The Green Slimy Pond of Guilt

by Pat Burns
www.seeking-serenity.com

Leora scheduled a session with me when she began to experience sharp back pains that she felt had an emotional cause, and were important to address.

As we began our session, Leora described her pain. “It feels like someone has punched right through my sternum. It’s really painful.“

Leora’s oldest son had just returned home from a trip overseas, his first without his parents. Letting him go was difficult for her. Initially she was fine with the idea, but by the following day she was hysterical. According to Leora, her son had changed and was different since his return. He had experienced a lot, both good and bad, and needed time to process it all, and since she herself had not had similar experiences, she couldn’t really relate to what her son was going through.

There were also some ongoing issues relating to finances, and secrets that she was keeping from her husband related to those finances. There was a lot of guilt associated with keeping those secrets. As she discussed all of this, Leora became quite emotional.

She felt strongly that she needed to start with how she felt about herself. We had agreed to utilize inner theater during our session, and she visualized herself as young woman with short hair, very much a mess, and trying to feed her very young son some broccoli, which was cold. He refused to eat the broccoli. Picturing herself in this vignette, Leora said,” This person shouldn’t have a baby..what right did she have to think she can do this to a baby?” Gentle continuous tapping.

A part of her felt that she was a poor excuse for a mother, and that she should never have had children. She said that she didn’t do “momsie things” like bake cakes. Another part of her, however, recognized that she had been, in her own words, “A damn good mom”.

As she thought back over raising her sons, her response was, “What have I done? I shouldn’t have had children. I shouldn’t have had to learn through my children.”. She was feeling tremendous guilt about her ability to mother her children.

We spent some time tapping on the things that Leora was feeling.

“This person shouldn’t have had a baby”

“What have I done to my children?”

When I asked her to describe the guilt that she was feeling, she described it as a green pool of slime. She could picture her children lying face down in the slime, with their little t-shirts appearing as humps above the slime. Leora felt that she had used her children as stepping stones, stepping on them to get to where she was today. Visualizing her children face down in the slime, she said “I did that”, crying all the while.

We started a general tapping on the guilt.

“I did that to my children..I put them in that slime.”

“I stepped on my children to get to where I am”

I asked Leora if she could help to turn her children over in the slime, but the kids were taking care of themselves, and jumped up as though they were characters in one of the Super Mario games, with grins on their faces.

At this point the green slime receded, leaving her children standing on a very small platform in the middle of a deep pit, holding on to each other. Could she throw them a lifeline, I asked? Again her boys took care of themselves, and she felt that it was really important to stand back and let them do that, to trust them, knowing that they had what it took to get along in life. Leora noticed that the pain in her back was easing.

Her sons had rope ladders, and tossed them across the gap between the platform they were standing on and the ground around it, and were soon off the platform and out of the pit.

I asked Leora what her children were doing now that they were out of the pit, and she said that they were racing around her in cars, perfectly happy. That reminded her of how difficult it was for her when her oldest son got his first car. She said that logically she knew that her boys were well balanced and capable, but that she tended to panic at the thought of them doing things that most normal teenagers do.

She also had a feeling that although her boys were happy, they didn’t give a damn about her, and would leave her behind. “They’ll go off and leave me”, she said. When I asked if that wasn’t what they were supposed to be doing as they grew up, her quick response was “Yes..shut up!” and we both had a good laugh.

Leora said that she was feeling quite a bit of release.

We spoke about Leora’s oldest son leaving home to take a degree at art college in the city next year, and she was totally unfazed by that major life change for her son and herself.

We ended the session on a very positive note, with Leora recalling a visit that her sons had made to her sister. Her sister was very stressed, and the boys felt that she was no fun to spend time with. Upon their return home, they thanked Leora for doing the work that she had done on herself and her issues, because they saw in their aunt what might have been but wasn’t. We agreed that this was a high compliment, and Leora acknowledged herself for all the hard work that she had done.

Several days after our session, I received an email from Leora. She said “The results of the session with you have been really showing now, with such an improved bond with my youngest son. He has been giving me voluntary hugs and everything just feels easier.”

I have since found that the issues between Leora and her husband have been resolved, and the back pain is gone. So much for that green slimy pool of guilt!

This entry was posted on Friday, December 4, 2009 at 4:50 pm and is filed under Families. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.