The Tin Man and Little Sausage — Chapter 4 — Mothering the Relinquished Self

Sometimes I get an urge to throw everything I own away. The specific urge is to feel unencumbered and free. Showered. Like myself. The urge can be a whisper in my brain, but if I feed it with any encouragement, it easily moves from a whisper to a wave that sweeps through my body: Let’s do this! Part of me braces itself for what is coming--lots and lots of action and change. Part of me cannot wait to get a move on and go through the carwash of life (Goodwill) and get rid of all the shit I acquired since the last car wash. 

Imagine someone trying to summit Everest carrying a year’s worth of clothes and food on her back. Imagine the relief as all those sweaters and shoes and undies and boxes of spaghetti go flying off into the rocky terrain (sorry for littering, but there are already all those dead bodies…). The urge to lighten my load feels instinctual and necessary, like a bird tearing off any binding that prevents its wings from unfolding. Why did I even buy these zebra-print pants that I couldn’t button without exhaling fully? I’d rather have the $120. Fuck.  

I have lived in the looping pattern of acquire and discard ever since I started moving back and forth between coasts in my early twenties. Buy and throw away. Settle down, tear up. Stay, go. Create relationships, destroy them. What was I doing? Was this an adopted person reenacting the relinquishment trauma? Was I trying to one-up my first mother? Look—I can give things up, too. There’s nothing I won’t drive away from or abandon. What exactly were these actions getting me? 

Now that I have met The Tin Man and Little Sausage, these behaviors make so much sense to me. I was being both selves at the same time: I was the coping mechanisms that formed the protective being of The Tin Man and I was the beating heart and flesh of Little Sausage. One wanted to keep life at a distance, and one wanted to eat it. One wanted to create walls of stuff around it to keep feelings at bay and the other existed in order to have the feelings.

For the two years after my dad died, I had aching sensations in my body that toggled back and forth—one was that my body was made of the small wooden alphabet blocks I had as a child, and that the blocks were rearranging themselves so they fit inside of me better. The other was that my body was full of hoar frost—like the edges of old-time open freezer at a grocery store. When I wasn’t feeling the blocks moving, I could feel the thick, old ice melting. This dissolving, shifting feeling was distracting the way the flu or a headache is distracting before you know you have it. Or the way your body opens when you hug a beloved.

Being in a body that was experiencing these internal shifts became my full-time occupation. This means I rested, a lot. I’m still resting a lot. My body feels wrung out, in need of rest all the way into its marrow. Maybe being relinquished is exhausting.

What I can see now was that I was learning the caretaking skills of a new mother for the stunned newborn in me that had gone into a kind of Sleeping Beauty slumber until someone who truly saw her showed up and helped bring her to life.

Little Sausage aches to throw off The Tin Man while The Tin Man fights to exist to protect Little Sausage from ever getting abandoned again.

They are quite a pair.

Kathy Mackechney, the wonderful IFS therapist, says that not all parts get adopted. I imagine she is talking about what I experience when I let myself relax into the all-encompassing Self energy that can see both The Tin Man and Little Sausage.

Self is not something that can be relinquished or adopted just as I can’t go outside today and relinquish or adopt the sky.

Self loves The Tin Man because The Tin Man sacrificed so much personal freedom in order to tighten up and protect Little Sausage. Self loves Little Sausage because Little Sausage lets Self experience the world on the physical and emotional plane. Self loves life because that is what Self is.

The way air loves air, Self loves Self.

Air is air. Self is Self.

Hallelujah.