Down, down, down I swim, with arms as strong as I’ve been able to make them, pushing aside dark, body-sized lobes of tissue to reach my deepest understanding of the fundamental truth of how life works, and when I stretch my fingertips for the blackest essence, this is what I touch: She is going to be mad.
. . . . .
How tragically, miserably prosaic. I had expected to hear Cat Stevens singing, “Love is all.”
. . . . .
When living captive to rage, one is required to engage, so one tans the rind of one’s awareness to leather to shield against the natural instincts to fight, flee or freeze. Or to attack. Or to feel. Or to think.
One defends.
One lives acutely, electrically observant, intimately learning the captor’s facial expressions, body posture, arm and leg movements, choice of clothing, all for clues of how bad what’s to come – and it will inevitably come – will be. But wait. The captor’s being nice. Maybe it’s over? Maybe the captor does love one after all?
One learns the captor’s body and being better than one learns one’s own.
One becomes the most careful of researchers, changing one tiny variable in one’s self at a time, wishing and longing that maybe, maybe one has discovered the word or deed that will cause the tides to shift, the rage to ebb and the love to flow. One thinks (yearns) to have that power. One shapes one’s attention and bearing and speech and movement and attire, not through an inner discovery of one’s own gifts and values, but in relation to the captor. Day after day, one forms one’s self from data gathered from without, not from within.
Rage is sometimes on, sometimes off, sometimes overt, sometimes covert. One never knows if one will glimpse the Bowie knife first or feel the stiletto upon exit. Ultimately any sentence, any act, will be wrong. One will be knifed.
The double bind, the position of having no safe option, of having no self without the other, the captor, divides one in two. Even when given a choice, one can’t bear staying and one can’t bear leaving.
. . . . .
One is put in a double bind when one hears sentences or experiences actions that are conflicting and one negates the other. Anything one does in response is wrong. A classic double bind is “Do as I say, not as I do.” More subtle examples: “I love you unconditionally” and “You’d be pretty if you didn’t have such a big nose.” Or, as a small child, one is called to sit in a smoker’s lap, one is embraced, and the smoker says, “Ever seen a match burn twice?” and the smoker moves the hot match tip towards the child’s arm.
Dogs will avoid the parts of an experimental floor that deliver shocks. When the whole floor is electrified, the dogs struggle frantically. When they realize every response is hopeless, they just lie down.
Living with a person who offers up double binds breaks the heart. It can also break the mind.
. . . . .
A functional adult’s psychological job is to take new experiences and fit them into the self’s inner grid. Using inner awareness and outer observation, the person notes what’s happening or, if it happens too fast, examines it later, and either integrates and assimilates it into the inner grid or feels and thinks his or her way through transforming it – alone or with help – into something that does fit.
The trouble with living with double binds is that one learns one is trapped and therefore helpless and powerless to transform very much. One maneuvers and suffers and endures. If the self survives, it seethes with hidden rage.
In If 2007 Could Be Different, I wrote I had some challenging “new experiences.” In response to those new experiences most people would have been able to say, “Too bad,” slide them into the self’s grid cells on the outer edges of awareness, and move on. I could not. I won’t go into detail, but my heart and mind have taken hits from double binds for a long time. As an adult, if I feel trapped, I alternately thrash, rage, and drop to the floor sobbing helplessly, repeat.
I think I began drinking because I had no more capacity for double binds. I could not take one more in.
- I so wanted to have a child that when I was a teenager I bought little baby clothes decorated with tiny, orange ducks and put them in my hope chest. I am unable to conceive a child.
- My classroom is a sacred, holy place. I experienced violence in my classroom.
- My hometown is a sanctuary. A mass murder occurred in my hometown.
- I believe awareness is the way to bring in enlightenment and healing. Every time I turn my awareness to what happened, I feel I am trying to bring in sharp stars with knife edges.
- I drink too much. I cannot stop drinking.
- I cannot bear what is happening to my mind from drinking. I cannot bear my feelings and thoughts when I am not drinking.
- If I drink, I feel terrible. If I abstain, I feel terrible.
- You’re only as sick as your secrets. Keep this secret.
- I write to free myself from silence. I will be imprisoned by stigma if I write to break this silence.
I have been abstinent from alcohol for 20 months. That’s 600 days of choosing to live with the thrashing helplessness of double binds.
