On Integrating Feeling and Thought When Someone Does you Wrong

It seems to me that the balance point on this healing path is in the holding of what happened, what the abuser did, how you've been wronged, grieving, feeling, weeping on the sofa with tissues and yet not staying there in the land of Narc Victim-hood--not allowing your new sepulcher to seal you in as victim, forever.

This lesson seems to return again and again on my journey. Allow but don't over-indulge. Give space to feelings but don't allow feelings to banish thought. As I've crawled out of the web, through the fog, I've had some difficult situations, where the dark emotions and the feeling wronged bit seemed so intense as if in boa-constrictor mode, I wondered if they'd ever let up. The temptation has been to perpetually indulge in my own victim-hood. To be swept away into the current of self pity, woe-is-me and all sorts of rivers that lead me to plant myself and grow roots in Victim Land. And as important as it is for healing to visit Victim land, one has to be careful not to buy a house there.

And so, the work of integration means marrying the poles in myself. Truly feeling. Truly experiencing and acknowledging what I've been through. And yet also allowing myself to emerge from the cocoon as butterfly when the time is right. In looking back on the past 5 years, my perpetual work seems to be finding the voices whom can lend new perspectives on my landscapes of experience. Reframing destructive situations not to let someone off the hook or minimize their destructive actions, but rather for my own healing, so that I can move beyond the land of victim hood and back toward my own becoming and purpose, so that I can do at last what I came here for. It's been especially difficult to reframe said situations when I have felt wronged by others. The following words are helping me to continue to let go and get traction in this dark healing work.

For Someone Who Did You Wrong

Though its way is to strike
in a dumb rhythm,
stroke upon stroke,
as though the heart
were an anvil,
the hurt you sent
had a mind of its own.

Something in you knew
exactly how to shape it,
to hit the target,
slipping into the heart
through some wound-window
left open since childhood.

While it struck outside,
it burrowed inside,
made tunnels through
every ground of confidence.
For days, it would lie still
until a thought would start it.

Meanwhile, you forgot,
went on with things
and never even knew
how that perfect
shape of hurt
still continued to work.

Now a new kindness
seems to have entered time
and I can see how that hurt
has schooled my heart
in a compassion I would
otherwise have never learned.

Somehow now
I have begun to glimpse
the unexpected fruit
your dark gift had planted
and I thank you
for your unknown work.

-John O'Donohue   

lost in the Dark

"There is perhaps a moment in every life that something dark comes along. If we are not careful to recognize its life-damaging potential before it grips us, it can hold us for the rest of our lives. We can become addicted to that wound and use it forever as an identity card. We can turn that wound into sorrow and forsaken-ness, a prison of crippled identity." (John O'Donohue)

There is a tension presented here. On the one hand one has to fully feel and truly experience what happens when the darkness comes along, in order to heal. On the other hand we can linger in the dark without striking a match, without searching for a way out, without doing what we can to gain traction and heal.

And this is my daily battle. I struggle to do anything, everything to help myself out and heal and yet I know I must do the work. I've just never quite gotten the right tension with how much you do and how much you allow to happen and trust the path. In times past, when I've been in rhythm in life, my path seemed to find me of its own accord. I merely allowed it to happen.

But in this healing, I feel as though I'm spinning my wheels, going nowhere. I've made decisions in the face of the advising and my own gut speaking regarding said big choices. And somehow, even still, traction in healing and moving out of the dark seems to evade me.

I made the difficult choice to move away from my ex and my kids. And the colleague I had come to rely on as something akin to family and friend betrayed me a few weeks shy of my moving. In the face of my trusted advisers recommending I move all the same, I followed through with the trajectory. I left everything and everyone I've known for nigh on ten years. I hit the control, alt, delete button and started over.

And once again I stare at the bleak landscape of my life.

I know this nothingness is opportunity to reinvent myself, reinvent my life. The blank slate. I keep telling myself to conjure creativity and imagination. I keep kindling hope that some day things will be better. I keep putting one foot in front of the other in spite of my own impulse to just quit. Not, today, anyway. Tomorrow. You can always quit tomorrow. But I worry my identity has become crippled by the narcissist's wounding. I worry somehow I have lost my own story. I don't want him to be my story. I want to sing a song to the soul that can survive all even when it feels lost, wandering in the endless darkness and hope it finds its way.

But, instead, I just continue to feel lost.

On Imagination

An awakened imagination enables you to inherit the riches of yourself--heart and soul. It enables you to find some of the outlines of the shape of your destiny. And it certainly is the only force of the heart that will enable you to carve from the dark slabs of fate some beautiful sculptures of possibility and healing and reconciliation.

--John O'Donohue

A Morning Offering by John O'Donohue

I bless the night that nourished my heart

To set the ghosts of longing free

into the flow and figure of dream

That went to harvest from the dark

Bread for the hunger no one sees.

All that is eternal in me

Welcomes the wonder of this day,

The field of brightness it creates

Offering time for each thing

To arise and illuminate.

I place on the altar of dawn:

The quiet loyalty of breath,

The tent of thought where I shelter,

Waves of desire I am shore to

And all beauty drawn to the eye.

May my mind come alive today

To the invisible geography

That invites me to new frontiers,

To break the dead shell of yesterdays,

To risk being disturbed and changed.

May I have the courage today

To live the life that I would love,

To postpone my dream no longer

But do at last what I came here for

And waste my heart on fear no more. 

--John O'Donohue

For the Interim Time

When near the end of day, life has drained
Out of light, and it is too soon
For the mind of night to have darkened things,

No place looks like itself, loss of outline
Makes everything look strangely in-between,
Unsure of what has been, or what might come.

In this wan light, even trees seem groundless.
In a while it will be night, but nothing
Here seems TO believe the relief of dark.

You are in this time of the interim
Where everything seems withheld.

The path you took to get here has washed out;
The way forward is still concealed from you.

"The old is not old enough to have died away;,
The new is still too young to be born."

You cannot lay claim to anything;
In this place of dusk,
Your eyes are blurred;
And there is no mirror.

Everyone else has lost sight of your heart
And you can see nowhere to put your trust;
You know you have to make your own way through.

As far as you can, hold your confidence.
Do not allow your confusion to squander
This call which is loosening
Your roots in false ground,
That you might com free
From all you have outgrown.

What is being transfigured here is your mind,
And it is difficult and slow to become new.
The more faithfully you can endure here,
The more refined your heart will become
For your arrival in the new dawn.

                                                    -John O'Donohue

After a Destructive Encounter

Now that you have entered with an open heart
into a complex and fragile situation,
Hoping with patience and respect
To tread softly over sore ground in order
That somewhere beneath the raw estrangement
Some fresh spring of healing might be coaxed
To release the grace for a new journey
Beyond repetition and judgment,
And have achieved nothing of that,
But emerged helpless, and with added hurt...

Withdraw for a while into your own tranquility,
Loosen from your heart the new fester.
Free yourself of the wounded gaze
That is not yet able to see you.
Recognize your responsibility for the past.
Don't allow your sense of yourself to wilt.
Draw deep from your own dignity.
Temper your expectation to the other's limits,
And take your time carefully,
Learning that there is a time for everything
And for healing too,
But that now is not that time... yet.

--John O'Dononhue (Irish poet, philosopher)