready to reach out, with littles connecting in ways that made us uncomfortable. Because receiving care and receiving attention is the opposite of staying safe by being invisible, the opposite of playing dead or ceasing to exist. Being noticed and being known was too much. And when those warnings are confirmed by the taking away of that care, it was devastating. And then, as the story talks about how the seal dried out, and how the pelt of her soul was missing, I knew that the therapist was right and that this is what had happened to me. That I needed care, specific care, nourishment. I needed my own skin back if I was going to survive.
There's a powerful line in the middle of the story when the woman is trying to get her sealskin back. And she says to the man, “I want what I am made of returned to me.” This is a powerful line. I highlighted it and I underlined it, and I breathed it in because it is everything. It is not a time to dissociate. It is not a time to pretend it doesn't hurt. It is a time to say, “I want what I am made of returned to me.” I need my soul skin back.
I am made of parts, people, altars, pieces of me, all of me, that have been banished because we were wounded, that have been in hiding because it was not safe, that have gone undercover because they were hurt so deeply. But I could not exist without them. And I could not hide from that pain. And I sat with it. I sat in it. And they were dark, hard years. And Courtney said for us, she said out loud, “I want what I am made of returned to me.” And I was afraid, and I was overwhelmed, and I was mortified that we would be so bold, that we would speak out loud, that we would share the things that we shared on the podcast. And yet it was a both-and. Yes, it hurt so much. But it's also true that we needed to say so to make it stop, to gather ourselves together again, to be safe, to put ourselves together again, to move forward, to become something we had not been allowed to be. And so for the first time we said to someone, “this is how we feel when you treat us that way, and it's not okay.” And that counts for something.
And really the only reason we could do that was because of the work we had already done. So the work we had done in Memory Time, in that Kelly Time, was real and valid, even if our relationship with her did not turn out to be. We had to go into those emotions, down and down and down and still deeper down. “And this seal woman and her child breathe easily under the water, and they swam deep and strong till they entered the underwater cove of seals where all manner of creatures were dining and singing and dancing in speaking.” And that is what those years felt like, where we just kept going further and further under, deeper and deeper under, and yet the more we did so the more ourselves we became, the more I did so the more I felt, the more real I became. Because those feelings were mine, and for the first time they were being acknowledged by me, and with my new therapist, by her, witnessed by an other. That's what supported me and my return to functioning.
I know that if you've not read the story, it won't all make so much sense. But it was so significant to me, I need it recorded. I need to hear this again. That I matter. That all the pieces of me matter. That all the parts of me, that all of me, matter. That all of us matter. That together we are something, something that is not yet created, something that is still becoming, something that lives, something that has feelings, something that moves and breathes and has a being, something that lives—I live. I am still here, here in New Now Time, where we are in this house on a hill, where the children dance and play because they are fed and safe and happy. Where we recognize trauma responses for what they are and respond to them accordingly. Caring for ourselves, caring for myself, tending to me for what goes wrong.
I don't have the answers yet for what it looks like or for who I'm becoming. But I know it's not a secret anymore. It's not just not my secret. It's not a secret. It's not something I have to carry, any of it. It's not even my job to carry all of those things that they did. Maybe for the first time, I can put them down. I can let go. I can step back and look and say, “Oh, that's what that piece was that was so heavy.” And I can leave it behind without leaving me behind.
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