Mosaic
(Interview with an
Enneagram Seven)
I'm collecting real-life
stories of the change process through these interviews so others
can see what it's like
for each of the Enneagram styles as they go through increasing
self-awareness; for people who are younger or less experienced
or new to the Enneagram, to learn from your story the high
points and low points, to give them a bit of a roadmap. To
start, what does the word "transformation" mean to you?
For me, transformation is about
things becoming different, and a
mosaic is one of the metaphors
I’ve used, especially since my husband’s death – the cause of my
greatest transformation so far. My life as I knew it was
shattered, and in this healing process it’s being put back as
something completely different. In life’s mosaic you might not
recognize some pieces, but the pieces can be put together in
infinite combinations. So for me to define transformation, it’s not like
the old disappears, but it’s unrecognizable.
You said “creating” a mosaic, so is there a conscious process of
looking at the pieces and creating a mosaic? Or watching it come
into creation? Or something in-between?
Nine
months after my husband’s death we hadn’t done anything with the
ashes, and I started talking with people at our church about
whether we’d want to build a columbarium, where you insert ashes
or spread ashes. We researched what others had done, and came
across a fascinating mosaic inside the building that was in
process. As the process continued and ashes were added, it took
further shape. This reminded me of when I worked in the field of
senior living and had gone to a nursing home that had one of the
most beautiful memory gardens I’ve ever seen: very long, with
flowing water through the middle of grounds, where you could
meditate, with a man-made mosaic on either side, but not like a
swimming pool where each piece of tile fits; more organic. For
me there is work in transformation. So for me the mosaic
is both what I’m creating and what’s coming into creation, like
that work in process, in that I don’t think I created some of
those experiences in my life – I certainly didn’t create my
husband’s dying – but it is what I have to work with: “So what
am I going to do with those pieces? What are they going to look
like?” And especially since that experience, I’m much more open
to going, “Hmmm… more exciting if I have no idea. We’ll see.” As
I approach the third anniversary of his death, someone asked,
“Does it seem like it was just yesterday?” And I said, “No, it
seems, actually, like it was about six lifetimes ago. Because so
many different things have happened in that time. So it’s that
kind of a mosaic. When you look at one section it looks like
something, but when you pull further back or you move further
down, you see that was actually part of something bigger.
A mosaic that’s organic and dynamic. So one major shock point
for you was your husband’s death. Before his death, when you
think back over your whole life, what was the first major
change?
For
me it happened when I went from southern California to Minnesota
to college, having never visited the town. I just wanted to get
the hell out of my parents’ house. And this was an acceptable
way, where I never even had to tell them that. I just went away
to college. I'd read some literature but had no clue what I was
getting into. The college town was a good-sized community of
10,000 people, but I came from the L.A. metro area and my world
was really small in the sense that I thought I knew everything
about the world. In Minnesota I met all sorts of people I knew
nothing about. It’s not that I didn’t know anything, but
the things I had in common with them were fewer than the things
that were different. Part of it was that about 85% of the people
who go to that school come from one of the neighboring cities,
and I’d been on the California coast, and
Mexico, and Hawaii. One of the first days of school someone said
they were from Cambridge and I said, “Oh really? Massachusetts?”
and they said, “No, Cambridge, Minnesota,” really taking
offense, like how could I not know? I felt so self-conscious,
like I didn’t get the script. I hadn’t really studied in high
school. I was able to get OK grades. But some of the other
students were merit scholars and valedictorian of their class –
although later I found out some came from a graduating class of
12! So it was a very difficult experience. I'd never felt like
such a
fish out of water. I was so used to being with people who’d had
similar experiences. So to go to school there was the first real
recognition of differences, and it was also the beginning of
being out of my parents’ home and trying to figure out who I was.
It was both mind-expanding and a new way of exploring “Who am
I?” And would you say a few words about why you wanted to get
the hell out of your parents’ home?
I
used to say I grew up in the family of Ordinary People
where everything looked good on the outside. My parents were
upper-middle-class, church-going people, parents who provided
for all our needs, but emotionally there was a lot of chaos and
conflict. My mother was an active alcoholic at that time and my
dad worked all the time. I often felt I couldn’t understand what
was going on. At that time, I didn’t know there was alcoholism.
That awareness was yet to come. I just thought that’s how life
was. But I did know I was incredibly lonely in my family. And I
created family outside my family. Friends from church and high
school. The same friends would always say, “I wish I had your
parents.” I thought “How could that be?” but I never said
anything because I thought it was about me, that I didn’t
appreciate my parents. My sister had an eating disorder, and my
brother had a lot of anger issues. So I was that middle kid who
tried to just get along.
And none of it was discussable.
No!
“Am I really seeing this stuff or not?” Your family was denying
it. You questioned your view of reality. So, when you went away
to college, did you discover you could see how the world
really was? Or did the fact that you didn’t know their world
exaggerate it?
I
think college actually exaggerated it. There were definitely
similarities in that experience: “Gosh, how is it that everyone
else seems to know what’s going on and says it’s OK, but it
doesn’t feel OK to me?” So that was one of those times when I
saw how I used my outgoing, friendly, humorous piece – to try to
make up for all the discord that was inside. I only lasted there
a year. By January I wanted to leave school. Because it was 40
degrees below zero, and I didn’t shine, hadn’t gotten good
grades because I didn’t know how to get good grades. I didn’t
know how to work. I’d gotten good grades by showing up and
doing things I already knew in a very surface manner. That was
one of the times, though, where my mother – the alcoholic,
unavailable person she was in my life until that point – said
one of the best things I’ve drawn on so many times since then:
“You can’t come home because you made the commitment to be
there.” That wasn’t normal in my family. We weren’t consistent.
She said “God hasn’t called you to be successful. God’s called
you to be faithful.” I stayed until May. That was it. Then I
said I’d take some time off and figure out what I wanted to do
with my life. To which my parents said, “That’s absolutely not
acceptable!” There was no question about going to
college; it was just a matter of where you went to
college. Both of my parents had gone to college. So I said,
“Oh, I’ll find someplace to go, starting in September.” And I
did. That’s how I ended up going to a small Lutheran school.
When I transferred to the sophomore class, one of my roommates
came there because she could board her horse there – because
they had riding stables. And my other roommate came there
because it was far enough away from her home that she didn’t
feel she was under her parents’ eyes, but close enough to all
her friends that she could party with them all the time. It was
kind of a stop gap for me.
Your first major shock point was moving away from home. Was
there anything between then and your husband’s death that was
particularly life-changing for you?
Well,
I spent my last semester of college in Mexico, just outside of
Mexico City and Cuernavaca as
part of a Global Justice and Peace program through another
university. There were 12-14 students living in community in
this house where we were immersed in Spanish. Then I spent two
weeks in Nicaragua and studied Latin American history and
politics. I'd been very
influenced by a pastor who came to the church I’d grown up in
who’d been a missionary in Bogota, Columbia and was really
involved in liberation theology and peace and justice issues.
Working with him and then going on this last semester of college
trip really changed my world view. I became aware not only of
how my family pretended everything was OK, but that I lived in a
country where everyone else looked that way, too. I could see
there were people who didn’t live like this at all. I can
remember going to stay with a family for about two weeks where
there were only two beds in the house. One was for the parents,
and I was never really clear who else lived in the house, but
they let me have one of the two beds. Only two of the rooms
actually had paved floors. I just hadn’t known people lived like
this day after day, and also – in the midst of that – they had
lives. So much of my experience up to that point was about the
stuff I had, the activities I did. That was very transforming.
So
when I then went to seminary, in Minnesota only fifty miles from
where I’d gone to college, I came from a very different place.
When I’d lived in Mexico I was determined to have the fullest
experience possible, and I decided I wanted to do that when I
went back to Minnesota. So not only had the experience
heightened my sense of a greater global community and my place
in that, but also it gave me some different eyes to see more of
the things we have in common, being open to new experiences. I
spent four years in Minnesota and one year in Wisconsin, and
during that whole time in the mid-west my experience was very
different from that first year. I made good friends, I figured
out how to navigate the cold weather. That’s continued to be a
reminder for me: when I feel I’m out of my element, instead of
running away from it or becoming defensive, because that was
part of what happened during that first year of college, is to
embrace it and say, “Well, if I were in Mexico, what would I be
doing?” That served me very well when I had my first
congregation in rural Montana. But in between, I spent four
years in the seminary, immersed in theological education, and
had an experience that often was enlightening and powerful. I
got into therapy and into recovery – because I went to a
therapist who would not see me if I didn’t go to a 12-step
meeting every week.
Because of your mother?
Yes,
around being the child of an alcoholic. And I started talking in
my family about the alcoholism. One of my professors in a small
group, when we debriefed our visits to a hospital for a nursing
home one day, had asked “I wonder if you tend to think
in black and white about things; I wonder if you ever think
that everyone else knows what's going on but you don't?" He was
describing classic symptoms of someone who's grown up in an
alcoholic family, but I didn't know that at the time. He said
"Would you please come see me?" And at that point he confronted
me and said, "I think you’ve grown up in an alcoholic family and
I think you need some outside help.” I thought I looked really
good and was together. It was terrible for me at the time. I was
devastated, in the sense that I felt kind of found out, but also
afraid that if my defense mechanisms, all my pretending
everything's OK, fell apart, what would I do? Yet that was very
significant because it got me into therapy and it got me into
Alanon, and so many other things. My final year at school I
became his teaching assistant and I was so grateful for
everything he'd done for me, for my speaking the truth about
what was broken in my life.
Out of curiosity, you
sought therapy and it was through that you became aware of what
it was like to be an adult child of an alcoholic?
No, in the second year
in the seminary, to continue you have to be matriculated –
it's how they weed
people out of the program –
and my professor said "I'll stop your matriculation if you don't
go see a therapist." My back was against the wall.
What did your professor
see that indicated you'd come from an alcoholic family?
He spoke about my seeing
things in extremes –
good or bad, yes or no –
and he told me "You're making up stories about things." I didn't
know the difference between what was true and what I imagined.
And in this class we were doing pastoral visits to people in
hospitals and nursing homes. It was about being fully present;
and I was incapable of that. The first assignment the therapist
gave me was to spend half an hour by myself every day, not
watching TV, not talking to people, not exercising. Just being
there. That was the first time I ever remembered someone asked
me to do something I could not do. I went back the next week and
said, "I couldn't do it." So she suggested spending 15 minutes
by myself, and I was able, over time, to be with me. And of
course, if I couldn't be with myself, how could I be with other
people? I think that's what my professor saw.
So in a way an
incredibly difficult life, and at the same time a lot of good
fortune. At a relatively young age to have support and resources
that turned you upside down.
Yep. During my senior year in the seminary I read Ann Wilson Schaef's When Society Becomes an Addict. I
realized I'd chosen a profession that mirrored the family I grew
up in, because one of the institutions Schaef talks about is the
church. I was also involved with a man who was older and who
came to the seminary as a second career student. He'd already
been in the advertising industry. I thought I was really in love
with him and I didn't want to move out of the Queen City area
because he'd still be in school. At the end of the seminary at
that time they were doing assignments with maybe 350 graduates
across the country. The Bishops all get together and it's kind
of an NFL draft thing where they bargain for different people.
I'd thought I'd choose one of the areas within reasonable
distance from the seminary so I could continue this
relationship. When we found out where we were going to be, I was
not in Wisconsin where I'd requested; I was in southern
California where I grew up. One of my professors said "Aren't
you excited?" And I said "No." And he said, "A lot of people
wanted you. This is one of the best places to be. You were one
of the first people picked." And that was so like the family I
grew up in. It wasn't what I wanted, but I felt I couldn't say
that. I just couldn't figure out what to do. So at that point I
decided I would take a year off. There was a program with the
same professor who'd gotten me into therapy that was
experimental, exploring what it would look like to have people
from different backgrounds –
medicine, religion, social work, education –
do a part-time therapy immersion experience. We all had masters
degrees. We'd read books on family therapy and actually do
family therapy with people. But it was an expensive program, and
I was working at 3M as a temporary office person in their legal
department, and couldn't afford to do both things.
My relationship had ended, and in one of those
spur-of-the-moment things I thought, "Fine, I'm just going to
get a congregation and I don't care where I go." But I didn't
want to go back to southern California because it would be too
close to my parents. One of my professors said "I can't believe
you're not in a parish, you're so wonderful, blah blah blah,"
and when I told him I was thinking of looking for a parish, he
asked if I'd be interested in going to Montana. I said, "OK" and
within two months I was interviewing in Montana. That's where I
drew on my experience in Mexico, wanting to get the most out of
it, and it was a big ego experience as well. In the seminary, if
you were one of the top candidates you'd be seen as going to one
of the more desirable parishes, and if you were someone they
thought couldn't do much damage, they'd send you to North
Dakota. So I thought, "Isn't this great of me? I'm one of the
top people, and I'm going to one of the worst places." It was
one of those icky fake humility things. I created a story of
"Isn't this great?"
So you put a spin on it.
Absolutely.
And that was a very big growing experience as well. I was an
associate pastor to one of those people who really couldn't find
another job and the relationship was very tumultuous at times.
It got me doing the 12-step program, working harder in therapy
trying to explore myself, and that's when I met my husband. I
was called to four congregations, a multi-point parish where
my husband had served an internship six years earlier. Part of my initial job description was getting
a youth
program up and running, so he and I began talking on the phone
about it. He was a more experienced pastor and I was very quickly in over
my head, difficulties with a colleague and people needing a lot of help. I
wasn't always capable of saying no to them or figuring out
whether to do the best I could or provide nothing for them,
because there were no social services in that small town. It was
a small, unhealthy town and one of the spins I put on it was "I
could live in L.A. and never be as afraid of physical violence!"
I'd never known people who'd killed other people. It was
discovered that one of the people hired at a youth ranch was a
pedophile and members of my congregation were going to kill him!
I was 26 years old and had been the pastor to this young man and
to these people who were threatening him.
I found refuge in talking to this man who became my husband.
I'd assumed he was married when we spoke on the phone. When I met him it
was as if I'd known him for a really long time, he wasn't
married, and he was very
different from anyone I'd ever dated. He asked me to be part of
a meeting and go out to dinner afterwards. Six weeks after that
dinner we were engaged. It was very fast. If we'd been
counseling another couple we'd have said "Date for six months,
and then we'll get back to you." So we decided to seek a pastor
colleague to do pre-marital counseling with us. I was still
seeing a therapist who, after my getting out of the bad relationship, had asked
me to agree to spend a year without dating
anyone. That got me out of the pattern of choosing people like
my Mom. If they weren't actually alcoholics, which some of them
were, they were raging. So my husband was someone who, years before, I
wouldn't have noticed because he was so calm. After I learned
the Enneagram we used to joke that "Nines start off slow and
taper from there." It was true of him. He'd have energy
for work, but at home we'd tease, "You have a pulse, don't you?"
So he was a great complement to my personality. And there were times
when he would have said he was more invested in our marriage
than I was. That was probably true.
And what did that mean?
He did more
things in our marriage to be connected. I'm not a memento
person, but I pulled out something recently that made me smile.
For our first Christmas after we were married he'd bought a Hallmark ornament with two raccoons on it, inscribed "It's our first
Christmas together!" That kind of thing is so not my style. But
I loved that it was his style. He was the one who loved movies
like "You've Got Mail!" Especially early on, that kind of direct
expression of emotion was still very uncomfortable for me.
You were open enough to be drawn to someone who was different
from the old pattern, but it still
wasn't comfortable.
Yes. And because we lived 300 miles apart in
Montana, he agreed to leave the congregation he'd served for
seven years, during which time he'd been diagnosed with
Hodgkin's Lymphoma and told he had less than six months to live.
That had been when he was 26, and I met him when he was 31. The
connection he had with his congregation was very intense because
he'd been there a year and a half when he had to say, "I
need to leave because I can't get the kind of treatment I need
for the cancer here and I don't know if I'll be back." He'd
never been married and he'd had only three girlfriends. The
diagnosis gave him a second lease on life. His
parents had taken him on his "last" trip because the doctors
said the tumor was so large and had collapsed one lung, they had
to believe he had cancer all over his body. He came back and had
radiation; later they found a second cancer on his lymph node.
After treatment for that his prognosis looked pretty good. Two
friends who'd gone through seminary with him both had
Hodgkin's and both died, which had confirmed
for him he'd been given a second chance, and what was he
going to do with it? So he'd returned to his congregation in
Montana with enthusiasm and loved life. Then he met me and
said he'd move wherever I was. The wedding
shower they gave us was the most depressing one I'd ever been
to, because they were so disappointed to lose him. He had that
kind of impact on people.
In later
years he became overweight and he'd say, "Well, you only live
once." So there were positive aspects of the Hodgkin's, but his mother
was always worried about his health. She'd call me so I'd make sure
he was going to get his yearly check-ups. He told me before
we married that Hodgkin's has a very high recurrence rate
and I really had to think about it: "Do I want to do this?" But
I loved him and was so grateful to have met him. During the first
18 months we were married, though, I became increasingly anxious about
his health. So that was another entry into therapy for me. I
worked through with the therapist that my husband's health was his business.
My business was to be his wife and love him, and not be his
nurse or his mom.
When I
decided I couldn't take Montana anymore and was called to a big
church with a very large congregation, we had a trip to England
planned. I said, "Oh, we can't go because there'll be moving
expenses," and he said, "You only live once." That was also the
kind of energy he brought and I'm so grateful we went on that
trip. He was always open to trying out new things. We'd been
married fifteen years when he died.
And his death was from something unrelated to the Hodgkin's?
Yes,
although after he had the stroke they wondered if it had been
some kind of recurrence, even that long after. It was ironic
that the year before he died he had a three-month sabbatical,
and he'd decided as part of the focus of that sabbatical to
work on his physical as well as emotional and mental health.
He worked with a trainer, lost 25 pounds, and
was probably in the best physical shape he'd been in since our
marriage. Many years later we understand he had the
stroke because of a blood clotting disorder that's now been
diagnosed in our daughter. We didn't know it at the time, and
I wouldn't have known it if I hadn't taken my daughter to the
doctor for all her bloody noses.
Yet another life experience to make you face up to some harsh
realities.
I
think this was the beginning of what would become a couple of pretty
quick changes
in my perception of the world, from "I see the world not as
it is but as I am." I was 30 years old and everyone was saying,
"Oh, I can't believe you're at this big church!" It was
televised every week. I had all this external stuff, and internally I absolutely hated
it and felt trapped. I told a friend, "I can't figure this out.
It seems whatever job I've had, in so many different areas
–
I've been a camp counselor,
I've worked at a card store, I've been a temporary in a legal
department, I've been a pastor – the same irritating people keep showing up wherever I
work!" Fortunately, this friend had the audacity and the courage
to ask, "Have you ever thought the common factor might be you?"
I heard it, and thought, "It is. And I'm not going to wait for
this situation to change. It's going to have to be
me."
Was there a common theme to what was so irritating?
Well, they
were always so demanding! So picky about stuff. So serious
about things! That same
year I read Bernie Siegel's Love, Medicine, and Miracles,
and I came home from working at a fundamentalist Christian camp
for kids and told my husband, "I'm quitting my job so I don't
get cancer!" We were leaving the next day to go to Florida on
vacation and he said, "Why don't we talk about it while we're on
vacation?" I said "I
don't want to do it one more day." I agreed I'd do it through
the end of December, but at this point my husband was only
partly employed because there'd been a church in crisis and the
bishop asked him to fill in, but his
job was going to end and we'd bought a house nine months before,
so I was pretty much the income earner, the one who had the
insurance, the one with the more stable job. And I wanted to
quit it. Once again my husband said "Absolutely. We'll figure it
out." I wanted to do something more like the family therapy I'd
done, so I told the bishop "I don't think this is the right
career for me, I'm at a crisis point, and I need a break." He
said they'd find something for my husband at a place that would
work. So I went to get a master's in counseling at the
University of South Dakota and my husband took a church nearby.
My son was
born in October of 1993 and I was scheduled to start my counseling
program in January. I completed that degree in two-and-a-half
years while my son was an infant and then a little kid. We
didn't have much money because I was a student and my husband
was in a rural congregation. We lived in a house owned by the
church. I would take classes when my husband could watch our son
or he'd drive 30 miles to the university so I could nurse the
baby, so we co-parented a lot. Prior to my husband's death I'd
say the biggest transformation for me was my son's birth,
because so many of my family issues were right there for me. He
was a very colicky, challenging baby and I was in a remote part
of South Dakota with no one I could relate to. People would say
things like "You're a nervous mother. If you weren't so nervous
he'd be a better baby." We'd read baby books and ask the doctor
questions, and he'd say "That's a stupid question. Did you get
that out of a book?" He was practicing medicine the way they'd
done in the 1950's. I had an emergency C-section, the baby came
out crying and didn't really stop for months and months. Fifteen
years later what I
couldn't let in then makes sense to me now: that he has sensory integration issues.
Some people think it's part of bipolar, and my son wasn't
diagnosed as bi-polar until he was eight years old. So from
his birth to age eight, I was pretty clear that I was an incompetent
parent and that was why he was how he was.
My daughter
was born when he was four, and I took her to
the pediatrician when she was two years old because she only had about a hundred words
and I
thought she was delayed. My son was speaking in full sentences
by the time he was two. But he was also emotionally volatile and
became violent. He hit his teacher when he was in kindergarten
because she'd tapped him unexpectedly on the back. He turned
around and punched her, then came home and said "the teacher was
trying to hurt me." Also my husband had decided to take a suburban church outside
Denver and we'd moved to Colorado. He'd been there two and a
half years when they decided they'd open up a congregation that
would be working with the women's prison in Denver. So at the time when
my son's behavior was getting tougher, my husband was in the
middle of being trained to be a pastor inside prison walls. My
husband and I had done most of the parenting together and he'd
always been the go-to person if something was too much for me.
But he was gone. That was one of the toughest times of my life.
So far this certainly trashes the happy-go-lucky stereotype of
the Seven. To stay
afloat with all this is quite amazing.
I don't
think I'm that different from other Sevens. It's the good
news/bad news about Sevens, because part of how you stay afloat
is you just don't let some of it in.
Ah, you were letting some of it in, learning, changing, growing;
and your fixation kept that from killing you, whereas I, as a
Nine, might have gone catatonic.
Um hmmm. My
Nine husband loved
sports, loved TV, following his teams, watching the NCAA. Once,
when it was a really hard time with his congregation, he came
home from work looking really down and I said, "Gosh, isn't all
this getting to you?" and he said, "Yeah, the Broncos didn't
make the play-off and it doesn't look like the Rockies are going
to have a good season!" That was his coping technique. So he
could do laid-back parenting with TV shows he'd watch with our
kids, or he'd take them to the park and he'd sit on the bench
while they played. So he figured out his own ways to check out
from some of that emotional intensity. When our son was two
years old he could name every single team of the NHL and their
logos. This was his "twice-exceptional" piece they talk about
now –very, very gifted and mentally ill. He read before he went to kindergarten and no one had
taught him. So it was a wake-up call when he was diagnosed as
bi-polar and the doctor said,
"You're delusional. What haven't you noticed about this child?"
When he was
seven years old, school started getting really hard. He'd get mad and push
at the teacher. I'd go in by myself to the school office, to see
the principal, to have conferences with the school social
worker, because my husband was gone a lot, and they'd say, "How
do you discipline him at home? How much other violence is there
in your home?" I realized, "Gosh, they think I abuse this kid."
So at this point –
and this is now the key for me that my
compulsion is going to kick in
–
I felt I was in over my head.
I told my husband, "You've got to take over from here; I
can't do this anymore." So he stepped in, arranged his calendar
so he could go to the parent-teacher conferences, to the
principal's office, and they'd say, "You are the best
dad!" He was a pastor in the community and had that quiet
presence and confidence.
Here you were, struggling already to know what was real, having
done some really good work on that; now here's another situation
where you're asking, "Am I crazy? Am I an incompetent parent?"
And society's reinforcing, "Yes, it's you."
Um hmmm.
You know, when you first told me about your
husband's death and how he'd done most of the parenting, you
weren't giving yourself enough credit. Now that I know the
details, this was a hugely
difficult situation, and yes, you reached a point when you said
"I just can't do this," but you did not go into complete denial,
you did not walk away; yet you'd fallen into thinking he was the
better parent.
Yes. There
were parts of me that wanted to walk out. I imagined telling my
husband I was going for a long drive and changing my identity.
But very fortunately there'd been a woman at the Alanon meetings
I'd been going to regularly who, in addition to having Alanon
issues, was also a recovering alcoholic. She'd talked about her
19-year-old son who was an addict, how she'd walked out when he
was four years old. Now she was back and it was so much
work! My son was four at the time, and I thought "She is my
future. If I walk out, it will be work one way or the other." I
was very, very grateful to her.
You've offered lots of information about resources. It almost
seems guided, and you were also open. Alanon has helped, therapy
has helped, books have helped, and people have shown up just at
the right time: relationships with your husband and other
people.
Yes, and
one of the ways I think of my life and experiences, and also a
spiritual perspective for myself, is being "God's great recycling
plan." It's the trash, the stuff we want to throw away,
that is so useable. Because it always, always seems that
someone later would be going through what I'd already been
through. So I look back and think, "Wow!"
You're able in your work to truly empathize because you've gone
through it. I know your
husband's death triggered a big transformation for you. Were there more?
If I were
to distill my life's transformational points, they were always
in heart-to-heart connections, whether it was about the healing
piece with the family I grew up in, or finding my own identity
and working on healing my own heart, or marriage, or parenting,
or death. Seeing the Enneagram through the centers, it's been
work around healing the heart center and using it for its
correct purpose. I'm being intentional about using my feeling
center, expanding it on things that can reciprocate, whereas
before I'd use my thinking center. I'd have intellectual
relationships with people, not intimate relationships.
I see what you're saying about the feeling
center, and you've used your thinking center to grow from
books like Schaef's and Siegel's, so it hasn't been completely
either/or. So with your husband's death you were now
a single parent with two children who are wonderful in many ways
and also difficult. Could you say more about that? What changes
happened for you with your husband's death? It was unexpected?
Right. He'd
had the flu, was throwing up, and we now know with
his blood-clotting disorder you can throw blood clots when you get
highly dehydrated. He had a stroke at our house in the morning
before I went to work. He was unconscious but regained consciousness.
We were an eighth of a mile from the hospital, so the ambulance
took him to the hospital and the doctors said "He's within the
three-hour window so let's give him this blood-thinner and we
can hope for a full recovery." With his disorder, which we
didn't know about, that was the very thing they shouldn't have
done. He was cognizant at this point and he signed the waiver to
take the medication. I'd called a couple of friends to take care
of the kids, and right away his fellow pastor showed up. At that
point we were all doing the very best we could, but as the day
progressed he didn't get better, and they wondered if the cancer
had shown up. The doctor said, "Whatever it is, the rehab is
going to be very long." The kids had come over and he knew who
they were, so they got to talk to their Dad. Lots of his
friends, people he knew from his church, had come by.
A friend
reminded me the doctor had said it would be good for me to go
home and get some sleep, because we didn't know how long this was
going to go. Some friends could stay, so I decided to go out to
dinner and see if I'd be OK with leaving him. I stopped in the
chapel on my way back into the building and said, "You know
what, God, if he's going to die,
take him now. I cannot take months of rehabilitation, only to
have him die." I saw him again for a couple of hours, then went
home. There were phone calls in the night that he was unconscious and they'd put
in a breathing tube. Because
of my work in long-term care I knew I was not going to have a
breathing tube, but his family is fundamentalist Christian and
believed pulling the plug like that was evil, so I was so glad he
and I had had many conversations about this and I knew it was
what he'd want. I asked the doctor, "If this were your spouse,
what would you do?" (cries) I was so grateful the doctor said,
"The husband you knew is no longer here."
My husband
wanted to be a donor and you have to be alive, you have to be breathing. Word had
gotten out to his congregation, so all kinds of people got to
come and say goodbye to him. It
took six hours while they checked his records; they kept hitting road blocks because of his
cancer. His parents wanted to come out from California and I
didn't want to have to argue with them over the breathing tube.
After the six hours, when it was clear he couldn't be a donor,
they removed the breathing tube and he died within 10 minutes.
People started coming in for his funeral and reaching out
to us, saying "Oh my God, what's going to happen, he was the
primary income earner and didn't have much insurance," and I
said "You know what? I'm not worried about the money. I'm grateful because we
have spiritual resources to draw on." In this encapsulated
moment I thought, "All this work I've done on my life; here it
is!" I didn't ask "Why did God do this to me?" People around me
were saying "This is so unfair! How could God let this happen?"
I had kind of a surreal
feeling; I knew God didn't do this to me. And that was my
most transformational moment.
A deeply felt insight.
And
incredible gratitude for the Enneagram, which had been
introduced to me four years before my husband's death. I thought "This is
a matter of the heart. The heart hasn't been the
strongest place for me as a Seven, so I'm going to get it on my
radar, that I'd better keep working with my heart." In the years
since, the Enneagram for me has been like the cliff notes,
because it highlights the most important things. I didn't want
to shut down my heart. His death would have been the perfect
reason for "Let's just pretend it's all OK."
With all the things life has thrown at you, in addition to
helpful relationships and books, have there been any practices that have
helped you stay and build your awareness?
I have
twenty years of written journals in my closet. When I started
with the first therapist, she did allow in "try to be quiet
for 15 minutes" that I could write some things. As long as they
weren't lists of things to do! That started a powerful practice
because it's really helped with my questioning, "Is that real?" When I'd tell a story and then wonder
"Did I just make that up?" I could go back and find it
historically. It's also helped because sometimes I'd read back
about something that had upset me and I wouldn't even know who
the people were who'd upset me so much! I had a poster with a
quote from Simon Wiesenthal, who founded the Museum of
Tolerance: "Hope lives when people remember." That's been my
motivation for both the practice of journaling and my practice
of sitting quietly at the beginning of the day.
In
addition to practices that have helped, I'm curious about
resistances along the way. You've mentioned wanting to run. And
you said you got the hell out of your parents' home, so there
were times when you did run. That's certainly a typical
resistance for Sevens. Are there other resistances you've been
aware of?
Busyness. Getting busy.
Another thing I've reflected on, growing up in a family where my
mother was a
Three with
a
Four wing and my
father a
Seven with an
Eight wing, among my
ways of resisting things is trying to create the surface to look
OK. The external make-over. "Let's just put on a new coat of
paint and it will all be OK" instead of taking the time to be
thorough and dig deeper, so I wouldn't be having all those
different jobs and thinking, "Wow, those same irritating people
keep showing up over and over!" That resistance at times has
been "OK, I'm going to get a quick fix. And if I can't fix it in
15 minutes, I'm not going to do it."
After
years of doing these interviews I'm wondering if my last
question is naive: "Where are you in the process?" As if there
were a beginning and an end. But in your life with all these
patterns and dynamics, what is it like for you now?
I'll take a moment to
think about that... When I remove myself from being in the
present moment, my life is absolutely unmanageable. But in
12-step recovery we say "we practice spiritual progress, not
spiritual perfection." And the progress for me has been that I'm
more often in the moment. And when I'm not in the moment it's
like what happened to me Monday night when a lot of external
events became the straw that broke the camel's back. Instead of
reacting to them I called someone. And then I relaxed. Now I'm
much more likely to pause when something is difficult, as a way
of staying with it; whereas before I used to fight with things.
If it was hard, I'd work harder. "I'll make a list. I'll fix
it." I also own an organizing business with a partner, and I get
to see from the outside how other people struggle with
rearranging things on the outside trying to solve core problems.
It doesn't work. You have to solve the core problem; you can't
just rearrange the furniture. There's a great deal of overlap
between the organizing business and the spiritual direction and
counseling and workshops I do. So there will be an ongoing
process of seeing where those core issues are coming up, so I
don't spend time fruitlessly rearranging furniture.
Your
organizing business is itself a living metaphor of working
through your issues as a Seven.
And our business card has
a box on it with the logo, "We think inside the box!"
(laughter) I also think, in conjunction with the mosaic
metaphor, when my heart keeps breaking it gets to have more
room. It's when hearts break that they start to expand.
That's beautiful. Thank you.
