Trauma & Art

Book related memories….

“Every woman, or at least almost every woman, in England has, at one time or another of her life, being in charge of the personal health of somebody, whether child or invalid,—in other words, every woman is a nurse…..” Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing What It Is, and What It Is Not

“What has changed is the culture in which we are rearing our children. Children’s attachments to parents are no longer getting the support required from culture and society.” Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate, Hold on to Your Children

“There is still plenty to go around— plenty of flowers, plenty of seeds, plenty of bugs— but the creatures in my yard are not interested in sharing. For them, scarcity is no different from fear of scarcity. A real threat and an imagined threat provoke the same response. I stand at the window and watch them, cataloging all the human conflicts their ferocity calls to mind.” Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

Walking in a spring rain   Sarah Ruhl, Love Poems in Quarantine

Sometimes bullies feel / like the weather – but they  /  are not the weather.

These last few weeks I’ve been busier and running more errands than usual, but in between I have managed to do some reading and listening to things that interest me. I will begin with a quote by Maria Shriver Kennedy from her newsletter, which is related to Easter [here in Greece tomorrow is Palm Sunday]. She writes: “So on this Palm Sunday, as we approach Holy Week, may we all regardless of our religious identity or lack thereof—think of our lives and the lives of others as holy indeed. Do you know how you would treat your life if you really viewed it as holy? Do you know how you would treat others if you saw their lives first and foremost as holy? I’ve been thinking a lot about that this week, and I believe that I would be gentler….. So this week, my hope is that we each attempt to treat each other and ourselves in a manner that is holy, that is kind, that is gentle, and that is compassionate.”This is also my wish for this Easter period and beyond.

As I wrote in a previous post I am trying to finish reading books I left halfway. One that I’ve completed is the book that Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate have co-authored, Hold on to Your Children, which discusses the negative impact of peer orientation on children’s development and their relationship with their family, the flat lining of culture and how parents and teachers can reassume their nature-appointed roles as the mentors and nurturers of the young, as the models and leaders to whom they look for guidance. They write that we need to give our children the freedom to be themselves in the context of loving acceptance— an acceptance that immature peers are unable to offer, but one that we adults can and must provide.

Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate discuss many valuable themes, but I will very briefly focus on competing attachments, which is less discussed. The authors stress the importance of children’s relationships to their adult caregivers / parents and the devastating impact in today’s society of competing attachments with peers. The book restores parents to their natural intuition and offers alternatives to today’s contrived methods of behaviour control and strategies for restoring or preserving the child-to-parent relationship. A lot of vignettes are included of cases where things have gone awry between peer oriented children and parents and teachers, and the consequences on children’s safety, development and maturation. The book explores many aspects of the main theme in detail. Additionally, two important related topics worth reading are the increase of bullying and the making of bullies and the challenges with raising children in a digital age.

The writers ask the question: If parenting skills or even loving the child are not enough, what then is needed? They go on to discuss in detail the indispensable special kind of relationship without which parenting lacks a firm foundation, which developmental psychologists or other scientists who study human development call attachment relationship.

They write: “Only the attachment relationship can provide the proper context for child-rearing. The secret of parenting is not in what a parent does but rather who the parent is to a child. When a child seeks contact and closeness with us, we become empowered as a nurturer, a comforter, a guide, a model, a teacher, or a coach. For a child well attached to us, we are her home base from which to venture into the world, her retreat to fall back to, her fountainhead of inspiration. All the parenting skills in the world cannot compensate for a lack of attachment relationship. All the love in the world cannot get through without the psychological umbilical cord created by the child’s attachment. The attachment relationship of child to parent needs to last at least as long as a child needs to be parented. That is what is becoming more difficult in today’s world. Parents haven’t changed— they haven’t become less competent or less devoted. The fundamental nature of children has also not changed— they haven’t become less dependent or more resistant. What has changed is the culture in which we are rearing our children. Children’s attachments to parents are no longer getting the support required from culture and society. Even parent-child relationships that at the beginning are powerful and fully nurturing can become undermined as our children move out into a world that no longer appreciates or reinforces the attachment bond. Children are increasingly forming attachments that compete with their parents, with the result that the proper context for parenting is less and less available to us. It is not a lack of love or of parenting know-how but the erosion of the attachment context that makes our parenting ineffective.”

They add: “In adult-oriented cultures, where the guiding principles and values are those of the more mature generations, kids attach to each other without losing their bearings or rejecting the guidance of their parents. In our society that is no longer the case. Peer bonds have come to replace relationships with adults as children’s primary sources of orientation. What is unnatural is not peer contact, but that children should have become the dominant influence on one another’s development…… Culture, until recently, was always handed down vertically, from generation to generation. For millennia, wrote Joseph Campbell, “the youth have been educated and the aged rendered wise” through the study, experience, and understanding of traditional cultural forms. Adults played a critical role in the transmission of culture, taking what they received from their own parents and passing it down to their children. However, the culture our children are being introduced to is much more likely to be the culture of their peers than that of their parents. Children are generating their own culture, very distinct from that of their parents and, in some ways, also very alien. Instead of culture being passed down vertically, it is being transmitted horizontally within the younger generation….”

Another book I’ve recently completed is Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, a memoir by Margaret Renkl.

It contains short chapters with introductory illustrations by her brother.  Renkl’s narrative left a sense of familiarity. Her descriptions of the natural world, mostly the world of her back yard and street, and her awe and empathic connection to the creatures and plants in it resonated with my own thoughts and feelings in relation to nature and creatures that cross my path; however, unlike her I don’t know the names of all the different species of birds, insects and plants. This experience of awe and empathic connection that has in my case resulted in my feeding and taking care of almost a dozen cats in my garden, something I had never planned on doing, but happened gradually after the passing away of our dogs, as the garden became a free zone for stray cats.

This is a photo of the ladder from which my husband fell off as he was trying to screw the new polycarbonate glass sheet on the pergola, which is too heavy for me to move and has now become a playground for our female cats.

Below are some excerpts from Renkl’s book:

“….. there is another game I play in church with Mother Ollie’s hand. I take it in my own and pat it smooth, running my finger across its impossible softness, marveling at the way it ripples under my finger, as yielding as water. My great-grandmother’s skin is an echo of her old Bible, the pages tissue-thin, the corners worn to soft felt. I gently pinch the skin above her middle knuckle, and then I let it go. I count to myself, checking to see how many seconds it can stand upright, like a mountain ridge made by a glacier in an age long before mine. Slowly, slowly it disappears. Slowly, slowly it throws itself into the sea.”

“Safe, Trapped: Inside the nest box, the baby birds are safe from hawks, sheltered from the wind, protected from the sharp eye of the crow and the terrible tongue of the red-bellied woodpecker. Inside the nest box, the baby birds are powerless, vulnerable to the fury of the pitched summer sun, of the house sparrow’s beak. Bounded on all sides by their sheltering home, they are a meal the rat snake eats at its leisure.”

“Flowers that bloom in the garden are called flowers, and flowers that bloom in the vacant lot are called weeds.”

“I like the idea of mist as much as I enjoy the lovely mist itself. Aren’t transitions always marked by tumult and confusion? How comforting it would be to say, as a matter of unremarkable fact, “I’m wandering in the mist just now. It will blow off in a bit.”

Finally,  poems from Love Poems in Quarantine by Sarah Ruhl, playwright, essayist and poet.

On homesickness, back when I travelled

….. And I thought:  / at home in the world  /  The endless desire to be / at home in the world……

Differences between me and my dog

 …. She eats from a bowl on the floor;  /  I eat from a bowl on the table.

She always bears small irritations with grace;  /  I sometimes bear small irritations with grace……

Crossing

The water rushes / and it doesn’t stop rushing.  /   We help each other cross.

Shelter

To love a house not  /  because it’s perfect, but  /  because  / it shelters you

To love a body  /  not because it’s perfect but  /  because it shelters you

Books as food

 Change the body by / what you fill it with; and so   /   too the mind – with books.

 Freedom

I will interrupt   /  my own mind. Instead of others   /   interrupting me.

What I’ve been up to….

“For now she knew well that everything blooms with love. And that with love even halves become whole” Tasoula Eptakili, The Teapot that Blooms

“As the carousel repeats / goes round and round, things come from that time, only each time we are asked to process them, to reposition what was old, and not reproduce the exact same, like the horse that goes round and round endlessly and does exactly the same thing…” Savvas Savvopoulos, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, [has for thirty years worked with cancer patients as a psychoanalyst-psychotherapist]

I’ve been weathering a cold and a mild fever so I’ve been a bit sluggish recently. Some of the things I’ve pondered on and engaged with and feel might be worth sharing today are:

1. Some new drawings, one of which has been inspired by Voula Papaioannou’s work. She was an important figure in Greek photography and considered part of the “humanist photography” that was developed as an antidote to the dissolution of human values during WWWII. As I revisited her photographs that capture what the people of Greece lived through during the period between 1940 and 1960 tears welled up and I became viscerally aware of how our own historical contexts, but also those of our ancestors, define our current social realities even though we may be oblivious to it more often than not. The civil war – that tremendous loss, wound and split in the Greek psyche – lives on and even though it mostly lives underground it is reflected in our politics and our viewing of each other. The wound to some extent or other is passed down from one generation to another.

2. A “bigger picture” type of reflection exercise

A tapping exercise by Jessica Ortner I listened to this month reminded me of a kind of “all basic areas of life’ inclusive meditation-reflection practice I have engaged with at times. During the process we can reflect or meditate while considering areas of health, money, work, primary relationship, other relationships, and so on. We can also reflect on these by tapping while asking questions and processing related events, emotions and beliefs. In the tapping version mentioned above we are also invited to explore different areas of our body to see where constriction or tension is held.

We might, for instance, start by trying to remember our earliest experience with money, related incidents and feelings. Then we can move on to later experiences all the way up to the present and the future. Whatever area we focus on we will most likely discern a repetitive pattern in terms of feelings, beliefs, thoughts, and bodily responses, which often arise automatically, or a point in time when these were disrupted, hopefully for the better. Along these lines we can explore our first romantic relationship and our current one if we are in one and see patterns, similarities and dynamics across time. Likewise we can explore familial relationships, educational and work contexts, health issues or health care we have received, our prevalent coping strategies when we feel tense, tired, sad, anxious, uncertain or angry. As we do so we gain some insight around contextual factors and dynamics, and our ways of responding or reacting.

The process is quite lengthy, not necessarily easy to do, and it reflects a more holistic picture of our experience. To use a metaphor it’s like looking from the theatre balcony, where we do not only see what’s happening on the stage. Our observation capacity from the balcony is broader than from the orchestra seats. This sort of activity allows us the kind of view that comes from stepping up and back, getting a broader sense of things. To some extent there is some power in this “higher” perspective from an elevated point of observation. Dynamics, events, relationships, decisions, choices come into the foreground, our understanding shifts, deepens, Emotions also come up and possibilities might emerge or disappear. New facts and perceptions, data and paths might emerge. We understand where we have been ignorant or averting our gaze. I read somewhere that perspective shifting and broadening our lens are among the cognitive competencies that we need to develop so that we may more successfully, and safely navigate our complex world, and that actually these are skills that can be learnt and practiced starting from childhood.

Taking in the bigger picture of our life and context is not a one-time thing, it is a process we might need to return to as our understanding shifts and as we encounter more of our experience. The exercise above requires empathy and (self) compassion, as well as, acceptance. It requires a certain capacity to stay with emotions that arise, to titrate the process to avoid overwhelm and to take care of our self, to situate experiences and consider the myriads of factors that influenced events, including  historical wounds that live within us even if we are often oblivious to them. It necessitates our befriending difficult emotions and defenses and appreciating their survival value. As we deepen the process we are asked to reconnect and embrace what some psychologists term as “the exiled parts of the self”.

3. A meditation I have recently enjoyed by Henry Shukman, writer and meditation teacher, involves our sort of taking a break from all our belief systems, identities, roles, even names, shedding them in our imaginations like layers of shirts and – for a little while – resting in a less encumbered sense of being, in a kind of signlessness, namelessness, as he puts it, an experience of simply being alive unhindered momentarily by all else [https://www.rickhanson.net/meditation-talk-finding-a-greater-wholeness/].

4. Over the past several years I’ve mostly been reading e-books in English, for practical mostly reasons, and have not had time to do much reading in Greek, but spending some time in bed with my recent cold I read Κέρμα στον Αέρα / Coin in the Air, a combination of fiction and memoir, by Tasoula Eptakili. Each chapter is a day in a member of a family through historical time, the war in the Albanian mountains in 1940, the civil war, the port of Pireus, where relatives set off for Australia during the years of massive emigration, the last dictatorship, the years that followed, the hope for a better future and the disappointment that came afterwards, the financial crisis. The immigration chapter, Third Class, felt familiar, my parents (and relatives) travelled from Pireus to Australia, some probably on the same ship mentioned in the book. The first to leave was my father in 1956. He invited my mother, her brother and others. I also remember their small 45 records, the same music, by the same record companies mentioned here. Eight decades. Ten people. Eptakili writes: “Moments from the history of a family. It could be mine. It could be yours.”

Α short extract from the last chapter with the title: Roses or mallow?

“How much of what I have recounted are real pieces of my own puzzle of the past and how much is invented? …. Ιs what we remember exactly as we experienced it… Is it as we heard it described to us or as we created it in our imagination?… When we stand in front of a mirror and we look at our image, the space behind us seems completely out of place and strange: the windows and doors are elsewhere, the light comes in from somewhere else, the furniture is in a different position, not where we’re  used to it. We lose our orientation. It is like vertigo. The same thing often happens when we look back in time.”

5. Finally, a book for children, also written by Tasoula Eptakili. The Teapot that Blooms tells us the story of an avid teapot collector, who loves jasmine tea, and how a little girl, found one of the teapots without its lid. The book ends with these sentences: “For now she knew well that everything blooms with love. And that with love even halves become whole.”