Square One, Story Fondling, and Grieving
I signed up for a mentorship course that Martha Beck offered with two master coaches, and after the first class I’m certain I made the right choice because I learned about a distinction that feels important to me.
I have written about Martha’s definition of Square One here before (April 4th), so you can read that to get more background if you are interested. In a quick summary, Martha outlines life not like a straight line but as the circular pattern like seasons changing over and over again, but in a spiral, as the line is always moving forward. In life, we encounter big events that make us shift or drop our current identity, and these events begin the change cycle—Square One is when we go from caterpillar to the soup a dissolved caterpillar becomes in the journey to butterfly inside a chrysalis. Square One is about having no idea what is going on. I suspect that, for me, in some ways I have been in Square One my entire life. I think “out of the fog” for adopted people may be waking up to the fact that we aren’t the butterfly we thought but instead more of a confused soup.
The mind is a meaning making machine, so when something happens to us that feels overwhelming, confusing, catastrophic, our mind gets to work to figure out what it all means. Square One can feel like Not A Fun Place because we don’t yet know what the change means to our life, to our sense of self in the world. Square One is where it can be an accomplishment just to keep breathing and get out of bed because you’re not sure why you’re even here.
Our culture would like Square One to last anywhere from fifteen minutes to, if we push it, a week. Our culture is not great at understanding, honoring, and making space for change, not knowing, grief, confusion, shock, uncertainty. Luckily, we are part of our culture, and so if we learn to make space for these things, well, our culture begins to shift.
I was thrown for a loop in the Wayfinder coach training course as I wrote about in my latest posts when I was taught to watch for story fondling in coaching sessions. When you ask someone what issue they would like to address, and they tell you what is going on and then slip into a story (often prolonged and spiderwebby) to “explain” the current issue, this explaining fall under “story fondling”. Story fondling is a repeated dependance on stories about the past, stories you just keep telling and telling and telling to justify or explain some current behavior—at least this is how I understand it.
As a story and writing coach, learning about story fondling felt like putting my brain through a wood chipper. Not just my brain. My whole self. I was (am) a Champion A1 Story Fondler. You ask me about the weather and you could make a game out of how soon it will take me to start talking about my first mother and relinquishment. (You know—just connect the dots—rain…loss. What I’m saying is that all things are delicately interconnected and I can connect loss to the refrigerator if given a moment.)
After learning about story fondling and feeling self-chastised (why ARE you so attached to these stories, Anne? why CAN’T you move on?), I want to Camp What The Fuck and set up a tent and got into my metaphorical sleeping bag and tried to wait out the changes that were happening in my system so I could see who I was and what I felt and believed on the other side.
That sounds a lot like a caterpillar making a cocoon and dissolving.
I’d like to tell you I’m out of the sleeping bag because it has been almost a year. I tried to hustle the process along a bit by getting rid of my sleeping bag (my bed and the house that covered it), but it turns out my skin is my own sleeping bag. I brought my grief and confusion and need to wait things out with me to Boston.
It’s not that I’m sad as much as it is I’m in limbo. I just don’t know what I believe about life or my purpose or how my adoption story fits into who I am and who I want to me. I don’t know yet what to do with my adoption story and the ways it lives in my body and in my decisions and choices. I’ve never waited for time to pass in this way except for when I was in the third trimester of my pregnancy and so impatient to change form and give birth.
In my coaching session, Renee, the master coach, said that when she suspects her clients are in Square One, she listens for grief because the stories told by a grieving person are part of the process of meaning making. This, then, is different from story fondling. This is processing.
What is the difference for an adopted person between grieving and story fondling? Here is where I am learning about myself because the world has been unable to help me much—I am learning the ways the mind and body process the grief of relinquishment along with the strange and useless secrecy and lies that generally go along with closed adoptions. I am learning that the impatience my culture and I have around the grieving process leads to impacted grief which makes the process of letting grief run its course longer and harder. Am I stuck in a story or am I looking for meaning?
What if the sixty years I have been alive is just a grain of sand’s worth of time in the big picture? What if I was born a second ago? What if my body and mind are still in that moment when the world both appeared and fell away at the same time? What if I’m living out everything everywhere all at once, always? Appear disappear. Appear disappear. Appear disappear. What if that circular set of circumstances is how my brain understands life. This means I go from caterpillar to soup over and over and over again, never getting a breath long enough to butterfly.
I think we can live many timelines at once, so what if this is just one state that runs through our existence as another version of us butterflies, flies around, goes through the change cycle? We contain multitudes, after all. A lot goes on in these minds and bodies. I can be both an adult and an infant as I stand in line at the grocery store.
If I’m using story to look for meaning and someone tries to distract or impede me from telling that story (or if I do these things to myself), the story remains a bug inside the Mexican jumping bean of us. It will try to eat or rot its way out. If I’m story fondling and telling the same story over and over out of habit, just because the synapses in my brain have connected and led me to tell you something I’ve told a hundred different people with no forward movement of understanding in my system, then how helpful is that story to me as it is not leading me to connect either with myself or with you? What if, in fact, it is leading to dissociation and disconnection?
I can feel drunk when I am talking and story fondling. It’s like I've left my body and a lot of air is coming out of my mouth that I am not in much control of. I can feel like a train that is hurtling down the track. I tend to talk really fast. When I am telling a story and looking for meaning, some part of me feels like a bloodhound. I am telling you this story because maybe the connection between us will spark a new thought in my brain and I will have some kind of revelation. I may talk more slowly. I am learning as each word comes from a place inside of me I can’t always access. It’s like pearls are bubbling out of mud. The thing is, if I don’t have an understanding listener, the pearls can feel like mud, like an embarrassment, like shame.
It’s important we find good listeners for our pearls, starting with ourselves.
