Green Surprise of Passion
Writings of a Trauma Therapist
by Shirley Glubka
Blade of Grass Press, 1998
paperback, 98 pages
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Writings of a Trauma Therapist
by Shirley Glubka
Blade of Grass Press, 1998
paperback, 98 pages
FREE
(except for the cost of shipping and handling)
(individuals, classes, groups: all are welcome to take advantage of this almost-free offer)
Click here to order.
Here, in poetry and creative prose, the reader will find horror and humor, wonder and fatigue, confusion and clarity as the author, a psychotherapist, strives to achieve balance during a challenging period of her professional life: she is learning to work with survivors of sadistic abuse, some of whom have Multiple Personality Disorder/Dissociative Identity Disorder.
"...it is rare to find, as we do in this book, poetic descriptions of the therapeutic process in such depth."
Margaret Blanchard, Journal of Poetry Therapy (June 29, 2000)
"She makes sense out of the places where one/I had not imagined the possibility of sense."
Ellen Goldberg, author of Meeting Street
"Well worth reading."
Lynn W., editor, Many Voices
Margaret Blanchard, Journal of Poetry Therapy (June 29, 2000)
"She makes sense out of the places where one/I had not imagined the possibility of sense."
Ellen Goldberg, author of Meeting Street
"Well worth reading."
Lynn W., editor, Many Voices
From the author's Preface:
It was the mid-1980s. My life as a psychotherapist was changing. Clients sat in terror, bombarded with images and sensations, struggling to tell me chaotic, fragmented stories. Or they avoided the stories. There were long periods of tense silence in the therapy room; sudden switches of personality; eruptions of rage; internals of sardonic humor; strategies, manipulations, defenses; strange games of humankind.
I had begun to see clients who were survivors of severe and prolonged childhood abuse, most of them women. Some of them had experienced sadistic, ritualized abuse, often in a group context, sometimes with satanic content. Some of them developed multiple personalities as a way of dividing overwhelming experience into (barely) manageable pieces. My training and previous work had done little to prepare me for what I was hearing and seeing.
This collection of writings sprouted from that very particular soil. It could not have come out of any other ground. Before then, and after, my work life was different. Before then, and after, I myself was different...
Sample poems from Green Surprise of Passion:
Unfinished
I was a child contained and careful,
cautiously enshelled. But I believed
my world was roomy. For did not Truth
stand large with classic lines against one wall?
And was not Love just soft enough for sitting
near the window as I read? What could be
more spacious than the ancient house of Faith?
Containment not yet named remained invisible.
I grew up and, growing, cracked the shell
I had not known was there. All form fell from me.
I traded Truth for existential risk, stood on bare air.
I breathed excitement for my breakfast every day.
I was thin and sure and freer than before.
I did not notice how abstraction
has replaced abstraction in my life,
how all was white on white,
how some connection still to some reality
has simply not been made.
Nor did I notice this:
that evil never thins to absolute abstraction.
Even weakened it is substantive, embodied.
Even ghostly it is cold and can be touched.
More to the point, it could touch me.
Two
Against a great canvas that tough cloth
she lays with a flat knife lapis lazuli
hard ground for blue, precise.
Sharp sorrow here, darkness disguised.
Self-making from stone dust
with cold daybright water.
I have seen this woman strut and glitter,
blazon forth. She shines and she can shatter.
I am private, practical, stubborn as rope.
I hold what I intend to hold.
She has fibers, too; hers have been tested--
stretched and pressed as mine have not.
And she survives: a brightly-colored being
who casts a sharp, dark shade.
I have my colors, drawn from
sources less severe.
I am absorbing every hour faithfully
a hue, a tone. I work at it.
Some minutes of some days
the whole damned spectrum seems to fit
inside my soul.
Those days I carry colors
like liquid in a bowl.
I think she cannot comprehend
a thing so whole
as my unbroken bowl.
Nor can I know the wilder colors
out beyond the spectrum--
all the edges of the pieces
of such a soul as hers.
We meet by miracle, I am aware.
So far we make a decent working pair.
At the Play Table
with the 6-yr-old Personality
of the 32-yr-old Woman
—I ain't scared.
—Oh, me neither, Sweetie.
—Let's be not scared together, OK?
Which didn't happen. For one thing I
wouldn't call her Sweetie and for
another if I joined the denial this way I
wouldn't publish it. As for line three
it's pure wish fulfillment.
I must be lonely
sitting here with her.
Unfinished
I was a child contained and careful,
cautiously enshelled. But I believed
my world was roomy. For did not Truth
stand large with classic lines against one wall?
And was not Love just soft enough for sitting
near the window as I read? What could be
more spacious than the ancient house of Faith?
Containment not yet named remained invisible.
I grew up and, growing, cracked the shell
I had not known was there. All form fell from me.
I traded Truth for existential risk, stood on bare air.
I breathed excitement for my breakfast every day.
I was thin and sure and freer than before.
I did not notice how abstraction
has replaced abstraction in my life,
how all was white on white,
how some connection still to some reality
has simply not been made.
Nor did I notice this:
that evil never thins to absolute abstraction.
Even weakened it is substantive, embodied.
Even ghostly it is cold and can be touched.
More to the point, it could touch me.
Two
Against a great canvas that tough cloth
she lays with a flat knife lapis lazuli
hard ground for blue, precise.
Sharp sorrow here, darkness disguised.
Self-making from stone dust
with cold daybright water.
I have seen this woman strut and glitter,
blazon forth. She shines and she can shatter.
I am private, practical, stubborn as rope.
I hold what I intend to hold.
She has fibers, too; hers have been tested--
stretched and pressed as mine have not.
And she survives: a brightly-colored being
who casts a sharp, dark shade.
I have my colors, drawn from
sources less severe.
I am absorbing every hour faithfully
a hue, a tone. I work at it.
Some minutes of some days
the whole damned spectrum seems to fit
inside my soul.
Those days I carry colors
like liquid in a bowl.
I think she cannot comprehend
a thing so whole
as my unbroken bowl.
Nor can I know the wilder colors
out beyond the spectrum--
all the edges of the pieces
of such a soul as hers.
We meet by miracle, I am aware.
So far we make a decent working pair.
At the Play Table
with the 6-yr-old Personality
of the 32-yr-old Woman
—I ain't scared.
—Oh, me neither, Sweetie.
—Let's be not scared together, OK?
Which didn't happen. For one thing I
wouldn't call her Sweetie and for
another if I joined the denial this way I
wouldn't publish it. As for line three
it's pure wish fulfillment.
I must be lonely
sitting here with her.
Sample of prose from Green Surprise of Passion:
From the short story "Hearts" --
Perhaps there really was a group of people devoted to terror, worshipping terror; a group now almost certainly dispersed to the outer edges of the universe, participants either dead or so totally changed as to be unrecognizable; a group to whom disguise was integral, and still is.
And perhaps the group did exactly this: cut open the chest of an adolescent girl (was she rebellious?) and directed a small child, also a girl, to hold in both her small child hands the heart, still beating, of the girl whose chest was cut open, the blood vessels intact, the blood pumping nicely, so that it was like holding a frightened bird, and it felt like a privilege.
And perhaps this small child, the privileged one, grew up and came to speak to me, whispering, for it was a secret. She would have the body of a grown woman by this time. She would be wearing Oshkosh overalls and a deep purple silk blouse with billowing long sleeves. She would be a big woman, muscled, with large rough hands; a worker. Also a painter, a sculptor, a psychic, and most of the time a lesbian. There would be room in the wardrobe for multiple expressions.
This grown woman blinks and rolls her eyes upward. She slides from the couch of my therapy office to the floor. She lands efficiently, crosslegged. She looks at me and asks, in a deep voice I know from sessions past—it belongs to the male protector, long won over, a gay male of the butch sort, who was threatening at first, but that was a long time ago—she/he asks Are you ready? Are you sure?
By this signal I know there is something to tell that is regarded as significant.
The legs shift up. The knees are grabbed and held for life. The whole body seems to shrink, but it is only compression caused by fear. The head turns up and looks toward me, for I am still in my chair and she is still on the floor. The wink comes. Here is the seven-year-old, then. Been practicing that wink for three months and has it pretty much mastered. A pale grin. She likes me, but she is frightened of her task. She tells me about the held and beating heart. She tries to make sure I understand the wonder, how special it is to hold a heart; and how secret it is.
I am almost used to this sort of image. I can almost enter the world in which such things become an honor. As long as I give no thought at all to the girl whose chest is used from such an event, I can approximate equanimity.
And, of course, it is perhaps entirely imagination, this scene. After all, this same woman sometimes turns into a nine-year-old of undetermined sex whose tongue has been cut out. Since the woman speaks very well, and easily, before and after she becomes this nine-year-old, I conclude that there is something other than my kind of reality at work. I have theories about this sort of thing, not all of which involve delusion, not all of which involve terror, not all of which involve abuse, but I do not worry about them while I listen on this day.
Listening is the task, so I keep listening...