This Messy Magnificent Life

by Geneen Roth

  Rob interrupts my thoughts and says, “I think I can help her. Come once a week for six weeks, and let’s see how it goes.”

  As I’ve worked with my students about what happens in the moment before they eat compulsively, I’ve come to realize that each of us plays host to at least two or three distinct identities that when triggered feel utterly familiar. They feel like who we actually are. We feel rejected or sad or lonely—and, in a flash, we shape-shift. Then we begin telling ourselves stories. This always happens. They always leave. I will always be alone. I need to eat. And because we’ve told ourselves those same things for many years, we believe they are true; the familiarity of the feelings, and the fact that they keep repeating themselves in many different situations, means, it seems, that the stories, and who we take ourselves to be in them, are who we really are.

  In my retreat work we call these historical, familiar identities the ghost children. Some of us—most of us—don’t just have one ghost child; we have a series of well-worn but incredibly painful selves whose skins we inhabit as easily as we slip on old, ratty coats from the back of the closet. Some of us (I won’t mention names) are running day-care centers for ghost children. Listening to, and believing, these voices, is partly responsible for the urge to eat when we are not hungry.

  One of my retreat students is sobbing. She has been in a relationship for six months with someone, she says, who loves her. She says it is the first time in her life—she is thirty-two—that she is loving and being loved by someone who doesn’t abuse her. When I saw her six months ago, before she met her lover, she looked vibrant and joyful. Now, she says, all she can do is eat. And eat.

  “I come home from work every night and I walk straight to the refrigerator. I open it. I dive into it as if it was my last chance at survival. Then I spend the night bingeing.” Through a gush of tears, she tells me that “All I know of love is loss.”

  “Really?” I ask. “All you know is loss?”

  “Yes,” she says, and cries louder, harder.

  We both know that what she is saying isn’t true, because in order to have survived this long she would have needed what psychologists call “good-enough love.” We also know that she has spent five months being with someone who understands and cherishes her. But her experience at this moment is subsumed by a ghost child. By the one who was abused, the one who wasn’t seen or cherished. And although there are many feelings that have become associated with love—loss, fear, abuse, shame, abandonment—they are not true in this moment. Nonetheless, those feelings are present and it is not helpful to push them away, or tell her to snap out of it and grow herself up. But neither would it serve her to believe that what she is saying is true.

  After a while, the stories from our past begin to feel like poems we memorized in fifth grade, or Beatles songs we learned by heart. They evoke memories, feelings, possibilities or the lack of them, and if we believe them we are defined by them. It’s as if we draw a circle around ourselves and say, This is me. This is what I am capable of. This is how it will be forever. Instead of being kind to the ghost children, instead of treating them as Rob urged me to treat Izzy (with a combination of kindness toward the pain and fierceness about not being manipulated by it), we either try to get rid of them or we become them. Either way, it’s like living on the inside of a scream from twenty, thirty, fifty years ago.

  Another story from a retreat: It is eight a.m., breakfast time, and more than a hundred of us are gathered in the dining room of the retreat center. The room is steamy and hot from bodies and coffee and mounds of scrambled eggs. Thirteen tables of eight fill the room; I stand on the side, ready to speak to anyone who is curious about the amount or kind of food she has put on her plate. Since most of us use food in secret by rationalizing why, just this once, we deserve to have this pancake/cinnamon bun/cake otherwise we will die, being in a crowded room with your plate piled with food and being asked to pay attention is like wearing your insides on the outside. There is nowhere to hide.

  A woman named Barrie raises her hand. She has large brown eyes, short cropped gray hair, and is perhaps seventy-five pounds over her natural weight. I weave my way through the space between the chairs, and stand beside her right shoulder. She starts to cry immediately, stops after a few moments, and looks down at her plate. It is piled high with eggs, three pieces of toast, mounds of potatoes, and two cinnamon buns.

  “I’ve taken enough food to feed three people,” she says.

  “Yes,” I say, “it seems you have. I wonder who or what you are feeding.”

  Without missing a beat, she says, “My mother died this year and I miss her so much I can’t stand it. The grief is too much. It’s too much.” She starts to cry again. Then she says, “I tried taking my cat for a walk on a leash, and he didn’t want to go, so he just bent over, laid on the ground, and wouldn’t get up. I feel like my cat. I don’t want to get up. I just want to eat.”

  I ask Barrie how old she feels.

  “Ten years old and I’ve lost my mom and there’s nothing I can do to bring her back. I can’t handle this by myself. I’ll fall apart if I let myself feel it.”

  “And what will food do?”

  “Fill the hole left by my mom.”

  “And how’s that working?” I ask.

  She stops crying and a giggle escapes. “Not so well. I’ve gained forty pounds and my mom hasn’t come back. I’m afraid I’ll get swallowed by the grief so I keep eating to make it go away.”

  “And now?” I ask. “What about right now?”

  “Now I feel sad . . .”

  “Where in your body do you feel that?” I ask.

  “In my chest. In my stomach. It feels heavy, like a dark, dense cloud.”

  “And what happens if you stay with the feelings instead of pushing them away by eating?”

  “Well,” she answers, “when I feel the sadness itself, it feels dark but also soft. It feels heavy but also warm. I don’t feel like my cat anymore, I just feel heavy, warm, soft, and dark. But I also feel something else: a tenderness toward it.”

  “And the food on your plate? How do you feel about that?”

  “Like it could feed me and a small army. Like I don’t want it anymore.”

  People come to my retreats to get rid of their issues with food. They want peace. They want release. And they want it by the end of the weeklong retreat. I understand the urgency; I know that what they really want—and it does feel urgent—is to be free from what tortures them. From all the voices that tell them they’re not good enough. From what prompts them to eat when they are not hungry. From the suffering of a lifetime.

  I was waiting most of my life for that. And I believed, really believed, that the freedom and the joy I imagined would come with it existed as a destination, like a balmy tropical island where Brazilian bikini waxes were outlawed, and piña coladas were free. If only I could skip over the painful parts. If only I wasn’t myself.

  Just last week I was back to thrashing around in ghost stories (“I’m a failure; I’m dying of cancer of something that hasn’t yet been discovered; I’m too needy, my needs are repulsive”) and the feelings that accompany them: depression, emptiness, and loneliness. I call it my Pigpen state. (According to Peanuts, “Pigpen travels in his own private dust storm knowing full well that he has affixed to him the dust of ages.”) The next day, I realized that I was swinging between two familiar poles: moping around in my own private dust storm and losing patience with the moping. Then I remembered that this process of discovery used to take weeks, and I also recalled that I can make a choice: I can decide to step out of my stories and turn toward the feelings directly.

  Turning toward myself in that moment feels like the very opposite of what any normal person would do (which is to run, screaming, in the opposite direction and toward the ice cream). It feels like I am choosing to die. And in some ways, I am because when I turn toward myself, the old-me story dissolves.

  For many reasons, we could not feel the hurt or pain
or abandonment at the time it arose—twenty or thirty or fifty years ago—so we keep feeling it now in the form of frightened, ashamed, unlovable ghost children. The choice now is whether we keep believing in, and reinforcing, those images in our minds, or whether we stop.

  The gaggle of ghost children—the worthlessness and shame and beliefs about how I/we should be, could be, should have been—are based on elaborate stories about why what happened, happened. For many reasons, we could not feel the hurt or pain or abandonment at the time it arose—twenty or thirty or fifty years ago—so we keep feeling it now in the form of frightened, ashamed, unlovable ghost children. The choice now is whether we keep believing in, and reinforcing, those images in our minds, or whether we stop. Whether we retreat into old stories each time we feel rejected or whether we turn toward that well of beliefs and the pain that accompanies them and allow them to speak. This turning toward is the very definition of kindness.

  When, on that Pigpen morning of my discontent, I stopped clenching against the pain (i.e., believing my thoughts about how awful I was), I remembered an interaction I’d had a few days before, with a friend who seemed to be withdrawing from our relationship—and I slowly realized I was blaming myself for wanting too much. And since a version of that interaction happened many times over many years—Why do you always need, need, need? Can’t you think of anyone but yourself?—I began seeing myself the way I believed other people saw me: as repulsive, as wanting too much, as an open wound.

  That morning I decided that instead of being disgusted by Pigpen, I’d invite him in. And then. Everything hurt. My skin, my feet, my chest. Without my mind’s stories about the hurt—Oh my God, this will never end; what if I can’t ever get off the bed?—it became a red pulsing sensation in the back of my chest. And as I allowed it to be there, it changed; first it softened, and then it spread like a wave into my arms, and down my belly. Tears came. I could feel my childhood confusion, the way I shrank to fit the space I thought my family could tolerate. And then came tenderness. For the child who couldn’t get enough of her mother, and for the mother who couldn’t take being wanted by her child. For the situation itself.

  Each time we turn toward rather than away from ourselves, the part of ourselves that is not our story arises.

  “Poor Pigpen,” I thought. And in that moment, I wasn’t young and I wasn’t old. I wasn’t crazy and I wasn’t lonely. I was both the pain and that which was holding the pain. The sadness and that which was noticing the sadness. The unlove and that which was untouched by the lack of love. Stillness itself.

  All any feeling wants is to be welcomed with tenderness. It wants room to unfold. It wants to relax and tell its story. And the magic of this is that each time we turn toward rather than away from ourselves, the part of ourselves that is not our story arises.

  Spiritual teachers call that which has never, not for one second, been affected by anything that has ever happened, true nature or presence of God. It is ageless and pure, responsive and full of potential. And what it feels like, what it always feels like, is that the noise in our minds has stopped. And for what may be the first time (or the five thousandth time, it doesn’t matter), anything is possible. We are free.

  It always feels the same, the turn that happens when I realize I’ve been in the thrall of an entity using my body as its host but now I have a choice about whether to free myself from its clutches. “Really?” I think. “I’m allowed to do this? There is no prison, no door, no key? Really?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  * * *

  Hoodwinked by Suffering

  Afew years ago, my friend Michael had his prostate removed, which meant he was bedridden with a catheter up his penis and a urine bag attached to his hip. From his bed, he told me that because he’d been doing tai chi and chi gong for thirty years, he had just created a new kind of “laying-down tai chi,” and was healing much faster than the doctor expected. He waved his hands over his pelvis a few times to demonstrate. “You do look radiant for someone who’s just had surgery,” I replied—and he did.

  As my husband, Matt, and I were driving home, It started:

  I can’t believe I didn’t follow through with that chi gong practice. What is WRONG with me?

  What if I have to have my ovaries removed and I don’t know how to wave my hands over their absence and heal myself?

  I KNEW I should have taken up tai chi thirty years ago when everyone was flying to Hawaii and studying with Al What’s-His-Name. Now it’s too late. I blew it. Again.

  Along with—and even more pronounced than—the Greek chorus of judgments was the set of physical reactions that accompanied It: a pounding heart; a stomach that felt as if it had fallen through my feet and taken my legs with it; a sense of having withered and shrunk. Then came the wave of emotional reactions to the physical reactions: a feeling of irrevocable failure; desperation to climb out of myself; neediness for “a big person” to rescue flailing me. And, as if that wasn’t enough, reactions to the original judgments started piling up:

  You’re such a fraud. You’re supposed to be teaching other people how to disengage from this mess and you can’t even do it yourself. How many times, for how many years, are you going to have to keep going through this? Don’t you ever learn?

  Then, the final insult (which seems to be a favorite, although it often has nothing to do with the situation at hand): You are going to die fat, miserable, and alone, with moles on your face that have bristles sticking out.

  In the car, we were passing fields of grazing cows, humps of ocher hills dotted with wind-twisted shrubs and sprawling trees. Matt was burbling about how well Michael seemed and hadn’t yet realized that she who had woken up with him, left the house with him, walked in Michael’s door with him, had disappeared in a whorl of comparative judgment and shame. When I didn’t respond to his attempts at conversation, he turned and said, “Are you okay, sweetheart?”

  Silence.

  What I really wanted to say was “No, and would it be okay if I walked into your body now so that I could leave mine? And if that’s not a possibility, would you mind telling me ten or a hundred reasons why you love me because I can’t remember a single reason why you should.”

  But I didn’t want to tell Matt the truth. I didn’t want him to discover that I’d been pulling the wool over his eyes for thirty years and that he’d married an impostor. So I lied to him instead.

  “Sorry,” I answered. “Yes, Michael looked great and isn’t the pink sky gorgeous and are we having poached salmon for dinner or did we decide on that zucchini frittata with chard from the garden?”

  By morning, I was still feeling small and panicky. Over breakfast of grilled cheese on sourdough toast with avocados and tomatoes, I murmured, “I should have taken up tai chi years ago when everyone was doing it; I missed my chance.” And Matt, having spent years listening to my laments about the life I could have had if only I hadn’t been myself, responded, “Uh, isn’t that the bully?” and added: “The voice of what Catherine Ingram calls ‘the crazy aunt in the attic’?”

  “Hmm,” I said, “maybe.” And then I dismissed the crazy-aunt possibility and thought, “He loves me too much to see how damaged I am. Or else, he’s too lazy to get a divorce.” But as I finished the last bite of avocado, I started feeling like Patty Duke playing Helen Keller.

  In the movie The Miracle Worker, Anne Sullivan, Helen’s teacher, refuses to let her leave the table until she understands the connection between the egg she is eating and the word for it. Despite Helen’s tantrums, Anne persists with signing the word into her hand until finally Helen makes a connection between two things that were previously unrelated—and “a new light comes into her face.” When Matt named the bully-aunt dynamic, I was able to see the connection between the doom and its cause; I saw that whenever the bully is around, the needy panicky one is also around, that they are a duo. And I saw that they were actually just thought patterns and I didn’t need to believe them.

  It always feels the s
ame, the turn that happens when I realize I’ve been in the thrall of an entity using my body as its host but now I have a choice about whether to free myself from its clutches. “Really?” I think. “I’m allowed to do this? There is no prison, no door, no key? Really?” Seeing that I can free myself is freeing myself since the awareness noticing the struggle is outside of it, and therefore already free from it. And being on the other side of comparative judgment or shame always, every single time, feels exultingly light, as if I’ve gone to the closet, put on the wings that were hanging beside my puffer coat, and am now soaring around treetops, shouting Hallelujah at every red-tailed hawk I pass.

  Each engagement with the aunt has recognizable ingredients: a big know-it-all wagging its finger at a small whimpering ghost child.

  The trigger can be anything at all: something someone says or does, a situation at work, an article about George Clooney or Annie Dillard, visiting a friend. You start comparing yourself to your own expectations of what you thought was going to happen and didn’t or who you thought you were going to become and haven’t.

  Triggers are personal and conditioned by your history and vulnerabilities (i.e., Matt did not respond to visiting Michael the way I did); they do not have to do with the situation itself. No one can cause you to compare, shrink, or shame yourself; a trigger is created when you believe your thoughts and the feelings they evoke.

  The physical reaction to the trigger: the pounding heart, the sinking chest, the feeling of shrinking to pint size. The sensation of energy draining from your body and leaving emptiness in its place, of being paralyzed or just too little to deal with this big bad world.