A beautiful integration
My therapist, who I’ll call KL, is magical. She is what I would consider a healer, in all scientific, mystical, and spiritual senses of the word. She’s not your typical psychoanalytic therapist, which is exactly why I love her. She focuses on somatics, which means she helps her clients connect to (and explore) their emotions in their bodies, not only their heads. For someone like me who already spends too much time ruminating and obsessing and questioning every minute detail in her overfunctioning brain, having a safe space, and a trusted guide, to help me actually FEEL things is a gift beyond anything I can describe.
I’ve been wrestling with a lot of self-doubt over the last few weeks. It’s a state that I’m more familiar with than I’d like to be, and yet every time, even though I know I’ve been there before, it still sucks me in with the force of a hurricane. I know what supplies I need, and I know what practices are helpful to lessen the impact of the storm. But the self-doubt is paralyzing, and all I can do is stand there, frozen, holding my breath as it tears me apart.
I came to last week’s session in a particularly tattered, heavy place. I was prepared to explore it, though—I had worked through some of the prompts KL gave me the week before, trying to help me feel into my feelings of loss, and confusion, and desire, and too-muchness, and also, not-enoughness. The prompts were simple on the surface: try to identify the different parts of myself who feel at odds with each other right now. Who are they? What do they look like? How do they feel? What do they believe? What do they need? Where do they live in my body?
Two distinct parts came to the surface relatively easily: Picket Fence Amy and Primal Amy. Clear opposing forces, although neither as straightforward as to be able to label them “bad vs. good,” or “right vs. wrong.” Even when I feel like I know nothing at all, I still know that nothing is that binary.
This is how they came to life in my journal.
Picket Fence Amy:
She’s messy, but she’s a model of what she thinks is virtuous. She tries to live by her values. She has high moral and ethical standards. She wants to be good to the people she loves and respects, and will fiercely stand up for them when someone else does them wrong.
She’s a rule-follower and a people pleaser. After feeling like so much of an outsider for most of her childhood, belonging and acceptance is so important. Even though on the surface, she’s more comfortable with and confident in herself than ever before, she still looks for external validation, and wishes she didn’t, because there’s a part of her that still doesn’t believe she deserves it. Still, she longs to feel special, appreciated, noticed. The shy, insecure kid may only be twenty-percent of her now, but sometimes she still shows up as the loudest.
She does all the right things: college, career, marriage, house, kids. She accomplishes more earlier, or faster, than other people, and both likes and hates being asked, “how do you do it all?” The recognition feels like sunlight, but the answer to that question is never true, because she feels like she has no choice BUT to do it all. This is the only way she knows how to be, because it’s the only way that’s “worked” to make her feel noticed and accepted.
She still mostly sees herself through other people’s eyes—judges herself based on what they think matters. But, she can also hold a hard line when those other people operate outside of what she believes is right, good, or true. There’s a boundary she won’t cross, and will actively defend, even at the expense of not being liked. Holding this line usually takes all of her courage, and she often feels a sense of loss afterward. That she’s disappointed others in the process of not disappointing herself. In the long run, though, she knows that holding the line is one of the only things that keeps her from completely breaking in the wind.
Primal Amy:
This is the Amy who wants to get out of her head and only live in her body. Maybe it feels a little bit like an escape route? But that escape also feels like pleasure. She’s tired of playing things safe, meeting other people’s expectations — even meeting her own. She’s greedier, and hungrier, and selfish. She looks around and appreciates everything she is and has, but still can’t help but wonder what else she’s missing.
When she’s able to drop into a deep, long, meditation, it feels like bliss. Like a soulful, deep-down-in-every-cell-level satisfaction. She knows she should make time to do that more often. But meditation can also bring out her sensual, luscious, erotic side, and Picket Fence Amy prefers to keep that part repressed. She scares her, because she is pure curiosity, and wanting, and touch, and sensation. She’s present and impulsive. She believes that fantasy is just as valuable as reality. She wants to be recognized, allowed to come out and play. But just like Picket Fence Amy, she’s afraid of what other people will think if she’s given the space to come to the surface. She’s been poking her head up more lately, still in the confines of her planned and externally-viewed life, fumbling to feel the edges of where she thinks it’s safe to be seen. Those tiny moments of sunlight only make her desire stronger. She’s contemplating breaking all the rules (whose rules are they?), the moral codes, the norms, because the desire to feel more and try more is so overpowering. She recognizes that she has the potential to be reckless, even when she knows the consequences. And that scares her immensely, but it also feels more alive than anything she’s experienced before.
Primal Amy thinks about her sexuality often. But Picket Fence Amy is ashamed of her, and holds her back from exploring what else is out there. It’s a continual tug-of-war, and Picket Fence Amy usually has the upper hand.
As I shared the Cliffs Notes versions of my two opposing selves with KL when we met, the space that she held for the enormity of both of these beings was lke being wrapped in the arms of the ocean. I dropped into a meditation so deep that I didn’t even know I was in it, until KL asked, “which one of those Amys is present for you right now?”
I searched and searched, but what I found was neither.
There was a third Amy I just hadn’t met yet. And she brought me to tears.
After our session, I tried to capture her essence, again in my journal.
Spacious / Clear / Becoming Amy
Something new came out today. This Amy was observing and noting, but with a beautiful sense of compassionate detachment. She was neither of my other extremes. She knew the truth: that none of it was true to begin with.
She was soft, airy, fluid.
She did not need to do anything. To think anything.
She allowed all of the pent-up emotion to release, to flood out.
She is stillness. Ease. Whole. Pure. Full.
She doesn’t take anything she feels personally, but also doesn’t stay in places that don’t welcome all of who she is.
She is a manifestation of love and light, towards herself and towards others.
She is soft-spoken, but clear and commanding.
She trusts herself.
She watches emotions like clouds. Sometimes they thunder with rage, and sometimes they glide like pillows.
She is my most-connected self, connected to my body and spirit and truth.
I like her, and want to nurture her, the most.
In a very strange, paradoxical way, I feel like this third self is both an integration and reconciliation of my other two identities, and a completely separate being all her own. She’s stayed with me for these last five days, and I have found so much curiosity, and peace, and self-acceptance, and joy in getting to know her.
She even allowed me to see some self-defeating patterns I was replaying in my life, and I trusted myself enough to let them go.
For the moment, anyway, I feel physically and spiritually lighter. I’ve been enjoying this newly discovered clarity…or maybe it’s not that the clarity is actually new, it’s just that I’m able to access it now in a way that I wasn’t before.
Despite all of this beauty, though, there’s one part that still scares me:
I know I won’t stay in this place forever.
Everything is impermanent, whether we want it to be or not.
Whether it’s pain or pleasure. Darkness or light.
Maybe that’s the real work of integration: knowing that I’m going to have to do all of this over, and over, and over again. Trying not to lose everything I learn with each new cycle, so that every repetition is actually moving me forward in an upward flow. Holding onto the trust I feel in myself right now, even when Picket Fence Amy and Primal Amy are telling me otherwise.
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My three words for this coming year are Wonder, Clarity, and Wisdom.
May they be so for all three of my parts, and for the good of all beings who are walking their own paths of integration, too.