It’s almost a year since I first watched the video for Sia’s ‘Chandelier’ and first heard the song; and though I have played other music since, and continue to do so, there are still some days (or even weeks) when I play it on repeat. The video had such a powerful effect on me that I wrote this post at end of February 2015, in an attempt to try and figure out why it had such an impact:
https://lifeinabind.com/2015/02/28/inner-child-and-past-child/
I realised that part of the video’s power was that the images spoke to me of the child part of me and of childhood – inner child and past child – and it was revealing in that it demonstrated the extent of the distortion of the lens that I use to view myself. At the end of that post I wrote that the song and video were proving to be a goldmine of therapeutic material, and that I thought I would be exploring that goldmine (or indeed, that minefield) for some time to come.
Sometimes I worry that I don’t know how to ‘go deeper’ into a subject during therapy. I will spend a session or two talking about something and then come to a point where it doesn’t ‘feel finished’ but neither do I know how to go on. My therapist often says that if a subject is important, it will come around again, and we will ‘get another bite at the cherry’. This has proved to be true for a number of subjects, and is proving true again, which is why I have chosen ‘Inner child and past child’ for this ‘Memory Monday’ post.
Since Christmas, my therapy has focused primarily on my relationship with my husband, and it has been very painful. Trying to honestly examine past and present patterns of relating which may be destructive, and talking about sides of me that I would rather deny, brings up not just feelings of guilt and shame, but summons up the parts of me that are resistant to the therapeutic process and that believe it is impossible to change.
I have also been reading some challenging books that are helping me to re-evaluate some of my attitudes to relationships, including a couple of books on Transactional Analysis (which I will write more about, shortly). In that context, I have once again been thinking about the ‘child part’ of me – how I view it, and the ways in which it influences how I view the world and others, and how I behave. Thinking about ‘the child within’ has brought me back around to thinking about ‘Chandelier’, and though I haven’t watched the video since last March, I feel drawn to it again. I wonder how it will feel to watch it, but with an added year of therapy ‘under my belt’ and with hopefully a modicum of deeper understanding and self-awareness.
I am constantly amazed at the way in which therapy uses the unexpected and ordinary events of our lives to illuminate the different parts of us; and how the same threads come back at different times and in different guises, simultaneously peeling back another layer of our defenses and adding another layer of richness to our understanding. Like the lines from T.S. Eliot on ‘waiting’ that are so important to me and to my therapy and which I keep reinterpreting and using in different ways; this song has become part of the fabric of the way in which I try to understand myself and a core part of my ‘therapy vocabulary’, and I’m looking forward to exploring it further.
Life in a Bind - BPD and me 