Thursday, February 11, 2021
I had Shelly this morning. The topic was grief; it has hit me hard. My deepest grief is over Mike's suffering. Not only how he suffered those last five weeks before his death, but how in suffered because of the impact of his family of origin. His work life was also intense. For most of it, he carried a heavy load. When he left his last job, they replaced him with four people. He was very competent but not always fully appreciated. I thought he was amazing.
Shelly said she never had anyone grieve over someone else's suffering. I guess she doesn't have people stick around long enough for that to come up. They're too preoccupied with their problems. I don't have many big problems anymore. I continue working with Shelly because I find exploring the human psyche fascinating. Also, I can apply what I learn to those I work with. While what applies to me isn't always applicable to others, experiencing something in myself opens me to see something different.
I spoke to K's dad, D. I've had four sessions with her prepping her for writing an essay about wishing she had one more day with her mom, who died two years ago. I told dad to have her write the essay independently without thinking of the exact words she wrote with me. I don't want her to memorize the text we co-wrote. She could be in the exam, forget them, and then panic. She should be thinking about the topic rather than the exact words. Dad was telling me he has a two-hour commute each day. You can walk from one end of the island of Oahu to another in a day. Traffic in Honolulu is unbelievable. There is no way to expand. They tried to put in a rail system. The whole project is a mess—lots of mistakes and possible corruption. I'm not so worried about K anymore. I saw reasonable skill in writing mechanics.
With J. I started with the phonemic analysis. I had him divide the word. He requested we work on a math problem and do more phonemic analysis at the end of the class. He said he was not copying the word problems perfectly, but it was good enough for him to know what the problem was about. We did a one-word problem. He still did not go back to the story, the concrete, to figure out the problem.
His English sounded better, and I told him so. It's a change in his intonation pattern. He said he thought so too. I asked if his Spanish was also better. He didn't know. I talked about the power of speaking to people using their way of speaking.
Trevor Noah tells great stories about this power. A group of thugs in South Africa once approached him with hostile intent. He spoke to them in their dialect; their attitude changed immediately. He was one of them. I talked about the importance of using language appropriately in a context if your goal is communication. One language is not better than another. I asked J if he wouldn't have trusted me more if I could have spoken Spanish when we started. It took him longer to trust me. All that is based on language alone. I asked whether his mom would be more comfortable if I spoke Spanish. He said he didn't know. Of course, now I could enter the house with some pretty outrageous behavior. I have proven myself trustworthy. I would get a free pass.
I worked with E today. God, he sounded good. The level of energy in his voice was stunning. Confident. Wonderful. He said his schoolwork was going much better. He had already finished everything he had to do for the rest of the week. Our new goal was finding schoolwork fun. He said he had nothing to work on. I told him to find something that annoyed him, anything- something in the room he was in – anything. He said the top of his head was itching.
I led the releases on that, releasing anything negative about his hatred of the sensation, etc. I remember I had done an energy release on the hatred statement but not the love. I had no idea what was going on. I don't know how I realized that he was starting to inhabit his body energetically. The energy moved down into his chest and then continued down to the bottom of his feet. I asked how he felt. He said heavy. It took me a while after the session to realize what had happened. When we don't feel good about ourselves, our life circumstances, we leave our bodies. He was reinhabiting his. This is exciting.
E. has a weight problem. We started working on it in one of our first seasons, but it got dropped. Now I think his weight may be compensation for his 'weightlessness. If he can be grounded with his own weight, maybe he can drop all those extra pounds. Wouldn't that be great?
I had a session with A today. His decoding skills are improving rapidly. I pointed out to his mom that in two sentences in this elementary text, there were 21 sound-letter relationships covered. Actually, there were two for a, as in lad and was. I still have to remind A to use cross-body blending when decoding. His more serious problem is his memory. For that, I worked on holding the visual image, which he seems to be good at, with the accompanying auditory image. I haven't had him push the save button yet. I didn't seem right yet.
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Musings.
Dorothy said something about free drawing for 3- and 4-year-olds helps them identify who they are in the world. That's an interesting theory. I thought, you know, I don't think I ever did that. She couldn't conceive of such a thing. Our mom let her do it. But my circumstances were her were different because my mom's circumstances with me were different.
I wonder if her parents allowed her to draw freely. She was born in 1903; the paper would have been more expensive than now. We go through reams of it daily now. That wasn't true back then. She wouldn't have had a role model.
She was older than any of the other mothers in our neighborhood. She wasn't a particularly social person. She wouldn't have observed another mother allowing their children to draw freely, assuming that was a norm in the early forties.
Also, I think my mom wouldn't have wanted the chaos of loose pieces of paper. I do remember clearly drawing in coloring books. I don't know how old I was.
I also remember that I did painting in kindergarten. How do I remember? Well, some boy who was back-to-back with me as we each painted on our easels threw a container of red paint on my blue dress with white polka dots. One doesn't forget moments like that.
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