March 21, 2007

• Voiceless Echoes

  Sometimes, in some things, I’m a bit slow.  I’m not beating myself up about it, just recognizing and acknowledging.  I’m plenty quick to pick up on some other things, I guess, and I’m not boasting about that.  Maybe that second thought came to me in contrast with and compensation for my realization of those incidences of “slow pickup,” and maybe it’s part of this story, so it seemed appropriate to say it.  It came to mind and I blurted it out.

  I just realized this morning that for the three decades of my life roughly corresponding to my second transit of Saturn, I did a lot of blurting.  It became my style to just say whatever popped into my mind.  Before I was thirty years old, I censored what I said and kept a lot of things to myself.  I often projected a false persona because I didn’t like the person I was.  I had one big horrible secret, about killing my father, that I told no one.  I also had a lot of more minor guilt, small shameful secrets.

  Some of my shame was entirely unwarranted, just the dirty overlay of guilt with which a moralistic and puritanical culture paints natural biological drives.  In addition to that, I had made a lot of regrettable choices.  Not until I started working through them in group therapy, did I begin to sort those things out, forgive myself for being a normal human being, and turn my mistakes into learning experiences instead of letting them hang on in the back of my mind as haunting secrets.

  I tend to go to extremes.  I always have, even before I learned anything about astrology and discovered that there are indications in my birth chart that suggest someone who goes to extremes.  I learned in group that it is therapeutic to speak one’s mind.  The therapy also taught me a healthier way to relate to people.  Where previously I had been manipulative, telling people what they wanted to hear so that they would like me and provide external validation, after therapy I became more emotionally self-sufficient.  Once I internalized the idea that what other people think of me is none of my concern, I went all-out in freely and openly expressing my thoughts and feelings.

  However, since I’m very empathic and somewhat telepathic, what I was expressing was not always my own thoughts or feelings.  It took me a while to realize that, and even longer to learn how to sort those things out so that I would know fairly reliably most of the time which thoughts in my mind are mine and which ones I am picking up from other sources.  The types of thoughts I pick up most frequently come in the form of a voiceless echo:  someone will say something and stop speaking but go on thinking about what they were saying, either to extend the thought, or to contradict it if what they had said was untrue or inaccurate.

  Over time, to save myself some trouble and to avoid embarrassing strangers, I began to filter what I said when I was in social situations.  With intimate friends I’d usually just go on and blurt it all out.  The people who knew me knew I was psychic.  Some of them simply accepted it, and others were bothered by it.  Each of my two closest female friends during the 1980s had a different reaction to it.  My oldest friend Mardy would occasionally be chagrined that it seemed she had no secrets from me, but she was generally accepting.  My nearest neighbor Willa said it freaked her out that I answered her questions before she asked and exposed some of her secrets around her daughters.

  The aspects of Moon, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune in my natal chart  illustrate the connections in my life among the unconscious mind (mine and others’) and communication, and might shed some light on the reasons why this blurting-out of other people’s thoughts and feelings had its inception at my first Saturn return and went through some marked changes at my second Saturn return.

  I never saw any reason to filter out and stop blurting out those voiceless echoes I was hearing when I was doing psychic readings for clients.  It was my stock in trade, a real asset in my profession.  Because my mindset and my communication style were strongly conditioned by the radically confrontational therapy in that Reality Attack group, I tended to voice those echoes more often than not even when I knew it wouldn’t be well-received by the people involved.  That’s how we did things in group, it was therapeutic, and if I thought about it all I thought that everyone should get a little therapy whether they wanted it or not.

  I attended that Reality Attack Therapy group around the time of my first Saturn return.  Around that time, I also stopped my drinking and addictive drug use (except for sugar, but that’s a long story).   Around the time of my second Saturn return, I started attending 12-Step groups:  Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and Double Trouble in Recovery.  I had worked the steps solo while I was in prison, which also occurred near the time of my first Saturn return.    I did not, and still do not, agree with all the dogma of the 12-Step programs, but in 2003, when Greyfox was in early recovery from his addictions, we both found some support there.   It was the closest thing I’d found to group therapy since I’d gotten kicked out of the first group, and I really enjoyed the fellowship.

  In group therapy, “cross-talk” interruptions and impromptu responses to things being said by the person in the hotseat were encouraged.  That was how the therapy got done, through feedback.  In 12-Step groups, it’s a series of monologues that aren’t very therapeutic.  Comments or interruptions are not tolerated.  I started learning to just sit there and listen, to the words and to the voiceless echoes behind the words.  It is often difficult for me to wait until it’s my turn before I point out that someone was spouting addictive bullshit, and I have had to work at learning how to do it without violating the rule against taking another member’s inventory.

  Our fourth AA/NA “birthday,” Greyfox’s and mine, is coming up in a couple of months.  It has taken me almost four years to gradually catch on to how I have been evolving away from the blurter I used to be.  That thought, in all its permutations and ramifications, interests me.  Just thought I’d share it.

  (Parenthetical Iditarod Update:  It is over.  Ellen Halvorson made it to Nome at 02-56-20 on 3/21/07 with the Red Lantern, in 58th place, with 8 dogs, and a time of 16 days, 11 hours, 56 minutes, and 20 seconds.  In 1973, ’74, ’76, ’77, ’82, and ’85, that time would have been fast enough to win the race.)
  

  • 5:51 pm
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