The Anarchic* Psyche of Michael A Leavy

We may have mentioned in an earlier post – or maybe it was just in the manuscript of our book? – that a couple of years ago we got rid of the habit we’ve had since puberty of giving ourselves migraines whenever we were planning to do something that threatened to expose us to intolerable dangers. Going to a party, say, or asking someone on a date.

This habit had been an inconsistent thing, probably dependent on expectations: if we really wanted to go out with the person we were planning to ask out, or knew that someone who we were pretty sure wanted to have sex with us was going to be at the party, then it was migraine time for sure. Otherwise, not so much.

This wasn’t just about sex and romance, though. Anything that had to do with what I hoped for in life was fair game for my inner migraine-makers. For instance, Junior year in college or thereabouts, I was in a film class where we worked in 4-person teams, rotating tasks through a series of filmmaking exercises. Since what I really wanted was to direct, I got migraines when it was my turn to do that and fumbled the task; when it was my turn to handle the camera, about which I cared not a whit, I felt just fine and did sterling work.

So, anyway: we finally put all of that behind us with a technique we pulled from Carolyn Elliott’s book, Existential Kink. This involved recognizing that some part or parts of me wanted the pain, wanted the benefits provided by the pain, and my job was to acknowledge that, to savor the pain with the part or parts responsible for bringing it, congratulate them on their skill in generating it, explore with them the why of it, and consider with them if there might not be other ways – less, shall we say, fucked up for the whole of us – to achieve the same goals. So we did that. It worked out really well.

But not forever.

The Sum, or Some, of Our Parts Being Greater Than the Whole

If you know Internal Family Systems theory, you might have perked up a bit when we used the words, paragraph before last, “some part or parts wanted,” ‘cuz that’s IFS kind of language. Elliott never mentions IFS, and I don’t think that she’s really talking about anything adjacent to it; I sort of am – like Richard C. Schwartz and his followers, I’m talking about figures in the psyche that I can sit down and have a chat with – but I hadn’t heard of IFS yet at that time, and my psychic terrain is in many critical ways different from the one mapped out by IFS. Still, if you know their work, you’d recognize the parts in question as Protectors, the ones who act to protect traumatized parts of the psyche from further trauma. In our landscape, they’re known as “Enforcers,” and they’re very protective of that name.

So, anyway: “But not forever.”

That is, we hadn’t beaten the migraine thing forever, just for a year, maybe a year and a half. Then, having not only started, but finished, a draft of a manuscript about us and our ways, some of the Enforcers began to suspect that we had gone to0 far and began to fling the occasional migraine or bout of sciatica around (variety being the spice and all, and us getting on in years) in order to slow things down and protect us all from further trauma.

So

We may have mentioned in a previous post – or maybe it was just in said manuscript – that once upon a time I started doing inner child work, and ended up having two wounded inner children instead of one (I thought that was allowed because I had read a book in which someone had two; but that book went out of print). And when I wasn’t looking, two more showed up; and when I was looking, a couple more caught my attention.

As we meditated, and journaled, and did body work together, we built ourselves a congenial internal landscape, and that attracted more folks – not just wounded inner children, but functional sorts of beings: weary, hungry, maybe even wounded hordes of Desires and Fears and Worries and Doubts…

Well. By the time we were working with Elliot’s book, we were well into what we think of as the “third wave” of what we think of as our “inner landscape” work: if the first wave involved the “unburying” of the Michaels – the iterations of the classical inner child – and the building of the landscape; and the second wave was the emergence out of darkness of task-bound figures like the ones we mentioned and certain more opaque counterparts; then the third waves was the slow crawl from out the shadowy depths (or now and then the splashy eruption from out the shadowy depths) of our psyche of the giant forms of those who really ran the show.

Folks like Shorty and the Lady in White, Wilma and Big Fred, Darkness, or the stars of the tale we will tell you soon: A Reluctant Giant (more casually: ARG) and the Nameless Little Girl.

To Finish: A Gratuitous Photo

Because the days are still too hot: last year’s first snow, falling in my back yard.