In an Instant…Everything Changed

In an Instant - Everything Changed

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” - Frederick Nietzsche

I was 42. It was COVID. And I was more than anxious about the world and everything in it. All the tools and practices I'd worked so hard to put into place for years - through my psychology training, my own personal therapy, self-care, education, support, a therapy practice that was supporting me…and it all failed. And I began to feel like I was failing…or worse…losing my mind, my rooting to the earth, and maybe even dying. 

I had no idea what was happening to me, no one that had modeled this for me, no understanding in my therapy training. I tried as hard as I could to hold it all together, but I couldn't. So I decided to let it all fall apart. I decided. And let it. And it did… I had no idea, in that moment, how important that decision would be…

To the Pain!

In the beginning, letting everything fall apart was something I wanted to keep private. To keep inside me. But it just wouldn’t do. I was in one of the most difficult seasons professionally that was challenging me to my core, drawing up fear and shame and doubts about who I am, what I’m capable of, what I believe about anything and everything. It’s like the tethers that had bound me to the earth were coming undone and I was free falling in to the void. I thought to myself, Well now I’ve done it. I’ve thrown myself beyond the universe, beyond God, and all that exists. My identity that had always been so fused with what I do and who I relate to was cracking and shedding like a too tight skin. I pulled layer after layer from myself…Therapist…RIP! Scientist…RIP! Wife…RIP! Mother…RIP! Daughter…RIP! Friend, nerd, athlete, colleague…RIP! RIP! RIP! RIP! I kept thinking, if I keep removing layers, nothing will be left. I will have nothing. I will be nothing… I could literally scrape so much of me away that I’ll just transcend to the beyond right here, right now. The light in me went completely out. And I did not resurface for a year.

Dark Night of the Soul

Have you ever been in the country, really in the country? So far from city lights that you see so many stars it takes your breath away and scares you a little bit? I grew up in rural Alabama in farm country. There are places where I grew up that didn’t have streetlights or much outdoor lighting at all. When the moon is new, you can’t see your own hand in front of your face.

That’s how pitch black it felt. Falling in to the void like Alice down the rabbit hole, discarding every identity I had on the way down, until I didn’t have any identity at all.

I was just in the void.

It was the void that had its way with me. It was the first time in my life that I just let myself be. And in my being in the darkness of the abyss, I found that I could not stand to be there alone. So in another first, I reached to a few people in my life that were witnesses and close companions and let them in to my experience without controlling the narrative or trying to manage my image. I could see in their eyes their fear. I didn’t feel fear so much as initially terror, and then relief. There’s an eerie stillness in the void that’s peaceful. And I succumbed to it completely. I lost weight. My eyes turned black. My skin waxed pale and translucent. My voice turned inward. My ability to sense others muted. My inner world consumed me. It was a crucible of incredible fire and then nothingness.

And then when I thought that I may live in the void forever, a little spark lit inside me.

Hope.

I had lived through my worst fear - that if I disowned my attachments to my identity that I would be hollow or nothing or die.

I was very much still alive. I could feel my heart beat, my lungs breathing fresh air in and out and carrying oxygen to every cell of my being. I could see leaves on the trees blowing in the wind and found the intricate veins in the leaves fascinating and fresh to my eyes.

The ground that had been cracked desert dust and nothingness that I landed on was soft and muddy, watering me from the bottom up. Fresh life came for me from the bottom of the void. I could see it in my mind’s eye…the desert, dusty and barren everywhere I looked became the bottom of a well. My feet were soothed in cool water that comforted me and revived me at the right time. Living water.

I found myself ashore, crawling from the void on fertile ground. Breathing into new lungs, baby stepping my way back to my life.

My sacred witnesses helped me, reflected back to me what they’d seen and heard and experienced, which helped me take form as I AM. They trusted me to care for myself and listened deeply to me when I didn’t even yet know how to make sense of what was happening.

I stand now, one foot on solid ground, one foot in the sea. I faced my monsters, and though I found myself in the void, it did not kill me. It transformed me. It was alchemy.

The void is terrifying because it is complete unknown and surrender. It’s chaos. A friend of mine said that chaos is also the place of genesis. It’s where creation happens. The Big Bang. Spirit hovering over the waters in delight before the universe took form.

I needed to be taken apart so I could be recreated into something new. Order. Disorder. Reorder. Life. Death. Life. We live in spirals of creation, destruction, and recreation - over and over again.

This is what the Dark Night does. The Heroine’s Journey. The deep corrective emotional experience of letting go of what I was so that I could become who I am.

Since my Dark Night experience, as I’ve shared about it, I’ve found that many other people have experienced or are experiencing it, too. I know how alone and terrified I felt, how crazy it seemed and how few people understood. I don’t want anyone else to feel that way or think no one could ever understand. We do.

If you’re curious about what helped me during my time in the abyss, these books were ones that helped me through:

• The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock

• tiny beautiful things by Cheryl Strayed

• The Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

• Anatomy of the Spirit by Carolyn Myss

• Anything epic or archetypal like Joseph Campbell’s work, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings

• Poetry

I have some practices and other pieces that helped that I’d love to share as the story continues to unfold.

Wherever you find yourself on the journey, I send you hope and light and courage that you may face your own monsters and the void, be kind to yourself on your way through, have a fellowship that will sustain you in dark days, and trust that you will find your way home to yourself.

Secure Attachment is a Privilege

Secure Attachment is a Privilege.

Secure attachment is a privilege. We don’t get to decide which family we are born in to, which family system we belong to, which society we enter in to, which neighborhood, which religious and spiritual affiliations we inherit, the systems and powers that operate at every level of our being from before we are born, which is when our attachment systems are forged. Our cells, which exist in our grandmothers in part, become our being now. Our societies, our peace or war,  our hunger or satiation, our safety or threat all become the way in which we see our world and ourselves.

To try and heal our attachment systems on our own is to try and heal a systemic issue on an individual level, which we in Western civilization are trained to do. “Work harder” “Try harder” “Self-starter” are phrases that imply if you’re hurting, it’s on you to heal. And that is true - in the context of a much larger system. 

Jim Coan, neuroscientist and brain researcher at the University of Virginia states in his book Perception that to study a human being as an individual is to study a human being at a deficit. There is no such thing as an individual. There is only an individual in the context of that person’s relationships. D.D. Winnicott, Object Relations Psychologist and human attachment researcher says that “There is no such thing as a baby. There is only a baby and a nursing mother.” And Sue Johnson, world-renowned attachment theorist and researcher, creator of the APA’s gold standard for couples therapy says “Relational wounds heal in relationship.” and all wounds are really relational wounds per Judith Herman, PTSD researcher and author of Trauma and Recovery. 

To look at a person’s attachment strategy and to weigh and measure that person based on it is to judge a human being rather than the system that human being was raised in. If a person has an attachment strategy of anxiously pursuing by asking lots of questions, we should be able to see that this person grew up in a system where it wasn’t safe enough to trust that they would have what they need when they need it, and instead,, safety comes from pushing for information with urgency. Compassion comes from understanding the root of people’s issues, not from blaming them for those issues. A better question than what’s wrong with you is why does that behavior serve you?

Secure attachment is a privilege. If you hit the genetic, social, and societal lottery of safety, comfort, exploration, risk, and acceptance, you’ve got the privilege of a calm nervous system, accepting of self because you’ve experienced acceptance from your family, peers, society, etc, willing to risk and have courage because you’ve received comfort and encouragement whether you’ve succeeded or failed, able to overcome triggers because someone in your life helped you learn to regulate your emotions so you can self-regulate your emotions now. All that we see as moral high ground is nervous system privilege. Does this mean that we are stuck with what hands we were dealt? No. But it does mean we aren’t all at the same playing field and it does not cost us all the same thing to move toward attachment security. Nor are we all destined to have it.