Reflections from the raft trip

The John Day River is America's longest free-flowing river--no dams whatsoever. Its origin is in Eastern Oregon in the Strawberry Mountain Range. It drains 8,100 square miles of land, and it's source is mainly snow melt. So it's cold.

It was flowing high and swiftly. The section we ran is really more of a float than a run, with two class II rapids.

More on the particulars of the trip later, perhaps. I'm thinking about Scott right now, and the implications of his behavior on this trip for more aggressive rivers.

Late last year after his IEP meeting I made the decision to try medication with him. He's on the lowest dosage of a ritalin-type drug. And it has helped his self-control and focus; I would put him in the camp of children for whom ritalin is a benefit. I generally don't give him medication on weekends, and didn't think it would be necessary for this trip. In the last frantic minutes before departure I'd decided to bring it along as a just -in -case, but got distracted by something else and forgot to get it.

Gary was right--he could fit camping gear for 2 nights for 4 people (sans camping table) + 75# dog in an 8' x 13' raft, but it wasn't pretty. It wasn't roomy either, and there was a lot of slack time in a small space with two children who could care less about scenery, one of them with ADHD.

I could really see a marked difference in Scott without medication. He seemed much younger, even in speech tones--more like a 5 year-old than a nearly 8 yr-old. His self-control deteriorated markedly. This would cause behavior that inflamed Connor, who had just returned from a week-long outdoor school. That trip had been a disappointment, and he was bitterly disappointed by the prospect of another. He really seems to be a homebody type, and he'd looked forward to "band practice" with his friends for the school talent show in two weeks.

So, small confined space, lots of slack time, child with ADHD, and child with negatively predisposed attitude.

My cousin once sent me a link to Scott Noelle's website Enjoyparenting.com; the title explains it. I was impressed enough by the essay she called out that I got on his 'parenting thought-for-a-day' emailing list. His essays are generally short, but speak very much to the heart of things that are dear to mine.

A few days before we left he'd sent a thought about unconditionality which shed a whole different light on the subject. Frankly before reading his essay I'd considered the idea of 'unconditional love' as a kind of 'Should'--a bar to clear, a standard to reach. It was something I felt I failed at whenever I'd feel irritated at my children's behavior. I'd been under the impression that unconditional love means NOT being upset at some kind of immature behavior that causes me grief or extra work. Here is Noelle's definition that turned that belief around:

Unconditionality is a state of mind in which you are willing to allow well-being into your experience... NO MATTER WHAT

I suddenly realized that I had preconditions for my own sense of well-being that had been hiding in plain sight. Well-being was conditioned upon either the presence or absence of certain sensations within my body. Certain elements tell me whether or not my inner state is, say, irritable. Generally I called well-being absence of such elements. Therefore if I felt those sensations I believed I was unhappy. So I was entitled to be unhappy because the preconditions for unhappiness were being satisfied. Now I understand that those feelings, ANY feelings can be part of my soul's general condition--yet not a determinant of my well-being. That's what unconditionality means. I can be unhappy, angry, irritable, whatever, and still have well-being too. This is an amazing insight for me. I don't have to be unhappy because I'm unhappy!

And this muscle received a real work-out on the trip. I hope it gets stronger; right now it aches a bit. It did get me through many uncomfortable moments--knowing I could hate how I felt sometimes and still be ok.

I need to find a way to be a more effective mother of a child with ADHD. It is so easy to react to the behaviors on their surface apparency, and from within my own frame of reference. My own inner condition does not give rise to hyperactivity, and I assume that his inner condition is the same as mine. Therefore when he behaves the way he does, I think it must be perverse, because I experience in terms of my own inner universe. It occurs to me that perhaps within his frame of reference, his internal thresholds, he feels a much different kind of baseline. In his world, in his internal feeling environment, his behavior makes perfect sense. If I felt the same way in my world as he does in his, I would be behaving similarly. I'd probably have an extra engine fueling my behavior too, which is resentment from always being reprimanded and the focus of much negative feed-back from others. We all start our self-control marathons at zero, but children like him start saddled with a backpack full of bricks. They look just like us, so we can't understand the extra load they're under. Why can't they keep up?

This trip often took him far beyond his endurance. Even to an older child like Connor it seemed endless and boring, the long stretches it took to unload the boat to set up a camp, and then to break down and re-pack next morning.

On Sunday we pulled off the river to a BLM camp, just for a break. I wandered off to find some juniper thick enough to give me some, uh, privacy, and when I headed back toward the river Scott was howling as he was walking up the little trail. He'd wanted to stay down by the river and play; Gary had wanted to walk up to the camp. Scott can absolutely not be left alone on a river bank, especially with the level of impulsivity he was showing. I happened to be feeling generous and so said I'd go back down by the river with him. Where we'd beached the riverbed dropped steeply, so I suggested we walk over to a shallow little area with some willows and a shallow sub-channel. He could pick up mud and drop it to his heart's content and was quite happy there. Unbidden, he said that inside, he feels like he doesn't have "any control, and it scares me". I told him it is very powerful that he could tell the difference between knowing he is in control, and knowing when he isn't. I told him that my job is to find a way to be more patient. (And shortly thereafter became impatient with him when he found a little frog and could not stop picking it up--I was afraid it would get hurt, and to him it was irresistible.)

The delusion is that I require compliant behavior from him; when I don't get it I'm entitled to irritation. All the preconditions for irritation are met and none for well-being. I see that if his failure of self-control is the spoke in the wheel, my own failure of self-control and empathy is the empty space between. His failure is more obvious and so it's easy to lash out at him. It's easy to miss my co-failure.

We need to find ways to keep a family conversation going that doesn't single him out as peculiar (already Connor, in one of his own lapses of self-control, has used the fact of the ADHD against Scott), but promotes empathy and understanding.

He is not defiant. But the latency period between asking/requiring something of him and compliance is often much longer than I'm accustomed to. This could be life threatening on a raft trip. Immediate response is sometimes required in an unexpected situation. The urgent tone of voice that says: "Act-now!" that is usually sufficient to change someone's trajectory is not sufficient for Scott. At least when he's unmedicated. He was not in imminent physical danger on this trip--that's the nature of a leisurely float. Still, even seemingly benign circumstances can be deceiving. I realized this on a stretch where we'd allowed the boys to hang onto the perimeter rope on the raft and drift along beside it in the river. It was cold enough that they didn't do that for very long, and instead laid on the tubes with legs dangling. I saw willows ahead and realized this was shallow water and ordered them to pull their legs in. Connor complied immediately. I had to pull Scott into the boat. I realized how easily a leg trapped between rocks and boat could lever him over the side, to be ground under as the boat passed. It's a full loaded raft--and we would not be able to lift it off of him.

If a slow river was to be a trial before a more adventurous float, then we need another trial of a slow run with him medicated. If he is as slow to respond to verbal direction while medicated as he is without, then he just can't go on trickier runs.

Emergence

I dreamed the other night:

Some sort of commune—sort of like the old Columbia Park. People without much money, including me.

I have a daughter who has disappeared. A family has helped me—one reminds me of a woman, Courtney, at Scott’s school. She & her husband live close to the water supply where people fetch their water. My daughter disappeared long ago. One day I’m approached by a little girl who says she has something to tell me. I’m getting the water, talking with the man. So I ask the girl to wait. She begins to cry. I walk with the man and see that they live on the edges of a large park that I’d not known was there. Rather dry and sparse, but on a sort of hillside.

The girl turns out to be a daughter I lost, probably while getting water long ago. I hadn’t recognized her but now I do with joy. This man has something to do with it? Seems glad.

I had an image that Ego is like a shark: needs to keep swimming in order to survive. It needs to feel itself positively engaged, usually by pushing or pulling against something. And it's profoundly uneasy at stillness.

Self-accusation has been my method for "moving forward". It is my equivalent of pushing, or pulling against something. I've not realized in my soul that I can also rest on the surface of the water--I can spread myself over it and allow it to hold me up. This is the empty space between the spokes, the silence between the notes.

As Lori said in the comments of my last post, Ego has a positive intent--to protect me, to help me to get what I want.

She also sent me a link to a brief article by an author/parenting coach named Scott Noelle. He described a process by which a desire becomes a 'should'. This is because of the influence of 'dominator culture' which frames everything in terms of 'right' or 'wrong'. This is not necessarily a problem when 'shoulds' are in alignment with our own goals and values anyway. It becomes problematic because it robs us of our freedom of choice. We have left the realm of Choosing and entered the prison of Must (or Must Not). (Humankind seems susceptible to this culture, and unfortunately has the tendency to create one-upmanship--"I'm doing what I 'should' better than you"--which creates food, parenting, religion, breast-feeding nazis).

I'm reading one of Martha Beck's books, The Four Day Win (End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace). She explains how the traditional weight-reduction diet is doomed to fail because of the spiraling dynamic it sets up within a person. Prohibition ("should/should-not") creates desire/compulsion. A dictator is created, along with an insurgency. A lapse (which is inevitable) strengthens the prohibition (as well as shame and self-loathing), and the intensity of the rebellion. Many of us spend our lives this way, in parallel versions expanded beyond the theater of weight.

Exposing the role of accusation and trial in my life to the light of day seems to have unlocked the doors to allow her, the lost 'daughter', to emerge. How interesting that I didn't recognize her at first. She had been gone for so long, it seems, that I'd habituated to missing her, so I didn't even register her absence any more.

I wonder if her emergence has anything to do with having seen the lawyer on Friday; if the other insights were preparing the ground and seeing the lawyer was a sort of trigger?

Someone is trying to kill me

I had a dream. I was in a white-water kayak and I was on a river. The river was swift, but did not contain rapids, at least not on the stretch I was supposed to boat. I was out ahead of my friends and swept right past the take-out. In my pleasure I'd ignored it. And ahead was a bend in the river and the roaring sound and a hint of white that told me there were standing waves. The next thing I know I'm on the bank, in a woods, and I'm having a head-slapping moment: "Oh yeah. I didn't make a plan for transporting the boat and myself back upriver! How could I have missed that!" That feeling is sharpened by the realization that I am keeping waiting people I was supposed to meet at the take-out, now upstream of me. I return to the boat, trying to work my way upriver by using the eddies, or areas of slack current adjacent to the bank. I see that I am in the midst of downed timber, floating alongside me. I have a vague feeling of alarm, and I can hear the voice of an old boyfriend saying "I don't do anything around logs."

The dream reminded me of kayaking trips. My mind was flooded with an image of me, in a boat, people waiting downstream of a tricky rapid to negotiate, and me, paralyzed with fear. Me, terrified of that first moment of commitment, because I'm not at all certain I have the skill to thread that needle, not get turned sideways and breeched, the force of the water bending the boat and breaking my legs. Or pinned underwater, knowing I'm beyond help and that I will feel the water flood my lungs when I can no longer resist the imperative to inhale. Worse, I'm afraid that my own fear will cause me to seize up and therefore fail to make the hair-trigger decisions that are required to be effectively responsive.

Not that I was ever in a situation that was quite so dramatically desperate. I'm afraid my over-active imagination is biased toward worst-case scenarios (which has worsened since having kids).

Still, I thought I'd examine that moment of recoil, where I feel myself on the brink of something and draw back in horror. For a split second I feel a ghost of the actual experience, of what something would feel like in my body--the moment I launch, of terror, the moment of surrender, the moment of knowing that this is my last.

All that was based on a belief that I couldn't count on myself. That in a moment where a split-second decision was required I'd be unable to deliver. Fearing fear itself, and fearing the self who fears.

Basically, I believed that self was trying to kill me. And I suddenly realized that in a way my life has been based on this belief that left to its own devices, my self would ruin everything I cherish, cause me to make bad choices, could never be happy and would make endless demands that would drive whatever I wanted away from me.

I tried to outwit her. I tried to subvert her with positive affirmations, with censoring "negative" thoughts, of censoring desire thoughts. I blamed her for everything from relationships that went badly to picking the slow line at the grocery store.

So who was trying to kill whom?

I realized as I mulled this over that the paralyzing fear at the top of a rapid was not an effort of a subversive self to keep me from functioning optimally. It was as loud and clear a message as possible that I didn't have the skills I needed to negotiate that problem. Rather than trying to kill me, she was mutinying against what she must have perceived as me trying to kill her.

oh

Counseling Session with Sharon

Dream:

I dreamt last night that Gary and an old boyfriend were kind of interchangeable. They wanted to do things with someone: Charlie with Nancy, the woman he’d been involved in before me; Gary his mother. Maybe there was a bit of John D. in there too, with that woman he was interested in at a restaurant we used to go to. Scott needed something and Gary/Charlie wanted me to take care of him while they took out Nancy/Darlene. In this dream I wanted to go with them; I didn’t want them going somewhere with these women without me. And one of the men asked me why not? And I said, Because I’m jealous. And I realized in the dream there was a time I would have rather died of shame than say that. I would have self-censored it; I would have tried to keep daylight between me and it. I felt good in myself saying I was jealous. Not relieved, particularly, but the sense of integrity from telling the truth. I said, “I’m jealous” and I let it stand. I may have even thought about it a little more in the dream, comparing the term with my insides and checking its accuracy. ...After I’d told him I was jealous, I ate a blue m&m off the floor.

There was another part of the dream too where I’m out in my yard and there is an azalea plant. There was something I was expecting from it—maybe some pretty foliage or something. Instead, it was studded with buds and beginning to bloom—beautifully. It surprised me because it was not what I’d thought was the normal bloom time of an azalea. It seems it was blooming—what, later, or earlier than what’s usually expected. Maybe it was early, because I remember having an idea in the dream that it must be a plant that’s meant to provide winter color—and it was gorgeous. A prize and point of pride. I was proud that I had this plant and proud to show others this unique and beautiful thing, growing in my yard.

Sharon said that it seems kind of funny that we humans have developed this great big brain, ostensibly for thought, and then choose feelings, Feelings, as our guide. Yet, the brain developed so we humans could figure out how to live with each other, because we had to, for survival. Our brains are about ‘how to get along’ with other humans. For safety. It’s not about Truth.

That surely makes sense. I mean, it kind of explains my whole upbringing and the unspoken ideas I was supposed to absorb and implement. There were certain forms of ‘getting along’ that I was supposed to comply with. Necessary hypocrisies, like pretending deference to adults who were being unreasonable. Denial of self. What I’ve been coming up with in terms of ‘erasing’ myself fits in to that model of the brain developing as a means to figure out ‘getting along’. It makes sense that I would be considered the faulty one if someone stepped on my feet and I called their attention to it. I was not supposed to notice, and if I did, I was not supposed to let the offender know, meaning I wasn’t supposed to let the offender know I knew. I was supposed to protect the offender’s sense of everything being right in his/her world.

So, at least intellectually I can see that I am going against a Pattern of being with other people; this is counter not only to the way I was raised, but to something that’s almost genetic in humans. To go against, to not get along, to not fit in, with other humans, to say no to them, declare one’s own Self as distinct from the group—is dangerous. Witness Galileo.

I think I’ve spent a lifetime denying my Self my feelings—such as the jealousy I mentioned in the dream. Basically these feelings were assertions of myself; a demand that my needs and priorities come first. And I could not insist on that and back it up, because I was ashamed of feelings that supported that impulse. I’ve spent a lifetime beating them back.

Certainly ‘getting along with others’ is very different a goal than that of being True.

Something here reminds me of the military. The way that the men in a combat unit aren’t fighting for an ideal, at least not in the heat of battle. They’re fighting for each other. Something about that seems kind of horrible. It’s like that natural impulse of humans to care for each other is being exploited. That’s what the cutting edge looks like. To a military strategist the fighting troops are the cutting edge in achieving their goals. Taking a key piece of ground; denying the enemy some need. For a blade to be able to cut it needs to be sharp. The love of these men for each other is what sharpens the blade, so they can act as a cohesive unit. This seems very wrong. To the strategist it looks like lines on a map. On the ground it looks like men loving each other and trying to protect and help each other as they strive to advance that ‘line’ a little bit forward.

So I guess that one of the socializations that human beings have taught each succeeding generation is that getting along with each other is the key to survival. I suppose some of us learn it more forcefully than others. I see what Sharon means about the Conscious Mind and the Heart. Very different agendas, one toward getting along in the world; the other toward the Truth. Religion and the traditional socialization mechanisms would become very important here: church, respect for Authority. Perhaps these conventions functioned to protect the person with an erased self. If there are strict rules guarding, say, one’s sexuality, then the person who’s been taught to submit their will toward others isn’t as likely to be ‘persuaded’ by the demands of someone who hasn’t sublimated their own sense of self quite as much. The erased self then feels an entitlement, indeed an imperative to resist the Other's persuasions. And these imperatives have to be backed up by Something or else they’re meaningless. So God becomes helpful. Interesting to conceive of religion in the service of socialization, rather than seeking the Truth.

There are people who don’t seem to be ashamed of demanding their own way. There are others who permit them. There are people who aren’t at all ashamed to say no, and have none of the phobia about doing that.

Is it possible that this conflict between my inner truth with what I was taught about what it takes to ‘get along’ is the core of the pattern that has run my life?

I do find, in my reading back over what I’ve written, that there is some terror of not-belonging in the phobia about "No" (not being able to tolerate that moment afterward without struggling shamefully to fill it with apology, with promises, or reasons). There is also some kindness, too, motivating that. There is both.

I also see in my writings a lot of turmoil, and a desire to erase my own feelings. Feeling unentitled to ask anything for myself, let alone demand it. That’s because I couldn’t, not without all those parts of me that had had to go dormant, because they wore such an ugly mask if they surfaced. I see now they weren’t monsters at all. And, I see that they were what was sacrificed in my effort to ‘get along’, which was pretty highly valued in my family. And I see I blamed my feelings for 'telling' me the pain of being erased. I wanted to erase the pain, and I blamed myself for having it.

So, if mainly all the years of writing I’ve done is to get me to here, to "claiming my disowned parts" without shame or apology—to acknowledge their truth…do I have as much need to write? If a great deal of grief in my life has come from the dynamic of taking seriously doing whatever it took to get along, and I’m unwinding that, then what? Do I start to move past the fierce need for such solitude? Do I move past the need to write?

All my life, any situation that involved me asserting my preferences and priorities put me into a huge bind because I’d really come to believe that I shouldn’t. I was dependent on Others to grant them to me, but I couldn’t insist on it. So when it came to a conflict between “me” and “thee”, the default setting was for ‘me’ to accede. Anything different from that was just crippling with anxiety. And it certainly meant a leakage and hemorrhage at the interface, the microscopic interaction of personal boundaries. There was a permeability of boundaries there. To define mine was to state that my preferences in that area were more important than the Other’s. Sharon and I talked about my perplexity about where I really do end and begin in my interactions with others, if it’s true that everything that comes into me is filtered through…me. If I say I’m feeling something from another person, is it just my projections, or is it for real? If I feel a sense that someone wants something from me, does that mean that they do? Or is it me filtering all input through my history, selecting out certain elements to form a pattern that I then identify a certain way? Where if I was different, the same set of circumstances might find me selecting other elements out of the Ground and perceiving an entirely different pattern? Does this invalidate my feelings?

Guess I was well socialized.

I wrote this in January of 1982; 27 years ago. It’s an example of a dynamic of accusation I unearthed a couple years ago. To rise, to accomplish something, to do something new and different that required some courage—it loosed an avalanche of self-accusation in me, because it seemed that to rise beyond my family was to somehow accuse THEM. There was this hint, or ghost of that:

I realized a dilemma, earlier, thinking about writing to John and telling him the things I’m doing lately. And cringing because I feel I’m doing it from a smug, self-satisfied, bragging, conceited motive. A fear of stepping outside of my bounds by saying, “I’m important” (For who would do or talk about these things unless they would think these things are important, and they for doing them—I feel like I haven’t a right to say “I’m important.” And I don’t know—how to let myself say, “I’m important" without being uncomfortable—or feel like I’m pushing on other people. When I consider my accomplishments & imagine talking about them I see a picture of me getting bigger, spreading out, and impinging on people’s space. Shoving them aside. I feel I’m putting them down ...

OK, so there’s a concrete example of how that dynamic worked in my life. The thread of the pattern definitely weaves through here. I accused myself of self-aggrandizement, even in talking about the things I was learning and doing. Because there was a ghost of a feeling that I was accusing the people I was talking to, in daring to emerge from the usual, do something that distinguished me. Highlighted the ‘not-me’. Which seemed exceedingly disloyal; so disloyal I had to accuse myself. It’s kind of amazing I kept going.

Because, painful as this thing was, I was on the cusp of a brand new life; the start of an amazing life, actually, of adventure. And of seeing myself rise to its demands. Where I met some very important friends, some who I still have today. Who influenced who I married which gave me my children.

So, beauty came from this. As Sharon once said, years and years ago, “You’ve managed to carve out a good life for yourself.” So, despite the very hampering effects of the pattern, I was able to lead a life that gave me great pleasure and satisfaction.

And if the dream is any indication, my life is beginning to bloom.

What I've come up with

I spent the morning thinking about 'icky'. And, I think, in a nutshell, it boils down to this:

There are people in this world with whom I feel a strong need to keep my boundaries explicitly clear.

This can be interpreted as my thinking something is 'wrong' with them, the other people. In fact, in white-bread culture there's an implicit rule against highlighting boundaries: the implication is that it's impolite. That it implies something negative about the other. That it will hurt someone's feelings. That it is selfish. ...This is probably the dynamic that runs the widespread and fabled reticence of saying 'no' to a request, at least in white American culture. There's a sort of phobia to being anything other than 'nice'.

There's a difference between feeling a need to delineate boundaries and a criticism or accusation of another. But sometimes that distinction gets blurred and it's hard to tell one from the other. Certainly it's not occurred to me before to interpret that feeling inside in that way, instead: I need to make my boundaries absolutely clear became I-don't-like that-person/something's-wrong-with-that-person (which in turn became something's-wrong-with-me-for-feeling-that-way). I've interpreted it before in terms of the 'worth' of the Other. To see it instead as a need for distinction puts it in terms of mySelf. This feeling is a fact; I can't deny that I have this feeling. This is about a personal internal experience which has little to do with another's intrinsic worth.

It's interesting that in the same way distinctions between the need to clarify boundaries and the worth of another become blurred, I think it's the sense of an impending boundary breach that activates the need to clarify. Most other people I know don't activate the need, but occasionally someone enters my life who does. Traditionally I've second-guessed that need and thought if I wanted daylight between myself and another that it was because there was something about them I didn't like and there must be something wrong with me for feeling that way. Maybe it meant I was mean-spirited. And I'd be troubled when the feeling persisted.

In a way I owe this family gratitude. It was through my ruminations about the escalations of their requests that I got the 'Yes/No' insight, which was big. This latest insight...might be huge.