Note to Readers: This article is by Scott, my best friend and first writing partner from John Dewey High School in Brooklyn (we put out quite a few parodies of various things, borrowed his father’s boat one night and went fishing, etc.). Oh yeah then we went to SUNY Buffalo at the same time for a year. Oh yeah! Then we lived at Miracle Manor for a year, doing A Course in Miracles. And we’re both Pisces. I guess when someone is your best friend they always feel that way. Scott is now a musician, minister, husband and dad who puts out his occasional ‘museletter’, and occasionally I promptly share his new essay with you. Here is his website. This article includes song lyrics — I’ll have a recording of the song posted soon from the top of this post. — EFC
By Scott Kalechstein
I had written so much about inner peace, balance, and harmony in cosmic terms, when all it really came down to was fallout from Mom and Dad on this earth. What a joke. You think you have a handle on God, the Universe, and the Great White Light, until you go home for Thanksgiving. In an hour, you realize how far you’ve got to go and who is the real turkey! — Shirley MacLaine, Dance While You Can
Are you going home for the holidays? To those people who love you, but who seldom express it in the way you would want? To those people who sometimes (or often!) have no clue how to honor your boundaries, or validate your feelings? To those people who can push your buttons before you even push the doorbell?
Coming to a place of real peace in our hearts with Mom and Dad, whether they are still alive in the flesh or just in our psyches and memories, is often both the most difficult and the most important soul work one can do in a lifetime. We can meditate all we want, feng shui our home and work environments, visualize our goals, get healers to clear our chakras, and eat organic, live foods, chewing slowly forty times each bite.
Yet if we have unprocessed indigestion from the hurt, anger and shame we felt when we were chewed out by our parents, it’s going to get in the way of enjoying lasting love and happiness in our relationships as adults. Engaging in spiritual pursuits without psychological and emotional healing work is like placing icing on a cake of mud. No matter how delicious the icing, the cake won’t taste good.
Sometime in my late twenties, a suspicion began sneaking up on me that the difficulties recurring in my relationships with women might have something to do with my connection to the woman I’ve always had the most difficulty with. (Take a guess!) My mother is one of the most passionately headstrong and expressive women I have ever met. She really voices her opinions and lets her feelings fly. Throughout childhood and on into young adulthood, I often felt swallowed up and overpowered by her emotional energy. It felt to me as if there was no room in our relationship for my own feelings, and even for my emerging (or submerging!) identity. My coping mechanism was to play the game of see-saw. When she raised her voice, I lowered mine. When she emoted, I suppressed. When she expressed caring, I danced at a distance.
It was a painful dance. My mother felt hurt, and she let me know it. I felt both guilty and resentful, and let nobody know it. I became an expert in emotional camouflage.