Facing Reality: Leslie’s commentary
For years, even decades, I held a belief that the amount of love I gave to another, I would get the same amount in return. The jagged, nauseating pill I had to swallow was the reality that people could only show up relational to their emotional capacity. I fought reality long and hard with the strategy of hope. Hope that if I gave them the love, tools and security, then they’d not only be full of gratitude, but also become the person I’d idealized them to be. I was hoping for them to be different…to show up in the form I needed them to be. This was coming from my own co-dependence, i.e., from a place of need. Need and love live in two completely different spheres, for true love needs nothing.
When I got to this realization point on the path, my bipolar symptoms as well as my body’s tendency to freeze, began to dissipate. Here, I found a much more grounded and equanamous version of me. I no longer had access to the high of mania states, nor the ability to split off into fantasyland. I grieved the loss of those two coping mechanisms. But, it also relieved me of the deep depression states my nervous system dipped into in order to compensate for the mania and fantasy highs.
Interestingly enough, when those mental illnesses lifted, I became in closer relationship with my cPTSD symptoms. I see my (and clients) mental illnesses states as “lids” the ego creates to protect us from the immense sensational pain that is experienced in cPTSD. Only when we’ve done the capacity work can we be in direct relationship with cPTSD symptoms and sensations.
I tell clients, that doing the “inner work” is a long process. I personally view it as a life-long exploration. There has never been and never will be a quick mechanism that brings traumas to the surface and integrates them into wholeness. As Thomas Moore said, “ Being a friend to yourself is no mere metaphor of purely sentimental idea. It is the basis of all relationship, because it is a fundamental recognition of soul.” Befriending and somatically integrating the fragmented parts of our individual self is the foundation of collective consciousness.
This “wholeness” is what I feel nearly every human is psychologically seeking. The physiological counterpart would be equilibrium. Most of us, on the soul-level, are born whole, but our social norms have yet to match up with the needs of soul, so we frag Humanity is currently in the process of doing this calibration. This process might be better illustrated as an undoing: it first takes individual work in coming to terms with the blocks that keep us separate from our True Self. Then, when we have a large collective consciousness from doing the individual work, we’ll be able to lovingly release the structures that engender systemic trauma.