Chronic inane tunes in the head. Squeezing the right thumb and snapping it. Jackhammer-braked inhaling. Arching four fingers, like yoga. Coughing psychosomatically – while entering a car in cold weather. Finger pad chewing. A single musical note sneaking in, to replace a breath. Palm gouging.
Before the
New Year I stopped all of my tics and stereotypies that have afflicted me for
decades. Without them, I’m left with the
pressure roar, the logjammed bloodstream of tension that they always assuaged
or distracted me from. Without the distraction,
I am looking at a world I’ve never seen: the non-me world, a world without
comfort, because distractions and tics always had my name on them, sickbed
lullabies. And because the tension was a
little boy’s handling of the world terribly poorly, and the world treating him
poorly, allowing him to be invisible, I am left sunk in my primary ineffectiveness
and the world’s predation. They want me
to fall into them, to scream out the agony of the child. But I can’t find the bullets and assassins
anymore, they are lost to memory, by repression. So I now sit feeling good about myself in a
nonviable twilight zone.
I believe
that my plight would be that of anyone who could quiet everything, all the
noise of self-medication, thought, intention. In this silence in which one sinks to first
cause is found the storm within the calm eye.
It’s the unresolved past, the un-begun past. In the silence is the chronic paradox of
being adult sobriety, maybe as thin as a membrane, calmly containing its inner
chaos. There is no real calm; there are
no real feet to stand on. Intention is
strong, but it’s a membrane – permeable.
Or it’s a soap bubble, that bursts.
This, I
think, is why it’s so hard to stop an addiction.
Great article! I am going to forward this to Dr. Taji Huang she will get a kick out of this.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate it. I've glanced at Dr. Huang's website, however, and noticed that she specializes in cognitive therapy. Many posts on my blog allude to, and some blatantly and maybe caustically name, my lack of appreciation for that ubiquitous mode. (My preference for feeling-centered, holistic, historic, "primal-related" approaches has, I believe, limited my readership to a select few.)
ReplyDeleteI should have added that the imbroglio with which I ended the short post is not one that I feel can be deeply helped by the cognitive (rational, logical, non-catastrophizing) method. Ultimately or theoretically, it would only be primal implosion into the original pains that could change the stuckness, creating an outlet for those pains and allowing some healing. Short of that, soberly facing and feeling the truth and the emotional truth: We are both incomplete child and incomplete adult bound together – along with a theme song of positivity and hope – will be the truest and mature path.
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