CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I can still remember giving my first lecture to 150 medical students, not to mention the fearsome back row of faculty members who, I was sure, were keeping track of all my errors. It was terrifying. But after three or four more lectures, I gradually got accustomed to teaching. Miron, however, had a very different experience. As he readily admits, he used to be one of the worst lecturers of all time because he became literally sick with panic every time he had to speak. Unlike me, he didn't adapt to the situation.
While fear of public speaking is very common, Miron's fear was exaggerated, almost incapacitating. I taught him basic meditation and breathing exercises, which helped to some degree. At least he could sleep the night before, manage his stomach cramps, and give his lectures. But, as Miron says, these lectures were mediocre at best and certainly didn't reflect his mastery of the subject matter. For a long time, he rationalized his poor lecture performance by blaming the students—they were just “spoiled rich kids” eager to judge him. He also blamed the system of medical education since it valued research more than teaching and provided little or nothing in the way of teacher education. Miron's choice to manage his anxieties by blaming others left him playing the role of the victim.
One day during this period, a friend of ours called. He was a Boston police detective and hypnotist whose job it was to hypnotize victims of crimes in the hopes of getting information that would help apprehend the perpetrator. Like us, “Dave” had an avid interest in healing, healers, and the power of the mind. He told Miron about a healing service that was held one Sunday each month at the Mission Hill Church in Boston. Following some prayers and a brief introduction, the priest blessed people with holy water. Some of them actually fell backward into a swoon, and many testified to physical or emotional healings. Although Dave hadn't gone to the church for a physical healing, he was surprised when a chronically ingrown toenail healed a week later.
Miron was intrigued by the description of the healing service, so we decided to “check it out.” The Mission Hill Church is located in a once-elegant section of Boston, bordering the dangerous ghetto area called Roxbury, which was once a neighborhood of gorgeous old mansions and townhouses. An island of splendor in a sea of decay, the church had managed to maintain the beauty of that former era. Dedicated to Mary, as are many of the great European cathedrals, it was filled with magnificent stained glass, sculpture, and medieval friezes. Clouds of sweet incense curled toward a ceiling that seemed only slightly less ornate than that of the Sistine Chapel. Rows of angels and beautifully carved confessionals lined the walls.
The opulence of the church prepared me mentally for a charismatic preacher whose energy would fill the impressive cathedral. Instead, we found Father MacDonough to be a quiet, humble man without a big personality. There was no fanfare to begin the service, just some prayers and a few songs by the community choir. Several hundred people, including a number of children, sat patiently in the pews. The priest then invited anyone who needed healing to come up to the rail of the sanctuary to be blessed. Miron and I watched from our seats. I was amazed when some people fell over backwards as they were blessed. “Mass hypnosis,” I thought, feeling the same resistance arising in me that I had felt as a nine-year-old during the birthday party with the hypnotist. Two big men walked behind the row of supplicants catching those who fell, placing them gently on the cool marble floor. No way was I going to fall over!
After a few minutes, Miron and I lined up to take our turns. As a drop of holy water touched my face, an incredible peace spread throughout my body, a peace so deep that my muscles just gave way. Two strong arms caught me as I sank down into an ocean of bliss. I looked up from the floor to see Miron grinning down at me. After a few minutes, my muscles recovered and I walked back to the pew to find that Miron had had a different, but equally remarkable, response to the blessing. He was weeping from the depths of his soul. In the decade or more that we'd been married, I had never seen him cry. His tears flowed throughout the remainder of the service.
When we emerged from the dark womb of the church into the bright light of day, I asked Miron why he'd been crying. Oddly enough, he didn't have a clue. Just as I had been simply overwhelmed with peace, he had been overcome by grief. As the weeks passed, he still couldn't figure out what had happened. So when the Sunday of the healing service came on the following month, he suggested that we return to the church with a few friends. This time he began to cry from the moment he set foot in the church to the moment we left, nearly two hours later. People were sending us tissues from several rows away.
This time we were determined to figure out what the tears were about, so I guided him in the mirror exercise described in detail in my book about emotional healing, Guilt Is the Teacher, Love Is the Lesson. He got comfortable and shifted into belly breathing, accessing the place of inner wisdom where the mind begins to quiet. Then he visualized the number three, and let the three melt into a two, the two into a one, and the one into a zero. Then he let the zero elongate into an oval mirror and asked to be shown a scene that related to why he was crying in the church.
Immediately, he flashed on a scene from his childhood. He was about seven and had recently emigrated to America following the end of World War II. His parents had trekked across Europe on foot, fleeing from their Russian oppressors. Captured by the Gestapo, they were fortunate that their stay in a concentration camp only lasted a few months, especially since Miron's mother was pregnant. After Miron's birth, they slowly made their way to safety in the American sector of Germany, their path often perilously close to the front lines where bombs and shells were exploding. His parents were survivors, arriving at Ellis Island with a boatload of seasick refugees, a six-year-old boy, and five dollars to start a new life. Once in New York, Miron used to joke wryly, his life took a major turn for the worse when his parents sent him to Catholic school.
The scene he saw in the mirror was of himself, alone in the family's apartment, crying in bitter frustration and anguish, banging his knee against the wall. It was evening. His mother was out learning English, and his father was at work in a factory. Miron wasn't afraid of being alone, so at first he didn't remember what the problem was. So, he asked the mirror again. The next scene that appeared was of his first-grade parochial school classroom. The teaching nun had asked him to come up front and read. He stood there filled with shame, his little hands shaking, because he didn't speak a single word of English. The nun stormed up, pulled out his hand, and beat him with a ruler. Several months later, she sent him to be evaluated for mental retardation. Somehow, in the midst of a massive period of immigration, it had escaped her that this lonely little boy spoke only Ukrainian.
No wonder Miron had an aversion to speaking in front of groups! And no wonder his grief had been compounded by a healing service in a Catholic church. The time had come to heal a painful memory that not only limited Miron's ability to teach, but also limited his ability to connect with God. For most of his life, Miron had believed that God was a sorry excuse for persecution in the name of righteousness. After all, when religion teaches fear instead of love, what else can a child be expected to think?
Once Miron became aware of the childhood trauma he had endured, the next step was to heal his wounds. From the perspective of his adult self, he was able to imagine holding his seven-year-old self and reassuring him that he was not to blame. Patiently explaining the truth of what had happened and giving the child the chance to express his emotions, Miron lovingly healed the memory—which included forgiving the nun. Whenever I heal my own memories, or those of clients, I always finish the process by enclosing the scene in a bubble of light and sending it back to the Universe.
The retrieval of the memory clarified some basic, life-guiding decisions that Miron had made as a child. Such decisions are not conscious choices. They are unconscious mechanisms of survival. To protect himself from abuse by authority figures such as the nun, he had developed an authoritarian, judgmental part of his own nature. If that part of him could have talked to the nun, perhaps it might have said, “I'm tough and you can't get me. Besides, I'm just like you. I bet you respect me now.” There was also a part of him that found safety in being a victim because he could get love from his parents, who wanted to soothe his hurts. Can you recognize these two parts of Miron in his interactions with the medical students?
In psychosynthesis terms, Miron's Victim subpersonality was in cahoots with his Judge. The Judge protected the Victim, and the Victim received sympathy, a poor substitute for love and respect, but at least a reassurance that he was cared for. When we are children, our world view is shaped by the need for love. How can we act, what can we say, to ensure the continual bestowal of love by our primary caretakers? Abandonment means psychological, if not physical, death to a child. Love is as critical to survival as food and shelter. In the process of adapting to our home, school, and cultural situations, we develop a whole system of subpersonalities similar to Miron's. These subpersonalities can be compared to masks that hide our true nature even from ourselves. Until we heal the wounds that formed them, we tend to compulsively act out the old stories from childhood with new people. Our true creativity and power cannot shine forth.
The change in Miron after healing these subpersonalities was profound. He began to see his students as people just like him, with their own fears and insecurities. He noticed how they worried about absorbing the enormous amount of subject matter in their courses. Would they flunk out? Could they make it as physicians? For the first time, he saw the students as people rather than as oppressors. On the day that his heart broke open in church, compassion began to flow. Emotional healing had kept his heart open, and he could finally empathize with the students' pain because he had lovingly faced his own.
Miron also opened his heart to his parents. His father, Dimitri, had been very distant as Miron grew up, and he felt as if they hardly knew one another. So, Miron decided to drive to upper New York State where his parents lived to try to make a heart-to-heart connection with his father. The entire five-hour drive from Boston was spent trying to figure out how to open up a meaningful conversation. He finally decided to make the simple request: “Tell me about your childhood.”
Miron's father had lived through a holocaust that is rarely spoken of, the terrible starvation that Stalin inflicted on the Ukrainian people, in which more than seven million people perished. As an adolescent, Dimitri had watched many of his childhood friends wither away and finally die. A mother in his village, crazed from grief and hunger, actually ate her own daughter. Dimitri and his mother managed to survive only because he had the foresight to hide grain in numerous gourds and hang them in trees all over the countryside. In addition, his mother still had a cow. He spoke of how the neighbor's children would line up, waiting for the daily glass of milk that was all the nourishment some of them had.
Dimitri cried as he remembered one little girl spilling the milk down her dress because she had become too weak to even drink. No wonder he'd been so distant all his life—depressed and stuck in the memories of his own private hell. As Miron listened to the story, the distance he had felt from his father melted away. Anger and hurt were replaced by love and understanding. There was no question of forgiving his father, because it was clear that he had done the best he could. Miron's healing deepened while listening to his father's story, and his father was also healed when he saw the respect and love that shone from his son's eyes.
As a result of these months of healing, Miron finally overcame his fear of public speaking. When he put down his Victim and Judge masks, he was at last free to become himself. He ended up winning Tufts Medical School's outstanding teacher award for four years in a row until he finally left academia. As you might imagine, his healing has changed our home life, too. The tendency to blame, which is one of the greatest toxins in a relationship, is practically nonexistent now. And the authoritarian, distant father of our children's youth has grown into a loving, supportive parent. One of the greatest joys we've both had in our long marriage is the continual deepening of our love for one another and our children as both of us have continued to heal.
Since relatively few of us were loved unconditionally as children, we can do only marginally better with our own kids. This is the meaning of the biblical statement that the sins of the father are visited on the children. Sin, after all, simply means separation. When we are separated from love, we become hypnotized by fear. Then we naturally teach fear rather than love because it is all we know. Every mask we put on, every subpersonality that we mistake for who we really are, is simply an expression of the fear that we are not lovable. Each person who heals him- or herself of this illusion helps break the chain of fear that has extended back in a long progression through our families and throughout our world.
Stop for a minute and think of two or three masks that you learned to wear as a child. What are they? Can you understand how they sometimes get in the way of your ability to love and create? Are you ready to heal them and claim the wisdom in your wounds?
Each of our subpersonalities is a samskara, an imprint on our souls, which is comfortably worn with use and which we will continue to live from until we consciously become aware of the pattern and choose to heal it. When we do, each subpersonality will become a jewel in our crown of wisdom. For example, behind the mask of the Victim lies the gift of a compassionate heart. Once we have suffered and healed, we have particular empathy for the suffering of others. Behind the mask of the Perfectionist lies a deep appreciation for beauty and balance. The healed Judge becomes a fine discriminator, capable of acknowledging the unique gifts of every person.
Someone at a workshop once asked Miron what the jewel in the healed Martyr was. He had to stop and think. The Martyr is certainly one of my subpersonalities, but it isn't one of his. “The healer Martyr,” he replied, “is a person who can suffer with dignity and grace because suffering is inevitable, but misery is optional!” I laughed, recalling my mother, who would sweat for days in a hot kitchen preparing the holiday meal, and then refuse to sit down and eat with us. She believed she had to serve and complain. In this role, she found some worthiness. Having been tutored in martyrdom from an early age, I can say that, for me, worthiness is the jewel of the Martyr. As part of my healing, I've learned to feel good about my being, not about a show of doing in which I give my life force away.
There are as many ways to heal old emotional wounds as there are schools of psychotherapy. As with meditation, different methods are suitable for different people. One caution, however, lies in making any process of healing your primary identity. This is just putting on one more mask to buy love. While 12-step programs have served to heal many millions of people, a few get addicted to their program and become professional 12-steppers. They are Sue or Sam, the Recovering Alcoholic. When you introduce yourself to people outside a recovery program as an adult child of an alcoholic or as an incest survivor, you have seriously limited your being. You are much greater than the sum of your wounds, no matter how grievous they might have been. (A wonderful metaphysically oriented book that deals with this very subject is Your Companion to 12 Step Recovery, by Robert Odom, published by Hay House.)
Similarly, some people get stuck in healing their inner child to the point where they elevate it to the status of brat-in-residence. Miron and our older son Justin once went to a men's group led by the poet and writer Robert Bly. One of the men in the group began to wax eloquent about the warm and wonderful relationship he had with his inner child, how he took him fishing and fathered him. Bly, in his endearingly blunt manner, yelled, “Well, then it's time to kill the little son-of-a-bitch now, isn't it?” What he meant was that, ultimately, healing is a letting-go, not a hanging-on. We need to heal our wounded inner children and let them grow up into emotionally mature, wise adults rather than coddling them for a lifetime.
Each stage of our life is marked by death and birth. Just as our infant self dies to become a child, our child self must die to achieve adulthood. Emotional healing is a series of deaths and rebirths. Every time we put fear to death, we are reborn to a deeper ability to love.
