Anne Giles Clelland

Good Company

Things that should have happened didn’t.
Things that shouldn’t have happened did.

We’re all messed up on some level and, after decades in education, community work, mental health and business, that’s my summary as to why.

That means that the people I’m standing by in the grocery store line, my neighbors, my parents, my spouse, his parents, my colleagues, the people I follow on Twitter, and the people who follow me - all of us to a greater or lesser extent are messed up.

That means we enter relationships, citizenship, and the work place messed up.

Life and circumstance may deal us terrible blows, but since we’re already messed up, we’re already at a disadvantage to handle them.

Add joy and hope and awing resilience, and that's the human condition.

Some with the human condition enter the world of business.

When I'm at a conference table surrounded by those in business, I feel in good company.

Letter to a Friend

"...Take all myself."
- Juliet, Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare

The person I called didn’t pick up, so I began to talk, then cry into the person’s voice mail.  Mid-sob, I found myself observing myself.  One more time, I was leaving a voice mail about how hurt I was from how badly this person had treated me.

The stories are endless and endlessly inexplicable about the abused returning to their abusers, the broken-hearted with broken promises returning to their breakers.  "Leave!" friends and family say.  "Where's your will power?" they implore.  Why, why do people return to the people who aren’t good to them?

For me, my psychological need for my heart breaker to value me is so ancient and so deep that I have felt, at times, willing to give my life for proof of this person’s regard.  Add to this need my fear of annihilation from the breaker’s rage if I were to end contact, my breaker-instilled-self-doubt-my-fault-self-belief that if I were just a better person, the breaker would treat me better, and my vision of the bleakness of life from cutting off ever having any chance to finally win this person’s regard, and that’s a formula for immobility.

Those who return to their abusers have unmet emotional needs attached to the abuser, deep resistance to “making” the person feel some way when they take a stand or walk away - rage, guilt, shame, grief among them - and a belief that they would be broken beyond repair from the loss of the person from their lives.

Even after much professional and spiritual guidance, even after earning a degree in counseling myself, I continue to feel as if I have my mind and my body, but the breaker owns and holds my heart outside and away from me.  I engage with the breaker to at least stay close to this hostage, my own heart.

And with a captive heart, how can I truly be heartfelt with those who love me and with those whom I love?

Into the phone, I stopped sobbing.  I told the phone person I had called that I had just realized that, one more time, over and over again, I was using the phone person and this method in secret, at a distance, from the breaker.  I wasn’t processing feelings productively toward solutions.  I was releasing them in hiding so I could return appearing unperturbed to the breaker.  And then I hung up.

I once asked a therapist friend, “When do people change?”  She answered, “When they’re in enough pain.”

I’m close.

I’ve sought but been unable to find the source of the quote I remember from my studies but here’s my paraphrase of a passage from Freud:  “Consciousness is everything.”

I can take action, or choose not to take action, only about that of which I am conscious.

During the voice mail, I became conscious that I had become pathetic.  I might as well have had a black eye and bruises around my neck, saying into the phone through broken teeth, “Yes, but…”

The abused lose their senses of clarity, faith, hope, and power.  Over time, thinking what to do, believing it’s okay to do it, believing it will work on some level, and believing one has the power to take action on what to do approach impossibility.

And yet.

My breaker doesn’t hold my heart hostage.  I’ve given it over in hopes the breaker would cherish it.

I have become conscious that the breaker will never cherish me.  Ever.  The reasons why are, ultimately, irrelevant.  What I long for with the most elemental parts of me?  It is not to be.

Well.  Then.

The mechanics of extrication of are just that, mechanics.  The what and how and when are mine to decide, no one else’s.  I have been taught and have consciously acquired self-soothing skills over the past decade.  I will need all of them.  Certainly I will feel relieved at times, but romanticizing the end of a breaker of a relationship demeans the process. This will be, at times, excruciating.  My unmet needs and longings can lead me to demoralizing visions of foul, tragic catastrophe.  I have learned to stop these thoughts as soon as I detect them.  To save myself from despair, I will have to do this.  Over and over again.

I turn 51 in a month.  The years of 49 and 50 seemed exciting milestones and I relished them as trajectories towards heights of insights through reflection and contemplation.  On the downward slope of the curve I see 51.  I can do triathlons, eat local vegetables, and meditate with a cat on my lap all I want.  Life will never cherish me enough to keep me.

Well.  Okay then.  Okay, fine, then.  I’m getting my heart back.  When I go, it will be all of me.

Shadow Tweets

“Lighten up, Anne.”

Over the course of a half century of life, I’ve heard that plenty.

My reply?  No...

In Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche, Jungian psychologist and analyst Robert A. Johnson defines “the shadow” as “that part of us we fail to see or know,” and asserts, “To honor and accept one’s own shadow is a profound spiritual discipline.  It is whole-making and thus holy and the most important experience of a lifetime.”

I tried most of my childhood and early adult years to have only a light side.  I discovered myself struggling to contain an unseen, unknown part of myself, living a half-sided, half-lived life.

Paradoxically, I find myself now feeling available to lightening up when I’ve balanced it with darkening down.

While the light side of me recoiled from one of the more amusing suggestions of Johnson to “do shadow work” by looking into the garbage, I consciously offer up taking care of the innards and outards of my cats to the dark side.

I find my light and dark sides titillated when @TweetsFromHell show up in my Twitter stream.  Poet Robert Olen Butler is tweeting one-line "value addeds" to accompany his new novel entitled, of course, Hell.

The tweeting poet has been covered in the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere, according to a Google search.  I think I first read of the poet on Twitter in the Wall Street Journal.

The light side:  In another life, I was a student of poet Peter Meinke.  He taught me to write a fine line of poetry, and probably more successfully, to appreciate one, so I find Butler's up-to-140-character-one-liners exquisitely beautiful.

The dark side:  Hoo, boy, some of those tweets...  Well, my shadow, my dark psyche, my inner celebrant of the cat box all revel in the blackness!

Take a look for yourself at this one:

Telemarketers & phone-sex workers are one here, calling endlessly, selling their own body parts. Handling & shipping is the tough part

Dark, dark, deliciously dark.

I'm honored to say that I have a Direct Message - a DM - from the devil poet himself.

On Publicity

Ten candidates are running for our local town council, many of whom have never before been in the public eye, who now seek publicity for their platforms.  Michael Jackson’s death caused many to ponder the power of publicity to harm a spirit.  In a post-Olympics interview, Michael Phelps was asked how he handled publicity.  I paraphrase what I remember:  “To do what I want to do - to raise the bar on the sport of swimming - it’s just something that has to be gone through.”  I have received kind publicity recently.  And my clients are starting to receive it as well.

Publicity:  1a.  Information that concerns a person, group, event or product that is disseminated through various media to attract public notice. b. Public interest, notice, or notoriety achieved by the spreading of such information.
- The American Heritage Dictionary

That’s how publicity is defined.  What’s it for?

“Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive…”
- John Berger

Ah, yes, return on investment, ROI. 

Ideally, investing in the dissemination of information - publicity - whether through time or treasure or both - results in “I didn’t know that!”, then “I gotta have that!” - or I gotta vote for that candidate, contribute to that cause, buy that ticket, buy that product, or call that company and make a deal.

“Don’t believe your own press release.”
- Old wisdom, first told to me by my mother

Hubris:  Overbearing pride or presumption; arrogance...
Arrogant:  2.  Marked by or arising from a feeling or assumption of one’s superiority toward others.
Arrogate:  To take or claim for oneself without right.
- The American Heritage Dictionary

“You can do anything you put your mind to.”
- Taught to all American school children

I have, at times, been subject to hubris, to believing my own press releases, to presuming a superiority that others did not possess, to arrogantly believing my fine mind could move mountains.

Then I wasn’t able to conceive a child.
Then I wasn’t able to keep a marriage together.

I treasure the regard of others.  I appreciate publicity and the success it might bring my clients’ companies and my own company.

And I know who I am and who I am not, and what I can do and what I cannot.

What’s really my point?  I want to protect those whom I care about, and to whom publicity comes, from pain.  Thinking that I can do so is probably hubris.  Wanting to protect them is human.

“All publicity is good, except an obituary notice.”
- Brendan Behan

May the publicity that comes my way and the way of those I cherish and support be good for all of us.

Big Learnings

A former colleague and I have recently reconnected. The colleague asked, "What have been your 'big learnings' from the past ten years?"

Here are my answers, born of experience in education, in community mental health, in business, and in person:

(a) I cannot control the thoughts, feelings, observations, awarenesses, opinions or behaviors of others. My attempts to do so are usually born of fear.  I can invite, I can inform, I can encourage, I can attempt to manipulate, I can even attempt to force, but I cannot "make" anyone think, or do, or feel anything about anything.  Including about me.

Others choose for themselves what they think, what they do, and how they respond to what they feel.

(b) If a newborn looks up into the eyes of its mother and doesn't see love and adoration - for whatever reason, intentional or unintentional on the mother's part - the newborn grows into an adult forever trying to hide its deepest secret:  It's a being not even a mother could love.

(c) Looks matter.

(d) Money matters.

(e) Looks don't matter.

(f) Money doesn't matter.

(g) A good cat is good company for (a) through (f) above.

Any Random Raindrop

I got a late life master’s degree in counseling, in part, to answer this question:  Why do people do what they do?  While I am now well-schooled in the nature vs. nurture origins of people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions, ultimately, for me, why people do what they do remains an enchanting, enraging, tragic mystery.

Another mystery to me is why we end up with whom we do.  Why is this person my neighbor and not that one?  Why is this person my colleague and not that one in line at the grocery store?  Why is it this mother and not that one?  Why is my boss someone who values this, and not another person who values that?  That these people populate my world and not those people seems to me random, arbitrary, even chaotic.

So, I don’t know why people do what they do, I can only invite them to value me, not make them do so, and whom they happen to be anyway has as much meaning as a raindrop falling on my punkin' head instead of someone else’s.  Great.

My conclusion?  With regard to power to control others in any way, I ain’t got none.

How do I handle that?  My vision.  I see the vista of where I’m going and why and I keep my face turned toward that.  Some people will join me for a time, I will join others for a time, some people will be indifferent to what I see, some people will scoff at it.  People come and go, though.  I make sure my mind and heart are right with the vision so I can love it and believe in it so I can keep going with it.  And I do.

I’m just back to small town living after almost two decades in the city.  In a city, I can more easily remember that a world with more than six billion souls has plenty of room for my vision.  In a small town, I find myself tending to see my vision through the eyes of so few.  I catch myself.  I love my vision too much to let anyone, even someone from this small town I treasure, take it from me.