A Filthy Combination (Part 3)

Before delving into this post, I recommend reading parts one and two, “A Filthy Combination”, and “Cleaning Up After A Filthy Combination".


         Shaming myself about feeling shame is one of the the highest forms of heart sabotage. There’s absolutely nowhere to go with myself if I don’t first accept how I feel. If I can’t do this, then I’m totally screwed before the gun goes off. I’ve lost the race before it begins.
        Right after an initial awareness, the first, crucial, all important, vitally necessary rung on this ladder of growth is some modicum of self acceptance. Just like climbing a physical ladder, I have to get some footing on this rung before I can climb any others. I can’t leap frog over this, or any other rung, for that matter. Just like walking before crawling, skipping that step will fuck you up later on. And it’s what so many of us do, because self acceptance can be so internally difficult that we say “Fuck it for now. I’ll accept myself later, when I’m healthier, when I get closer to the top of the ladder.” But it doesn’t work that way. We’ve got it backwards.
        We can’t even get near the top of the ladder until we at least begin the process of better accepting ourselves. In fact, we can’t really climb the ladder at all without a decent dose of self acceptance, even if it’s only fleeting. If we skip that step completely and keep climbing, it’s as tough the step gets removed from the ladder. And this step is crucial in holding the ladder steady and making it strong. The higher we climb, we may think that we’re seeing more, but the ladder itself is actually getting more shaky because the first step is gone, and we’re higher up the ladder, therefore putting more pressure on the whole structure.
        Just like with a physical ladder, the physics change completely if there’s no first rung. What should be a sturdy vehicle for growth is now a shaky apparatus that will eventually fail and send us crashing to the ground. Without that first rung of some self-acceptance, the whole ladder is different. The ladder is incomplete. Our growth is therefore incomplete. And somewhat unstable. We must cultivate self acceptance from the beginning. As we climb, as we grow, we can get better at it. We learn to be kinder to ourselves, and accept ourselves more and more. But we can’t just skip it entirely.
        Being with somebody who could accept the naked truth about me was a tremendous help. All of the work was, and is, mine, but having this woman in my corner was invaluable. She didn’t think less of me because I thought less of myself. When I admitted that I was jealous, thought she disappeared on me, and that I felt vulnerable and worthless, she didn’t run away. She didn’t find me less attractive. She didn’t get turned off. All the things I feared she would do, she didn’t do. All of the things I feared she would say that would hurt me, she didn’t say.
        In fact, opening up about this painful place inside me and sharing it with her brought us closer. And this is really my whole point about relationships. If we can dare to be ourselves and share all of that with the one we’re with; if we can risk doing that most terrifying of all human endeavors - being exactly who we are in the moment - and show the world nothing but that, we open up the endless possibilities that such a courageous act provides us. If we dare to show ourselves, we dare to heal. We can not heal if we hide. If we hide from ourselves, we will never heal. And we’re all hurting in some way, on some level. Take that to the bank. If we don’t hide from ourselves, but hide from the world, in other words, if we play it safe, we only heal somewhat. If we take the next step and show ourselves to the world, we open up possibilities in our lives that are not available any other way. We live a fuller, richer, more authentic life.
        If, however, we can go even deeper, and open up all of ourselves, even the painful, messy parts, to our partner; if we can cultivate a truly intimate relationship, then we have the potential for healing on the very deepest of levels. I have come to know this over the past year, after my heart got shattered.
        When I became willing to show all of myself to another, I began a unique process that can’t be done any other way. It doesn’t even matter if I ever got the chance to show her (I didn’t). I simply became willing. For the first time in my life, I wanted to show myself completely to a woman. That new found openness and desire is all I needed to start down the path of truly deep healing.
        I don’t have a special woman in my life to do that with right now, but that doesn’t matter. That will happen. Because I know that’s where I’m headed. What I have been able to do is share so much more of myself with my own life. Through this blog. Through being even more of myself out in the world than before (even though those who know me may say that wasn’t possible, because they saw me as so out there to begin with. Just goes to show how much I hid and how much more there is to me). I’ve shared so much more of myself through my words and actions with loved ones. Through digging deeper into myself. Through cultivating the kinds of relationships I want. And through letting go of relationships that I can’t make work, no matter what I do.


©2009 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and a very tall ladder of Wrongs) Reserved.

Cleaning Up After A Filthy Combination

Note: To fully mine whatever you may from this post, please first read yesterday’s piece “A Filthy Combination”. This is part two.

         When I came clean with my girlfriend, I felt anything but. Admitting that I got triggered by her comment about being checked out by a group of guys didn’t make me feel better. It made me feel worse. After I opened my mouth about it, there was no catharsis. There was shame. More of the shit that I didn’t want. I immediately got exactly what I feared. By telling her I was in this place, I headed even deeper into that very dark alley.
        This had nothing to do with her. She just listened. But there was something about saying the words aloud. By speaking up, as opposed to having a conversation within the confines of my mind, it made my emotional predicament more real. Which means it made it more scary. It was out there now. It was no longer a secret.
        There’s a saying that goes “We’re only as sick as our secrets”. But at that moment, keeping this a secret felt like a life preserver that I had just given away while I was drowning. Exposing this felt like nothing more than a new anchor tied to my ankle. And this one was going to sink me.
        This is all because of the insane amount of very toxic shame that I had attached to feeling this way. Not only that night, but throughout the course of my life, I learned to be ashamed of how I felt. Ashamed of what I thought. Years and years of that will corrupt you at the deepest inconceivable level. Shame infests your very cells, and then poisons your being on a sub-atomic scale. It’s not just in your body. It’s not just in your cells. It’s not just in the atoms that make up those cells. It’s the fuckin’ raw material that the atoms are made of: the protons, neutrons, and electrons. When it’s that deep, it feels like I AM shame. The very stuff that I am made of is shame itself. There is not a lower feeling on the planet.
        I admitted to her that, after she said that she was being stared at, I felt completely worthless. When she uttered the words, “Did you see the looks I got when I walked by those guys?”, I left the present, and traveled back in time. Who’s says there’s no such thing as time travel? We do it all the time. We experience something in the now and immediately link it to painful memories that we haven’t yet released. We emotionally and mentally travel to different points in time where similar events happened, where the consequences were excruciating. We forget who we are now, who the people we are with are, where we are, and the particular circumstances of the current moment. It is exactly as if we just jumped into the way-back machine and went to another moment in time.
        When we travel back in time, we change. Therefore our perception changes. Therefore our very reality changes. And it all happens in an instant, often before we even realize it. We’re suddenly there, and we don’t even know we ever left. Because magically everything looks the same. Feels the same. Is the same. Even though none of that is true, it’s true to the person we’ve suddenly become. Because they’re still trapped in the past. And now so are we.
        There have been enough times in my life where the woman that I was with, and in love with, enjoyed the attention of other men to the point where she emotionally and mentally left me, even though physically, she was still right there. No longer with me, she basically abandoned me. Ever perceptive, I could tell when a woman did this, but I could never articulate it. If I did, rarely was the woman self-aware enough to deal with it, so instead, it became an argument over me making up stuff that wasn’t happening.
        There were plenty of times, however, when my judgement was off and all I was doing was acting out my own insecurities. But I could almost always make the distinction between when I was acting out and when I was sensing something she was doing that really hurt me. Maybe not always right then and there, but always after some introspection. The problem was that I usually couldn’t do anything about it, because I didn’t have the tools to take that distinction and act on it. But I usually knew when I was bullshitting myself, and when I was being bullshitted. Acting on that takes courage, openness, and lots of self trust. And those three internal commodities were in much shorter supply when I was younger. Especially openness and self trust.
        When I knew that a woman emotionally and mentally left me, I suffered abandonment, my worst nightmare. Once I went there, all bets were off. I suffered the worst feelings of worthlessness that I’ve ever been conscious of. The trauma of those moments, that go all the way back to my core wound of abandonment, all the way back to birth, was a pain that I kept re-living, and therefore reinforcing. It just got heavier and heavier. But this was the first time I was able to articulate this to the woman I was in love with. I told her where I went and what happened to me when she said what she said. I traveled back in time, and felt like she left me at that moment. And I was devastated. Even though that wasn’t her. Even though she wasn’t like that. It felt the same, because I couldn’t stop myself from time traveling.
        For the first time, the genie was out of the bottle, and it was a huge fuckin’ genie. He overpowered me. He overpowered both of us. The pain around this was so big that we couldn’t deal with it right away. Neither of us really understood what we were dealing with. I felt shame, and she felt horrible for hurting me. I didn’t mean to, but I was partially dumping years of abandonment on her within the course of a few minutes, and there was no way she could carry it all. It wasn’t even hers. But she wanted to help. She wanted to understand. But the weight was too big, even for the both of us to carry. So all it did was crush us that night and the next morning. For about twenty-four hours or so, this was between us, and neither of us could figure out what to do with it. A house call relationship therapist on speed dial would have been extremely helpful.
        But, with some time and lots of talk, we started sorting it out. I became aware that she was not the type of person who would just suddenly take off on me. She wasn’t going to bolt on me emotionally and mentally if she got attention from other men. She was just going to feel flattered by it. I was projecting others’ behavior onto her. I got that. She reassured me that she wasn’t like that, and I could feel her sincerity and her caring. Once all that sunk in, I started to heal, and it felt safe to bring this up to her if it ever happened again. I was grateful that I was with a woman who I could say this to, in the moment it was happening, and she would walk me through it, holding my hand, instead of mentally and emotionally taking off on me. That had never happened before. For either of us.

Please come back tomorrow for part three. Same bat time. Same bat
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©2009 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and enough Wrongs to cause a warp in the space-time continuum and thus enable time travel) Reserved. 

A Filthy Combination

        About five years ago, my girlfriend came to one of my gigs with a few of her friends. During one of my band breaks, we were standing near the bar talking when my girlfriend walked over to another table to get something. A group of guys stood between her and the table, and when she walked by them, they all checked her out. Rather thoroughly. When she came back, she mentioned that she was aware that the guys were gawking at her. She was smiling as she said this, and why not? It’s nice to be noticed, and she was noticed.
        I smiled too, because she was going home with me, and let’s face it, virtually every man likes it when other men think their babe is hot. Even men who are pretty evolved will admit, if they dig deep enough, that it’s flattering if other men desire the woman you’re with. Some of it has to do with hundreds of thousands of years of evolution still stuck in our DNA. The alpha male got his pick of the women, and that was a bragging right of the highest order.
        This dynamic can also lead to trouble, as we all know. More than a few fights have broken out precluded by the line “Are you checkin’ out my girlfriend?”, especially when alcohol is involved. Throw in some inappropriate male behavior, some jealousy, and a woman who likes stirring up the testosterone pot, and you have the makings of all out mayhem.
        This was not one of those nights. But something big got triggered in me. Immediately after my girlfriend made the comment “Did you see the looks I got when I walked by those guys?” with a smile on her face, I took off. Not physically, but emotionally and mentally. Instantly, without a thought to act as a torpedo, my heart sank. I didn’t know why at the time, but I knew the feeling. My throat and my heart took a header into the middle of my stomach. My voice, and my love for this woman, suddenly got buried beneath years of internal emotional garbage that I was still holding onto. Spread throughout my metaphysical body, this amalgamation of old pain instantly collected itself into one massive heap and dropped itself right into the center of my being. Chicken Little was right. The sky had fallen.
        For the rest of the night, I was off my game, and my playing suffered. Nobody else noticed, and the band sounded great, but I knew I was off.
        Instead of taking a personal time out when I felt my heart plummet, I just acted like nothing was wrong. I pretended that I wasn’t suffering a sudden attack of heartache that I couldn’t explain. To be honest, I was ashamed of myself. I was the drummer in this band that was kicking ass in front of a large, rowdy crowd. I was going home with the best looking woman in the room, I loved her, and I knew she loved me. I looked pretty good myself, was getting more than my share of looks from females, and my playing was solid and fluid and fun. I should feel like the king of the world. Or at least the king of the room. Certainly in contention for the role of alpha male, at least in this narrow context.
        But all I felt was pain. Heartache. Anxiety. Confusion. Anger. Shame. What the fuck?
        For the rest of the night, these emotions got stirred and heated inside of me like a simmering stew while I just soldiered on. If I was crumbling on the outside, though, nobody, repeat nobody, was going to know about it. Here was a skill that I had gotten very good at. Looking peachy on the outside while I was rotting away on the inside, like a piece of fruit that looks great until you bite into it and all the brown, mushy crap comes dripping out of it. Well nobody was going to bite into me that night. Not even the woman I loved. In fact, especially not the woman I loved.
        In my temporarily distorted frame of mind, she was the one who had injected the flesh eating bacteria into me in the first place. But on a deeper level, I was aware that this had nothing to do with her; I knew that this was my stuff. Yet I was in so much pain that I could justify being mad at her. I know now that, at that point in my life, I needed that anger to keep my wall up. Without the anger to energize this emotional electric fence I had put around myself, I would have broken down and cried like a baby in the bathroom behind closed doors. And damn it that wasn’t going to happen.
        By the time I got back to her place after the gig, I was a mess. She had come separately, so I drove just myself and my equipment back to the cape. In my car, I started to cry, and I had no friggin’ idea why. When I arrived at her home, she was on the couch, waiting for me, looking as inviting as a woman possibly could. Wrapped under a blanket with her blond hair pulled back in a pony tail, wearing her usual sleeping attire: skimpy cotton boy shorts and snug workout tank top that stopped just under her breasts, exposing her trim midriff. She looked good enough to eat, but I wasn’t hungry. I was hurt. And I was behind my wall.
        So when she asked me what was wrong, I said the only thing I could, which was, “Nothing. I’m just tired.” Eventually, though, I knew I had to tell her, because I wanted to. I wanted to feel better. But I didn’t even know what was wrong. And I was completely ashamed that I even felt this way.
        The filthy combination of shame and fear is like a horrible long, dark alley infested with vermin. You can’t see anything, and you’re getting attacked by these toxic thoughts. The only way out is to start walking through the alley; that is, own where you’re at and starting talking about it. But if you’re ashamed you’re even there, you’d rather hide out in that alley than move through it and therefore expose yourself. Because then, somebody else will know what a shit-head I am for being in this fuckin’ alley in the first place. At least right now, I’m the only one who knows I’m here. So all the judgement and hatred is coming from me. The last thing I need is to pile somebody else’s judgement and hatred of me on top of that. That’s not a solution. That’s just another problem.
        That’s really how I thought then. Opening up was so difficult for me because I was so sure that whoever saw this would be horrified and bolt on me, triggering the mother-load of all fears: Abandonment. As horrible as the current pain inside me was, I knew that it was nothing compared to the ten million needles of viscous, toxic, agony and shame that would befall me should I ever be abandoned. I was choosing the lesser of two evils. But as a wise friend has repeatedly quoted: “Choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.” But I didn’t know of any other way. To me, it was a lose-lose scenario no matter how I sliced it. I really didn’t know I could do it differently. I didn’t know that I had the key in my hand the whole time and could have begun the process of healing by just opening the jail and walking out. Or if I did know, I was just too scared shitless to do it.
        Tune in tomorrow for part two, where I spill my guts to my girlfriend, take a plunge into the emotional unknown, and pass along what I discovered.


©2009 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and a long, dark, nasty alley full of Wrongs) Reserved.