After the gaslighting

Gaslighting is a deliberate process where one person sets out to destroy another person’s relationship with reality. It is often a feature of abusive relationships because a person who no longer trusts their own judgement is easier to harm and control. It’s also very normal for abusers to tell their victims that nothing happened. There was no punch. There was no shouting. It didn’t happen. The victim is mad.

When you hear day in and day out that you said things you are sure you never said, did things you do not think you did… you question yourself. If the person you love and trust keeps telling you that you’re imagining things, the damage can be done long before you notice what’s happening. You end up not trusting your memory or judgement and that’s terrifying. You’re so busy trying to hold on to a viable reality that you don’t see what’s being done.

I got out. What I’ve only just started dealing with is the legacy of gaslighting. I’ve not seen much about the aftermath which is part of why I’ve only just realised that there is one,for me.

If someone states as fact that I’ve done or not done something, where I think the opposite is true, then I fall straight into total panic. It’s easily done. A misheard word, a misremembering by someone else, a misreading, a misinterpretation… but I don’t default to assuming the other person made a mistake. I go straight back into that headspace where my reality was broken and I didn’t trust myself to know if something that hurt was in my best interests or not. I recognise it now as a form of triggering that makes me largely unable to deal with this kind of situation.

I can be put here by accident – we all make mistakes and many people pay less attention to their words than I do. What we remember is not always what the other person remembers – usually that’s fine, it’s when it gets thrown at me as unassailable fact that the panic kicks in. I can also be panicked by people ascribing meaning to my actions that was not what I meant at all and refusing to let me explain how I see things. I’ve gone a few rounds with this without recognising that triggering was part of the process. Evidently, I can be triggered by anything that looks like gaslighting and while it’s happening, I have no way of even thinking about whether this is an intentional attack or just poor communication. I don’t experience it as either, initially. I experience it as me being an awful failure of a human being who should crawl off somewhere and die quietly, because that’s where it puts me.

This is one of the things that makes triggering so difficult to deal with. While it’s happening, you often can’t tell it’s happening – a previous reality asserts itself over the top of the one you are currently in. You’re back in the place or the headspace where the trauma happened. It doesn’t leave room for questioning it, or thinking about the mechanics of what’s happening. With gaslighting, being put back there suddenly is terrifying and disorientating. It reasserts a former reality that wasn’t real and that was all about trying to break me. I feel the things I used to feel, and they are not good and further, they rob me of all means of dealing with whatever’s caused the trigger. If I’m panicking because I no longer know what’s real, I can’t deal with the other person’s mistake. Or my own.

I’m working on a strategy to cope with this next time it comes round. Here’s what I’ve got so far: I am entitled to feel however I feel regardless of whether it makes sense to anyone else. I am entitled to have opinions, even if they are at odds with other people’s opinions. I am entitled to feel safe, so if I’m not feeling safe I should step back from a situation and make some space to get myself on a better footing before I try and sort anything out. I do not owe anyone a response or explanation straight away, I can have more time. There are usually other people who I can check in with about what I said and did, and how it might be interpreted. I should do that as soon as I can. I have people I can trust to help me navigate. I need to develop these ideas when I’m not triggered so that I have them in my head when things go wrong.

I recognise that what has happened to me was not of my making. That makes it harder to deal with alone. However, the support of people around me makes a lot of odds. Trust is something I find difficult, but increasingly I think trust is the way out of this for me. It is in trusting the people who think I am sane enough, and good enough that I can build resistance to the triggering.

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Your favourite tree

Do you have a favourite tree? Do you have a favourite species? The second question is easier for me because that’s beech. I like all trees, I’ve never met a tree I didn’t appreciate. Beech trees are the dominant tree of my landscape and I love them dearly.

There are many individual trees I know to look out for when walking. Larger, older, more dramatic, or inhabited in certain ways… and of course I have particular fondness for the trees closest to my home.

The single tree that looms largest for me is not the biggest, though. It’s probably old because the species is slow growing, and by hawthorn standards, it is an unusually large one. The tree in question is in a field, just over the other side of the fence from a cycle path. There’s a spring that emerges somewhere around its roots. It has presence. It is a definite candidate for being the sort of folkloric hawthorn that fairies might frequent.

There’s a fence between the path and the tree, so I’ve never been right up to it, but usually when passing, I stop there briefly to listen to the spring and look at the tree.

I’m not going to nominate it for Tree of the Year – the location means I have little hope of getting a photo that would do it justice. It’s not a tree you can easily see in one look/photo. You, however, may have a favourite tree that photographs well and could therefore be nominated. If you’ve got a tree in your life you’d like to celebrate, have a look at http://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/visiting-woods/tree-of-the-year-2019/ and for more information about Tree of the Year nominations, go here – https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/press-centre/2019/05/tree-of-the-year-nominations/

 

Manifesting your desires

I find it interesting that there are a lot of new-age concepts out there about manifesting your intentions and positive thinking your way to the life you want, and far less about the process of making your life. There are times when positive thinking helps – visualising the way you want to handle a situation to help combat nerves is a good example. There’s only so far positive thinking can take you, and when it comes to manifesting things, if you don’t do it, who will?

Working with your own through process is a good first step towards making change. You have to picture it, dream it, shape it before you can put your will into the world. Magical thinking tends to be a good deal clearer about backing up the magic with relevant action. If you want the perfect job for you, there’s little point doing spells if you aren’t also filling in some job applications and doing some networking and getting the relevant qualifications.

It is so easy to miss the power of what we manifest in small ways on a daily basis. Body language and tone of voice. Small choices to do and not do. Little things we tell ourselves in our heads when we aren’t repeating the positivity mantras.

We don’t get to decide the course of our lives in every way – everyone else’s ideas, intentions and efforts impact on us. But, the more deliberately we live, the more we undertake to manifest what we value, the better. Which quickly flags up another interesting thing. You can’t simply choose to manifest wealth, or fame – you can pretend, but fake it until you make it is often a route to debt in this context. You can manifest love, generosity, patience, kindness, you can manifest your spirituality in all kinds of ways. You get to choose who you are, one action to the next, one word to the next.

The decision to live kindly, thoughtfully and well, from one breath to the next makes for a rich and interesting life. In terms of what we experience, how we choose to feel about things, what we choose to dwell on and prioritise has the most influence on us. If your basic needs are met, then the choice to experience joy and abundance is already in your grasp. Many of us would be much happier people if we stopped obsessing about how to be younger, richer, thinner and more popular, and learned how to take joy in what we have.

Small Space Living

I spent 2 years on a narrowboat, which, when you have three people and a cat, and two of the people work from home, is a very small space indeed.  Currently I live in a fairly small flat – a grand and luxurious pad compared to the boat, but still less space than is considered normal for three people and a cat, especially given that two of the people work from home…

I’ve learned a lot from small space living – particularly about what is important to me and what I can do without. I continue to miss having a garden. I have an enduring gratitude for toilets that do not need emptying and water supplies that do not need filling up from a tap. I have a much keener appreciation of reliable electricity and internet, and places to dry wet clothes. I’ve learned to give things away because I can’t keep everything, and I’ve learned to be fussy about what I keep and why.

Small spaces require massive cooperation. Just to get two people working together in the kitchen takes attention. To move people and stuff round in a small space, to share it feasibly – it all takes thought, mutual awareness and care. I’m very glad we’re the sort of household that can do this. We don’t depend on being able to get away from each other.

Smaller spaces make for greener living arrangements – you occupy less ground. Small spaces take less energy to heat, there are fewer spaces to light, the lack of space creates a pressure not to buy stuff. However, there are no two ways about it – this is easier to do if you can afford to pick out the best things to fit the space. Small space living is easier for people who have more money and do it by choice, but more likely to be what happens to people who can’t afford a bigger space and can’t afford to be fussy about furnishings.

There are things you can’t do in a small space. I have no spare room to put up visiting friends, or to rescues anyone in crisis. I can’t have large parties. I can’t host a meeting, or a jamming session, or a rehearsal. I can’t do any large art of craft or DIY projects. I can’t stash things for crafting to any large degree. I depend on borrowing spaces and on more public spaces – pubs and libraries especially. I have good resources in walking distance, but for many people, small space living has a serious social impact.

I look at the vast houses up in the Cotswold hills, and I wonder about what they cost to maintain, heat and light. I wonder how many, or how few people live in them and for how much of the year. It is greener to downsize or share space with more people, but I note that the people who most need to do that are clearly the ones least interested in living a bit more lightly.

Seeking the handcrafted life

Creativity should be an option for everyone. Making and re-making, repurposing, and upcycing are skills we all need to reduce what we throw away. The pleasure of creating from scratch should be everyone’s right, not seen as the domain of the talented few. Whether that’s cooking or gardening, rag rugging, painting, dancing or singing or anything else you can think of, we should all have the time and resources to follow our creative interest. Not as a way of making a living, necessarily, but for the sheer joy of it.

As an aside, I think there would be much greater appreciation of professional creativity if everyone was engaged with it for fun as well. A culture of creativity would increase the value of original work.

Creativity is not just about obvious arts and crafts activities. It’s also about how much innovation we have in our lives. Do we just run through the same routines day to day? Do we do what we’ve always done, powered largely by habit and clinging to what’s familiar? Does life have scope for adventure in it? Is there room for surprise, for joy, excitement, novelty and pleasure? Can we make these things for ourselves or are we only looking to buy answers to those human needs for interest?

One of the things I’ve learned working creatively, is that inspiration requires space. You can’t be busy all the time and expect to keep coming up with great ideas as well. It’s the quite down time that hatches plots and plans. It’s the unstructured spaces where I can daydream, chew over things I’ve learned and wool gather that makes room for a lightning strike of inspiration. If I’m nothing but busy, I don’t have anything like as many good ideas – about anything.

The busyness of conventional western life doesn’t leave us much room to think. Most of us are sleep deprived as well. We rush from one thing to another, time pressured, money pressured, constantly getting messages about why we aren’t good enough. These forces can leave you living a life that is not of your designing. You can so easily end up running after money and then needing that money to console yourself for everything that’s missing. A slower, less economically active life can be both less expensive and more rewarding. Without the space to think creatively about how you live, this is hard to achieve.

Most of us have more time available than we think we do. The trick is to turn off the screens for a bit. Screens are addictive, and feed the fear of not keeping up, the pressure to be available, the sense of panic if we don’t know what’s going on and aren’t busy all the time. Turn the screens off. Remove small screens from about your person. Turn them off and leave them behind and go to a quiet place, and just breathe for a while. Look at the sky, or a tree, or the life in the grass. Sometimes it takes a while for all the chaotic, stampeding things in your head to calm down, but eventually they will, and once there is calm, there is space to ask questions about what you want, and what you need, and what just has you chasing your tail to no real purpose.

When you have time to think, you have the scope to think creatively. When you can think creatively, you can take much more control of your life and live on your own terms. A handmade life, imagined and crafted by you and for you. It’s well worth making the effort for.

If you don’t want abortions

No one actively wants an abortion. It’s just that there are times when not keeping that small bundle of cells is a better choice. It should be blindingly obvious that no one with a womb should be required to carry a child of rape or incest to term. It should also be blindingly obvious that women who need late term abortions are not baby killing monsters. A late term abortion is a tragedy – always. It means that a baby who was very much wanted has got into difficulty, or the mother has, and there is only pain and misery ahead. The abortion is the kindest choice available – which is a dreadful, heartbreaking place to be. Anyone needing a late term abortion needs care, support and understanding.

There are four main reasons why women get pregnant when they don’t want to be pregnant. Reason one is lack of education. If you haven’t had proper sex education, and don’t know precisely what leads to pregnancy and exactly how to avoid it, then your risk of getting pregnant against your will is much increased. Good sex education reduces the need for abortions. The second main reason is lack of access to free, or at least affordable contraception. This is also easily fixed.

Reason number three is economic. If you cannot afford a child, then raising one in poverty may not be an appealing idea. Women are less likely to seek abortions for economic reasons if having a child is not likely to throw you into poverty. Proper financial support for parents makes it easier for a woman to say yes to a baby she was not expecting.

The main reason women find themselves pregnant when they don’t want to be pregnant, is men. Without a man in the equation, penis, sperm and all, it is pretty much impossible for a woman to become pregnant by accident. If a man declines to use condoms, or takes them off during sex, or won’t pull out, the risk of an unwanted pregnancy is much increased. Power imbalances in relationships remain a thing. Imagine a world in which a man could be prosecuted for causing an unwanted pregnancy. Consider the implications.

The right to bodily autonomy for a woman disappears as soon as a man puts his sexual pleasure ahead of her safety. Our culture tells the story of the feckless woman who isn’t sexually responsible and goes out and ‘gets herself’ pregnant and then doesn’t want the baby. No doubt careless women exist, but the more you know about the implications of getting pregnant, the less likely you are to take those risks in the first place. Women who have had a decent sex education don’t tend to go this way unless what they’re after is a baby – in which case you won’t see them seeking abortion.

We do not talk about the role of men in abortions. For every abortion, there is someone who brought his sperm along. Again, education will play a big role here, but for the chaps I think it’s not just about sexual education, it’s the need to educate about responsibility. As long as pregnancy is seen as a woman’s problem, male responsibility for causing it is ignored and most critically, ignored by the men who are causing unwanted pregnancies. A woman does not get herself pregnant, there’s someone else in the equation. Someone who is not currently subject to legislation about their rights to get women pregnant and who bears no legal responsibility for the unwanted baby.

A culture serious about reducing the need for abortions would provide good sex education and free and affordable contraception for anyone who wanted it. That culture would not have a rape culture within it in which women’s safety is seen as less important than male pleasure. A culture serious about the idea that babies matter would make sure no child ends up in abject poverty. When you look at the policies of places criminalizing abortion, these other things are also in short supply too. The underlying idea is not that every baby is precious, it is that women should not be allowed to decide if they go through with a pregnancy. Carrying a baby to term is no small thing and it will change your life. The man involved may be made to pay maintenance, but he’s not obliged to change his whole life to accommodate this new person.

If abortions are illegal, knowingly causing an unwanted pregnancy should also be an offence. That it isn’t tells us a great deal about the real priorities involved.

Stories about ourselves

We all tell stories about ourselves. Humans are storytelling creatures and we like to make narrative sense of the world. We present ourselves to each other in the stories we tell about what we’ve done and seen, where we’ve been and who we’ve known. Many stories are very short and often we don’t notice them – as tellers or as audience, or what effect they might have.

I’m intrigued by people who tell stories about the sorts of people they are – that they are empathic people, or highly aware, sensitive, special – these come up around Paganism a fair bit. These are stories that tend to come from people who seem to be none of those things, in my experience. Then there are the people who want to tell a story about who you are – to measure you and demonstrate that they understand you. When there’s depth of relationship this can be valuable feedback, but it’s the empathic people who do it off the cuff I find least helpful.

No doubt we’re all inclined to make ourselves look good when we tell our stories. We want to pick out the best bits. At some point there’s a line to cross between a good retelling and an actual falsehood. That line is seldom easy to see.

One of the falsehoods I see frequently, and that I know to be harmful, is the habit of bigging yourself up. Social media is full of it – people putting their best self out there and doing their best to look like they have great and successful lives. I see authors doing it too – overplaying book sales, what ‘best seller’ on Amazon means, and the like. Success is attractive, is the theory. Who wants to buy from a moderately successful author? The trouble with this comes when you need help.

If you’ve been telling stories about how good you are, but those stories aren’t true, how can you ask for help? I’ve seen authors who have presented as successful start Patreons and not get any support – either because what fans they have believed the success story, or because they never had many fans in the first place. On the flip side, creators who are honest about how things work for them are often much better supported. Fans understand the struggle, and care and want to be involved. In practice, most creators don’t earn enough to live on and investing time in creativity alongside regular employment isn’t easy. But when you’ve overplayed your success, this is hard to talk about.

When you’re over-invested in the story of your own success, you can end up tied in knots about your reality. This way lies cognitive dissonance. When you have to believe in your literary legacy, even though no one seems to be reading your books. When you have presented a perfect family and cannot then admit how your household is falling apart… The greater the distance between your stories and your reality, the harder it becomes to let anyone into your life. The more you’ve misrepresented to look good, the harder it gets to effectively ask for help.

The stories we tell to ourselves, about ourselves and about our relationships with other people are tiny, every day things. We might not even notice when we do them. We might be crafting it deliberately as good PR, as fake it until you make it, as positivity or to feel better. But, these distortions come at a cost – they increase anxiety and feelings of pressure to succeed and they don’t reliably work as marketing strategies, whether you’re trying to look good to your family, or sell more books.

Most of us identify more with stories of honest struggle and occasional success than we do with people who seem to have it all. Our kindness is engaged by empathy with other people’s trials. We can enjoy the success of people we feel have earned it but may resent people who seem to have had it all handed to them on a plate. Better not to fake it until you make it. Better to be real, and human, open to being supported and able to have a wail about the crap along the way.

Contemplating Love

Love – at least in the romantic sense – is something we tend to treat as a mystery. How and when it will happen, no one knows, and who it will direct you to is unpredictable. Although, when you look at most people’s partner choices, you’ll see comparable age, class background, educational level and more. We’re more likely to pick people who are much like us and of course in doing this we’re more likely to have a daily life that requires few changes.

Love is a choice, not an accident.

Lust can be a bit random, but I’ve never considered lust on its own a good basis for a relationship. So many of our films and books show us people experiencing lust and getting it together, with this presented as romance. Romeo and Juliet are a classic of the form – two kids who do not know each other but really fancy each other and act on it. Love calls for more time, more depth, more involvement with each other.

Love is the choice to be open to something or someone – because of course romantic love isn’t the only option. Relationships that remain good (not habits or battle grounds) depend on choosing to keep loving each other. It’s an everyday choice, expressed in the tones of conversations, the small, affectionate gestures, the making and doing together that builds a life. Love is not something that happens to us, it is something we do, and the more deliberately we do it, the better the results are.

If you treat love as incomprehensible mystery, you are at the mercy of your desires and you can’t build anything. If you treat love as a deliberate choice, you can create it day by day. And quite possibly you can find some one(s) to co-create that with, making a life, a family, a relationship, a home, a network, a community or whatever else you want it to be. Choosing to invest deliberately in the people who love in return, who enrich your life, who delight you and who want you to be part of their existence means you have more scope for more good stuff. When love isn’t a random act of God, you can more readily walk away from what doesn’t work out, and pick where to invest your energy. The results are much better than ascribing it all to fate.

Flowers, margins and trees

Where I live, we’re now at the point in the year when the summer flowering has begun in earnest. Many of the spring flowers appear in the woodlands – getting in before the canopies closer over. The summer flowers can generally be found at the margins – woodland edges, alongside hedges and on road verges. My locality is blessed with some large open commons where orchids and cowslips bloom in profusion at this time of year. We also have a lot of fields that are rich in wildflowers.

There’s been a great deal of intense growth in recent weeks. The cowparsley now comes up to my waist. The cleavers are, where they can lean on anything, about the same height. Ragged Robins, campions, great hairy willowherb, tall grasses and all manner of other wild flowers abound. Beautiful to look at, sometimes challenging for the nose and eyes!

Margins tend to be the places with most biodiversity. The edges of woodlands are especially lively places. What ideally we need are large woodlands with plenty of room for open glades, thus maximising the scope for life. Butterflies especially like this kind of habitat. One of the reasons cutting small areas of woodland in cycles is good, is that you open up more margins.

Of course to many people this seems unnatural – humans manipulating nature. However, you have to consider what is no longer in most of our woods. We don’t have wild cows, let alone giant aurochs. We don’t have wild boar in most woods, or wild horses or ponies or anything else that might clear out areas of low growth. We used to have these larger mammals. We also used to have beavers.  It is their activity, in the past, that would have created clearings, and in the case of beavers, would have created pools as well.

The other major mechanism for naturally creating clearings is the death of old, massive trees. For this, you have to have a steady supply of massive ancient trees. We don’t have those. There are no giants whose falling will open up a large area – certainly not in most smaller woodlands. We’ve got hundreds of years of work to do if we want to restore them.

Our woodland ecosystems are damaged. If we want the best woodland we can have – and by best I mean most diverse and able to support the most life – we have to help. At least for now. Perhaps one day we’ll have enough woodland to have room to support the boar again. Perhaps the European program to recreate aurochs from what’s left in the DNA of domestic herds will work out… perhaps we’ll have our beavers back to manage water systems and thin out trees. If we get there, we won’t need people to do the work, but in the meantime, people are needed to make up for what’s missing. We have to compensate for the mistakes our ancestors made.

The image in this blog came from The Woodland Trust (with permission) and you can find out more about how The Woodland Trust takes care of woods here – https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/about-us/ancient-woodland-restoration/ancient-woodland/why-is-ancient-woodland-special/ 

The ritual of writing

There are a great many small joys and privileges that come from working at a Pagan publishing house. I get to read all sorts of books ahead of release. I get to help new authors break in, and more established authors reach further. I get to help. There’s an immense joy in seeing a writer winning – a first time author with a breakthrough title, an author whose been slogging away at it for years finally getting the attention they deserve. This is not always the work I am paid to do, this is sometimes stuff I do in my own time, because I can.

A few years ago, Andrew Anderson submitted a manuscript to Moon Books. It wasn’t something we could publish – it was simply too short. I liked his ideas and his writing style, so I dropped him an email with some pointers about what might work and get picked up – I’m not the person making those decisions, but I know how publishers operate. To my immense joy, he came back with a new book, and it clearly was one that we could put out. This month it is released.

The ritual of writing is a book for bards, and for anyone else using the written word as part of their creative spiritual life. Anyone inclined to write rituals, spells, prayers or meditations will find something they can use in this book. For anyone who wants to use writing as a focus for their spiritual journey, this book is resplendent with tools and ideas. It’s an ideal read for anyone on the Druid path and a natural companion book if you’re doing the OBOD Bardic grade. That Andrew is studying in the Ovate grade with OBOD should come as no surprise!

I’m personally delighted to see a book exploring creativity as ritual process in this way. I’m excited to see a new and innovative addition to contemporary Druid thinking. I’m looking forward to seeing what Andrew does next. I feel honoured to have had the chance to be part of his story.

The ritual of writing is available anywhere that sells books. here’s the Amazon link – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ritual-Writing-Spiritual-Practice/dp/1789041538