Tonight's Bulletin

You're lack of organization does not constitute my emergency.

The Puer

 

Puer aeternus is Latin for eternal boy, used in mythology to designate a child-god who is forever young; psychologically it is an older man whose emotional life has remained at an adolescent level. The puer typically leads a provisional life, due to the fear of being caught in a situation from which it might not be possible to escape. He covets independence and freedom, chafes at boundaries and limits, and tends to find any restriction intolerable.

The Peter Pan Syndrome (PPS) describes men, who are childlike in their relationships, their ability to handle responsibilities, and their pursuit of pleasure. “He’s a man because of his age; a child because of his acts. The man wants your love, the child your pity. The man yearns to be close, the child is afraid to be touched. If you look past his pride, you’ll see his vulnerability. If you defy his boldness, you’ll feel his fear”

Victims of PPS appear to be emotionally stunted at an adolescent level. Their impulses take priority over any internalized sense of right and wrong. They cope with their problems by engaging in a great deal of primitive denial, e.g. “If I don’t think about it, the problem will disappear. They excel at blaming others for their shortcomings, and are often extremely sensitive to rejection from others. The PPS sufferer desperately needs to belong, as he feels very, very lonely. There seems to be an immense vacuum in his life unless he is around people, preferably the center of attention.

Emotions are the most difficult areas for a PPS client. “Older victims say they love or care for you, but can’t seem to remember to express their love. Ironically, although they started out as extremely sensitive children, these men often appear to be self-centered to the point of cruelty). At times they appear warm and caring; however, these sentiments can be rapidly replaced with cold indifference, a change that greatly confuses the women with whom they are involved. Dr. Kiley refers to the emotional numbness of the PPS sufferer, stating that they have lost touch with their emotions and simply do not know what they feel.

The typical PPS victim experienced a great deal of permissiveness in his upbringing. This led to a lack of self-discipline, demonstrated by laziness and irresponsibility, along with the inability to learn how to control their emotions. “They do not know the basics of protecting themselves from life’s disappointments. As a result, their feelings get hurt easily” Since they don’t know how to protect their feelings from getting hurt, the PPS client has learned to withdraw from emotional areas. They avoid feelings, manifesting an “I don’t care” attitude.

Because of problems stemming back to disturbed relationships with their mother, PPS victims have a great deal of difficulty relating to women. They strive to prove their male potency, manifesting it in “macho” and chauvinistic talk and attitudes. They often will collect notches on their bedposts, having sexual intercourse with any and every available woman. They feel potent because of their power to seduce women with their superficially good social manners, which includes an ability to put out an almost irresistible line of romantic blarney. One PPS sufferer I know in his early 40’s stated that he would like to go back and apologize to the first ten women he had had sex with and give them another sample, as his sexual prowess had improved so much with time and countless experiences.

The PPS client has a long and repeated history of taking his lovers for granted. He feels that the love of a mate should be like the love of a mother – unconditionally positive. A wife or lover, in his eyes, is never supposed to expect more of him than he chooses to give at the time he chooses to give it. “He doesn’t understand that adult love is conditional, it involves give and take. Rather he is the taker and his wife or lover is the giver. If a woman challenges this inequity, she is seen as a bitch who doesn’t know how good she has it” (p). He is very concerned about the opinions of others, especially males, and will run out to do a good deed for others without even telling his mate where he is going. He seems to rescue everyone else but usually stands motionless when his mate needs help.

When reality is pushed upon him hard enough so the emotional insulation or denial is broken through, the PPS sufferer will often call upon rage to intimidate whoever is pushing reality upon him. This anger keeps people away from the PPS sufferer’s fragile self-esteem. Unfortunately, it also keeps love, concern, and warmth away. “Rage is the wall that keeps the PPS victim isolated from close contact with others”

The word philanthropy means love of humankind...

http://youtu.be/cHKPDV1VYJs

Notes From Dixie St John's 'Nightlight In The Hallway' Workshop

 

Night Light In The Hallway: Getting Through Grief And Transition

Dixie St John

There are two kinds of endings. Both are a form of death that stimulate growth.

• Pro Active Endings which are like prunings that are Self or Universe initiated, and
• Cyclical, Natural Endings like leaves falling, which include life cycle endings, empty nest syndromes, etc

Although any true growth requires that we first release ,we live in a change focused, transition and endings ignoring society that denies that endings are necessary. Our collective mindset is all about INCREASING. We add numbers of Facebook friends, clients, and even shoes.

In our culture we have a bias against comprehensive grief process. People tell us not to cry over spilt milk, that the past is the past, to get over it, and to move on. Our culture tends to approach life losses ion one of two ways, 1.) to simply deny or avoids endings and / or 2.) to label them as pathological.

Transition, the process of ending an old way of being, takes time and unlike depression, is a very active process. But to avoid the discomfort of the endings, we tend to rebound not just with other relationships but with other ideas and never quite complete the process.

The stages that mark the ending process are what you allow and experience not what you do. Disenchantment asks the question “How can I?” Realizing one's world is no longer real and that life no longer seems reasonable we ask “How can I believe this anymore? How can I go on this same way” There's a loss and then on top of that loss, a loss of innocence.

If we don't allow ourselves time to experience disenchantment and to understand it fully, we will likely go to disillusionment and not allow ourselves to be transformed by our loss. In disillusionment we are more cynical and simply switch to a new partner or belief system, eliminated our chance for true growth.

Disengagement asks “What am I?” Here we disengage from the context in which we've known ourselves and break connections in a physical way. Indigenous cultures had rituals to prepare people for this stage.

Dismantling asks “What am I? Here we're taking apart the internal structures, rendering them uninhabited, like ghost towns. Slowly we start thinking of ourself as I not we. This takes considerable time and requires significant emotional release. It's useful to know that emotions are the response to the grief process not the process itself.

Dis-identification asks “Who am I?” How do I describe myself now? At this place I am not sure who I am and this is perfectly normal. I'm no longer his partner, their Grandma, as young as I was when we first connected etc., This stage can create a profound dis-orientation.

Dis-orientation asks “ Where am I?” In this middle stage of the transition, as our culture pathologies, we often feel panicky and lost. Here's where we tend to freak out. Martha calls this Square One Change and identifies it as a living hell. Her mantra for this place is “I don't know what the hell's going on here and that's okay.” This is the in between phase of the process and the least supported by our culture. Unfortunately this lack of support undermines the time we need to re-orient.

In Martha's Stages of Change, Step One, The Meltdown is illustrated as the caterpillar becomes a butterfly. While engaged in this transformation, the caterpillar wraps herself up in a cocoon (disengages) and begins to dissolve (dismantles) losing every habit and all predictability until she becomes a blob / soup. Here disorientation is in full swing. The caterpillar is in the hallway! A butterfly is NOT a caterpillar without legs but something absolutely and completely different. This process cannot be rushed!

Dixie's advise:

Wallow in your grief. Grief is energy. It's emotion. The intensity of your grief depends on how emotionally invested you were in what you lost. It comes in waves and if you don't fight it, emotional grief cramps will overtake you, cleanse and benefit you and last approximately 90 seconds each. Experiencing this will help you digest and metabolize your losses.

Remember that grief is almost the opposite of depression. It's an active, dynamic process. It is called the deep liver of the Soul. It wakes you up at every level and helps you answer two questions: 1. What must be mourned? And 2. What must be released completely?

Commemorate your losses. A death of part of your identity has occurred. When you're ready make a time capsule, create a ceremony...

Some retreating is essential. On the eve of their rebirth Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tse, St paul all did this...

Stay present in your body. Your brain will lie to you but your body won't. Breathe when you feel like pushing.

Dose. Do concentrated mourning giving yourself a time and place for grief and thereby meeting it halfway and eliciting the process. Dixie works with her vertigo this way and tries to meet the spin by shaking her head fiercely at onset.

Use comfort care for your pain. Loss and transition hurt. Acknowledge and name the hurts. Dixie calls this kissing the boo boo. Call yourself by name and ask where it hurts then ask your body what she needs and give it! You're engaging your senses and your body won't lie. Sometimes when she needs comfort, Dixie swaddles herself into a cocoon .

And when we launch into our stories (our dirty pain) label our stories. Name the monsters in the hallway so we can say oh that's my “I'll never regain my self esteem story.” This may sometimes help us detach from the drama.

Finally allow your eyes top adjust to the darkness. When you do you'll find you are able to make out the next step ahead.

Nelson DeMille - Vietnam

Workin' my new sunglasses

Lissa Rankin

http://youtu.be/7tu9nJmr4Xs

If you're a body worker...

1.) What percentage of your clientele falls into this category?

http://youtu.be/ESDP7Iq3Xfk

2.) What do you do to prevent dependency?

Thanks for your input.

Martha's MIND: Heartbreak Post Doctoral Fellowship

Heartbreak Academy: How to Make it Through

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In her illuminating writing manual, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott recounts the story of a woman who goes to the zoo and sees a male gorilla sleeping against the bars of his cage. The woman is so entranced by this magnificent beast that she reaches out to touch him, whereupon the gorilla wakes up, grabs her arm, and mauls her half to death before zookeepers can intervene. Days later the woman is still in the intensive care unit when a friend comes to visit. “God, you look like you’re in a lot of pain,” says the friend sympathetically. “Pain,” says the injured woman, “you don’t know pain. He doesn’t call, he doesn’t write….”
Ah, yes, the exquisite agony of heartbreak. We who have experienced it know that romantic love is a fall-in, crawl-out proposition: When you’re bonding with that special someone, everything is wondrously effortless; when the relationship hits the skids, getting through an ordinary day feels like climbing Everest without supplemental oxygen. But every instance of heartbreak can teach us powerful lessons about creating the kind of love we really want.
Mind you, just having your heart broken won’t get you a degree in love-ology. If you learn nothing from heartbreak, you’ll keep repeating the same old painful subject matter in one bad relationship after another. If you refuse to love at all, you will guarantee isolation and pain, rather than preventing them. The only way to graduate from Heartbreak Academy is to really master the material, and that means absorbing crucial lessons about your true self, your true needs, and the nature of true love.

Course offerings from the Heartbreak Academy of Emotional Pain

There are many ways to get your heart broken, all of them highly educational. Breakup 101 will teach you all about the discouragement and guilt that set in when you end a relationship that just isn’t working. In Situational Heartbreak 165, you’ll learn about the pain that occurs when you and your loved one are separated by circumstances such as geographic distance or (God forbid) death. Then there’s Advanced Conflict 206, a combat-training course you enter when you and your significant other become locked in a war of wills. Most unpleasant of all, in my opinion, is Unilateral Torture 262. This class starts when you’re deeply in love, investing full trust and openness in a relationship, and suddenly your partner calls the whole thing off or simply stops calling at all. It’s like getting hit by a truck, only way slower and more humiliating.

Study Guide: How to Make It Through Heartbreak Academy

I was in my first semester of Unilateral Torture 262, a class I’d taken three or four times already, when I stumbled across a concept in a psychology textbook that finally allowed me to learn my lesson and move on. I don’t remember anything else about that book, but I recall one crucial sentence perfectly. “Some patients,” it said, “mistakenly believe that their loneliness is a product of another person’s absence.” I stopped and reread this maybe ten times, but it still baffled me. I could have sworn that my loneliness was a product of my ex–significant other’s absence. If not, then what on earth was it?
Finally, slowly, over the next several days, weeks, years, the light dawned: My loneliness, and the antidote to it, did not come from the significant others I’d loved and lost. I’d been emotionally isolated before I ever fell in love. Something about certain people helped me lower the drawbridge over the moat that separated me from the world, but in the final analysis I was the one who’d actually done the trick. The power to bring me out of solitude—or to push me back into it—had never belonged to any other person. It was mine and only mine.
This realization is the most important thing you need to get through Heartbreak Academy with minimum effort and maximum positive effect. Realizing that your heartbreak is not a product of the other person’s absence brings the pain into an arena where you can work with it, instead of riveting your attention on some missing lover you may never see again and could never really control. Each time you find yourself longing for the love that was, asking yourself the following study-guide questions will help you learn the lessons of heartbreak and move on to a relationship that works.

Study Question #1: How Old Do I Feel? 

Most often, heartbroken people are unknowingly grieving a loss or trauma rooted in childhood or adolescence. That’s because we tend to fall in love with people who remind us of those who cared for us—even badly—when we were young and totally vulnerable. We become childlike when we feel securely adored, letting go of all inhibition. The failure of adult relationships is often caused by the dysfunctions we internalized as children, and the devastation we endure when we’re rejected almost always opens ancient wounds, making us feel as bereft as an abandoned little kid.
If you ask yourself how old you feel when you’re in the worst throes of heartbreak, you’ll probably find that a surprisingly low number pops into your head. Whatever the age of your grieving inner child, it’s your job to comfort her, as you would help a toddler or a teen who had lost a parent. Do small, practical, caring things for yourself: Listen to a song that helps you grieve, schedule a play date with your best friend, wrap a soft blanket around yourself and let the tears come. Most important of all, give your childish self the chance to talk. Open your journal or visit your therapist, and let yourself express your anger and anguish in all its irrational, immature glory.
As you do this, you will almost certainly find yourself grieving losses you suffered way back when, as well as the one you’ve just endured. This is good: It means that you are finally progressing beyond ways of thinking and acting that didn’t work for you early in your life and still aren’t working today. Acknowledging and comforting that younger self is absolutely essential to easing your pain, recovering from your wounds, and finding new sources of healthy love.

Study Question #2: What Did My Lost Love Help Me Believe About Myself? 

Look back on the time when you were falling in love, and you’ll realize that though much (or some) of your time with your lover was fabulous, the relationship made you happy even when the two of you were physically apart. The really potent part of love is that it allows you to carry around beliefs about yourself that make you feel special, desirable, precious, innately good. To graduate from Heartbreak Academy, you have to learn that neither your ex-beloved nor the fact of being in love invested you with these qualities. Your lover couldn’t have seen them in you, even temporarily, if they weren’t part of your essential being.
Make a list of all the things you let yourself believe when you saw yourself mirrored in loving eyes. Write them as facts: I’m fascinating. I’m beautiful. I’m funny. I’m important. Realize that you chose to believe these things in the context of your relationship, and now that the relationship is over, you have another choice: either to reject a loving view of yourself or to believe the truth.
But, you may say, what if these positive things aren’t really true at all? What if the truth is that I’m hopelessly unlovable? Well, let me remind you that when you believe you’re an insignificant bird dropping on the sooty gray pavement of life, you feel unspeakably horrible. On the other hand, when you opt for believing what love once taught you about yourself, the core of your despair is replaced by sweetness, however bitter your subsequent loss. I say, use what works. Self-concept is a self-fulfilling prophecy: When we let ourselves believe that we’re wonderfully attractive, we act wonderfully attractive. By letting yourself believe the most loving things your ex ever said about you, you can get rid of the bathwater but keep the baby, honoring and preserving what was precious in your relationship, while letting go of the pain.

Study Question #3: What Did My Relationship Give Me Permission To Do?

Being in love is so intoxicating, that special person so compelling, that lovers often drop some of the obligations and rules that dominated their lives before they met. When you’re in love, you may forget that you don’t usually allow yourself to splurge on perfume, or write poetry, or be wildly sexual, or say no to invitations you’d rather not accept. When your relationship is over, the bleak prospect of going back to the rules can drive you to the brink of despair, making you pine obsessively for your lost love to return and free you again. Eliminate the middleman. Free yourself.
You can start by making another list. This time write down all the forbidden things you allowed yourself to do when you were madly in love with someone who was madly in love with you. Now give yourself permission to do all those things anyway.
Nothing can make your trip through Heartbreak Academy easy or painless. Grieving will always hurt, but it is not mindless torture. It’s more like panning for gold. Recurrent floods of sadness and anger gradually wash away the rubble of the defunct relationship, leaving only the bits of treasure: the remembered moments of real communion, a new understanding of your own mistakes, a clear picture of the dysfunctions you will never tolerate again.
Letting these precious things emerge naturally means that you will retain the real love you’ve received, even as you let go of your former lover. And realizing that you hold the keys to your own healing will keep sadness from becoming despair and help you master the lessons a broken heart can teach. It means the relationships you create after that will be more trustworthy, the unavoidable losses less devastating.
“The world breaks everyone,” Hemingway once wrote, “and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” A broken heart is simply a heart that has a chance to become stronger. It’s a heart that is more self-sufficient, more open to the truth, and more capable of lasting love.