In my correspondences with women, coming to me seeking advice or understanding, there are certain patterns that emerge. Among the most common ones, if not the most common, or at least, the loudest, is the one in which they describe themselves as if they are experiencing life from behind the glass. They see it, they view it, they yearn for it, but yet, they cannot seem to access it. They fear, they hold back and they save themselves — for some hypothetical future when the times and conditions will be right. So they buy the dresses that they wear to no event or dinner, and lingerie that no lover ever sees or takes off. They share their fascinations with none and in spite of the sweet and pleasing surfaces, they confess to feeling internally cold. Their dreams reflect this — they are full of ice, snow, frozen and cold landscapes.
I will share a quote, which is actually a confession by a woman who worked with the psychoanalyst Marion Woodman (it is featured in the “Addiction to Perfection”). I am sharing this because I know many women will resonate with what is said and personal experience is always more powerful in these cases than simply theory:
“The whole structure of my life has depended on one premise. I have to please others. I am incapable of thinking in any other way. No matter how hard I work to recognize what my own feelings are, however conscientiously I try to hold onto the moment, I still fall into delayed reactions. Tomorrow or the next day I will know how I felt about the situation. Then it hits me like a bolt, sometimes anger, sometimes fear, sometimes joy but I can’t get hold of the feelings until after the moment which should be spontaneous has passed. I spend one hour of analysis digesting the real feelings from the session before. Then it is too late to act on them. In the actual situation I am paralyzed because part of me is trying to please the analyst and part is trying to drop into my own feelings.
I am incapable of interacting with people I love the most. In fact, that is the most difficult. When I return to my aloneness, I feel hungry and depleted because I cannot open myself to receive the emotional nourishment, and I have not given of myself, so on my deepest levels I feel unexpressed, unfulfilled and self-betrayed. The flow of energy between people who love each other is short-circuited to me. I burble, I hear others burbling, but I am afraid to open up my own core. I have no idea what might come out. Intellectually, I know that emotional and spiritual growth takes place in interaction, but I bury myself alive in a glass coffin sealed off from life. I am withering in there. My body becomes more rigid; my soul becomes more hungry. It is self-destruction because I know I will eat until I fall into unconsciousness.
It is all a replay of our family dinners occasions with the best possible food my mother could prepare and my father presiding over the toast. The table groaned with goodness and love. What mother has spent the day preparing, we were expected to eat. To refuse was to reject her. If I raised my voice to argue with my father, he said I didn’t know what I was saying and quietly told me what I did think. And once when I cried that it wasn't what I thought at all, my mother dismissed me from the table and said she wasn’t raising any crybaby.
There was a plaque on our dining room wall with an ethereal head of Christ looking into heaven and underneath it said: ‘Christ is the head of his house, the unseen guest at every meal.’ There was an unseen guest all right, I was certainly aware of his presence. It was the devil himself. If I didn’t eat what was offered physically, emotionally, mentally, I knew that he would materialize. He was a killer. I had no choice. I either swallowed what was crammed down my throat or I was killed. From the beginning, anything that came from my own little girl was mocked or silenced. The mess was there before I was born. My mother hated her pregnancy, hoped to God she’d have a boy, went through hours of agonized labor, was finally anesthetized and I was dragged into the world, leaving her internally damaged. No wonder she couldn’t cope with me. What she must have suffered trying to breast-feed me! And what I must have suffered trying to get the milk.And that’s the infantile pattern that keeps going on and I am forty bloody years old. Every time I try to receive I go through Hell. Outwardly it is the milk of human kindness overflowing from the bounteous breast, and I am the dutiful infant forced by my overflowing mother and my own hunger to feed. Inwardly I know I have to please Mommy and the only way to please Mommy is to kill myself. Drink her poison and say thank you. The unseen guest is always there, that’s for sure, telling me that everything I am is poison and that the only way I can survive is to drink what I am given, even if I know it is poison to me.
When I binge it is the infant tyrant gobbling up witch mother and the terrible irony is that’s exactly how I can best please her. Eat her poison and annihilate myself. When I starve, it is the infant rejecting witch mother. But the outcome is the same. Reject life and die. I am incapable of receiving into my own Being. I cannot trust the sweetness of the milk. I can’t receive communion. I take wafer but I do not receive it. Even springtime I see, but I do not feel how beautiful it is. I am in a death-trap, a constant contradiction. I want to survive. To survive I must please. To please, I must die, I, my feminine feelings, my sexuality, my needs, my desires. Instead of accepting, I escape. I live in my glass coffin ugly as it is and watch life pass me by.”
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