(PDF version)

Anyone else feel like an outcast on Mother’s Day? It’s not a festival of sunshine and flowers for all of us. Mother’s Day can be a minefield of emotional triggers for those who grew up in dysfunctional, abusive, or neglectful family systems.

The article linked below is addressed to daughters but it was a huge eye-opener for me as a son as well:

Maternal Narcissism Survey: Is This Your Mom?

For many men, there is nothing more terrifying (or unthinkable) than looking into their own Mother Wounds. I know my Father Wound well. It hurts but does not scare me. My Mother Wound terrifies me. It feels like a pit from which there is no return.

My Mother Wound is equally deep in its own way as my Father Wound, but much of it is hidden in the weeds and shadow realms of my psyche. Finding its various elements and aspects, seeing them, and recognizing them for what they are has been a tricky job, largely because my mother was the person I trusted most and she conditioned me not to see what she was doing to me. The culture has amplified, and continues to amplify, the conditioning my mother laid into me so early and so often that women (especially mothers) can never do wrong or be at fault, making a tough slog through the dark feminine underworld in my own psyche even tougher.

Today on Mother’s Day, I’m supposed to be the adult (as always) and set my own needs and feelings aside (again) for a woman who has no interest in me, and never really has. The loneliness and alienation I feel today as a son is multiplied by the non-stop social and media imperative to adore and deify a mother who has no understanding of me and no use for me outside the scope of my being what she wants me to be to suit her own needs.

This topic isn’t easy for me to write about. It feels incredibly risky. I feel safer writing about being sexually abused than writing about this. I never felt unduly constrained by the urge or the obligation to protect my father from my feelings about him as I wrote about working through my Father Wound. Mother is another story entirely. I expect I’m probably going to stumble and make mistakes going forward down this path, but this is work I have to do if I have any chance of being whole, mature, and complete as a man.

I know there are other men out there who need to do this work as well and I hope they’ll feel encouraged to do it. Any man who is consciously, actively working on his Mother Wound deserves support and understanding. By confronting one of our culture’s most powerful and deeply entrenched taboos, he is charting a necessary and critically important new route through largely unexplored territory for other men.

Photo credit: David Jewell. Used by permission.

Related Posts:
phantom mother
mother junkie
mom rules 1-4
three wounds
mother’s day 2011

My poem “losing self” is the featured “Poem of the Issue” in this week’s edition of The Austin Chronicle.

(PDF version)

“What you wanted, you still want.” ~ Robert Bly

1. Wound

I’ve been blessed during the last couple of months with another very fruitful phase of deep and intense creativity, soon to end when I return to the world of “real” work, i.e., work that is “real” in the sense that it’s perceived by others as having financial value. I love doing my creative work and know that it has tremendous value, but unfortunately that doesn’t translate into any sort of income, at least not so far.

It is, as always, terribly difficult for me to accept the hard reality that the work I love so much, that moves me so deeply and comes so naturally to me, doesn’t provide me with any material support. I know that there are many other writers, artists, guides, healers, and teachers out there (some of whom, quite frankly, have less to offer than I do) who are successfully supporting themselves doing their work. I don’t know why I’m not one of them, and it eats at me all the time.

The work I do, my real work, is a birthright once lost that I’ve fought long and hard to reclaim for about a quarter century now, nearly half my life. The battle has not been without its rewards, but I’ve also made some unexpected discoveries that have left me with painful questions I can’t answer, as expressed in the poem below.

original wound

many years ago
I heard a man say
	your gift to the world
	is in your wound
I found this idea very appealing
I ran with it
and I've been running with it
ever since.

in the last twenty-five years
I've discovered many gifts
	most long forgotten
	or never known to me at all
in many wounds.

many of the wounds had been
	forgotten as well
or not so much forgotten as buried
	deep in my dreams
beneath my skin
	in muscle and bone
under a series of identities
	I'd been forced to assume
	throughout my life
in order to survive.

so what I was told
	was not wrong
there truly is treasure to be found
	under the scars
but I've also learned something else.

my gifts
much like my wounds
are for the most part
unseen and unwanted by the world.

needed they may be
wanted they are not.

I wasn't prepared for such a discovery
and I also wasn't prepared for the fact
that the land of wounds seems to stretch out
into infinity
in every direction.

every wound I tend and heal
seems to be an entry point into several more
they cover one another like bandages
they're nested inside one another like
	a set of chinese boxes
	each of which contains
	another set of chinese boxes
and every wound I tend and heal
yields yet more gifts
that the world does not want.

perhaps that is the original wound
the mother of them all
the point of origin
the first and deepest cut
and the ultimate rejection:

	the world does not want me
	and it does not want
	what I have to offer.

if I could talk to the man who sent me
down this path twenty-five years ago
I'd love to ask him
	how am I to live
	and what am I to do
	with so many gifts
	the world does not want.

2. Reflection

I sat with this poem for several days after writing it. One of the core themes, that “the world” does not want my gifts, felt a little off to me. I know of many people who value my work and there are probably many others who do so of whom I’m unaware, so it struck me as an overstatement of the facts to say that “the world” does not want my gifts. And yet it still felt true to me at some fundamental level.

In terms of dollars and cents, I could still make the argument that a world that associates no financial value with my work doesn’t want it, and I think that was a lot of what was motivating what I was feeling when I wrote the poem, at least on the surface. But as I sat with what I’d written, I was reminded of something I’d heard someone (I can’t recall who) say years ago: When we speak in absolutes (always, never, etc.) about things that are upsetting us, there’s a good possibility that we’re actually expressing the pain of a wound that goes all the way back to childhood, when we were so very little, our needs were so very big, and everything that affected us deeply felt so very absolute.

I was then reminded of the following comments made by Robert Bly to Bill Moyers during the excellent but now largely forgotten documentary A Gathering of Men, first televised over twenty years ago:

Alice Miller says a wonderful thing. She says, “When you were young you needed something you did not receive. And you will never receive it. And the proper attitude is mourning.” Mourning is the proper attitude, not blame, mourning. And she says another thing that’s so wonderful. She says, “You know, when you came into the world, you brought this fantastic thing with you, coming from centuries, and eons, and you brought this amazing energy in from animal life, reptile life, other planets, everything. And this incredible energy you brought in … your parents didn’t want it. They wanted a nice boy. They wanted a nice girl.”

You couldn’t believe it. That’s your first rejection. It’s pre-verbal. That’s why encounter groups won’t get to that. That’s your first rejection. It’s profound. They didn’t want the energy you brought. They wanted a nice boy or a nice girl.

So when you’re small, you realize you can’t fight against that stuff your parents want … so you make up a kind of a false personality … You invent a false personality, and you survive.

And then Alice Miller says, “Now, please, you’ve got to forgive yourself for that, because you did it to survive, and you did the right thing. You did the right thing.” And the proof of it is that you’re alive right now.

I’ve watched A Gathering of Men many, many times over the years. Bly’s comments above, while they’ve always made complete sense to me, have never resonated more strongly with me than they do now, and I believe that’s the core truth I express near the end of my poem:

perhaps that is the original wound
the mother of them all
the point of origin
the first and deepest cut
and the ultimate rejection:

	the world does not want me
	and it does not want
	what I have to offer.

“The world”, especially when we are very young children, is home and family, and we construct our internal model of the world, the one we will carry forward into adulthood, accordingly. A large chunk of that model is developed in response to interactions with our parents. My mother wanted me to be someone else and did her best to make me into what she needed until I was no longer young enough, malleable enough, and helpless enough to be controlled and manipulated. My father didn’t want me at all and did his best to destroy and, ultimately, to eliminate me. I formed my identity living in the shadow of two giants too blinded by their own damage and their own unmet needs to see who I was. I wanted to fix both of them, even if it meant sacrificing and forgetting myself, and I tried for many years. Tried, failed, and lost myself in the process.

That was the world, as I experienced it, not only from the moment I was born, but from the moment I was conceived. That was, and is, my original wound: I was not wanted as I was, what I had to offer had no value, and I had to make myself into what “the world” wanted me to be in order to survive.

Now I’m about to do it again.

3. Process

I’m good for about ten hours of productive work on an average day, assuming I’m feeling well. I need about eight hours of sleep nightly. That leaves six hours for everything else: self-care, social activities, exercising, shopping, preparing and eating meals, etc. And down time.

Down time, doing nothing in all its forms (resting, daydreaming, allowing my thoughts to wander, etc.), is incredibly important for me, and not only because it’s the source of so much of my creative insight. It’s also vital, as I am a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), to my health and well-being. Additional down time is necessary for HSPs because of the high amount of information we perceive and receive, and the depth and thoroughness with which we need to process it. Without at least two to three hours of down time every day, my edges begin to fray and I can lose my center pretty quickly.

Any so-called “9 to 5″ job I get is going to consume my ten productive hours a day (at least) leaving me with nothing for my deep creative work, my real work, the work that gives my life meaning and keeps me alive: the work of my soul. Even worse, it’ll consume my mornings, which are the keystone of my entire process.

For almost eight months now, I’ve been off the chain. A lot of people might assume that not having a job would equate to not working. Not so. I’ve been working about ten hours a day most days, sometimes more. No one has been making me do it. It’s natural. I wake up every morning with ideas. The process begins while I’m sleeping, in my dreams. My most productive hours, as a writer, generally come before noon. What happens in the morning determines the creative course of my day, and it happens every day, of its own accord, provided that I’m available to it.

There’s a wonderful sequence in the movie Pollock (one of my absolute favorite films). It begins with painter Jackson Pollock waking up in the morning. He dresses and stumbles half-asleep into the kitchen, where his wife hands him a cup of coffee as he lights his first cigarette of the day. She helps him put on his heavy coat, hat, and scarf and sends him off with a wordless pat. He steps outside into a cold winter day and trudges the short path through the snow to his studio in the barn. Once inside, he stokes the wood stove, gets a fire going, and starts his work for the day, which will last into the evening.

It’s clear from the presentation of this sequence in the film that this is his daily pattern, and I resonate with it so strongly because it is, in my own way, my daily pattern as well, that is, when financial circumstances allow it. I’ve often wondered how Jackson Pollock would’ve tolerated losing his mornings five days a week in exchange for sitting in a cubicle somewhere. My guess is: not well.

Doing creative work, in the way I do it, requires a certain amount of open time and space. In a lot of ways, I’m a channeler. Most of what I write (and all of what I draw) comes to me without any specific conscious intention. I never “try” to write a poem or an essay about anything. Words and ideas simply start coming. Sometimes, as in the case of most of my poetry, the bulk of the thing comes to me quickly and it’s all I can do to keep up. Essays can take a bit longer to germinate, beginning with a general idea or feeling that then develops in the background of my mind over a period of days, weeks, or even months until suddenly, one day, it’s time to write.

Whatever the case, whether it’s a poem that started as I was waking up or an essay that’s been incubating for a couple of weeks, when it’s time to write, I have to be there for it because, if I’m not, that transient energy that’s attempting to coalesce into something more solid will be lost, and lost forever.

I never know where a poem or an essay is going when it begins, and I never know how long it’s going to take for the process to complete itself. My most recently finished poem (“shelter”) began when the first several lines came to me completely unplanned (as usual) as I was sitting in my truck in the parking lot of the neighborhood grocery store. I was supposed to be on my way to be drug tested for my upcoming job, but took the time to follow the thread those first lines offered as far as I could before hitting the road. After a short drive, I sat outside in the parking lot of the drug testing facility and worked on the poem until the place was about to close, at which point I set down my pen and pad and went in.

By then, the poem was nearly complete, but I still wasn’t satisfied with the ending. The last three lines finally came to me (again, unexpectedly) about half a mile into my evening walk. I didn’t have anything with me to write them down, so I had to repeat them to myself for a mile like an ad hoc mantra so I wouldn’t forget them before I made it home. I continued to poke at what I’d written for several hours though the evening until I felt satisfied, more or less. I never know if anything’s really done until I’ve slept on it.

All in all, from the moment the first couple of lines came to me until I felt comfortable enough with what I had to call the poem done, the process took about five hours. Five hours. Nineteen lines. Ninety-five words (including the one-word title, which also had to be dug out of the word stream). That’s what I mean when I say open time and space is required to do this work. If I’m unable to give those five hours to that poem when I did, there is no poem, period.

4. Survival

I start the new job in a couple of days, and I can already feel my creative engines shutting down. The same part of me that generates all the ideas and insights also knows when the required window of open time and space is closing. Shutting the process down, as bad as it feels (and it feels like death itself), is a necessary and largely involuntary form of protection for me. Not being able to roll out of bed, trudge out to my workshop, fire up the stove, and get to my work every morning means that insights and ideas, if they come, will have no opportunity for development, realization, and expression.

Imagine that if every time you started having sex you were forced to stop before you were finished. Imagine having that experience every morning, day after day, week after week. Before long you wouldn’t even want to start having sex, or even want to feel sexual at all, but that underlying, undeniable life energy would still be there in you nonetheless, looking for a way out, and you’d feel it. That’s how I’m going to be feeling when the circumstances of making a living force my most vital energies underground once again.

As a result, I would expect this to be my last blog post for a while. Maybe a long while. It’s hard to say. Sometimes my creative energy is powerful enough to push its way through constraining circumstances somehow, but if I’m not available to do something with it, I’ll only wind up frustrated and there’s a part of me that would rather feel nothing at all than feel that.

Money is an unfortunate necessity, and from that standpoint, I’m grateful to have this new job. Grateful, but not happy. It’s possible to feel one without feeling the other; gratitude and happiness are not the same thing. I’ll go forward, mindful of my original wound and its influence on how I see and experience “the world”, and I’ll try to keep Robert Bly’s comments paraphrasing Alice Miller in mind:

“Now, please, you’ve got to forgive yourself for that, because you did it to survive, and you did the right thing. You did the right thing.” And the proof of it is that you’re alive right now.

What I wanted, I still want. But once again, I’ll do what I have to do to survive, and I’ll forgive myself, as best I can, for doing it.

Photo credit: David Jewell. Used by permission.

(PDF version)

(PDF version)

The last few days have been pretty hairy for me so this one seems like an appropriately timely choice. Kind of a little southwestern US region / Arizona / New Mexico vibe going on here, with something reminiscent of a mutated I Ching hexagram in the center.

Drawn on Valentine’s Day 2013. Any connection to the alleged holiday of Feb 14 is purely synchronistic in nature.

Last December, I published a post titled “A male survivor’s perspective on ‘rape culture’” in which I wrote about attending my first group for male survivors of childhood sexual abuse at the local rape crisis center. I recalled that as men entering a space most prominently defined as a safe space for women, an environment where men were perceived by many to be the enemy, we were less than welcome:

I’ll never forget the looks I received from the women I encountered as I crossed the parking lot and entered the building. Hostility would be putting it mildly …

I could understand the attitude, given the “men are perpetrators, not victims” orthodoxy of the time and the likelihood that at least some of the women felt profoundly unsafe around men due to personal history. I could allow for all of that, but it didn’t make screwing up the courage to face the unearned anger, scorn, and disdain every week any less of a challenge.

The publication of my post resulted in an email conversation with a female reader who, having also read some of my poetry (including this one), said:

I wrote something, encouraged by the directness of your poems, and even though I don’t want to share it as ‘me’, I would like to share it anonymously. The idea came to me that this could be something that would fit well with your mission and would allow you to address the topic you addressed here further, on how it’s important for women to understand the impact they have on the men around them who had nothing to do with their abuse trauma …

Writing this has been a big healing milestone for me and an anchor point and I wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for your e-mail. Thank you!

With her permission, I’m posting her poem below (anonymously per her request). Beyond its personal significance for the author, this poem is a wonderful example of how an open-hearted dialogue, in which men and women hold their own space while allowing space for the other, can lead to significant new insights and better understanding of self as well as of the other. As such, it is a welcome antidote to the deeply held antagonism and bitter power struggles so rampant nowadays in what is commonly known as the gender wars. It serves as a much-needed reminder that a healing conversation between men and women is still possible, especially if we are willing to identify and take full ownership of our personal histories, projections, and fears.

Here is her poem. It is untitled.

I already knew that love was foreign to you.

Yet mom always said you are a typical (normal) man

and so for a long time I believed her.

I knew that getting on your good side
meant being rational.
I knew that the closest thing you knew to love
was respecting someone
because they were able to win.

I tried hard to win.

Yet the better I got,
the more I was losing.

I got to a point where I realised I didn't want to compete with you for approval.
I didn't want to try so hard to get your 'positive' attention.

I started to understand that it wasn't normal that I had to try so hard.
I started to understand that you are not a typical, nor normal man at all.

All this time I'd expected all the men in my life to be like you,
and so I let them get away with being cold and rational,
just like I expected.

I was pushing away all the good men out there,
because I didn't believe they really existed.

Sometimes I was mean to someone
and I didn't understand where it came from.
Or I didn't realise I was being mean at all.

I had forgotten that I was maintaining
two different versions of you:
version one was the man who did
what you did.
Version two was the man who did
what you should have done.

I waited a long time for version two to materialize in you,
and all that time,
I was angry at all the men out there
because I believed that deep inside,
they were all a version one of you.

I was confused.

I needed to be confused
to survive the insanity.

So I saw you everywhere,
except in yourself.

Now that you are you again,
all the other men
can again start morphing back
into who they truly are.

No longer version one of you.

I am sorry
for all the pain
of those projections
that kept me safe
from my own fear
of the truth.

incest.

~AnonyMiss.

Photo credit: David Jewell. Used by permission.

new element

subatomic love particle
cosmic elucidator
translucent crucifix
transfixion illuminator.

so many years
broken and torn
now I am ripe
now I am born.

purple firestorm
eat me up
burn me down
into the ground
reduce me black
in ash and dirt
return me back
from where I came
and make me solid again
in flame.

celestial impact

alien object
born of the stars
smashing to earth
easing my mind.

another ex-girlfriend I never had
not even a memory
only a name
another blank page
in another empty book.

A little background on this post: I originally wrote this entry on 02/28/13, but was feeling a bit too vulnerable then to share it. I read through it again this morning for the first time in over a month and felt a bit sorry that I hadn’t posted it. So here it is, a bit out of sequence in terms of specific time and feeling, but still relevant in terms of my motivation for writing it.

I’d like to thank everyone for the encouragement and supportive suggestions shared in response to my blog post from yesterday (“Caught between the road and the sky”). I’ve been struggling with the issue about which I wrote for a very long time. It has deep roots and there are times (like now) when I feel as if I will never resolve it.

I know I’m not alone in having longstanding core issues that challenge and confound. Unfortunately, I still often find it far easier to extend my patience, compassion, and understanding to others with their own issues than I do to myself with mine. Try as we may, sometimes we simply cannot see ourselves and our own situations fully and clearly. At those times, we need others.

I learned to survive during childhood by internalizing everything I could because my perceptions and feelings were not welcome or safe, and by relying on myself because I couldn’t trust others to be there when I needed them. Old habits of survival learned and practiced under decades of duress can be hard to shake.

I still expect, much of the time, that if I open up about a problem or share a fear or weakness, no one will be there. I still tend to expect that the help I need will not be there when I need it, and that I’ll have to go it alone, because that’s been my experience for so much of my life. I also learned, very early on, that any help, support, and attention I received typically came with a price. Receiving help, support, and attention meant paying up now or owing a debt. Most of the time, I paid by giving up part of myself, as that was all I had to give as a child. I’ve not shaken this pattern fully either.

I do my best to be brave and clear in both my life and my writing, but sometimes, despite my most heartfelt efforts and intentions, I feel weak and confused instead. I aspire to freedom but find ways to trap myself. I am sometimes as stubborn in my desire to quit as I am in my refusal to quit. I’ve been experiencing all of these states lately in some very deep ways, and I’m frustrated with myself, with my inability to be smarter, to make better decisions, and to solve my own problems.

For all of these reasons and many more, I appreciate the fact that I have allies, witnesses, and supporters out there (most of whom I’ve never met) as I continue to make my way forward in what mythologist Joseph Campbell called “the night sea journey … where the individual is going to bring forth in his life something that was never beheld before.” It’s a long trip, often lonely, sometimes dark, and it’s good to know that you’re with me.

Photo credit: David Jewell. Used by permission.

bursting open

electric butterfly
fly while you can
before the cage
swallows you
up again.

desperation

I grasp I plead I
try to convince.

I need to
present my
evidence.

My video reading of the poem “easter” from my book Iron Man Family Outing is featured today on the Beyond Meds website, accompanied by a short written reflection on the poem and its role in my developing view of my father over the years. Click here to watch and read.

door slammed shut on
memories of fear
I ran far away but
escape came too late
for the child.

I hAvEN’T posTEd ANY of mY owN ArT hErE oN ThE
blog IN AlmosT Two YEArs. I AlwAYs fINd mYsElf wANTINg To wrITE
somEThINg To go wITh ThE ArT buT gENErAllY doN’T kNow whAT
To sAY, so ThEN I ENd up NoT posTINg ANY ArT AT All. I doN’T kNow If
ThE words ArE EvEN NEcEssArY ANYwAY. MAYbE I’m
TrYINg To usE words To jusTIfY ThE ImAgE. MAYbE mY
nEEd to provIdE A vErbAl EXplANATIoN of A pIcTurE cAllEd

“ANXIETY” Is drIvEN bY ANXIETY.

]]> http://rickbelden.com/blog/2013/03/26/anxiety/feed/ 4 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ http://rickbelden.com/blog/2013/03/19/gemini-kitten/ http://rickbelden.com/blog/2013/03/19/gemini-kitten/#comments Tue, 19 Mar 2013 18:09:17 +0000 Rick http://rickbelden.com/blog/?p=6134 Continue reading →]]> gemini kitten with your supernova eyes drown me in your fountain of youth. charm me with your purple advance overcome my disbelief knock my train right off its tracks reignite my burnt-out heart. win me over come inside wake me up then go away. rebel foxy feisty genius micro romance blindside flash leave me sleepless in the dark calling for my missing twin.

(PDF version)