Lick It. Bite It. Suck it. (part 4)

        If I think of my whole personality as a big symphony orchestra, with many different instruments, or parts of me, all trying to play the same song, the song of my life, then it’s easier for me to understand my internal dynamics. Each one of my parts, or sub-personalities, is like a musician in the symphony of Clint, each with a a job to do. There’s Self Conscious Guy, who keeps me “safe” by telling me not to risk rejection. He’s like the tuba player: a background instrument. And there’s Dancin’ Boy, who wants all the attention, all of the time, or life’s just no fun at all. He’s like first violin; a lead instrument as opposed to a supportive one. And because he’s a lead instrument, I identify with Dancin’ Boy more than I do Self Conscious Guy. He’s more in the front, more visible, and he’s playing a melody that’s closer to my heart. Just like first violin.
        But just like in a real symphony, all of the parts, all of the instruments, are important. If I want the song to sound it’s best, if I want my life to be firing on all cylinders, then I have to find a way to make all of my inner parts work together. Just because I identify with one sub-personality, with one instrument, more than another, it doesn’t mean that the other instruments aren’t important. In fact, just like in a somewhat psychotic symphony, where each instrument is an extremist just like each one of my sub-personalities are, if one instrument doesn’t get enough attention, doesn’t get heard enough, he plays louder and harder, even if it fucks up the rest of the orchestra. Because damn it, he’s got to be heard, and being a myopic extremist, he doesn’t care if the rest of the orchestra gets blown up in the process.
        Conducting this cacophony of instruments is my true self, my higher being, the real me. Just like the conductor of a symphony orchestra, he has to make it all work. He has to be in charge. If not, it’s chaos; just like it was for me at The Gypsy Bar. First violin Dancin’ Boy and tuba player Self Conscious Guy were taking over the orchestra, and instead of getting them to play together, I just let them jam on their own, the result being considerable discord.
        I couldn’t find my conductor that night. I was aware of the disharmony within me, but I wasn’t aware of how to help it. The more conscious I become, the more work I do on myself, the better I’ll be at identifying exactly what’s going on and how to correct it, all while it’s happening. Because I couldn’t do that the other night, my symphony was out of sorts. So I was out of sorts. Not terribly, but enough to know that I wasn’t fully present. I wasn’t showing up the way I wanted to. I wasn’t being enough of myself. My song, the song of Clint, wasn’t sounding like it could have if my inner world was more in harmony.
        Here’s what it sounded like inside my head that night:

Dancin’ Boy: Yowza, look at those women dancing! I want a piece of that! Let’s get out there and shake it up! I need some lovin’, some attention, and they look just right for the job!

Self Conscious Guy: No way. Look at them They’re gorgeous. You’re mojo isn’t workin’ at 100% tonight, and that’s what you would need to even have a chance with getting them to even look at you. Besides, it’s too bright in here, and everybody can see what you’re doing.

Dancin’ Boy: Fuck that! The band is hot, the chicks are hot, and damn it so am I! I’ve got more style than any other guy in this room! And there are no other dudes dancing! It’s all women! And I can dance! C’mon, this is perfect! You’ve already said hello to that blond at the bar. Go over and ask her to dance! It’s “Livin’ On A Prayer”, by Bon Jovi for god’s sake, and I’m in New Jersey! The song’s got a great groove, and the place is hoppin! They WANT to dance with a guy! They want to dance with ME! Look, they came all the way over from the other side of the room to dance next to our table so they could be closer to me!

Self Conscious Guy: I’m not convinced. Stay here and hang with your buddies. It’s safe talking to them and just ogling the women. You can’t get hurt doing that. Just stay put.

        My higher self, the orchestra’s conductor, wasn’t in the building that night. So these two just went at it, unabated, the whole time. When I can find that conductor, that is, when I’m more conscious and present and in the moment, I’m more myself. I’m integrated, and more of me shows up. Not just one or two parts hell bent on getting their way. And I’m able to listen to all my parts without getting too caught up in any of them, the way a good conductor leads a symphony.
        If I had been able to find my conductor that night, there would have been another, less extreme, voice that would have directed my inner dialogue.

Higher Self: Okay, I’ve heard you two, and we’re going to have to come together on this. I know you’re trying to protect me Self Conscious Guy, and I appreciate it. But if rejection comes my way, I’ll be able to handle it. I’ll laugh it off and have a good story to tell. And Dancin’ Boy, I get how bad you want attention. That’s not a bad thing. But we’re not going to judge whether the evening was a success or not based on how much attention we got from women. I feel like dancing, so I’m going to ask them if they want to join me. Whatever happens, we’ll be fine. And my college friends are here with me. So either I’ll get ribbed for striking out or exalted for dancing with the hottest babes in the bar. It’s all good. Hey, we’re in Atlantic City with a bunch of guys we love. What could be better than that?

        When I’m more myself, that’s what it sounds like inside my head. Sometimes I’m there, and sometimes I’m not. But I’m going in the right direction. My symphony is sounding better, sounding more like me, more often. My song is getting out there a lot more these days, and I love the way it sounds.


©2009 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and a Psychotic Symphony of Wrongs) Reserved.

Lick It. Bite It. Suck it. (part 3)

        Paul Simon wrote in his song Slip Slidin’ Away; “A good day aint got no rain. A bad day’s when I lie in bed and think of things that might have been.” Simple words that ring true.
        There’s a stark beauty in simplicity, especially when it reflects such powerful truth. But I’ve always found immense pleasure in taking that simplicity and, once I’ve absorbed it, deconstructing it and examining the complexity that lies within. Like a perfectly executed, successful scoring play in football, when experienced in the moment, the result is a touchdown. If you walk away from it with just that, it’s simple. Victorious. Six points. And there’s a joy in that that’s unique.
        But after reveling in that excitement, I find a whole new experience in breaking down the play, analyzing it, and understanding how and why it happened the way it did. It doesn’t diminish the original elegant simplicity in the least; that stands on it’s own. But it adds another layer to the experience, making it richer, fuller, more complex. It works for me that way in football. And it works for me that way in a lot of other things too, one of them being my own process of growth, change, and experience of life.
        Although I admit, sometimes I can get too caught up in the dissection and analysis at the expense of pure enjoyment. It’s not so much a balance as an integration. Having the simplicity and the complexity co-exist, side by side, each standing on their own and yet also somehow contributing to the overall complete experience that is both simple and complicated. I guess that’s the zen of it.
        Either that or I’m just missing the whole fucking point completely.
        I’ve written about being more in touch with this little boy inside of me and the parts that my psycho-emotional self has developed to protect him. There’s a simplicity in that that automatically resonates very deeply within me, and there’s a complexity to it that I want to better understand.
        The naked truth is that the more in touch I am with this kid, the more other parts of me are going to try and protect him from getting hurt. Because that’s their job, and they’ve been doing it my whole life. I’ve been aware for years that this kid and these protective defense mechanisms have been inside of me. But I’ve done a lot of inner work with this over the last few years, and I’m close to another breakthrough now. I’m close to helping this little boy let go of more of the pain he’s still holding onto. That freaks my defense systems out, because with no more wounded boy to protect, they’re out of a job. A job they’ve had for a long time, that they’re very good at, and in fact don’t know how to do anything else. Who the hell would want to give up a gig like that?
        One of these defense mechanisms is Self Conscious Guy. He’s hyper...self conscious. Very critical of me. Very scared that I don’t look right or act right. Very concerned with how I appear and of what other people think of me. At The Gypsy Bar last Thursday night, he was in overdrive.
        His job is to protect me from getting hurt, or more precisely, to protect that little boy in me from getting hurt. So how he does that is to scare me out of taking risks by coming up with all these doom and gloom consequences that could happen if I put myself out there and really show up. He automatically thinks “rejection”, a real buzz word for most of us, and plays out all of these painful scenarios that should befall me if I get rejected. That’s how he sees the world. As a potential stage for rejection, humiliation, pain, and suffering. To avoid that, he wants me to stay inside myself and hide. That way, I can’t get hurt.
        Polarized from Self Conscious Guy is Dancin’ Boy. He’s a psychological construct in direct opposition to the dire consequences of rejection. He sees life as a party: damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead, take no prisoners, let’s jam. He’s the person I show most of the world a lot of the time. He’s closer to the real me than Self Conscious Guy, but he’s still an extremist. He’s an extremist because if I don’t squeeze the maximum amount of fun and mayhem out of every single moment, he’s not happy and he gets on me for not seizing the moment. He’s just as brutal as Self Conscious Guy, but in the other direction.
        He’s trying to protect this little boy inside of me as well, but he’s doing it by trying to kill the pain with fun. With attention. With “Look at how great I am!” He’s not self conscious at all. He wants the attention. In fact, he wants all of it. Every minute. If he’s not getting it, he feels less than, in the same way Self Conscious Guy feels less than by rejection.
        These two extremes are built around trying to protect this kid inside of me. The closer I get to him, the more these parts wig out, because they’re afraid that once I really connect to this kid and release his suffering, they won’t be needed.
        What I’m developing is a new paradigm where these parts aren’t in conflict but in harmony. Integration, not separation. Zen, not....something un-zen.

Please join me again for part four.


©2009 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and a Self Conscious amount of Dancin’ Wrongs) Reserved. 

Lick It. Bite It. Suck it. (part 2)

Please read Lick It. Bite It. Suck It. (part 1) before engrossing yourself in the following literary departure.

         With a gaggle of beautiful woman dancing on one side of me and a group of friends from college on the other, I was a man in the middle. Not so much physically, but mentally and emotionally.
         I was having a conversation inside of myself between a guy who wanted to dance with these women and guy who was very self-conscious about doing so. The dialogue between these two parts was loud and incessant. When that happens, I’m not really present, because the noise in my head is so loud that it takes me out of the flowing moment and into the restrictive confines of my mind. And my mind can be like a bad neighborhood: I shouldn’t go there alone.
         For the rest of my time at the Gypsy Bar, I swam between having fun hanging with my buddies and getting caught up listening to the obsessive chatter in my mind. I didn’t dance at all that night, and that frustrated me. What was this about?
         One of the problems was that these two parts of me that were in conflict, I’ll call them Dancin’ Boy and Self-Conscious Guy, weren’t talking to each other. They were just talking to me, and I wasn’t facilitating the conversation very well, if at all.
         Imagine, literally, that there are two people, each with an agenda, each convinced they know what’s best for me, yelling in each of my ears, and I’m paralyzed. Instead of encouraging them to talk to each other, with me listening and acting as facilitator, mediator, and final decision maker, I’m just dumbfounded by their constant cackling. I’m not moving the dialogue along at all. They’re each very stubborn and myopic, sticking to their guns, and unable to hear each other, if they’re even aware that the other exists at all. Like a negotiation that gets bogged down because neither side has the least bit of interest in what the other side is saying. When I get stuck in the middle of that internal madness, I get taken out of life, and I detach from the moment. Life becomes a melodramatic soap opera happening between my ears, instead of a beautiful circus occurring all around me.
         What I need to do is get these two parts talking to each other. But before I can even do that, I have to identify who the hell these parts are. How can I negotiate a dialogue if I don’t even know who the participants are or what they want? The real trick is to be able to do all this while it’s happening, so that I can resolve this internal conflict in the moment. Sometimes I can do that, and sometimes I can’t. That night at The Gypsy Bar, I couldn’t.
         Starting when my heart got broken about a year ago, I’ve gotten in touch with a very wounded little boy inside me. This kid is literally stuck at a time in my life where everything hurt. This is one of the by-products of unresolved emotional trauma. Parts of us get frozen in time. These parts see the world, and every experience, through the eyes of a traumatized kid. To them, every situation is just a reenactment of those traumatizing events. It’s like he’s watching the same movie over and over again, not realizing that the projector is busted and that there’s a whole world happening outside the theatre. According to this kid, life is a movie that hurts, and it’s playing twenty-four-seven.
         I’ve been aware of this kid inside of me for many years. But like a son I abandoned, I never really got to know him. I never spent too much time with him, or listened to what he had to say. I just knew he was there, and I usually ignored him, because I was afraid of all of his pain. I was afraid that if I got to know him, I’d be crippled by his story, because it was so heartbreaking.
         Like a bad parent, I used to be able to tune this boy out. He was my neglected son, suffering quietly, struggling to find his voice and make it heard. This kid needed my attention but wasn’t getting it.
         But now that I’m in touch with him, I can’t tune him out the way I used to. Just like a son who I once neglected but now have a relationship with. He’s a part of my life now, and I can’t just ignore him. Not for long anyway.
         That’s the “bad news”, but it’s really the good news, because it means I’ve got to deal with him now. And by dealing with him, I help him heal. And because he’s a part of me, when he heals, I heal. That’s the payoff. The payoff that’s worth the awareness, the challenge, the struggles, the pain, the change, the everything. I want to heal. At any and all costs.
         So I’m aware that this boy is with me now, all the time. The problem is that I can’t let him run the show. If I used to be a neglectful parent, I don’t want to overcompensate and become an over-indulgent one. I have to listen to this boy, pay attention to him, help him, develop a solid relationship with him, but I can’t let him lead me. I’ve got to lead him. Which is always a challenge, as you parents of external children well know. Just like parenting a kid outside of yourself, parenting one inside of you is a learning process, and not a linear one. There are setbacks, stumbles, giant leaps ahead and giant meltdowns.
         When we come to understand the little kid still inside us, we come to know that we’ve also developed powerful defense mechanisms, actually other parts of us, to protect him or her, because we weren’t doing such a great job. We were neglectful, after all. As we get to know this kid, we get to know the protective parts of us as well. These protectors have a job to do, they only know how to do it a certain way, and they don’t like us messing with this kid. Think of it like your son or daughter going out and finding somebody else that will protect them because you just ignore them. When you come back into the kid’s life, there’s going to be some conflict. There’s going to be resistance and turmoil and pain and change and all that fun stuff.
         That’s what was happening to me at The Gypsy Bar. I had parts inside of me that each wanted something different. Parts of me fighting for air time, and I got caught up in the battle instead of trying to resolve it.

Please join me tomorrow for part three.

©2009 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and a classroom of neglected eight-year-olds) Reserved.

Lick It. Bite It. Suck it. (part 1)

        The Gypsy Bar, at The Borgata Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, is by all accounts a happenin’ place. About one hundred feet long by about sixty feet wide, with very high ceilings, hardwood floor, dark, heavy wood moulding, and plenty of large windows that look out onto the rest of the casino, the place has a laid back but chic atmosphere. The room holds no more than a couple of hundred people, and the overall effect is intimate but exciting. It’s casual hip that rocks, with great live bands that play as loud as possible without causing nerve damage. The bar tenders tend to be women, tend to be very attractive, and tend to wear tight black T-shirts that say “Lick It. Bite It. Suck It”. I therefore tend to go there whenever I’m in town.
        Last Thursday night, I was at The Gypsy Bar with a healthy contingency of my Villanova Men’s Tribe. We were in Atlantic City for a weekend of golf and overall general mayhem. The band that night was called Liquid A, which I found an appropriate name for their brand of entertaining, aggressive, rock covers. I was sitting at a table with three of my buddies when a group of four or five very attractive women started dancing with each other, not far from us.
        I love the fact that women can dance with each other and it’s totally accepted in our society. In fact, it’s damn fabulous. Truth be told, I’m envious. If guys do that, they’re labeled gay, even if they’re wearing “Official World Testosterone Level Champion” patches on their shirts. We just can’t get away with it the way women can. To be honest, I don’t want to dance with other guys, but that isn’t the point. We don’t really have the option the way ladies do, and that’s too bad. It reminds me that there is plenty of sexism out there, and it’s not all tilted in favor of men.
        That night, there was a conflict in me, and I suddenly became very aware of it watching these women dance. A part of me wanted to join these beautiful ladies on the dance floor, and another part of me became very self conscious about doing so. This internal clash took me out of the present and into a private little war that was happening within the confines of my being.

Please join me tomorrow for part two. I know this post comes off as a bit of a teaser, but honestly, the rest of the piece just isn’t there yet. I wanted to get this ball rolling though, because it’s a big one.

©2009 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and a casino bar full of Wrongs) Reserved.