Ghost of Nothing: Defenseless, Attachment, Humility

Usually, the wee hours are a time of quiet solitude, productivity and comfort for me. I guess those three things have always gone together. And I guess I realize that the magic of their success depends on having all three. One missing ingredient and the whole thing falls apart. This seemed to be one of those mornings where for the life of me, I could not get anything to “work.” And I could not seem to settle down. One of the advantages of this one finger typing is that everything is so glacially slow that it facilitates or perhaps imposes a heightened level of awareness. It reminds me of those mindfulness practices that I always found unbearable or stupid, where we had to chew one raisin 100 times. I figured you have to be on acid to get anything out of that.

I broke my right arm once before. It was 1974, I was 19. I was cheating on my boyfriend with a guy I met on the bus. It was that eye contact thing. Eye contact is powerfully erotic and connecting. That is why children of neglect tend to avoid it like the plague. It was one of the first “markers” of neglect I came to notice. We avoid it because it tickles the unremembered memory or the void, the missing experience of gazing. The loving exchange that is nature’s design, or first communication other than nurturing touch. For the deprived, it becomes unbearable to feel, to stimulate any of that. Anyway, that was how we met.

He took me to a Grateful Dead concert at Frost Amphitheater at Stanford. He was old enough, so we had a gallon jug of Annie Greenspring, $1.99. In the US that is a pretty darn big bottle and almost no money even then. And they did not have rules about bringing your refreshments, even glass containers, into shows. Annie Greenspring was heavily food colored sugar water with a massive alcohol content, masquerading as “wine.” Horrible but it definitely “worked.” I fell and broke my arm. Of course I had to stay until the end of the show, I was feeling no pain anyway. By the end my arm had ballooned to a grotesque size. He took me to “Rock Medicine,” they sent us to Stanford Emergency where they put it in a monster plaster cast. This guy was kind enough to wait, and then deposited me at 4:00AM at my boyfriend’s place. Ah the hubris of the drunk. I don’t remember a whole lot more than that. It was my sophomore year of college, I lived alone. We only wrote longhand back then. My left-handed writing was pretty good. A lot better than now. I had no choice. Three months later, poof, it was history.

I figured I could tell people that story. It’s much more entertaining, colorful. About as useful as any other drunkalog you hear at an AA meeting. You get a laugh, that is that. It wasn’t making me laugh, however, this morning.

Most people who know me know I always have a song in my head, a constant and endless backbeat. Now with my aging memory, sometimes I only get a fragment, or a fitting phrase. This morning it was a few incomplete lines from a Bruce Hornsby song I could not place: “Got to get something done today, give accomplishment a shot –  full palette to use – gonna paint with the colors I’ve got…” I could not remember any more of it, but somehow, I did remember which album. I wasted a lot of time on a fruitless search, until I thought to simply enter the fragments I did remember, and the wonders of Google took me to a YouTube video of the song. I watched it, listened to it, again and again. And the clouds began to break, I could feel this quaking in my belly, and I could think. I thought, oh yes. This is that primordial emptiness, the nothing. Without the “benefit,” the cloaking disguise of alcohol, food, sex, compulsive exercise, work…This is the darkness I had so effectively mostly eluded, defended against. I know no better word than nothing. This is what I can tell you about. The song broke through it.

I watched Bruce’s hands on the piano. I have always profoundly admired and appreciated those hands, not only his genius, but the hours and hours I imagined he spent alone practicing. What it would have meant for him to injure an arm or hand, wondering if he ever had. But mostly thanking him. And I felt better.

Attachment

I realized, this is what I can tell you about, nothing clever or cute. Our defenses work. They create their own agonizing tyranny, but powerfully insulate us from something even worse. And we fight them and focus on them until we don’t need to anymore, at least most of the time. Blessedly for me, alcohol, food, starvation, compulsive exercise…they are all out of the way now. The last holdout, admittedly, is work, although an army of helpers and true loved ones are on me about that. I guess not getting that one to work for me this morning left me stripped bare, flailing untethered in space, the dreaded “memory” of nothing.

I remember back in 2002 when I was at the Sensorimotor training in Boston, and incidentally when I first listened to that song, we learned the Sensorimotor definition of mindfulness. Back then it wasn’t a household and widely marketed word. It meant part of you is in the experience, and another is outside of the experience, and able to watch, notice and think about it. The psychodynamic people called it observing ego.

Around that same time, driving my little old rattle-trap Toyota, I would listen repeatedly to my grainy cassette tapes of Bessel talking about the brain. In trauma we go completely limbic, into raw terror. Running from a tiger, we cannot think or speak. Bringing the prefrontal cortex, the thinking brain, online is one of the great tasks of healing from trauma and neglect: becoming mindful. Bessel, Bruce, they were my attachment figures then. Not completely imaginary friends, but not exactly real attachments either. Nothing like what I have now. But they calmed and comforted me then, much as Bruce did again today.

Now with a firing prefrontal, I can tell you, even in this slow, one-finger, hunt and peck way, that is what we desperately flee in all kinds of ways. Until we don’t have too anymore. Yay.

Humility

 

And I thought, “OMG you can’t tell the people that!” It is way too pathetic, my “expertise,” any pretext of usefulness to anyone – out the window. But I realize that trauma in all its iterations is a great leveler. And it is humbling. After years and decades of work I am unfortunately reminded or taught that there is ever deeper we can go. We can’t entirely erase that original circuitry, only build ever stronger alternate pathways, viable most of the time. Thankfully I am not alone anymore. And I am also able to share this with you.

As we enter 2025, I am pleased to say that 148 Ukrainian therapists, thanks to the stewardship of EFT therapist Sandy Jardine and Brian Spielman of the Academy for Therapy Wisdom, have received a gift of my ATW introductory course on Neglect Informed Psychotherapy. I am heartened and gratified to be able to help even in this small way. Hope and healing to all for 2025.

Today’s song: