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The Integrity of Love
Connie Donaldson, MA
| Dumping the Magic A Retired Cynic Revisits Spirituality and Healing |
Chapter 1 |
March 15th. Ten days after my fifty-eighth birthday. A dozen different things went through my mind as I
headed down the Parkway that Tuesday. None of them had anything to do with God or my mother. I’d
given up on both of them years ago.
My thoughts bounced from the weather—it’s March; it shouldn’t still be snowing—to my dislike of
driving to the other side of the city. As a native Pittsburgher I generally tried to avoid going any place
in the city that involved crossing a bridge and going through a tunnel in the same trip. Even if traffic
wasn’t horrific on the way to my appointment, it would be on the return trip. Plus, once I got to the
place, I knew I’d have to find a parking place on one of the busiest streets in the universe.
Only something as huge as my need to find a way to remove the emotional boulder lodged deep
inside me, keeping me from resuming my life, was enough to keep me going. After almost eight years
of debilitating Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and years of therapy before and during the CFS, I was
ready to get back to real life with a vengeance.
I smiled as I pulled into an extra large parking space in front of Dennis McKenzie’s (a pseudonym at
Dennis’ request) office. I loaded the parking meter with gusto. The challenging part of the journey was
over. I was ready to face the easy part—the therapy.
Dennis’ office was comfortable. The walls were filled with cultural artifacts; leafy plants hung in the
windows. Dennis was genuinely friendly and intelligent. He listened intently. His eyes never left mine,
and he nodded in all the right places. When I finished the synopsis of my reasons for coming—
depression, the need to lose weight, the desire to find a new career—he asked just one question:
“And your mother; how are things with your mother?”
He caught me off guard. I hadn’t even mentioned her. I smiled. “I’ve worked with that issue a lot
already. I think I’ll wait until one of us is dead before I deal with it again.”
He didn’t smile back. “So, she’s still living. How’s your relationship?”
I was a little angry as well as nonplussed. “That’s not why I’m here.”
“Then you might want to find someone else to work with.”
For a second I thought of leaving. But then I thought—and for some strange reason, it mattered to me
at the time—“Wait, I have almost an hour and a half left on the parking meter; I’m staying.”
“OK, I’m at least willing to listen. What do you mean?”
“In the kind of work I think would help you most, Family Constellation work, this is key. Healing your
relationship with your parents is essential to understanding and healing your life. I could explain it to
you in great detail. I’ll be glad to suggest some books and articles to read, but let me just say this: If
you give this approach a chance, I can assure you that you’ll come back here some day and say to
me, ‘Dennis, thank you. Thank you for helping me do this work while my mother was still alive. I can’t
believe what’s happened!’ ”
I forgot about the parking meter; I was still skeptical but now also intrigued. I decided to give it a
chance.
Dennis asked me to put my relationship with my mother into a couple words, maybe a sentence. I
thought for a while. I wanted to make sure it was strong enough. “I guess I always felt I wasn’t safe with
her, that she just might abandon me because I wasn’t good enough.”
“Did she ever abandon you?”
“No, but you asked me what it felt like. It felt like I wasn’t safe, like I was always afraid she would.”
He asked for more information about my mother. It embarrasses me now to remember how arrogantly
nonchalant I was about her life that afternoon and for so many years before. With a sigh, I gave him
the standard story I knew.
“She was the middle child of a butcher and a housewife. Although she was born in Pittsburgh, her
family sent her and her older sister to live with their maternal grandmother in Italy for a few years when
my mother was about three. Her own mother, my grandmother, was seriously ill and couldn’t take care
of them. They returned to the states when my mother was five years old.”
Dennis stopped my recitation. “What was her mother’s illness?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think anyone ever talked about it.”
“How odd you don’t know. You have children. What kind of illness would you have to have that would
make you send your own little children away—to a foreign country—for years?”
Wow, I’d never thought of that, of what could have been going on in my mother’s family—during my
mother’s young life—to make Grandma send Mom and Aunt Norma away. It gave me a moment’s
pause.
But Dennis didn’t let it drop there. “How old are your grandchildren?”
“Four and three.”
“Do you think you can imagine what it would be like for them to be sent away at this age? Is there
anything you could say or do that would make them understand it? Is there anything that would make
such a thing OK for them?”
“No—and I don’t want to imagine it. I don’t want to even think about it!”
“But it really did happen to your mother. Talk about abandonment issues. Do you think that, when she
had children of her own, these issues might have affected her in some way? Do you think her own
fears could have—consciously or unconsciously—affected how she treated you? It’s just something to
think about.”
I was still holding on to my righteous indignation toward my mom, just a little less firmly. Dennis was
planting some big depth charges to derail my old belief system. He then asked about my position in
the family, how many siblings I had.
“I’m the oldest of five.”
“No deaths of siblings? Your mother had no miscarriages?”
“Actually, there was a sister after me who died at birth, and my mother had several miscarriages.”
I told him of my mother’s appendicitis attack when she was about five months pregnant. She was able
to stay pregnant two more months but then went into labor well before her due date.
“So you’re the oldest of six, not five.
“Yeah, I guess so. I just never thought about it…”
“So, after all the other losses in her life, she lost her second child? Was it a girl or a boy?”
“A girl. Judith Lynne.”
“And the miscarriages, how many?”
“I don’t know for sure. My mother tended to exaggerate those kinds of things.”
“But she did miscarry several children, right?”
“Yes”. Again he made me see my mother in a different light.
We talked a little more about Family Constellation theory. Dennis wrote down the titles of some books
and then glanced at the clock. We’d gone way over the hour designated for the appointment.
“We’ll begin next week with the actual constellation work. Let’s see when we can schedule it.”
As I got out my checkbook, my mind was racing. I didn’t want to wait an entire week. Something in his
confidence, something in this new perspective, something in the weight of his promise and the depth
of my need clicked.
“Do you have someone scheduled for the next hour?”
He glanced at his appointment book. “No.”
“Well, now you do. Let’s do it today.”
Dennis hesitated a moment, perhaps weighing the advisability of it, perhaps just rearranging his
afternoon. Then he faced me with a smile. “OK. Let’s do it.”
Typically, Constellation Work as Bert Hellinger introduced it in the 1980s is done in a group setting
with members of the group volunteering to represent parents, siblings and ancestors. However, the
method can be amended to one-on-one work where the facilitator acts as the director of a guided
visualization. That’s what we did on that wintry Tuesday.
The first part of the process involved my dad, who had died twenty-eight years before. In the first
visualization exercise, Dennis had me imagine myself as a little girl standing in front of my dad. He
asked me to get in touch with how it felt being with him (Wonderful!). He told me to make the
visualization as real as I could, using as many senses as I could. I pictured how Dad looked when I was
little. I remembered the cigarette smell of his soft flannel shirt. If he were wearing flannel, it was the
weekend, and he’d be home all day. I felt my muscles loosen with that image. I pictured him telling me
a story—acting out a story—with different voices and the flash of an imaginary sword rousting the bad
guys from Sherwood Forest.
“Now just tell your dad how much you love him.” That was easy! “And just do a small bow or curtsy and
thank him for being your father.”
The bow felt a little hokey, but the words came easily as I imagined myself standing in front of him. “I
love you, Daddy. Thank you for being my father. Thank you for being my dad.”
Dennis brought me out of the visualization and we talked a bit about it. He was satisfied that I
understood the process. I was a little surprised at how real the experience felt. It seemed to touch
more than just my imagination.
“Ready to do something similar with your mom?”
“Sure, but it won’t do any good. I wouldn’t be sincere, and she wouldn’t accept it even if I were.”
Dennis took my hesitation seriously; he led me in another, easier, visualization first. For this one, he
put a large, tall pillow beside me on the couch and asked me to imagine that it represented my mother.
Then, when we got into the visualization, he asked me to try to just lean into it a little, just to see if I
could imagine relaxing into my mother’s embrace. I tried. I failed. I wasn’t being stubborn. I was scared.
When I opened my eyes from this exercise, Dennis said we had two choices. We could leave it here
and continue next week, or we could try to move forward. I was a little overwhelmed and apprehensive
but also excited. I felt that we were on the verge of something big.
“Let’s do it.”
“What if you’re not sincere? What if your mom doesn’t accept it?” Dennis was throwing my own
objections back at me, planting more depth charges.
“I’ll do it anyhow.”
“OK, let’s keep going.”
At first I had to work hard to get back into a visualizing kind of space, and then, suddenly, I was there.
In my imagination, I saw myself standing in front of my mother. I could feel the discomfort in both the
little girl I was and in my adult body doing this exercise. The feel of the visualization with my dad had
been like being in a warm spring breeze; this felt like a hot dry desert. My entire body was tense and
brittle.
I focused on her well manicured, red fingernails; I sensed her disapproval. Dennis tried to get me to
relax with this image. I couldn't. But I stayed with it, waiting for his instructions. Finally they came.
“Now, just bow your head and say, ‘Thank you for being my mother.’”
I could feel myself tense up and pull back from her. But oddly, I didn’t want to leave the visualization.
The little girl in the visualization stood her ground. I watched her take a deep, determined breath. She
bowed her head very stiffly, very slightly, and then said the words: “Thank you. Thank you, Mom, for
being my mother.”
Dennis added more words and little Connie repeated them in my head: “Thank you for giving me life.
Thank you for loving me. Thank you for not leaving me.”
Then it was over. Dennis instructed me to open my eyes. I felt a little disoriented but nothing else. No
feeling of relief. No rush of emotion. I remember thinking to myself that the visualization probably hadn’
t worked. “If this had been real,” I said to myself, “wouldn’t I be crying now?”
We talked a little more, and then I wrote the check—for two sessions. Dennis suggested I wait until I
was ready before we made another appointment. This made sense to me. At that moment, I wasn’t
even sure I’d ever come back.
And then I stood up! To this day, I don’t know what standing up had to do with it. Maybe my body was
on delayed reaction time. But as I stood, a feeling of—not happiness, not joy, not lightness—of
movement deep inside me took place. I could feel my face flushing. It felt like a hot flash.
I stood there in the office, a little dazed. I knew I should be just walking out the door, but I couldn’t. I
needed to ground myself.
“I need to give you a hug.”
Dennis chuckled and nodded.
I hugged him hard; then I could speak. “Thank you. I don’t know what just happened, but I know it’s
big.” The next words I said surprised me as I heard myself say them. “Whatever just happened
happened on a tectonic level. It’s as if continents shifted inside me.”
After I left his office, I sat in the car for a while until I felt normal enough to drive.
headed down the Parkway that Tuesday. None of them had anything to do with God or my mother. I’d
given up on both of them years ago.
My thoughts bounced from the weather—it’s March; it shouldn’t still be snowing—to my dislike of
driving to the other side of the city. As a native Pittsburgher I generally tried to avoid going any place
in the city that involved crossing a bridge and going through a tunnel in the same trip. Even if traffic
wasn’t horrific on the way to my appointment, it would be on the return trip. Plus, once I got to the
place, I knew I’d have to find a parking place on one of the busiest streets in the universe.
Only something as huge as my need to find a way to remove the emotional boulder lodged deep
inside me, keeping me from resuming my life, was enough to keep me going. After almost eight years
of debilitating Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and years of therapy before and during the CFS, I was
ready to get back to real life with a vengeance.
I smiled as I pulled into an extra large parking space in front of Dennis McKenzie’s (a pseudonym at
Dennis’ request) office. I loaded the parking meter with gusto. The challenging part of the journey was
over. I was ready to face the easy part—the therapy.
Dennis’ office was comfortable. The walls were filled with cultural artifacts; leafy plants hung in the
windows. Dennis was genuinely friendly and intelligent. He listened intently. His eyes never left mine,
and he nodded in all the right places. When I finished the synopsis of my reasons for coming—
depression, the need to lose weight, the desire to find a new career—he asked just one question:
“And your mother; how are things with your mother?”
He caught me off guard. I hadn’t even mentioned her. I smiled. “I’ve worked with that issue a lot
already. I think I’ll wait until one of us is dead before I deal with it again.”
He didn’t smile back. “So, she’s still living. How’s your relationship?”
I was a little angry as well as nonplussed. “That’s not why I’m here.”
“Then you might want to find someone else to work with.”
For a second I thought of leaving. But then I thought—and for some strange reason, it mattered to me
at the time—“Wait, I have almost an hour and a half left on the parking meter; I’m staying.”
“OK, I’m at least willing to listen. What do you mean?”
“In the kind of work I think would help you most, Family Constellation work, this is key. Healing your
relationship with your parents is essential to understanding and healing your life. I could explain it to
you in great detail. I’ll be glad to suggest some books and articles to read, but let me just say this: If
you give this approach a chance, I can assure you that you’ll come back here some day and say to
me, ‘Dennis, thank you. Thank you for helping me do this work while my mother was still alive. I can’t
believe what’s happened!’ ”
I forgot about the parking meter; I was still skeptical but now also intrigued. I decided to give it a
chance.
Dennis asked me to put my relationship with my mother into a couple words, maybe a sentence. I
thought for a while. I wanted to make sure it was strong enough. “I guess I always felt I wasn’t safe with
her, that she just might abandon me because I wasn’t good enough.”
“Did she ever abandon you?”
“No, but you asked me what it felt like. It felt like I wasn’t safe, like I was always afraid she would.”
He asked for more information about my mother. It embarrasses me now to remember how arrogantly
nonchalant I was about her life that afternoon and for so many years before. With a sigh, I gave him
the standard story I knew.
“She was the middle child of a butcher and a housewife. Although she was born in Pittsburgh, her
family sent her and her older sister to live with their maternal grandmother in Italy for a few years when
my mother was about three. Her own mother, my grandmother, was seriously ill and couldn’t take care
of them. They returned to the states when my mother was five years old.”
Dennis stopped my recitation. “What was her mother’s illness?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think anyone ever talked about it.”
“How odd you don’t know. You have children. What kind of illness would you have to have that would
make you send your own little children away—to a foreign country—for years?”
Wow, I’d never thought of that, of what could have been going on in my mother’s family—during my
mother’s young life—to make Grandma send Mom and Aunt Norma away. It gave me a moment’s
pause.
But Dennis didn’t let it drop there. “How old are your grandchildren?”
“Four and three.”
“Do you think you can imagine what it would be like for them to be sent away at this age? Is there
anything you could say or do that would make them understand it? Is there anything that would make
such a thing OK for them?”
“No—and I don’t want to imagine it. I don’t want to even think about it!”
“But it really did happen to your mother. Talk about abandonment issues. Do you think that, when she
had children of her own, these issues might have affected her in some way? Do you think her own
fears could have—consciously or unconsciously—affected how she treated you? It’s just something to
think about.”
I was still holding on to my righteous indignation toward my mom, just a little less firmly. Dennis was
planting some big depth charges to derail my old belief system. He then asked about my position in
the family, how many siblings I had.
“I’m the oldest of five.”
“No deaths of siblings? Your mother had no miscarriages?”
“Actually, there was a sister after me who died at birth, and my mother had several miscarriages.”
I told him of my mother’s appendicitis attack when she was about five months pregnant. She was able
to stay pregnant two more months but then went into labor well before her due date.
“So you’re the oldest of six, not five.
“Yeah, I guess so. I just never thought about it…”
“So, after all the other losses in her life, she lost her second child? Was it a girl or a boy?”
“A girl. Judith Lynne.”
“And the miscarriages, how many?”
“I don’t know for sure. My mother tended to exaggerate those kinds of things.”
“But she did miscarry several children, right?”
“Yes”. Again he made me see my mother in a different light.
We talked a little more about Family Constellation theory. Dennis wrote down the titles of some books
and then glanced at the clock. We’d gone way over the hour designated for the appointment.
“We’ll begin next week with the actual constellation work. Let’s see when we can schedule it.”
As I got out my checkbook, my mind was racing. I didn’t want to wait an entire week. Something in his
confidence, something in this new perspective, something in the weight of his promise and the depth
of my need clicked.
“Do you have someone scheduled for the next hour?”
He glanced at his appointment book. “No.”
“Well, now you do. Let’s do it today.”
Dennis hesitated a moment, perhaps weighing the advisability of it, perhaps just rearranging his
afternoon. Then he faced me with a smile. “OK. Let’s do it.”
Typically, Constellation Work as Bert Hellinger introduced it in the 1980s is done in a group setting
with members of the group volunteering to represent parents, siblings and ancestors. However, the
method can be amended to one-on-one work where the facilitator acts as the director of a guided
visualization. That’s what we did on that wintry Tuesday.
The first part of the process involved my dad, who had died twenty-eight years before. In the first
visualization exercise, Dennis had me imagine myself as a little girl standing in front of my dad. He
asked me to get in touch with how it felt being with him (Wonderful!). He told me to make the
visualization as real as I could, using as many senses as I could. I pictured how Dad looked when I was
little. I remembered the cigarette smell of his soft flannel shirt. If he were wearing flannel, it was the
weekend, and he’d be home all day. I felt my muscles loosen with that image. I pictured him telling me
a story—acting out a story—with different voices and the flash of an imaginary sword rousting the bad
guys from Sherwood Forest.
“Now just tell your dad how much you love him.” That was easy! “And just do a small bow or curtsy and
thank him for being your father.”
The bow felt a little hokey, but the words came easily as I imagined myself standing in front of him. “I
love you, Daddy. Thank you for being my father. Thank you for being my dad.”
Dennis brought me out of the visualization and we talked a bit about it. He was satisfied that I
understood the process. I was a little surprised at how real the experience felt. It seemed to touch
more than just my imagination.
“Ready to do something similar with your mom?”
“Sure, but it won’t do any good. I wouldn’t be sincere, and she wouldn’t accept it even if I were.”
Dennis took my hesitation seriously; he led me in another, easier, visualization first. For this one, he
put a large, tall pillow beside me on the couch and asked me to imagine that it represented my mother.
Then, when we got into the visualization, he asked me to try to just lean into it a little, just to see if I
could imagine relaxing into my mother’s embrace. I tried. I failed. I wasn’t being stubborn. I was scared.
When I opened my eyes from this exercise, Dennis said we had two choices. We could leave it here
and continue next week, or we could try to move forward. I was a little overwhelmed and apprehensive
but also excited. I felt that we were on the verge of something big.
“Let’s do it.”
“What if you’re not sincere? What if your mom doesn’t accept it?” Dennis was throwing my own
objections back at me, planting more depth charges.
“I’ll do it anyhow.”
“OK, let’s keep going.”
At first I had to work hard to get back into a visualizing kind of space, and then, suddenly, I was there.
In my imagination, I saw myself standing in front of my mother. I could feel the discomfort in both the
little girl I was and in my adult body doing this exercise. The feel of the visualization with my dad had
been like being in a warm spring breeze; this felt like a hot dry desert. My entire body was tense and
brittle.
I focused on her well manicured, red fingernails; I sensed her disapproval. Dennis tried to get me to
relax with this image. I couldn't. But I stayed with it, waiting for his instructions. Finally they came.
“Now, just bow your head and say, ‘Thank you for being my mother.’”
I could feel myself tense up and pull back from her. But oddly, I didn’t want to leave the visualization.
The little girl in the visualization stood her ground. I watched her take a deep, determined breath. She
bowed her head very stiffly, very slightly, and then said the words: “Thank you. Thank you, Mom, for
being my mother.”
Dennis added more words and little Connie repeated them in my head: “Thank you for giving me life.
Thank you for loving me. Thank you for not leaving me.”
Then it was over. Dennis instructed me to open my eyes. I felt a little disoriented but nothing else. No
feeling of relief. No rush of emotion. I remember thinking to myself that the visualization probably hadn’
t worked. “If this had been real,” I said to myself, “wouldn’t I be crying now?”
We talked a little more, and then I wrote the check—for two sessions. Dennis suggested I wait until I
was ready before we made another appointment. This made sense to me. At that moment, I wasn’t
even sure I’d ever come back.
And then I stood up! To this day, I don’t know what standing up had to do with it. Maybe my body was
on delayed reaction time. But as I stood, a feeling of—not happiness, not joy, not lightness—of
movement deep inside me took place. I could feel my face flushing. It felt like a hot flash.
I stood there in the office, a little dazed. I knew I should be just walking out the door, but I couldn’t. I
needed to ground myself.
“I need to give you a hug.”
Dennis chuckled and nodded.
I hugged him hard; then I could speak. “Thank you. I don’t know what just happened, but I know it’s
big.” The next words I said surprised me as I heard myself say them. “Whatever just happened
happened on a tectonic level. It’s as if continents shifted inside me.”
After I left his office, I sat in the car for a while until I felt normal enough to drive.
| Dumping the Magic A Retired Cynic Revisits Spirituality and Healing |
| Dumping the Magic A Retired Cynic Revisits Spirituality and Healing |
is scheduled for publication in March, 2012. If you have not already done so, you can enter the drawing
for a free copy of Dumping the Magic by clicking here and providing your name and email
address. Drawing will be held on the publication day.
for a free copy of Dumping the Magic by clicking here and providing your name and email
address. Drawing will be held on the publication day.