I want to talk about sobriety

Tomorrow morning at 8:45 am Phoenix gets his biopsy.  

I feel very edgy today, very not ok.  I’m trying to be ok with not being ok. 

I do this by practicing doing what I’ve been doing intensely for two years now: feel my feelings.   Once a month (sometimes more, sometimes less) I’ve been going to a woman named Heather who helps me feel what I feel instead of talk about what I feel.  She does this by working with my body. She will find a place in my body that hurts, whether through my skin and sinew or through my energetic body and then she will ask me what comes up.  

It’s backassward to ask the body, not the mind, what’s really going on.   Ask my mind and I’ve got a TON of theories, insights, quotations, book recommendations…you name it.  I am swollen with my own knowing.  But my body? My body is deflated and MUTE.  I was taught the body (especially a woman’s body) is deceitful, untrustworthy, a lesser thing than the mind.  The body is a dangerous feral animal and it needs to be tamed, preferably with the whip of shame because those lashes make the longest-lasting scars.

No one had ever directed me to my body as the seat of my own knowing. 

In fact, no one had taught me there was such a thing as “my knowing.”  And I was ok with that because looking back, I was afraid of the power and the responsibility of my own knowing.  It was easier to have knowing come from the outside. From the teachers and the pastors and the parents and mostly from the men; from the articulate or the powerful or the one with the amplified voice.  Knowing could be done for me and my job was to listen and obey.  That way, if it didn’t work out, I could blame those other people who were supposed to know, and if it did work out, I had heroes- people to look up to, to rely on to do the dirty work…I could rest in the ease of following the leader down the well-trod path.  So much easier than trusting my instinct, the faded footprints, and the faint light from a stranger a little farther ahead in the dark and muddy undergrowth. 

I did not start going to Heather as an empowered woman looking to unlock her own knowing.  I wasn’t there yet. At least not cognitively.  

I went to her because I had repetitive patterns that refused to break, no matter how much talk therapy I did, how many prayers I prayed, how many books I read.  A trusted friend kept telling me about her nervous system (which I’d never really thought about before) and what it meant to be in fight/flight/freeze (or all three at the same time which is called syndromic and which I’d also never heard of...and later found out, I am), and what it felt like when Heather helped my friend’s body regulate-how all the crazy clamping in her head would just relax its white-knuckled grip because of what her body was doing, not because she pried the fingers open using her mind to free her mind.  

I went to Heather and sat in her chair and launched in on talking about my problems, waiting for her to maybe be my next prophet guru and wreck me with her wisdom.  She listened for a few minutes and then simply said, “I don’t really need to know all this. Let’s get you on the table and see how you’re doing.” 

I was stunned into silence. 

I thought she would be impressed by how well I could verbalize my internal world, proof of all the work I’ve done and such.  

I laid on the table and she started moving her hands in the air around me, and then she went to my feet and asked me to find points on my feet and points behind my eyes, and once I had, to connect the foot point to the eye point with a vertical line on the left and right sides of my body.  I didn’t know if I had found the points but I guess I did because she said, “There. There it is, can you feel it?” No? I didn’t know what it was supposed to feel like. But I went with it.  

And then she slid a strong hand under my back and asked me to think about a time when I felt whole and happy.  The ocean. It’s always the ocean. I went to the ocean with my mind and Heather said, “There. Can you feel it?  Did you feel how your breath started slowing and your kidneys lowered?” No. I have never felt my kidneys in my life.  Then she said, “Your kidneys are so hiked up in your body they are preparing for danger. Do you ever feel safe?” And I started bawling.  

This is how a session with Heather typically goes.  She finds blocks in my body and as she works to remove them, all kinds of emotions come up and then as she helps me stay with being triggered and not flip out or have an anxiety attack, it turns out I can handle it.  I can move through it and come out the other side more resilient. I didn’t “know” I walk around feeling unsafe until Heather guided me into listening to the language of my body, and suddenly SO MUCH makes sense and I am sad and relieved and humiliated all at the same time because safe?  Safe is so basic.  How could that be what my body is trying to tell me?  

I have not been fluent in the language of my body because fluency is not just a result of expression; fluent means to flow freely.  It means when a thing comes up, you let it come instead of tamping it back down and moving on.    

Heather says it is the hardest work of our lives, to feel what we feel. 

To stay with it.  To let the feelings roll like waves through and through until they slow and then abate.   To not numb or press the eject button or drink or eat or exercise or not eat or justify or perform or check out.  

I have to agree.  Feeling my feelings is harder than anything I’ve ever done, including birthing my children. 

Birthing my children felt natural, instinct kicked in. Feeling my feelings (and I don’t mean getting emotional … I mean actually sitting with every sensation that comes up and letting it happen to you and take you where it wants to take you) feels like the most unnatural and God awful business around.  It means that when I feel a flush of anger roll through my body because my 13 year old just talked to me like I’m two and he’s the parent, I stay with the anger and I let it happen to me and I don’t offload it on my teenager by screaming at him to be more respectful. I let the anger come and turn me red in the face and make my stomach hurt and my neck tighten and I notice all these things because they are trying to tell me something if I can STAY WITH IT.     

This is why I want to talk about sobriety.  It’s not really a word I would apply to myself since it implies addiction.  But I AM an addict.

I’ve been addicted to not feeling my feelings my whole life.

I’ve gotten really good at finding a way out from the experience at hand.  I have a long-standing tendency to jump in an escape pod (historically a man) to fly me over the Bermuda Triangle of my bottomless feelings.  

The thing with the Bermuda Triangle is that you have to stay in it until it spits you out the funnel of the bottom into a new place....where you find out what you’re made of (like in Gulliver’s Travels).  It feels like endless nauseating cycles around the same black darkness-welcome to the journey-but if you catapult out before it spits you out, you miss the lesson and you miss the growth. 

About a month or so before Phoenix’s diagnosis, both Michael and I decided to get completely sober. 

This did not mean we were drinking or doing drugs every night of the week. For me, this meant a sense, usually right before dinner time or right after, that I could not handle the day any longer and I needed to release the pressure valve with something. I know this is completely socially acceptable. In fact in Fort Collins, home of 10,000 breweries, this is how life goes down. Drinking is one of the finer things in life.  

About a week before Phoenix’s diagnosis, I told my friend Toni that I thought I was pregnant and I almost wanted to be because then things would make more sense. Ever since I’d gotten completely sober, things about our life didn’t seem right and in some ways, being pregnant had always saved me from having to track the discomfort.  It had quelled the vertigo of futility and steadied me with purpose. I told her my body felt weird and my stomach felt weird and I knew that something needed to change but I wasn’t sure what.

I knew I needed to birth something but I couldn’t figure out what.

I’d been reading Women Who Run With The Wolves and I remember looking up from the pages of the book thinking, “I am tracking something.  I am on the trail of some kind of wild thing that is just out of reach and I need all my senses available and acutely aware for me to find the thing.”  I remember thinking the stakes were high and I could not afford to miss the scent. I imagined myself like a wild wolf sniffing the way. I wrote things in the margin of the book like “What is it I’m not seeing?  Help me see.” Things like, “something seismic is happening.”  

The night before Phoenix’s diagnosis, I dreamed I was sucking on bone marrow like you would suck out the poison from a snake bite; I kept sucking and spitting it into the earth, and it was making me sick.

I woke up with a stomachache. 

The month of sobriety got the addiction to numbing out of our systems. And so both Michael and I have been feeling this entire thing stone-cold sober.  I don’t sneak a flask into the hospital room or go outside for a smoke or get a bottle of wine on the way home from the hospital to have once we put the kids to bed. We don’t celebrate any good news with a craft cocktail.  Other than coffee and sugar (sugar is where it’s AT for numbing...still working on this one) I feel it all. 

I’m convinced my work with Heather is the main reason I’m not completely dissociated or running on sheer adrenalin right now. It’s why I can find gratitude and grace and even delight and also why I can go to the low places without the fear that I’ll never return.  I’m not stockpiling all the fear and pain and anger for a later date. I want it now. Give me every last lesson, every bit of my knowing unlocked.  

I will drain the dregs of this cup of suffering and I will ask for the strength to let the work work upon me.  

It’s funny because when I think about the other acute periods of suffering in my life, I wouldn’t have chosen sobriety but I was pregnant, so I had to.  I remember being annoyed at the baby inside me for foiling my plans for blissful annihilation. Now I see it like my babies conspiring with God to help me come back to myself.      

This is the first time I’ve made a conscious choice to leave all my receptors ON, like trembling tentacles with tendril fingers wrapping around every last pain point.  Nothing slips through without impact. As it should be. Phoenix has to feel at all.  

I can’t take his pain away, but I can pledge to feel mine.  

And I think this is the very essence of love.

Tip: For more on this idea, I recommend Pema Chodron’s book When Things Fall Apart.

Caveat: I do not recommend experimenting with feeling your feelings, especially the big ones, without a guide.  You might get lost in there. It could be OK for you to start with small things like, “Oh, I notice I’m getting so upset at the guy in front of me for driving so slowly.”  And then notice where you feel it in your body. Is it a tightening in your stomach or tension in the back of your neck, perhaps? Feel the sensations like a shape and breathe into them and stay with them, track them as they rise and fall without judging them; just observe, and then back off just a little to observe from a little further out; give the sensations some space and then watch as they calm down, like children who were throwing a tantrum to get your attention.  They just wanted to be seen. You let them come home and now they can calm down. Those sensations have integrated. But this work is much more tolerable with some kindred travelers and a guide. Not a prophet guru, but someone who turns you back to your own knowing.  

Update: I have had a few glasses of wine since mid-December and every time, I feel so aware of the cost. It messes with my head. I wake up in the middle of night stricken with shame and irrational fear.  I cannot afford to not feel and to not see. The stakes are too high. I’m not saying this is my new forever. I’m just trying to be honest about my right now.