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

Maybe I'm Crazy

         Maybe you think I’m crazy for nakedly sharing how I feel on a website. Closer to the truth, maybe I think I’m crazy. Maybe I am. But there are worse things than being bonkers. Being asleep at the wheel, for one thing. Which is what I was for over a year and a half after my dad died.
         Those were My Dark Ages. Twenty months of sleep walking through life. Six-hundred days of not knowing who the hell I was or what the fuck I was doing. The “Who”, the “What”, and the “Why” of my life were questions that I grappled with long before my dad passed away. I was actively engaged in a quest. After he died, I went into depression. And although I was doing most of the same things I was doing while he was alive, I stopped involving myself in finding any answers. I was just going through the motions. I didn’t believe that I would ever find what I was looking for. In fact, I no longer knew what I was looking for. And I stopped believing that I would ever find any relief in the answers if I found them. So why bother searching? All of a sudden, absolutely nothing made sense. Nothing mattered.  
         Pundits speak of "The Big Three" changes that create maximum stress and trauma in one's life. Death. Moving. Divorce. In the span of nine months, I experienced the first two outright, a taste of the last, and a bludgeoning of a few other losses. My father was dead. I moved out of my home. My girlfriend of over four years and I split. And the hits kept coming. My band, which was like a great little boys club, broke up. I loved the guys in my band. Still do. My twin brother, one of those band members, and I had a huge falling out. I had been estranged from most of my family for quite some time. But after my dad died. whatever emotional connection I had left to them basically disappeared. There seemed to be this vacuum that was sucking away everything that I cared about in my life. I unconsciously determined that the only way I could handle all of this was to stop feeling.
         All this pain inside of me had no place to go. But it had to go somewhere. It had to be released. So it started eating it’s way out of me. Like an tiger trapped in a cage made of raw meat. The animal had to be free. And if I had to be eaten alive in the process, so be it. And that’s exactly what started happening.
        I used to think that depression was when I felt so much pain that I got...depressed. But that’s not it. Depression happened when I stopped feeling, and then turned those feelings against myself. All that anger became self anger. All the hurt became ammunition in a merciless barrage of self-criticism and self-judgment. In order for my pain to eat itself out of me, it had to get positively aggressive. It had to turn itself against me. Which it did. As a result, I hated myself. I hated my life.
        I had people in my life who loved me, but I couldn’t feel it. I knew it, but I couldn’t feel it. Because I couldn’t find one drop of self love anywhere within me. It didn’t matter what they said or did, because I was still no fuckin’ good. These people could see that I was in pain, but they didn't know just how bad it was. I couldn’t possibly let them in on that. Because that’s about as unattractive as it gets. They see that, they are gone. Then I’m really alone. I didn’t see a way out.  
       Before I became too self destructive, I broke out of that self manifested hell and into a whole new world. And I’ll tell you more about that another time.
       What happened to me during My Dark Ages, both internally and externally, set me up for the transformation that I experienced this past summer. This worst period of my life actually helped me heal.
       Let me leave you with this. Real Change is possible. Outright Metamorphosis does happen. More often than we know. Even though I asked to change, prayed for it, for years, I never thought it would happen to me (does that sound too much like the beginning of a Penthouse Forum story?). But it did happen. I changed. Dramatically. From the inside. If you want it bad enough, keep asking for it, keep doing for it, you shift. Not necessarily when we want, and usually not through the door we expect. I'll be writing more about my story. I'd love to hear some of yours. Go to the Life Change page and tell about something that changed your life. Or post a comment.

© Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and Wrongs) Reserved

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