Offering: April 10, 2022

Beginnings, recovery, shame, learning.

Image description: An Eastern Pennsylvania woods in spring with cut-outs of characters by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. From left to right they are Justice, The Lovers, Five of Cups and The Fool.

To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.

Spring here in Eastern Pennsylvania has felt withholding, dragging its feet out of winter. I had so much momentum on those first warm days and then it was cold, now it’s rainy, I took a rest, got sick, have been tired.

During the first warm days I was spending a lot of time gardening, thinking about beginnings; planting seeds, moving things around. And I was thinking about how theologian Catherine Keller troubles the narrative of fresh beginnings altogether, in her book Face of the deep: A theology of becoming. 

I was thinking about spring itself as a non-fresh beginning—with a lot of fits and starts and lapses back into winter—even as it carries an undeniable energetic of new life. As I dropped seeds—peas, kale, carrots, radishes—in next to the old sage and rosemary that somehow survived the winter, I thought about how the old plants were also ready for a fresh start, but would necessarily carry into the new year leaves and bits from the old life, too. For them there can be no pure, new beginning. 

Perhaps oddly—though certainly on-brand—all of this got me thinking about behavior change and recovery, and how important it might be to interrogate the idea of a fresh start when you’re working on change. One model of behavior change that I learned about in social work school, called the trans-theoretical stages of change model, is cyclical not linear, which in itself challenges even the possibility of pure beginning. 

One of the most interesting things about this model is that relapse is included right there alongside all the other stages—contemplating, preparing for, taking action on, and maintaining change. For relapse to be a valid stage in the process means that a slip doesn’t send a person back to some mythological “square one” and it certainly doesn’t evict anyone from being in the process of change itself. I personally find that both comforting and valuable, which is not always the case with comforting ideas. 

Reflecting on my own processes of change over the years, I’ve noticed that there was often a switch that would flip when I’d set a rule for myself and then break it, and with it went the fantasy of a new leaf turned over, of pure wellness, or of recovery as absolute. A backslide into something I’d been working hard to shake or transform could make me feel instantly that all had been lost or destroyed. And in that place, I would often meet shame, hopelessness, or a feeling of “why bother?” that generally made things worse. 

Catherine Keller’s work—like many process-oriented thinkers, I think—seems to situate new beginnings as something constant. I particularly appreciate her words that “we begin again, or not at all” (2002). Of course, with an understanding of a beginning as something that can occur at any time, comes a realization that relapse can, too. 

But in this framing, relapse is not some alien, other force that will destroy my hard work. Rather it is a marker in time, where I begin again. I think Keller’s work inadvertently challenges an absolute way of seeing that’s entrenched in the binary of recovery and illness which in my own experience can make mistakes feel more consequential than they need to be.   

One of the most helpful things for me in my own recovery has been recognizing that every single moment is a portal for a new beginning, and that a beginning is not some exclusive club that I can only get into at certain times of day, week or year. Instead of keeping office hours only on Monday morning or New Year’s Day, beginnings open their doors at 4:37 pm and 8:03.

This recognition has affected me in two ways that might seem contradictory; that I was both a.) quicker to bounce back when I did things I’d rather not have done, and b.) more able to hang out in the painful aftermath of a misstep, so that I could learn from it. 

I say hang out here, not as in: drown in shame, linger in self-criticism, continue to do the thing I didn’t want to be doing because, f*ck it, what’s the point in trying? I say hang out as in poke around, investigate, see what ‘s there. So that then, I might learn something that I can carry with me.

I want to be really careful here, not to make it sound like I’m claiming to have reached some pinnacle of wellness. At the same time, this is something that has really truly helped me, and I’m in a much better place for it than I was for a long time.

I’ve written a lot about the “one forbidden thing” motif in folktales and myths these last years and it never really occurred to me why that theme was so resonant for me, but writing this today I think I’m seeing a connection. When you have things you do that you know create pain for yourself and for others, it is like living in a forbidden thing fairy tale. You can do anything you want, go into any room in the castle, eat any piece of fruit in the garden—except that one. 

Remember Psyche, and how she lived in paradise with just one rule to follow—don’t look at your husband because gods can’t be looked at directly by humans and everyone knows that. But of course, she couldn’t help herself, and was in for a world of suffering thereafter.

Remember the three sisters in the story of Silver Nose? They lived in a castle with complete run of the house when their husband Silver Nose was out for the day, except for that one room which they must never enter. And how one by one, they went into the one room anyway? Remember Eve and Adam? And the fruit? Remember how none of these people were able to resist the thing they weren’t allowed to do and how horribly it went for them afterward?

We can see in these stories how forbidden things create a kind of magnetic pull and I don’t know what it means but I do know that—at least in the cultures whose stories I’ve spent a little bit of time with—there is an enormous amount of fear wrapped up in the notion of transgressing. There is this sense of mistakes being irredeemable, a point of no return, and it feels like an obsession with purity. From there, doing a forbidden thing becomes an experience that is overrun with shame. 

Shame does a lot of things and one of them is, it makes it hard to learn. In Tarot for Change I wrote about this in relationship to the Five of Cups, which shows a person crying over three spilled cups, with two cups standing upright, behind them. A popular interpretation of the card is something along the lines of “don’t focus so much on what’s been spilled, just pivot and look on the bright side.” 

This reflects, I think, a common impulse to want to turn away from our mistakes, losses, or failures as quickly as possible. But I think we miss out on a lot of good data if we aren’t able to take a hard look at the cups that have spilled. How did happen, why did it happen, what does it feel like, and what could be done differently?

There’s a fine line, of course, between dwelling or wallowing, and spending the time to gather information about what’s happened and how to move forward. I do think that it’s possible with practice to look at, learn from and to keep doing what needs to be done. 

Shame is hard to be with, which makes it tough to move flexibly. It often stimulates a drive to avoid, so if you’ve done a forbidden thing, it might be really hard to look directly at or feel into what’s happened, and the aftermath. But not being able to look at mistakes directly means that we deprive ourselves of access to a lot of valuable information. Really feeling the consequences of an action—in the emotional and physical body—can drive change more than any intellectual idea about why change is necessary.

There’s a thing called chain analysis in dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) which is a tool to compassionately interrogate the forbidden things that we do. (I would love to do a chain analysis on some of the characters mentioned earlier,  by the way, but maybe that’s an Offering for another day.) 

When you do chain analysis, you identify a behavior, ask questions about what prompted it (including internal and external events), explore context and consequence, wonder about what made you vulnerable, and identify more adaptive choice options for the future.

When I first learned about chain analysis—as a graduate student interning in a DBT program—I connected it right away with Justice in the Tarot for the way that it cares about cause and effect, which are not about judgment or punishment but instead seek to understand, restore balance and learn.  

In the early days of reading Tarot I used to say of The Fool that they invite the querent to imagine what it might be like to see a situation with fresh eyes, like the beginner’s mind of Zen Buddhism. With my own beginner’s understanding of the physiology and psychology of trauma, I’d always add that even as we might get something from imagining what it might be like, we can also acknowledge that it’s not possible to do anything with that sort of pure seeing.

And I do wonder whether making peace with that could be helpful in other areas of life where change is needed. If I understand that even on the day of my birth I came into the world with baggage—if for no other reason than having lived inside my mother’s body—I wonder how that would affect my ability to see beginnings not as ultimate, but processual. And if that might make it easier to catch my balance when I feel like I’ve transgressed in a way that there’s no coming back from.

This is a subscribers-only paid weekly Offering, but if you feel moved to share it with anyone you are welcome and encouraged to. Thank you so much for your support.

See you next week. <3

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Sources

Keller, C. (2002). Face of the deep: A theology of becoming. Routledge.