16 - Initiation, part 7: taking off my "victim badge"

What I write about in this post is how the final foundation stone of experience fell in place for the building of my worldview. It's a foundation stone that has put my relationships with humans into a whole different perspective than I had before; a perspective that is radically different from most of what I see around me, but one that I find immensely empowering.

This foundation stone came along in 2009, but it took many more years after that to build the rest of the building that I gave a very brief description of in my first post about my worldview.

            -------------------------

I'm going to set the stage for finding this foundation stone by taking up my chronological story where I left off. The last I wrote about where I was, I was staying with my 84-year-old dad, taking care of him at his home on the North Shore of Lake Superior. I spent August to October of 2008 living with him and bringing him back to somewhat normal health. But living with him had made it obvious that he really was in no state to be left on his own to take care of himself anymore.

In November, Nick and I moved him out of his house, and gave him a room in the house I was living in in Pine River. Taking care of my dad was still taking a lot of my time, so I quit my job permanently, the permaculture job I had been hired for when my then-husband Ed and I had moved to Pine River in June of 2006.

Nick, (reminder, this is not his real name, the man I had fallen in love with in March of 2007, when Ed was leaving our 12-year-long marriage,) had sold his house and had moved in with me, but he was still working an hour away, so he rented a small apartment there where he stayed during the week, and spent the weekends with me, my dad, and my son. We were still working on plans for building our own house together on the land owned by our friends nearby.

This was the situation, when I was learning about doing emotions from Amy, and finding out about Martín Prechtel. It had been about a year since I'd had the "enlightenment" encounter with the scraggly old fir tree in my yard. (I tell this part of the story in post #10.)

       -------------------

In the midst of all these radical shifts in perspective, and expansions of my awareness, about who I was, who we are as humans in relation to the cosmos and how we understand our history and our present society, I was trying to carry on a partnership-type relationship with a person who wasn't going through the same sorts of paradigm-shifting experiences. I was having a hard time finding clarity and navigating my new self through this relationship. 

The connection between Nick and I was fraying badly, as I explained in my post about learning to do my emotions. I could feel old emotions surfacing about Ed, who had decided to quit our marriage over two years ago by now, and Nick wanted me to forget about Ed. I could feel old emotions in Nick affecting how he was reacting to me. I was beginning to understand that what we both were feeling were old things coming to the surface, but I didn't see things clearly enough to explain it to him, and I really didn't know what to do about it.

I've described how Nick was paranoid about me being attracted to someone else, and that I knew this was coming from his own sense of unworthiness, because I was very much in love with him when this paranoia first surfaced, and he thought his fear of losing me was there because of things that I had done. There was another part of our relating that was getting worse also. I found it harder and harder not to be critical of him, and he would get more and more defensive. This dynamic was exactly how being with Ed had felt to me, except that I had been the defensive one, and Ed had been the constantly critical one.

The fact that these were mirror images of the same dynamic, and that I was on the other side this time, was not really clear to me for a long time. I could sense that the defensiveness in Nick was some sort of insecurity and self-loathing that he was carrying around with him, and I could feel an innate sort of difficulty in resisting the urge to criticize him. This energetic exchange felt like a sort of physics that had a life of it's own, and I resented that I was always blamed for how he was feeling. Looking back on it now, I can see that this dynamic had been going on for as long as the dynamic of paranoid jealousy, but I'd been better able to contain my urge to criticize him, and to apologize when I couldn't, when I'd felt more in love with him.

As this dynamic became more prevalent, it also became harder and harder for me to feel in love with him, and to want physical intimacy. It got to the point where his touch made my skin crawl and I couldn't tolerate it. This, of course, was a downward spiral, and by March of 2009 we had stopped being physically intimate at all.

At the same time, paradoxically, all of my own feelings of rejection and abandonment from Ed were bubbling up stronger and stronger. I had tried to get Ed to talk to me about my feelings, and to get him to take some responsibility for how I felt about him dumping me for beautiful young women, on top of all the criticism I had felt from him while we were together. I had a vague sense that this feeling I had, of wanting Ed to be accountable for how I felt, was exactly what I was resentful of Nick wanting from me, but it all felt somewhat unavoidable and inescapable and I couldn't see the underlying process at work in both situations, never mind having any idea of what to do about it.

I felt like having some resolution between Ed and I was something that would be good for the universe.. like somehow the Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine, (which were New Age terms that felt useful to me for some reason, at the time,) would be able to find some peace after hundreds of years of conflict, if Ed and I were to talk and understand each other. But Ed consistently refused to talk with me about our past, or how I was feeling now. My intense desire for accountability, or even just conversation, was bumping up against his total refusal to engage with me, in a way that became increasingly frustrating for me. Looking back I can also clearly see that just because I had heard about Amy "doing her emotions," didn't mean I had any idea how to apply that concept in my own life yet.

By sometime the following spring, that is, in 2009, I was kind of beside myself with the frustration of not being able to talk to Ed. I tried to keep this from Nick, because I knew he wouldn't like that so much of my attention was on this other relationship. But Nick found and read my journal, where I was writing out my frustrations and my desires for resolution. I didn't want to be back together with Ed, but Nick was furious, because what I was writing made it look as though I did, and he took all of our love letters that we had written back and forth to each other in the early part of our romance, and burned them in a fire in the yard.

At some point in this confusion and tension on all sides, I decided to get a reading from a psychic I had heard good things about in Pine River. I'd never had a reading by a psychic before, but it sounded intriguing and I was sort of desperate for some relief from the frustration with Ed.

At the beginning of the reading, the psychic had me hold an intention for what I wanted to clarify, then shuffle and pick out a series of tarot cards and lay them face down on the table in a pattern. She started turning the cards over one by one and telling me what she felt they were saying about my life. It was really quite interesting, and seemed to ring true to me, though I don't remember any part of it until one of the very last cards.

She turned over a card and said to me, "I see you taking off your victim badge."

By this time in the reading, my frustration with Ed had come to light, and she made it clear that what this card was saying had to do with my desire to have Ed engage with me about our past. I said that it felt like it would be good for the universe if Ed would talk with me about what I felt. She gave me a look, like "you know, don't you Lorna, that your ideas about what Ed should do, has nothing to do with what is good for Ed." She probably said something like this out loud, too, but I really just remember the volumes that were transmitted in the look she gave me...like I should know better than to think that I needed to infringe on someone else's sovereignty in order to be happy myself, and that what was good for the universe had nothing to do with me imposing my will onto someone else...and the reasons I was feeling the way I was feeling about Ed had nothing to do with Ed, and everything to do with me. 

Well. This "taking off the victim badge" did not sit well with me at all. I felt like it was a righteous and justified demand, to want Ed to be held accountable. I felt like my "victim badge" was a part of me that I needed to defend and hold onto tightly, because it would get me something that was important for me AND important for the universe...

But I didn't argue with her about it any more, because a part of me could sense a finality and a truth to what she was saying. However, most of me was not in agreement with this notion at all, and honestly couldn't imagine living without this "victim badge."

Never-the-less, as the days and weeks went on, things began to shift inside me. One shift I remember was, I think, a couple weeks later, as I was listening to music on headphones and dancing outside. For some reason, it occurred to me that my jealousy of the beautiful, flamboyant, artistic young women in their 20's that Ed, who was in his 40's, was hanging out with, had nothing to do with Ed or the young women. My jealousy was a portal into how I had never felt beautiful or free to be myself when I myself was in my 20's. These young women were showing me something about myself that I didn't like to look at. It wasn't anyone else's fault if I didn't feel beautiful now. It was within my own power to feel beautiful or not. I may not have recognized that I had that power when I was in my 20's, but now I could feel that it was up to me, whether to let my beauty shine or not. If my beauty wasn't shining, that was on me, not on Ed or anyone else.

In May, perhaps a month after the reading, I was still feeling some residual frustration about wanting the masculine/feminine resolution to happen between Ed and I. I went to visit Amy, and we talked about it, and she told me some things that shifted the whole thing in my mind. One of the things I remember her saying is, "you know, you have both the masculine and the feminine inside of yourself." For some reason this had not occurred to me in this context, but it made perfect sense, and I could feel the need for resolution with Ed begin to dissipate, and I could sense how I was complete inside myself.

I recently found an email that I wrote to her on May 17th, 2009, after this visit with her, where I'm thanking her and telling her about what happened in me afterwards. Here's the most striking part:

"The morning after I got back, I had an epiphany like a bolt of lightning that illuminated my past with Ed in a way I had never seen before. How my whole life I have been afraid that if people saw who I really was they would reject me. This was so strong for so long, and when I met Ed, that is Exactly what he was in my life, the manifestation of my own fear of rejection, mirrored back to me with such intensity it was frightening. So he came into my life to show me how I felt about myself. Whew. What a relief to release my sense of victimhood."

So there it is, right there! Until I found that email just recently, I had forgotten entirely that I'd had an epiphany the morning after that visit with Amy, and that that was the moment I realized that my victim badge was actually a fraudulent, dis-empowering lie. And I'd had no idea how liberating it would feel to let go of it, until it happened!

This was a life-changing "lightning bolt." I had not expected that my victim badge would fall off, much less that it would fall off naturally by suddenly realizing that all the things that I'd been feeling with Ed, that I'd been blaming him for, were really all just things that I'd been carrying around with me for a LONG time. I could suddenly sense the immensity of my subconscious and how it had been hiding in plain sight, magnetizing people and experiences that would trigger it.

At the start of this post, I said that "taking off my victim badge" was a radical and empowering shift in perspective. It was also liberating. It felt liberating immediately, because it released me from the frustration of "needing" someone outside myself, in this case, Ed, whom I was not in control of, (because I'm not in control of anyone outside myself,) to do something to make me feel better. And this liberation from feeling like my internal landscape was under someone else's control, opened the doorway to being empowered within myself.

Or maybe the empowerment created the liberation. Either way, the key to both was realizing two things: firstly, that I was carrying a vast amount of un-discharged emotional energy around in my body from past events, and secondly, that present people and circumstances come along that magnetize those un-discharged energies to the surface where I would become aware of them.

This "lightning bolt," that illuminated my internal landscape in my relationship with Ed, felt like a sort of miracle, a gift from the divine dimensions that I hadn't known I needed. It was dropped like a magic bomb into my body. This bomb arrived all at once, as a complete intuitive truth. But it exploded very slowly and incrementally. It's taken many years to actually learn how to put that information to use.

The metaphor I used in the beginning of this post was that this  new understanding was a foundation stone. It helped me to fit together some of the other foundation stones, like knowing myself as a pillar of Love, and understanding that I could let my emotions flow as energy. It would take a lot of challenging relationships and situations before I figured out how to build a daily life on those foundation stones. But the foundation had been laid for a whole new understanding of myself in relation to other people, and that foundation has stood the test of time.