"Jigsaw has an answer. He puts the pieces together"
[WARNING: Some things may be triggering]
“What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us.” (Gaston Bachelard)
Cafe Spirituality was quite an interesting event for us on more than one level. Hosted by VCMHS (Vancouver Community Mental Health Services), it was quite a large group of people discussing three themes on bringing spirituality into the mental health services. There were 9 tables with about 6 people per table plus a “table host” to facilitate the discussions. At each table there was supposed to be at least one “professional” representative, one family member (with a family member who is mentally ill) and at least one “consumer” (someone who has experienced a mental illness and received services from the mental health system). Each table had a specific theme/question to discuss. After twenty minutes of discussion each group moved to another table to talk about a different theme. This was repeated one more time. The first question/theme was how to make it comfortable to talk about spirituality in any relationship (professional to client, peer to peer, etc) within the mental health system. The second question was how to start talking about spirituality and the third was how a dialogue on spirituality can help recovery. They were tricky questions but the answers were fruitful.
The discussions were quite enjoyable and very interesting. What else was neat about it, is that we saw a few people who we knew from the past, all of whom we have met within our experiences in the mental health system. It brought up the recognition that we have been in this system for a long time now and have been involved in a number of organizations and their events. A reminder of some of the parts of our journey we have forgotten.
In the end, we are so glad we chose to do this. Even before the session we had been thinking a lot about spirituality and what it means to us. It was good to hear other people’s take on it as well and makes us want to read more and think more about how to bring spirituality into our own life in a bigger way. Not just by doing meditation but by our daily rituals, our daily tasks, our thoughts and our relationships with other people.
And now back to our story.
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1997
March 18, 1997: Caer has been having a very hard time. Tir (1) has wanted to take more meds. Raven (3) is negatively affected by this. A new alter has emerged. Reed (6st). (from Stoene Boy (6st)). Stoene Boy is a baby “gone crazy” and Caer fears he will die, thus killing Reed and other alters. She did drawings about Reed. She had a dream about an older girl called Jessie who was killed. She had a lot of feeling. [Lyn]
Yes. A dream about a woman named Jessie. She is a beautiful woman. In the dream, we are young, less than 12 years old, and we love Jessie so much and think she loves us as well. But she does not care about us at all. She is going to be punished, possibly killed, by a group of people, a community we belong to. She is laying on a bed or on the ground, and we lay beside her sobbing, calling her name, touching her beautiful hair. But she barely responds. She is a woman already dead – emotionally gone. She has stopped caring for anyone including herself, stopped caring about dying, or how angry people are towards her. She does not hear us or see us or acknowledge us.
Then, we think we have woken up crying. We seem to be in bed overcome with such grief and sobbing. We think of calling Lyn for support. But then we truly wake up. We are not crying when awake but the grief and sorrow is still there, so strong, so very painful.
We talk Inside about the dream and about Jessie. She is a woman who has been terribly betrayed and now has nothing more to give to anyone, even to herself. She is not even able to grieve her losses. She is beyond grief. It’s too late for her.
Oh .. I forgot the last part of the dream. She is killed by the group of people. Her heart is ripped out of her and torn to shreds.
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We have waited so long for you Reed housed within the Stoene, diving beneath MoreDread (5), deeper into who we are. Reed, young naked boy, embedded in stoene and carried down by its weight to the bottom of the sea, to the hole that we must fall into eventually, into vast nothingness, into space itself, the sky.
And into the Iew Sae.
We are afraid that Stoene Boy is permanently “crazy”. That he will never recover.
A drawing of Reed, diving down into the Iew Sae, heading straight for that dark hole that lasts forever. Sinking like a stone.
We have struggled repeatedly to tell our story but we are still lost as to what the story really is. Where does it begin? Who should we tell it to? Who of us should tell it? The words have become harder, the speaking of them. We want to withdraw, not wanting to speak anymore. Tired of knowing. Tired of grieving. Tired of the exhaustion and sickness that come after releasing memories. Wanting to move on and to do the work we feel we need to do in this world. But yes, we are doing the work. Our words on the page are our work. We keep forgetting that.
Am I, Shell (1, 2), the narrator of this story? I’m just not sure. Maybe I am and maybe it means I really am the Outside Person, the Outsider of this Web. Everyone else is Inside.
It is so difficult to not have the memories. I was not there. I don’t remember. It didn’t happen to “me”. I didn’t have to pretend everything was normal. I thought I was somewhat normal. We didn’t have a typical family. Our stepfather was 30 years older than our mother and was retired. He stayed home and did most of the cooking and cleaning while our mother worked Monday to Friday. Not typical but “acceptable”. I was not too shy or anything either. I made friends and played like most kids. I behaved well in school, in church. There was nothing strange about me on the outside.
But the truth is in here, heavy in our guts, real like jagged edges of glass, swallowed and sticking into us from the inside. The truth lodges in our throat and it pours out of our eyes in so many tears.
There is a voice from within that says there’s no point in us telling our story. It won’t help. No one really wants to hear it. They will simply think we are too self-centered. And they won’t believe us anyway. But is that what we believe or is it what we fear? Are we afraid that no one will really care about our pain, that no one will care that we were hurt? We want so much to tell our story, to tell about each and every one of us Inside. There are at least 100 of us and we are proud of every one. We are proud of our names, proud of how each of us has helped this body/mind/soul to survive, proud of our own self-creations, proud of the internal structure we have set up in order to be functional and competent in the world.
The place we reside in these days is dark, silent and lonely. At the bottom of a quiet, cold and deep sea. Reed (6st) has taken us there. He and others protect us from the secrets we are not yet willing to reveal, to face. Maybe it is not so much that we are afraid to tell our story to others, but that we are afraid of hearing our own voice, hearing those words, hearing the truth. Maybe we are afraid to tell each other, to pull down all the walls, the barriers that have been between us. I know there is so much I don’t know. And I want to know. We are the ones who need to know the most.
Maybe we ask the wrong question – why bother telling anyone? Maybe the question should be – why bother telling ourself? Why bother looking at who we really are? What’s the point? What difference will it make? How will it change anything? Will it make things better for us or only cause more pain? Will it all simply re-traumatize us?
I think our Darkness right now is the Darkness between us, the stories we don’t tell each other. We are not connected Inside very well right now. And we are very lonely for each other.
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