This is a podcast episode that you can listen to above, or with these links:
Apple Podcasts here, Spotify here, Youtube Podcasts here
Or you can read this episode as a piece of writing below:
Shedding Skin - Confessions of an Itchoholic
Episode 9 (of 10) - Growing Up (Whilst Parenting)
Subheadings:
* Psychedelics
* Shedding
* Revelations
* Booze Again
* 'Alternate' Therapies
* Parenting and re-parenting
* Powerlessness and Control
* Shit In Your Own Spa
Chapter 9 – Growing Up (Whilst Parenting)
I've been crawling on my belly
Clearing out what could've been
I've been wallowing in my own confused
And insecure delusions
For a piece to cross me over
Or a word to guide me in
I wanna feel the changes coming down
I wanna know what I've been hiding in
My shadow, my shadow
Change is coming through my shadow
My shadow's shedding skin
I've been picking
My scabs again
From the song Forty Six and 2 by Tool (1996)
sung by Maynard James Keenan
How was it that at my worst singular moment, when I thought I was going to die, when I was alone, scared, unable to breathe, that was the moment I let go and found a piece of the elusive internal freedom that had evaded me? What was it about going to the brink, being forced to accept my predicament, and facing more fully the sensations in my vulnerable body without the story of my mind to obfuscate and suppress and deny that lead to my veneer being reduced?
This is a surprisingly common human experience, and it’s called an ego death.
The spark of knowledge I’d gained in my ego-death hospital visit was this – there is a falseness to fear. It’s a trickster. It’s not only fear, but also terror. The terror at being alive. The terror of awareness of future pain. Of knowing you will die. Of attempts to control. It looks to envelope you, cage you, hold you to your old ways. Yet it can be faced, you can more fully accept yourself, and in doing so transformation can (and reliably does) occur. As Joseph Conrad said
“Facing it. Always facing it. That’s the way to get through.” (68)
Acceptance of what is, no matter how hard, is always better than fearing it’s complexity and ignoring/avoiding/sitting in self-denial. The other side of the existential coin where terror lies is awe, an openness to the magical mystery of the complexity of life. "Whatever tomorrow brings, I'll be there. With open arms and open eyes." (16) sang Incubus in Drive.
What does a man who has self-medicated his entire life, to escape, to hide, do when his self-medicating has turned against him, morphed to addiction, a failing crutch that can no longer hold his weight?
I turned to self-medication of course! All of life, all our pursuits, are in some ways self-medicating to survive, we just use different medications – work, sports, art, drugs, ‘success’, attention, sex, prayer, food, TV, technology, shopping, co-dependency.
This time, I swapped alcohol and pharmacopeia with psychedelics.
Psychedelics
Psychedelics go by many names - the word psychedelic means ‘mind revealing’. They are called drugs. They are called plant medicines, offered as agents of healing for millennia in many traditional and indigenous cultures. They are called entheogens and hallucinogens. However they are labelled, these psychoactive substances can be consumed to produce a physical and mental reaction, a ‘trip’, a journey into an altered state of consciousness. These molecules, including LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, peyote and others are all Schedule 9 prohibited substances in Australia.*
(well that was true when I wrote this, but MDMA and Psilocybin has been rescheduled pretty recently and it can be offered as part of therapy for people with PTSD and treatment resistant depression. Maybe more on that later as it’s complicated)
They are illegal. You cannot make them, grow them, consume them, without fear of legal ramifications.
So, when I found myself sitting in a circle of strangers in the mountains of Northern New South Wales staring into a cup of green, lumpy cactus juice that I was about to swallow, I was very much taking my health into my own hands whilst shunning the medical and legal authorities. Fortunately, I wasn’t worried about this anti-establishment element, nor about taking my health choices off grid because this is something that I had been doing destructively for years – all the alcohol, all the sleeping tablets, all the pain meds, all the steroids, all the shit food and sugar. So doing something in the name of ‘healing’, however off grid, was a much easier thing to accept.
To be fair, I had spent countless months reading all the books, watching all the shows, talking to people and researching these substances, just like my 1990s magic mushroom research from those florescent dial-up internet websites. As written previously, I had taken psychedelics before a few times but never with any intent other than to get ‘high’.
Like so many people in 2018 I read Michael Pollan’s “How To Change Your Mind”, which was a cultural zenith for the mainstreaming of psychedelics for healing. I microdosed weekly for nearly a year, which is a process where you consume a small amount of psychedelic, not enough to even feel the effects, but enough to open your mind to more creative thought and disrupt your regular patterns of thinking. Sitting with modern day shamans in idyllic and remote settings and consuming plant medicines for ‘healing’ was having a big cultural moment, so there were plenty of podcasts and written content, all of which I absorbed.
Yet, as I stared down into this foreboding brew, I was absolutely terrified.
Any familiarity or confidence I may have gained in my research about the power of these substances evaporated. What was I about to do to myself, by consuming this petrifying Peruvian cactus concoction? (Traditionally called Wachuma - or San Pedro for the colonisers - the psychoactive ingredient being mescaline). Who would I be on the other side of this weekend? What was I doing here? I knew I would be ‘facing myself’ somehow, but other than my ‘hospital ego death’ experience, I didn’t really know what that meant.
I remember the heavy sensation of the weight of my troubles, the predicaments that had spurred me to be here in this moment, bearing down on me – my desire to be a better father, my desire to heal my addictions, the overwhelming need to escape from the circular health issues I was trapped in, wrapped in, the exhausting cycle of chronic illness, the lack of agency in my own life, a slave to my old patterns of thinking and the agonising cycles of my body. The itch and the scratch, the obsession and the compulsion, the pain and the (short term, escapist) relief, over and over again. I was petrified my body would let me down and collapse in some way during the weekend, exposing to this group of strangers the weakness that I had attempted to keep hidden my entire life.
I wore these burdens like a technicolour dream coat of shame, like an all-encompassing carapace of scarred skin, inflexible, restricting and suppressing.
So I drank. And I faced myself.
And I shed.
Shedding
It still feels a bit taboo to talk about psychedelics, but anyway, here we go.
My experiences on that weekend, and subsequent weekends, were not what I expected prior to sitting with these medicines – expectations being the way our minds attempt to (often erroneously) control the future.
The experience of being under the influence of the medicine is of course its own thing - it can be intense, it can be a struggle at times, you can feel euphoria and have insights and you can reflect on the wonder of all things and see some of the patterns occurring in your life and feel an expanded sense of love for those close to you. It can be ecstatic – not a word that I’m particularly fond of. Also, it can just be a dreamy, floaty bit of not much – you’re pretty out of it, often lying down, one part of you half awake and in the real world, one half asleep straddling mythical dreamscapes. Time warps, it can be a whirlwind with moments of great pleasure. In my case, being under the influence of psychedelics is often physically uncomfortable – my body reacts to these substances in a similar way that it reacts to most things – with suspicion and inflammation.
Many stories of taking psychedelics get caught up in what happens whilst the medicine is still active in your body, i.e. whilst you are still under the influence, i.e. what it is ‘like’ to be high and ‘tripping’. But I’m not really interested in that, other than to explain the lifting of the ‘burden of being’ i.e., whatever weight I was carrying in those moments, felt immensely relieving. Everything just is. I was having an experience that was not passed through the usual affirming filters of my personality, my ego, much like dying in a hospital bed. It's not easy to describe the relief garnered to a brain that was always struggling to know how to be, or to avoid how not to be, when it is suddenly just, well, existing, in this moment of perfect complexity. It's the state that I tried to get to with alcohol so often, without understanding that alcohol doesn't allow you to stay present, it pushes you down.
When I consumed Wachuma, had my ‘journey’, went to sleep, and woke up the next day, that is when the real changes began to happen.
I had reformatted my brain like a hard drive. I had wiped the cassette tape clean. I’d rewritten my CDRW compact disc. I’d setup my VCR brain ready to tape the freshly incoming ‘Simpsons episode’ of existence. How many more data storage metaphors can I come up with, and what do they mean?
Things had changed. Scrap that – I had changed. I noticed some of the following:
· I didn't feel like I had 'gained' any new information from the experience per say, it's paradoxically the opposite, it was more like I had diminished, or lost completely (did I mention shed?) parts of myself that were holding me back or standing in my way. To paraphrase an advertisement I must have seen over 100 times in the 90s, “It’s the parts that Nick Gilpin rejects, that makes Nick Gilpin the best”
· I felt more like myself than normal. Than I ever had! A deeper, calmer me – like the me that rolled back to Brisbane after travelling Australia for a year, only more. (How is this possible, I was always me, wasn’t I? How could I be more me?)
· Any of the positive things that I felt I had gained, like expanded love for my wife and children or a fuller acceptance of the complexity of humanity, seemed to have been inside me already
· It became easier to accept things as they are, rather than apply some sort of judgement or filter to them. Whatever was happening was happening – for example I climbed Mt Coolum and saw a rainbow piercing the sky, landing straight down into the waves of the endless ocean - and I was simply a witness to its beauty
· The ‘things’ that I found easier to accept could occur in the ‘outside world’ (someone pushes in front of me in a line and I just smile) and could also occur in the ‘inside world’ (I notice a self-negative thought and then gently let it slide out of my head)
· The judgements that usually come from the egoic part of my mind seemed to have been reduced
· I noticed nature a lot more. My own nature and the rhythms of my body (a new thing for me), and also the beauty of the nature that was around me that I normally didn't notice because I was too 'busy' or in my head
· My well-worn, “unthinking”, often compulsive patterns of thought and behaviour became illuminated to me. It turns out that what I hid from the world over my long life of concealment, I hid from myself. Yet these self-eluding structures could hide no longer
Without getting too much into the neuroscience, psychedelics seem to have a reducing effect on our ‘default mode network’, (69) a part of the brain that acts as a sort of ‘conductor’, alternatively suppressing and allowing certain brain regions to communicate with another. When this default mode network is dialled down, brain activity doesn’t increase, but connectivity between areas of the brain does. Previously unavailable neural pathways can be forged anew, as if your brain has been through a reboot, cleared out a bunch of old cache and corrupted databases, and is bootstrapping again whilst seeing the world with fresh eyes and increased openness. In some ways you are briefly returning to a more childlike state, a veneer-less toddler, seeing the wonder and awe in the world as you once did before your mind built the mechanisms for survival that ultimately closed you off to some of these experiences. (This is exactly why people drink alcohol, it gives them permission to act ‘young’, to be childlike and to act up and be silly and laugh and not act their age. Who wants to act their age?)
In This is Your Mind On Plants, Michael Pollen shares his thoughts on taking mescaline. He notes that "Natural selection has shaped human consciousness not necessarily to scrupulously represent reality but to maximise survival, admitting only a 'measly trickle' - Huxley's phrase - of information needed to get by", but that ‘something 'very different' happens in the brain on mescaline.' and that the 'bottom up information of the senses and the emotions inundates our awareness, sweeping away the mind's predictions, maps, beliefs in what feels like a tidal wave of awe'. (70)
Many people have taken psychedelics and changed their lives, me being just one. Of course, many people have taken them and not much has changed too. It turns out the way you take them, the infamous ‘set and setting’ (the environment you consume them in and your mindset and intention at the time) is crucial too, but more than anything it depends on who you are and what is happening in your head at the time.
There is an oft lampooned impulse for people who take psychedelics to overshare their experiences, shout about them from endless podcasts and the pages of substack newsletters, bang on and on about their healing and how “You have got to try this!”. Luckily, I suffer from crippling self-doubt after a lifetime of shame, so I won’t be recommending that a new utopia on earth can be reached by us all just getting high and loving each other and putting flowers in our hair (as nice as those things would be). I have seen some of the dark side of taking psychedelics – they can amplify what already exists in people’s minds to negative ends (they have been called ‘non-specific amplifiers’), and they can impart a sense of unnecessary grandiosity and individualism. If you are blank slating your mind and rebuilding your inner self from scratch with very intense ego destroying drug experiences, you can become vulnerable to the many extremely bad ideas that are floating out there in the world. For example, there seems to be a correlation between people who have taken a lot of psychedelics and a belief in pseudoscience and conspiracy theories as they relate to new age spirituality. So, it’s with caution and a sense of humbleness that I speak to how much my life of has been changed by these substances.
The gigantic leaps in my own personhood happened when I started to see more deeply the patterns of decision making and internal thinking that had been the dominant story in my head, such as the illumination of my addictive and compulsive behaviours and my dysfunctional relationship with my own body. After days or even weeks post ‘journey’, many of these restrictive internal dialogues began to recede and fall away, and I started to act out new sets of patterns and habits and rituals that came from deeper consciousness about how I wanted to be and how I should 'honour' myself. I use the word honour here because that word more than any explains how I began to think about myself. It is synonymous with 'taking care’.
Revelations
The reason that for my entire life I was unable to care for my body the way it needed was because as a coping mechanism for the trauma and suffering my body wrought upon me, I disassociated from my body and treated it like an ‘other’. It had to be an other, because it would be too painful if it wasn't, if it was just ‘me’.
I always wished my body away.
I always wanted it to be different.
I couldn't accept anything close to the truth about it, it was too painful. The mental separation caused treating my body like shit to be completely normalised, simply a way of coping with the burden of having a calamitous and inflamed physical meat bag to wobble around in.
The revelations are so obvious and so simple and are things that I had intuited over the years, but the complete understanding of the reveal requires the person whose mind is deceiving themselves to heal enough to ‘feel’ the truth. One of the paradoxes of understanding seems to be that you can be told things, like facts or truths, even think them yourself, and still not absorb what they actually mean. It’s when you feel them, like a revelation, like an embodied understanding, that they really affect you and you fully receive the news you’ve been (actively) ignoring. (Of course, it is possible to feel things that are not factually true, another mental landmine.)
In her book Listening to Ayahuasca (Ayahuasca being a type of plant medicine similar to Wachuma), Rachel Harris PhD gathers many reports of people’s experience of their life after consuming this plant, noting that “People described being more aware of their bodies and their energy levels, along with a greater desire to take care of themselves " (71) (p69)
Mescaline quickly revealed to me that I had been hiding from myself a gargantuan set of programming that kept me in a cycle of suffering:
· My body felt sick or was in pain (physical suffering)
· This caused substantial mental anguish
· I didn’t have any positive framework to ‘hold’ these sensations (I had no mechanism to go on the ‘dropped ice-cream upset roller coaster’ because I was constantly dropping the fucking ice-cream because it was riddled with nuts and the roller coaster was constantly making me deathly nauseous)
· My coping mechanism for this suffering was to create compulsions and reach for the self-gratification of all my addictions
· These addictions would contribute to making my body feel sick
· The merry go round continued
I knew this cycle intimately on a subconscious level, but up on the conscious level I would exist in great shame every time a got sick knowing that I wasn't 'doing everything I could' to care for my body. I knew that I was contributing to my body’s ill health on some level, but I didn’t know how to break out of that frame and accept the truth of my compulsions and addictions.
Psychedelics stripped away this self-deception, revealing to me that I had never learnt how to look after myself because I was constantly reacting to the suffering of my health, that passage of Kronos time that never relented, with the patterns that I had developed from my earliest, formative days. I learnt to suppress the pain and suffering, to not share it, not talk about it, and not just ignore it, but to concoct a version of myself that ‘didn’t have these burdens’.
I couldn't see clearly through my own mind’s defence, my veneer, my own personal umwelt, a mechanism that had built me up to survive in the world and to interact in the social realm but to do so by pretending I was something that I was not. My disastrous paranoid experience in my early 20s was the parts of my mind unsuccessfully trying to reconcile this split.
It was staggering to me that I could exist for so long without knowing that my body really, really needed me to care for it. And more than an average person, too. Who knew I needed to love myself? *face palm emoji
I spent weeks, months even, just flabbergasted that I had existed for so long where everything in regard to my body revolved around some sort of disfunction – sugar, drugs, alcohol, junk food, sleep routines, exercise, you name it, I was hiding from it. Like I’m genuinely not being hard on myself about this, it was just objectively true that I didn’t look after myself. The power of the patterns of addiction and reaction and dislocation were so strong they suppressed this humungous truth from me.
Yet here I was finally, becoming uncaged, untamed, sumo slapped into ‘waking up’ to my delusions.
Booze Again
Have you ever woken up, cursed to the high heavens your deathly, nauseating hangover, swore never to touch the hideous devil’s juice again, and by the afternoon you think 'hmm, I could go a fresh cold one?' That, my friends, is the ‘alcohol roller coaster ride’, the modulating of your dopamine and endorphin systems, the elasticity of your ever springing back nervous system from suppression to withdrawal, to the lure of suppression again. ‘Hangover’ is simply a more socially acceptable word for withdrawal.
I had tried many times to reduce, or quit completely, my love affair with lady liquor after 2 decades of riding the booze roller coaster.
Michael Pollen tells the story of Bill Wilson, an alcoholic living in New York in the 1930s who: ‘credited his own sobriety to a mystical experience he had on belladonna, a plant-derived alkaloid with hallucinogenic properties that was administered to him at Towns Hospital in Manhattan in 1934.’ Bill went on to be the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, the sobriety program that would be championed by my Uncle Jimmy in Sydney in the 80s and 90s. I have no idea if my uncle knew that a cornerstone of Alcoholics Anonymous, the ‘surrendering to a higher power’, can be traced back to Bill’s semi-psychedelic drug trip. (69)
Once I had consumed Wachuma, my attraction to alcohol vanished almost overnight. The strangest thing was I didn’t have to ‘quit’. You see, quitting requires energy, force, planning, it’s like a battle, you must summons inhuman (and often unsustainable) amounts of energy to keep reminding yourself of what you are trying to achieve (NOT drinking tonight). You also need to tell people about it, compelled to externally justify something that you are struggling to justify internally. “I’m off the booze until Christmas holidays”, “I’m doing Dry July”, “I’m just taking a break”. But just like dieting without facing the reason that you comfort eat – you’ll most likely put the weight back on when the effort to sustain the diet subsides – if there is a deeper reason you drink too much and you can’t figure out what that is, the addiction will remain.
I was able to previously quit alcohol for weeks at a time this way. Months even, fooling myself that I wasn’t under some spell. But it would never last, and like a scoundrel I would eventually wake in an anxiety riddled dehydrated hungover mess of a state, my digestive system exploded after capitulating to its power over me once more.
Some further research from Rachel Harris in regards to psychedelic users ability to face their addictions - “Changes were not the result of willpower or discipline....rather they seemed to unfold spontaneously as if based on some kind of revelation. Others came out of ceremony and changed lifelong patterns with seemingly no effort" (p68) And that rather than being the result of “white knuckle self control”, many people reported their destructive patterns, obsessions and addictions were healed by “an internal shift that seems to happen organically”. (71)
Alcohol was no longer a part of the ritualistic component of my life, whatever patterns that existed in my mind that drew me to modulate myself with booze, patterns perhaps passed down through the generations, had been rerouted. Ways of relating to the world, thought patterns, habits and rituals are all codified in our minds over time, and my mind had just been through a big cleanse and all the rituals and habits where now up for grabs.
Suddenly, I was able to advocate for myself over much longer time frame, opting to prioritise my long-term physical wellbeing in ways that were hitherto not available to me. This included illuminations about my sleep habits, nutrition, exercise, my dental health, and being much more responsible with my medicines - all quite sensible things that perhaps most normal people are aware of, but for me, once I was able to face them calmly and with fresh eyes, greatly improved the quality of my life.
Bessel Van Der Kolk again –
“Self regulation depends on having a friendly relationship with your body. Without it you have to rely on external regulation - from medication, drugs, alcohol, constant reassurance or compulsive compliance with the wishes of others.” (15) Simple self-regulation became available to me for the first time in my life, I could experience myself with the non-interference of the toxic patterns in my head.
‘Alternate’ Therapies
Once I was ‘awoken’ in a sense to my own mind fuckery, I was able to explore more options for wellness and techniques for better managing my body, including alternate therapies like breathwork, meditation, nature immersions and cold plunges.
For me, these techniques are great, but they didn’t and don’t really solve any of my health problems directly. They offer me a less destructive way to regulate my inflamed nervous system, to sooth it, manage it, coddle it, cuddle it. They are pleasantly antithetical to alcohol and sleeping tablets and getting shouty at my children.
There is a potential downside to ‘alternative’ therapies. In her book The Gospel of Wellness, Rina Raphael outlines how 'wellness' has become like a religion - everyone is drinking Kombucha and cooking bone broth and downward dogging their way to enlightenment - but it is often a commodification and commercialisation of our inherent desire to have some control over our fates, often fuelled unhelpfully by social media. The 'cleanses' and the diets and the gym memberships and the Instagram aspirational quotes are an attempt to purify us of the 'toxicity' of our modern lives, but so much of this so-called toxicity is conflated with the norms of modern living which offer us untold (and often unseen) benefits that are rarely appreciated. Once again, it's the certainty that rubs me the wrong way – “this painfully strict regimen of self-care will provide you the salvation you desire, just purchase these supplements!”
Often the rituals and supplements and ways of life offered by the wellness industry appear just another way we hold on so tight to our 'definitive knowing' - this product will make me feel the way I ought to - in the face of an ultimately complex and unpredictable world that can be challenging to navigate. We want to know what we can do to make things all right, and there are plenty of people willing to sell us the answer. That desire for 'wellness' can become as obsessive as the calamitous coping mechanisms of addiction to survive that I deployed for much of my life, swapping a veneer of disassociation from the truth of the complexity of life, with a veneer of the futility of obsessing over controlling for that complexity.
It's important for me to remember I'm not looking for perfection, because that doesn't exist. My imperfect body and my loopy mind remind me of that daily, but a previous version of myself could only lust after a different me, a level of perfection that I saw on TV and magazines and in my mind’s eye. "I want a perfect body, I want a perfect soul". Thom York wistfully laments in Creep. (3) These are the things we all desire but none of us have. As Rina says "Unattainability is the leading tenant of perfection. More than anything, perfectionism says a lot about what we crave. It is, at the end of the day, and anxious need for control over our lives.” (77)
I have to remember the goal is self-acceptance with a sprinkling of self-exploration - not self-mastery or self-dominance, as these things are not possible.
I’m sowing the seeds
I’m sowing the seeds I’ve taken
I’m sowing the seeds I take for granted
This thorn in my side.
This thorn in my side it’s from the tree.
This thorn in my side it’s from the tree I planted.
It tears me and I bleed.
I’m digging my way to something better
From the song Bleeding Me by Metallica (1996)
and sung by James Hetfield
Parenting and Reparenting
I couldn’t be the only one that needed to ‘wake up to myself’ (whatever that means), could I?
It turns out I wasn’t even the only one who needed to ‘wake up to themselves’ in my own family.
My wife Cate had to go through an intense period of suffering, collapse and stress for the first few years of being a mother before her own long history of anxiety and OCD was revealed to her so she could begin to understand it and let it go. The immense pressure she felt to ‘be a certain way’ as a mother was in part a catalyst for her to begin understanding that so much of her life was mediated between her desire to live authentically and her constantly arriving, obsessive self-talk that she was insufficient.
So we found ourselves summonsing the most monumental and gargantuan effort to ‘grow up’ whilst right in the middle of raising other people, and a global pandemic no less. Much research has confirmed that the child raising years are ‘less happy’ for many, many parents, so this hardship is real and quantifiable, but for us both the need to become more aware of our own foibles and neuroses was catalysed by the arrival of our children because we realised we were not able to act the way we wanted as parents because we hadn’t yet ‘sorted out shit out’.
What is a meaningful life, and can I create that for my children?
The reason I find myself asking that question is because through my actions as a parent, I am directly answering it, whether I am consciously asking myself the question or not. What I am being, my patterns, habits, rituals, addictions, my way of coping, is what I am passing to them. The life I am building for my kids arises out of how I am towards them and what I do, the patterns of my actions and my reactions.
The next question that immediately arises from that is, do I have a meaningful life for myself? What a terrifying question!
Fuck me, what am I doing?!?
One thing I am definitely doing is passing on whatever the fuck I am doing to my kids, whether I know what I am doing or not.
I must be learning ‘life’, exploring life, playing with life, in order to teach it, else I am teaching a rigid, immovable, unexplored way of being through unseen patterns and reactions and compulsions.
Can I create meaning for my kids that I cannot create inside myself and for my own life? I don’t think so, else I risk the forcing of an inauthenticity onto my children that I felt for so much of my childhood. The trap is thinking that I can hammer the square peg of certainty, control, and rigidity into the round hole of complexity, meaning and purpose. An understanding of the complexity, challenges, and full breadth of life’s travails cannot easily be held, but one that needs to be attempted to be understood. As Alanis sang in 1995 – “no one's really got it figured out just yet”. (73) A better way, the only way, is to be attempting to figure out these things for yourself, then ‘show them how to live’ by being that process of attempting, and even better, be curios with them, share with them, and include them in the attempting. I can’t hide my struggles from my own children.
All of this is helpfully laid out in Harry Chapin’s song Cats in the Cradle (74) – a Dad has a son, and wants a better life for him but misses his childhood by being busy. When the Dad is old, he wants to connect with his son, realises his son has grown up ‘just like him’ (because all his son ever wanted was to be like his Dad) – that is, someone too busy to connect.
Where disconnection between parent and child exists, it’s a projection of the disconnection inside the parent with themselves. My grandfather's anger, alcoholism and violence was a reflection of his deeply held dislike of himself, his self-shame. In lieu of his inability to process these things within himself, he could only unconsciously spread it outwards into the lives and nervous systems of my Mum and her siblings. My grandmother's strictness, fundamental thinking and desire for control arose out of her feelings of inadequacy and a fear of not being accepted and of having to be seen a certain way (that futile attempt to control what others think of us), and this emerged as an uncaring strictness, emotional disconnection, addiction, and a need to control my dad and his brothers.
Some of these traits were passed to my parents, and then passed to me.
We’re all someone’s daughter, we’re all someone’s son, (75) as John Farnham crooned.
In our worst moments as parents, when we lose it at our kids and turn into snarling, judgemental beasts, we treat our children the way we often treat our deepest selves. You know that part of you that is very critical of yourself, super judgemental, even cynical to the point of self-hatred? (You might have to look super deep, but it’s there somewhere). That part, left unseen and unhealed, is the part that you will not be able to prevent from leaking out and onto your family members, which is often harshly, and with judgement, and oftentimes without the mega amounts of love that they deserve. These are, after all, the people you love the most.
Therefore, they get the worst of you.
The irony of this situation is that if, say, we react with anger towards our children, in order for them to maintain the necessary attachment to us as their loving carers and guides in this world, they deflect their hurt and frustration away from us, and angle it towards themselves. Children will instinctively make themselves feel unlovable, as if a personal failing of theirs, rather than to see their parents as unloving towards them. In When The Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress, Gabor Mate says ‘Not infrequently anger is redirected from an attachment figure who aroused it, and is aimed instead at the self. Inappropriate self-criticism results.” (76) Of course all this happens in degrees, over many changeable situations and life stages - it's not an all or nothing binary. Our children don't really know what's true about themselves as opposed to what’s true about their parents, because they haven't separated enough from us yet, and they haven't matured the self-awareness faculties that can allow personal reflection.
The lesson for me here is that parenting is about self-regulation. Can I keep my cool inside my own nervous system whilst trying to regulate those external, yet to fully develop nervous systems?
I want to teach my kids that in order to become good at something (even better, *master* it), first, they have to be crap at it. Really crap. Like useless. Tolerating our own crapness is essential, otherwise we feel shit about ourselves all the time, and never feel any momentum. The problem with being a kid is they are crap at so many things (said with love) - you take them to the beach and they do their best to drown themselves, get stung by jellyfish or get fried to a crisp in the deathly hot sun, only because they haven't learned how to best be in the world yet. They haven't mastered anything, let alone 'life' (does anyone ever?).
Here's the problem when it comes to the parent - because the kids are novices at everything, they require our expertise. Constantly. It's exhausting. They require our expertise to primarily keep them from dying, and then to be the best people they can (the first only marginally easier to achieve than the second). With the relentless need to manage and corral and administer, the parent runs out of the ability to self-regulate, (if they had it to begin with). Superhuman strength is required to regulate your own nervous system and those of the little people around you, who seem completely happy to smear raspberries on the absorbent fabric couch cushions, or piss on the living room rug whilst laughing maniacally, or barrel into the ocean with no regard for rips and sets of waves coming to annihilate them. The question then becomes, can I, the ah-hem, "wise" parent, keep my cool, self-regulate, calmly navigate my children through time, and not need to reach for the wine bottle or whiskey glass once they are finally asleep, just to cope?
If you can get through some of this as the years roll past, one of the greatest gifts is bearing witness to when you children do reach some sort of mastery in something. When their skills in something impress, even surpass your own – ohh man, that is the gold
Powerlessness and Control
Addictions arise out of a sense of powerlessness, and the addictive habit is the way we ‘control’ for that. For me, obviously it was feeling powerless to prevent my body from becoming ensickened (that isn’t a real word, but I’m coining it). Ensickened.
An addict can easily be shamed for lack of discipline, yet a more nuanced understanding of an addict’s behaviour would show multiple factors at play - from disconnection from self and others to past trauma and learned negative patterns, to the avoidance of current pain and suffering with old, unhelpful coping tools, plus the temptations of powerfully addictive activities and drugs that are easy to reach for.
I also find solace in the knowledge that I’m not alone at feeling if not powerless, at least partially at the mercy of the huge forces at play in this world. We are all living, albeit unequally, through loss, death, isolation, alienation, FOMO, discrimination, and the ever-looming spectre of our own death. And our own very human responses to the tectonic plates that we find ourselves walking upon are to strut and fret our way through each moment, holding tight to our specific compulsions and obsessions as the ‘control’ we feel we need in order to walk straight and not fall.
Part of the solution for me is to attempt to hold the larger complexity of human suffering and sickness - it affects us all, and it all leads to the same place - death. Often life is not fair. My amazing, incredible, talented, and big-hearted friend Scott died in the snow in Japan, and I want to know why. But there is no answer that can justify the immensity of the loss.
People regularly get sick, and die, and we want to know why. And then I get sick and I want to know why, to find an answer to that constantly salient question - why do I feel so rotten? The question means that I avoid the reality that I am sick, as hard as it is, and that is my burden in that moment.
The question could be reframed as 'how am I going to shoulder the burden of this sickness right now?' Am I able to not beat myself up mentally about this? Am I able to not pass on my frustrations onto those around me? Am I able to not feel less than, but just accept what is? For the majority of my life I was unable to take responsibility for how I felt – not that I was the cause of it, or to blame for it – just that it was real and happening. Without first accepting it was happening, and not hiding from it, I was unable to hold myself softly and instead created predatory thinking about my value as a person.
Shit in Your Own Spa
There’s an old adage (that I made up) that posits that if you absolutely must shit in a spa, shit in your own spa, not someone else’s. At the very least I was considerate in that sense. I’m thankful that over my life I have never really shat in other’s spas (if I have, I apologise and am happy to offer you filter cleaning reparations), but for so long I was a seasoned expert at shitting in my own.
.
Thanks for reading episode 9 / 10.
If you would like to support my work which is free to access, you can donate here at Buy Me a Coffee
Find me at sheddingskin.substack.com and on Twitter/X @nick_gilpin_
.
.
Vids, Links and References
These are coming, busy week, broken rib, been sick with RSV, getting there!!! 😎
Share this post