1-2-3-4-5-6...
...and on until I catch myself and stop counting. It is a compulsion that I have, and it only surfaces when I'm swallowing liquids. I count the gulps. It only lasts a few beats, but, for some odd reason which perhaps I'll discover here, I do nothing to fight the compulsion. When I do catch myself and stop, it is most often with a chuckle, as in, "It's amazing how this habit got rooted so deeply in me."
Luckily, I know how it took root. It was (seemingly) indelibly imprinted on me around the time I was six years old. That was an even tougher year than the ones preceding it. From the time I was about four and a half until six, I found it almost impossible to keep food down, and promptly vomited after each meal. When I was finally weaned from this behavior, it was done by filling a book with columns of little sticky stars; one for each meal, and, at first, another for each hour I was able to keep my meal down. So many stars in a row and I'd get a toy. It was then that I began counting the number of swallows that I kept down. Apparently, the compulsive counting of food swallows has faded away over 45 years, but this is not so with liquids.
My relationship with food was a reflection of a number of things. One was being witness to meal after meal being prepared by my mother. At the time she was bitterly disappointed by life, in seething rages much of the time, and, while cooking, would be expressing her pain incessantly and aloud. It was all coming in to me. Being rather sensitive, I would absorb the anger that came through her whenever I was around her, but during those meal prep times while I was in the kitchen doing my homework, I could sense that the food I would be eating absorbed it as well.
Paradoxically, the impulse to vomit provided me a dependable source of comfort, also. I would usually go right to the kitchen sink after eating, or the bathroom if I could make it, and while I vomited, my mother would come to my side and put her hand on my shoulder to comfort me. She was touch-phobic, and in years of scanning my memories to find evidence to the contrary, I've come to the conclusion that that was the only way I could get her to touch or physically comfort me.
At around six years old, another thing had begun to happen. Though my mother was not physically abusive with me, outside of the occasional swat on the ass, in second grade I started getting beatings in school by a twisted nun, who, as it turned out, was only one of many twisted nuns to follow. 1957 was the year when IQ tests became the rage in Brooklyn, and I had the misfortune of scoring third highest in the Catholic school I was attending. I would imagine, living in the home I lived in, I didn't pick up too much of a desire to excel at anything, for the majority of my energy was being spent in surviving. The nuns felt they had the right, if not obligation, to beat the "laziness" out of me.
Basically, I was quite the wreck. My mother carted me from doctor to doctor to find out what was wrong with me. She was on an incessant quest to correct the things wrong with my being. This was a significant part of my early years, and I, literally, carry the scars with me.
One of my "problems" was that I had flat feet. Mother dragged me from doctor to chiropodist to podiatrist seeking a way to correct me. They all said either it was no big deal or that what would need to be done was so extreme that it wouldn't be worth it. Undaunted, she kept her eyes open. There, in a shoe store on Avenue D, she found a little old German shoe salesman, who, I would imagine, had been a cobbler in the Old Country. Charlie knew just what to do. He began selling my mother shoes for me that were about one and a half sizes too small, and then, he inserted "cookies"--compact foam pads of increasing thickness--under my arches. My feet were bound in that way for a good (good?) two years. I don't remember the pain, but, to this day, left with arches high off the ground, I feel out of balance in my walking.
At the same time, though, some very important things happened to me that gave me the foundation upon which I could build a life. My first year of Catholic grammar school, which I started when I was five, introduced me to choir, and my voice. In that choir, led by Sister Cor Marie, who I hold close to my heart to this day, I found my direct connection to Spirit. Through her patience with my total disregard for Latin, and support of what I could move through me, I was able to transcend my experience of "God's representatives on earth" and find a vibrant, loving force that would always, and in all ways, be present for me. And then, there was Dorothy Powell. She was our big, black maid who came on Thursdays and got on her hands and knees and scrubbed our floors, and did all the dirty work my mother didn't choose to do. Dorothy was round and soft and smelled like ammonia and loved me like no one I ever knew. She held that space for little white children all over the five boroughs. I met a few in subsequent years, and I'll lay money that through her, they got the touch and love that just didn't exist in their households. Wherever you are Dorothy, thank you for teaching me what unconditional love feels like.
I have to pause here, for a moment...
It wasn't until writing this that I realized the vitality I find in my fatness; how I seem most equipped to love and hold and transmit security when I'm fat. Or, perhaps, how easily it comes when I embody my role model. Funny, all this time I just assumed it was about protecting myself from the sting and slap of the pointer on my hip.
There's a whole litany of psychological, emotional, physical, sexual, and Spiritual abuse in my childhood that occurred before I was ten years old. There were also very deep understandings gained that spoke of a Spirit that can guide, protect, teach, and support. I have been sorting out the aftermath of it all, ever since. As is evident right now, I think it's fair to say I'll be doing so until my life is over.
The end product, as loath as I am to admit it, is that I understand pain. I can recognize it and identify it, even put a name to it, in the same way that the Eskimo has a word for every different type of snow. Pain was my companion, and my whole life was, and continues to be I suppose, a sacred dance with it. Whereas it was, at first, my jailer, today it is my friend, for through exploring its many facets and turning that knowledge into tools of action that are valuable in helping others, I have learned to change shit into diamonds.
Through working with myself and many, many others, I have come to find a theory that helps me to better come to terms with how pain shapes our lives.
Developmentally, in broad strokes, the first ten or so years of our lives are spent trying to "size up," get a sense of what the world is that we have been born in to. Not only are we trying out our "earth suits," which, if you've ever watched an infant getting used to being in the confines of skin, you'll understand, but we are coming to terms with the nature of the world around us. What is this world, and who are we in it?
They say that the "power of reason" takes root some time around our tenth year, when we begin to fully realize that we are a separate entity and that the actions we take have consequences. We appear to not know this very well intellectually before this time. Whatever impressions we get of the consequences of our actions (translated as being completely ourselves) gets imbedded more viscerally, either physically or energetically.
It is at this point of burgeoning self-awareness and consciousness that we make a few decisions, and those decision are, "This is what the world is. This is what my life is. This is how things go." This filter, or mode of interpretation, persists throughout our lives.
For children who grow up in a largely safe and supportive environment, the most important understanding that expresses itself throughout the rest of their lives is that the world is, at least, something flexible upon which they can have an effect. They are more akin to growing up with the tree's innate awareness that bending with, rather than fighting against, assures longevity.
For those of us who have been more traumatized, however, that understanding is considerably different. Years of self-help related work has shown me that the biggest stumbling blocks of my life fall into the category of my having embraced the view that the world I knew as a six year old--a world full of fear, self-protection, solitude, distrust, and chaos--IS the world. Period. Today, as I work with others--and continue to work with myself--I see the biggest challenge is in working with what IS, rather than responding to what WAS.
The reason for this being such a difficult thing to shake is that, at the time, our very survival depended upon our working with that world as we knew it. There was no other world. If you took the chance to gamble on there being a different type of world, chances are, at the age of six or so, you would be violently thrust right back into the world as you thought it was. A continuous cycle of reinforcement ensues. Once the outward circumstances change, as in getting old enough to move out of the abusive situation, there is a tendency to seek out that which you know so well. The impression of that world got in largely non-verbally and viscerally, and the rate of recovery is proportional to the amount of time that we spend in that other, more safe and supportive world.
The glitch here is the innate desire to duplicate the familiar. There is not a one of us who has not been able to find a shred of security within the context of the traumatic worlds that we have been born into. Even what others would describe as horrors are often interpreted as sources of love. In my case, for example, for years I pursued relationships most adamantly where I sensed I would not get my touch needs met. The energy of my mother, as painful as it was, was what I understood as love. There was no other. There IS no other, until I learn, by repeated exposure, that there is. And that takes time.
Oddly enough, this is of great comfort to me. Now, I know what I'm working with--both in myself and in others.
Russ Reina (Firetender) lives at LVEC, is available for counseling, and teaches a workshop called "The HeART of Healing," which uses acting and improvisation games to build the muscles of choice that contribute to intuition. "I am amazed," he says, "at how the work never ends, and how the benefits of doing it are so immense."
©2003 Talking Leaves
Summer 2003
Volume 13, Number 2
Community With All Life