{"id":337,"date":"2015-02-03T00:58:19","date_gmt":"2015-02-03T00:58:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/catherine.klatzker.com\/?p=337"},"modified":"2020-10-23T19:16:32","modified_gmt":"2020-10-23T19:16:32","slug":"exceptions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/catherine.klatzker.com\/?p=337","title":{"rendered":"Exceptions"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first group I belonged to, my family, taught me how unsafe they were and I\u2019ve performed poorly in groups ever since, unless I\u2019m leading them. Even then, I stifle so much fear. This has been true my whole life. As long ago as grade school, I preferred independent study and the value of group work entirely escaped me. I couldn\u2019t sidestep the feeling that I was outside <\/em>the group, different in ways no one would understand, and I isolated myself, sure that others would do that if I didn\u2019t do it first. This sort of thing can be self-fulfilling, obviously, even if it\u2019s true that one is<\/em> different in some indefensible way.<\/p>\n

When I think about groups, I think about book groups, study groups, committees at work\u2014work itself has and is its\u2019 own group. Churches and schools\u2014classes\u2014all those places where people gather and you find yourself with the same congregation of people time after time. I\u2019ve watched other people make connections in all those situations. People choose friends, go out for drinks, meet for lunch, get together and socialize outside the group\u2014and that\u2019s what I look at and notice and don\u2019t do. I think I don\u2019t know how, that I\u2019ve never known how, that it\u2019s somehow too risky.<\/p>\n

I ask myself, has there ever been an exception?<\/p>\n

When I participated in group therapy for one year five years ago, I learned that many adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse dissociate, that many even have alternate identities and they never speak of it in group. My mindfulness was challenged when my younger alters leaped into my heart space to greet the child-Parts of another woman when she breezed through the entrance on my very first day there. Nothing like that had ever happened, that my Parts would dance for joy to find another person\u2019s Parts in the room: my un-integrated Parts jumped out to befriend the Parts of another woman in the group. My Parts went ahead and made friends without me and I just tagged along. To me that was more confirmation of how different I was from others at that time, that I couldn\u2019t reach out and connect on my own.<\/p>\n

I still pondered this and I wondered was I always alone before?<\/em> when my granddaughter brought me a stack of books from one of the children\u2019s shelves in my study last week. I noticed The Little Prince<\/a>, <\/em>probably too old for a three-year-old, but I opened it anyway and found a long handwritten inscription inside.<\/p>\n

It was dated August, 1966, addressed \u201cTo my very own Catherine,\u201d and signed, \u201cLove, Bon\u201d. My friend Bonnie wrote of the \u201cmillions\u201d of enlightening, revealing, hilarious, long talks we shared and how much she gained from our friendship. She promised, as my baby son Adam\u2019s godparent, that she\u2019d be honored to help him grow up to be the kind of person he\u2019d be proud to be if, God forbid, something should happen to me; and as I read her nearly fifty-year-old words written in the front of The Little Prince, <\/em>it began to come back to me, all that I\u2019d forgotten, and how close Bonnie and I were during the year I lived in Salt Lake City. Her note is raw and honest and beautiful.<\/p>\n

Bonnie and I worked together. We were two ing\u00e9nues, greenhorns selling books door-to-door in Utah to housewives in the sixties. We went out for drinks after work. We played and did family things with baby Adam on weekends. Mostly, I remember so much drinking at the age of nineteen and twenty\u2014I\u2019m sure I abandoned all inhibitions when Bonnie and I talked and philosophized and shared all our secrets.<\/p>\n

My child Parts can obviously make friends, and how interesting is it that Bonnie gifted me The Little Prince? <\/em>Because those child aspects of me are perfectly tuned in to essential matters of friendship, like \u201cWhat is her smile like\u201d and \u201cWhat games does she love\u201d and \u201cDoes she collect butterflies,\u201d to borrow from Antoine de St. Exupery. And my child Parts have always regarded the fox with equal measures of fear and fearlessness, for \u201cone runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets oneself be tamed\u2026\u201d to quote the Little Prince. I am left to wonder how many Parts came out without my knowledge and told Bonnie our story, what secrets I actually shared with her. Our drinking times were very playful, just as my Parts were when they chose to make friends without me.<\/p>\n

I consider the wall of inhibitions I live behind, and that alcohol and dissociative disorder <\/em>have breached it, but I have not. Not yet. What would happen if I allowed my self out a little at a time in a group I belong to? Would it be as humiliating as I fear? Or would there be other exceptions?<\/p>\n

After finding her long-ago note in The Little Prince, <\/em>I looked up Bonnie online and I found her obituary, that she had died suddenly at home in 2007. In the time after our friendship she had married, had two sons, divorced and then lost her ex-husband again when he died, and gone back to school for advanced degrees. She became a social worker, an instructor at the University of Utah, director of a battered women\u2019s shelter and a hospice worker, among other healing professional work.<\/p>\n

The Little Prince said,\u00a0you will be content that you have known me.<\/em><\/p>\n

She named one of her sons Adam.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first group I belonged to, my family, taught me how unsafe they were and I\u2019ve performed poorly in groups ever since, unless I\u2019m leading them. Even then, I stifle so much fear. This has been true my whole life. …<\/p>\n

Exceptions<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[19],"class_list":["post-337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-making-friends"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherine.klatzker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherine.klatzker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherine.klatzker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherine.klatzker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherine.klatzker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=337"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/catherine.klatzker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":867,"href":"https:\/\/catherine.klatzker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337\/revisions\/867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherine.klatzker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherine.klatzker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherine.klatzker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}