"...bright, angry little fairy who lived in a secret garden and would allow no one in. [She] has used food, alcohol and various drugs compulsively - in amounts that bordered on excessive. But she was too smart to go over the edge, having a very practical streak and an IQ of over 135. In one dream she was wheeling a starving, angry infant through a banquet hall filled with food, but it wanted none of it.That's me! The part I've bolded, that last sentence, is exactly what I'm pretty sure happened to me, because I've tried to fill that gigantic void in the middle of me for so long now in so many ways.
We discovered that the baby was starved, in a greedy, desperate way, for love and attention."
But my body is more and more rejecting all substitutes, and forcing me to go out into the world and face my fears.
The scary thing is, having had no training whatsoever in healthy ways to deal with and express anger, I find myself raw and vulnerable, irritable and cranky, just like a baby. Everything has to be just so, and if it's not, I can lose it.
I think the anger comes from feeling that I was never allowed to have boundaries or borders - my mom could come and take what she needed from me (emotionally) whenever she wanted, and I was absolutely powerless to stop her (being an infant, and all, when it first started).
The pattern between us became so deeply ingrained that even now, with two years of almost total non-communication between us, I still have a very hard time setting limits of almost any kind with people, even complete strangers. I always give them the benefit of the doubt, always second-guess myself, feel guilty that I've been too stingy with my time or energy.
I think the anger, irritability and bursts of rage is the raw inner core of me trying to protect myself from this incessant energy drain: It sometimes feels the way I imagine a dog feels when it barks or growls at somebody who frightens it or it dislikes or wants to stay away from.
But we are so trained to 'be nice,' not to make waves, put on a happy face, etc. etc., that it's very difficult.
Tonight a guy at a convenience store asked me how I was, and I said, "Cranky and irritable." I get so sick of totally random strangers asking, "How are you?" when you know for a fact they couldn't care less. I mean, what if somebody's feeling totally miserable and suicidal? Isn't it a form of cruelty, of sadism, almost, to ask such a casual question when so many people truly are suffering or in some kind of physical or emotional pain?
I mean, would you ask a beggar, or a one-legged person, "How are you!" in this bright, cheery voice that practically dares the askee to give any other answer than a chippy, "Great!"
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Hypervigilance; Reich's theory about segments, especially the eye segment and association with anxiety and hypervigilance.
I've been working a lot on the armoring around my eyes for months now, and sometimes I feel it let go. I think it's come a long way in the last 10 years since I started worked on all the stuff in this Pandora's box of mine :-) Wonder how much further I have to go? I imagine certain aspects of it will always be present, and will always require a certain amount of - maintenance? - work, or something. It's like someone who learns a language as an adult never has quite the same fluency, freedom or comfort level as someone who learned the same language from the cradle on.
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A couple of interesting Reich links:
http://www.orgonomicscience.org/training/appearance.html
The Ocular segment [...] is always involved in processes of psychosis and disassociative disorders. [...] for example, in schizophrenia, there is a problem in eye tracking.... In orgonomy, that fact is regarded as a central issue. The fact that the eyes are not in contact with the world to the extent that they are in normal people, we think is a factor in being able to distinguish reality from unreality.http://www.philhine.org.uk/writings/ess_reich.html
What one learns when one investigates how eyes are armored is sometimes surprising. For example, one patient reports that when she looks into a mirror, what she sees is her body outline. Another patient reports that when he is in a painful confrontation, he has learned to endure that confrontation by focusing on one point on the other person's body and keeping his eyes fixed at that point. That way he is able to get through the confrontation. Another patient reports that she has no visual memory. When she looks at something and closes her eyes, she cannot remember what she has just seen. These are things that happen not only in psychotic people, but people who are walking around as if they are normal.
Reichian work differs from pranayama in that in doesn't try and impose a rhythm on the breath — instead; it just tries to loosen it, to allow it's natural function and depth to return. This can be really powerful — the first time I tried it, I couldn't conclude the session, I found myself overwhelmed by the intensity of feeling. With breathwork, moods can shift rapidly and I've frequently found myself completely exhilarated, laughing ecstatically or on the brink of tears. .I began working with the ocular segment by allowing myself to notice my peripheral and the area to the sides of my eyes. I think this is worthwhile as it's an area of the body we don't normally notice. I noticed that allowing this alongside becoming conscious of my peripheral vision brings up some odd indefinable sensations — hard to describe, a "deepening of feeling" is the best I can come up with. You start to see the connection here between the emotional tone of our gaze, perhaps we have habitual patterns of staring, or a gaze which flicks rapidly from thing to another. You begin to notice other qualities in the act of seeing. I've followed this with another Reichian therapeutic procedure which is, after some work with the breath, to have someone manipulate an object (such as a fingertip, a pencil or penlight) near the eyes in irregular patterns, while you try and track it with your eye — the random movement is supposed to loosen the armouring, the muscular stiffness around the eyes. I've found this to have very powerful effects. When this has really hit home something "clicks" between you and what you're looking at, and all of a sudden, you're flooded with emotion and bodily sensations, breathing deepens rapidly, and sobbing reaches right down into the chest.
Some other techniques of mobilising armouring in the segment would be to have a patient roll their eyes, and raise their brows, or make suspicious or angry or needful expressions, expressing as much as they can through the eyes. I've found it a useful meditation to study people's gaze as I go about my day to day business and see if the quality of their eyes tells me anything about their character.
More from Elaine Aron HSP book:
Like hungry chickens, when we cannot be fed what we need, we feed ourselves what we can find. [bold mine.]
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