Full Tilt Halloween

©2008 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and Wrongs) Reserved.

Abandonment Part 3: Fire and Pain

       For years, my insides were like one big smoking heat sink, with small brush fires burning in selected locations and a few all out forest fires here and there. I would release the heat and the beauty of this fire through many forms of self expression. Music. Writing. Photography and film. And through simply being myself in the world.
        I did all of of this often enough, as friends of mine will attest. But I didn’t do it all of the time. And I wasn’t sharing my fire with the the whole world. And I wanted to. I wanted to be myself, all the way, all of the time. I wanted to release this beautiful burning light to the entire world. Not just to people and situations that felt safe.
        This went along with not showing all of myself in relationships. I never showed it all. I couldn’t be that vulnerable. I was too scared of getting hurt. What I did show was plenty, it seemed. I had many people in my life who knew me, and loved me, intimately and otherwise. And they always described me as unique. As out there. As deep. But I knew there was so much more inside of me that I wasn’t showing. There were depths to me that I dared not expose.
        All I needed to release this internal fire and turn it into a blaze that would ignite my life was a gallon of napalm. Enter my last girlfriend. Principessa. She stirred my insides up just by being herself, and neither of us realized it. She unknowingly stoked this massive, smoldering, barely contained cauldron within me. Then out of nowhere, she dumped me. It took a few weeks for that to hit. On the outside, everything was relatively unchanged. On the inside, it was chaos. The best kind of chaos. The kind that changes you.
        The pain of losing her triggered all of this other pain that I was storing inside of me. The pain, I’ve come to learn, was the napalm. The means for releasing all of myself had been within me the entire time. I just wasn’t able to access it. Her abandoning me put me in touch with that pain. All of it. KABOOM! My whole world was on fire. Burning with a reckless abandon the likes of which I could barely grasp.
        Going through the pain released my fire. All of my creativity and imagination and passion and desire and hope. It’s all burning brightly. All of the time. And I’m living it.
        That’s me now. My challenge is to let the fire burn with all of it’s brilliance and power and fury and passion and light, yet keep it harnessed for my highest purpose. Keeping it going is not an issue. There is more than enough fuel here to last my life time. And every moment that I live my life from my open heart, more fuel gets added. What to do with it all and how to do it is my challenge. And my life’s work.
        This website is just one piece of it. I’ve been exploding all over my life.
        And I will never again be so emotionally stingy. Whoever you are, if you want it, you are going to get all of me, all of the time, right from the get go. I’m not talking about inappropriately overwhelming anyone with how I feel or what I think. I’m talking about no longer hiding because I’m afraid of getting hurt. I’m talking about consciously aspiring at being 100% of myself 100% of the time. If you want to see me and hear me and know me and experience me and maybe even love me, I’m not going to shut you out. If you don’t want to know me, that’s fine. Don’t ask. But if you do, be careful for what you ask for. Because you are going to get it.

©2008 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and Wrongs) Reserved.

Abandonment Part 2: CARDIOPLASTICITY

       Neuroplasticity is a buzz word in the field of neurology. It states that the mind is perfectly capable of creating new neural pathways at any age. At any point in our lives, new experiences can create neural “re-wiring”. Therefore, we are not “hard wired” by adolescence, as previously believed. The mind, both consciously and non-consciously, can learn to think differently. In other words, we can literally change our minds.
        The same holds true for the heart. No matter how old we are, profound experiences can shift us emotionally and spiritually. If the heart was closed but is now open, we literally “feel different”. Our attitude shifts and our emotional experience of life expands. This literal change of heart impacts our lives in amazing ways. It happened to me. It can happen to anybody. So I’m coining a new phrase: Cardioplasticity.
        I used to equate love with pain. Whenever I started falling in love with a woman, the inner turmoil was unbearable. I experienced so much anxiety and fear of abandonment, that I eventually retreated to a place inside myself that was safer. I felt so absolutely out of control emotionally that I had to do something. Because if she knew how out of kilter I was, she wouldn’t like me anymore. I couldn’t let her know how nuts I felt inside. How scared I was. Because nuts and scared is ugly. So to share this with her would be the kiss of death.
        Because all of these fears came true with my first girlfriend. More than once. And that was all the proof I needed, thank you very much. But really, it goes back much further than that. It goes back to my original wound of abandonment. My experience from day one was that to love with all your heart, the only way a child knows how, was synonymous with abandonment. And to be left was to suffer unbearable pain. So don’t ever love with all your heart. It could kill you.
        When I was a kid, feeling and expressing love was a mostly unpleasant experience. I experienced a constant yearning that was met with only sporadic episodes of joy. Or even more rarely, bliss. And when that joy and bliss came, it was so unpredictable and short lived that I learned to expect it to end soon. And it did. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
        In adulthood, I learned how to get love without risking too much. I learned how to give love without leaving my flanks exposed. This wasn’t a conscious plan or a calculated scheme. This was autopilot emotional survival. Which isn’t to say that I’m not responsible for it.
        I honed an ability to pull away emotionally, just enough to stay safe, but not enough to lose her or drive her away. Because abandonment was still the overriding fear. I gave love, but I never gave it all. It was a psycho-emotional tight rope that I walked so that I could love, be loved, be safe, be in control, and not be abandoned. And like anything practiced, I got good at it.
        I never grasped the truism that love is something you get more of, the more you give away. The key was to give more. Not try to get more.
        That formula got lost on me. Because I was getting what I wanted: love, sex, and companionship, without giving away the store. And because I was coming from my head most of the time then. “Give to get” just didn’t make any sense from there.
        The only place that I gave everything I had was in the bedroom. That was the only place I felt safe. That was the only place I really knew who I was and what I was doing. Because my guard was down between the sheets, all of me came out there. All the love, all the passion, all the wonder, intensity, playfulness, and excitement. I just couldn’t carry that over into the rest of my relationship.
        Until we become conscious of what we’re doing, we keep repeating ourselves. We develop coping skills and strategies to minimize the fear and the pain. But we’re always missing something. We’re missing true intimacy. That was me.
        Operative word there is “was”. Thanks to cardioplasticity, I’m not there anymore. I still struggle with abandonment, but I’m aware of it now. More importantly, I know, not just intellectually but in my heart, that the way out of that abandonment pain is to go through it. Not around it. Or over it. Or past it. The way out is always through.

©2008 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and a stupifying amount of Wrongs) Reserved.

Abandonment Part 1

The following is the first in a series of blogs on abandonment. I strongly encourage you to respond with comments, questions, or ideas in the comments section. Abandonment is such a huge issue for so many people, that any dialogue, discussion, or sharing about it could be extremely beneficial for anyone in the blogging community who struggles with it.

        The word “abandonment” is a positively terrifying word for those who are petrified of being left. Which is to say, most of us. Or that population of most of us who are in touch with that piece of ourselves.
        Rejection, loneliness, insecurity, inadequacy, worthlessness, shame, hopelessness, and despair can all be triggered by the “A” word. That’s one reason it can feel so impossibly painful. Because abandonment ignites virtually every other smoldering hurt we have. And it sets ablaze anything else that is already up for us. We can be burning alive. And if we’re in denial about the pain, or if we’re depressed and therefore numb, we don’t even know that we’re on fire.
        Abandonment is not content with attacking us by itself. As if it were not overwhelming enough, it recruits all of our other great pains too. Soon, it’s as though we’re drowning in a toxic stew of our greatest sufferings and our most frightening nightmares.
        Abandonment takes no prisoners. It can feel like it’s trying to kill you. Maybe it is. Because the pain is so great, we sometimes believe that death might feel better. Maybe abandonment is doing us a favor by trying to kill us so that we don’t have to suffer anymore.
        If our abandonment issue goes deep enough, it feels like it’s who we are. There is nothing deeper. It is us. Everything else on top is just frosting over this dark, tortured self. That means we will never be rid of it. We will never be over it. It will always be with us, and it will run us whenever we face it.
        Our abandonment pain comes from somewhere back in childhood. If it goes back far enough, we don’t consciously remember the incidents or memories that created the original wounds.
        In my case, it goes back as far back as it possibly can. Birth.
        Right out of the womb that I shared with my twin brother, I got shipped off into an incubator for three weeks. Alone. No mom. No dad. No twin. No hanging out in the hospital room with the family for a few days. Nobody at all, except a nurse who fed me a few times a day. I don’t even know how much, if at all, she touched me when she fed me. Judging by how affectionate I am, and by my desire and love of physical contact, I’d guess that I probably wasn’t touched much at all my first three weeks of life.
        Being left alone at birth like that is similar to what an orphan experiences. I’m not comparing my entire childhood to that of an orphan’s childhood. But I am drawing a parallel to my original wound and the original wound of an orphan. Or with anyone else who can’t consciously remember the pain of their original abandonment.
        This emotional and physical orphaning leaves very deep, very big, very painful scars. The issue can loom large in our lives. Especially in our intimate relationships. That’s where the rubber meets the road. Because it was an initial love relationship with a parent, or parents, that created the original wound. We carry that with us into every intimate relationship from then on. Only when we become aware of it and choose to face it can we be set free. Like the worst monster we can imagine, unresolved abandonment can keep us prisoner our entire lives.
        To me, that monster looked so enormous, so invincible, that the only solution seemed to be to never face it. For it will eat me alive and still be hungry. The only way to beat abandonment was to not risk being abandoned. To not be completely vulnerable. I avoided putting myself so far out there emotionally that there’s no turning back. I didn’t let myself love anyone with absolutely everything, EVERYTHING, I had. It was measured love. Restricted giving of self. Safety.
        I’ve been there most of my life. Maybe you have, too. But I'm not there anymore. Because I’m tired of loving that way. I’m tired of living that way. And I’ve found a way out. It can be slow. It is painful. And it works.

© 2008 Clint Piatelli. All Right (and Wrongs) Reserved

Battlefield Tea Party

       “What the hell happened to me?”
        That question is usually asked under less than optimal circumstances. Like waking up the morning after an all nighter and not knowing where you are or how you got there. Even worse, waking up one morning in the middle of your life and not recognizing it. Or yourself. That’s much scarier than the first scenario. And more common. Has it happened to you? It has to me. More than once.
        My particular circumstances may have been different than yours, but the feelings probably weren’t. I wasn’t in a job that I didn’t like. My finances were okay. I owned several pieces of property. I was a bachelor who enjoyed good health. I had a beautiful girlfriend. From the outside, everything looked great. That’s the point. On the outside, everything was great. But I wasn’t. I was in constant pain. Because inside, it was war. And I was losing.
        The battle raged on between the real me and the me I had created to survive. The war analogy works here, but in complete reverse. In the middle of the two me’s, there’s the “battlefield”. That’s actually the okay part. Because that’s where the real me and the other me are engaging. Where they meet. It’s really more like a tea party than a fight. The problem lies in the two opposing camps. That’s where the real mayhem is.
        The two sides take up different amounts of internal space. This is a battle of territory. And the self is the landscape. The “real me” needs more room. The “survivor me” has got most of it, and he doesn’t want to give it up. When the two engage, they’re actually able to work things out. That’s the battlefield tea party. That’s who the world sees when I engage in life. When I feel safe and can be myself. It’s the person that my friends know and love. It’s the me that plays drums in a band, or throws killer parties, or goes to California and makes films about the trip. It’s the me that connects easily with people, and finds life infinitely fascinating and wondrous.
        This battlefield tea party was me at my best. It’s the me I was about twenty percent of the time. Unfortunately, the tea party didn't last very long, and it wasn’t big enough. Eventually, the survivor me took charge and ended the soiree. The landscape got altered, and therefore so did I. When the party’s over, I am too. The real me goes back to its camp, doesn’t engage, and waits for the next chance to shine.
        That was the way I used to be.
        The real me is finally winning the war. No longer in constant conflict, the person I created to survive now takes up much less internal real estate. More troops have joined the tea party, which now goes on for days at a time. The real me, all of him, is showing up, a lot more often. And he’s staying around longer too. This blog, this website, is living proof of that.
        “What the hell happened to me?” was that I got in touch with how I felt. All the way down to the bottom. When I did that, when I opened my heart, I started winning. I started winning myself back.
        Getting in touch with your heart is what gets you yourself back. And there is no greater prize on the planet.

© 2008 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and Wrongs) Reserved