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Sunday, December 23, 2012

Hoarding, Hypnosis and seeing Rose.

On Waiheke, December 2012.

Hoarding, Hypnosis and Happy.
December 23rd 2012

I’m exhausted in that way that makes me wonder if a giant Octopus Man enslaved me for the night for purposes of labour. I feel I have been dragging stones under the sea to build his castle. He then convinced me that I was dreaming (like a strange Derren Brown hypnosis experiment with a somnambulist) and quickly dried my hair with one of his many tentacled hands before returning me to the land lubbing world. I awaken feeling annoyed and bloaty faced, limbs aching.

The best thing to do is whack on one of my hypnosis tracks (I’ve made up quite a few) and shift some of the weight from my shoulders and mind. Even a minimal shift can have such an incredible impact on the rest of the day. What hypnosis really comes down to is changing your mental and physical state enough that you’re able to access the subconscious more easily. It’s outside of belief systems and yet can easily include them.

My work has finished up for the year, and now I’m going to divide much of the next four or five weeks between visiting mum and my beloved on Waiheke. I’ve been helping mum to do some cleaning and sorting as she’s a hoarder and it’s been a bit out of hand for about 15 years. I realise it’s an issue of on-going loss, unresolved issues, of grief, so it’s not as simple as barking “have a garage sale”. I am also of the hoarding tendency but am doing my best to ‘break the cycle’, ha ha!

When I lived in Korea I downloaded the ‘Hoarders’ series from America and studied the way the psychologist and cleaning specialist would tackle the problem with each person. These Hoarders were of a different order. They make my mum’s piles of boxes, clothes, magazines and avalanches of mail look quite manageable. These were the Hoarders of America whose homes were often more like dumping grounds, sedimentary layers of rotting pumpkin and dead cat amidst the valuables. I would watch it and notice how the severe hoarders who succeeded in cleaning and maintaining the environment were the ones who admitted they needed help on the mental and emotional levels. They got this help and it had to be on-going.

Those who said things like “I need a bigger house”, or “my husband/sister/daughter/whoever is storing things here too you know!” were the ones who could have lived in a ten bedroom mansion and still filled it with an assortment of treasure and trash by the end of a year. The ones filled with bitterness and self pity, who blamed others and claimed that expired food was ‘absolutely fine’ were unlikely to change. They were the ones losing their health, their families, their minds. Denial only seems to lead to a living death.

 Most hoarders have a form of obsessive compulsive disorder or some other issue stemming from anxiety or depression.  Watching those shows fills me with a mixture of sadness, hope and horrified excitement. There’s a strange car crash feeling to seeing someone living like that, especially when they are often intelligent, articulate and attractive.

Mum and I watched the one about a British man, Richard Wallace. There’s a clip on Youtube showing how out of control the hoarding had become. He lived like a mole, burrowing furtively under the small gaps left under the tops of doorways, sliding over the newspapers he hoped to one day archive. The only thing that really helped was the kindness and patience of the local landscaper. The psychologist wouldn’t help because Richard said it wasn’t a mental problem, it was a storage problem.

The gardener offered to do a big clean up in the garden and asked locals to help out. They cleaned up tonnes (literally) of rubbish and in the process Richard’s heart was softened. He felt cared for and connected to the community instead of judged and picked on. Even though he was still in denial, the gardener persisted. As they looked at the paper and rubbish piled high on the inside of the front door, Richard wept to think of how horrified his mother would be if she were still alive. It was then he could admit he had a mental problem.

I would like to watch more of those Hoarder programmes again; I get really inspired regarding the right approach to take when someone is not well mentally and finding it impossible to order their environment. Although hypnosis may not be ideal for severe mental disorders and addictions, it can be a very effective tool, and I’m going to experiment with myself in terms of increasing order and clarity in my environment.

In fact, you could now say my life is going to be one big hypnosis and healing experiment!

Things are going well with my Love. When I say ‘going well’, I mean that it is perfectly imperfect. If you are truly falling in love, honestly seeing the person in front of you rather than some projected fantasy, then discussing whatever fears or hopes arise is incredibly empowering. I am still quite amazed that we've finally found each other. I'm spending Christmas with mum, then I'm going to My Love's place a day or so after that for a lovely catch up.

When I last visited him, I knew I was going to bump into Rose that weekend. You may recall that I had a friendship come to it's completion at the end of last year. 'Rose'  lives on Waiheke, and it's a small place so I knew that I'd see her soon enough.  I'd seen her twice in traffic, two days in a row the week prior and realised that the angels were lining things up in order to be dealt with.

At Enclosure Bay, processing a complicated situation inside my head.
My Love had to work on one of the days I was visiting, and so I went to Enclosure Bay for a swim. I'd intended to go to Little Palm (Nudey) beach originally, but this inner voice kept whispering that it would be better to go to Enclosure Bay. As I approached I saw that the only people there were a family, all looking out to sea, languid. I recognised Rose's sister and thought "oh shit, what do I do?". Then I  decided this must be the right time to say hello. Instead of turning around and going to another beach, I boldly approached, smiling and saying hello. Her mum, sisters, nephews were all friendly. From behind our sunglasses Rose and I could not reach each others eyes, and so safely we smiled and conducted around two minutes of small talk.  Lying next to her was a large man. "Is this your partner?" I asked rather nosily, blurting it out in true ADD style.
"Oh yeah," she said, as he sat up groggily in the heat to shake my hand,
and introduced us. He had a really nice face, a good hand shake.
They wished me merry Christmas, I commented on how much her nephews had grown. I walked away, around the bay, feeling strange. 

I couldn't help but go over the whole scenario from the end of last year. I was severely depressed and begged to stay one night with her on Waiheke to lift my spirits. I felt so sad and fragile, but she refused and told me she would be busy 'right up till next year'. Fortunately Lisa of the North welcomed me with open arms, and the difference was glaring.

A few weeks after this, there was a misunderstanding about when we were meeting for dinner, and even when I apologised repeatedly, she ignored emails and texts and then deliberately stood me up for dinner. She texted me five minutes before we were supposed to meet to say she was not meeting me. That was the night I reunited with Lou and Becky from schooldays. When I told them what happened they shook their heads with a grim smile and said I was better off without her. 

I walked around the rocks, swam, fell asleep on a vintage table cloth I'd scored at the Waiheke Markets for $1. I realised something. I thought I was always helping Rose. Sometimes I really was. Yet in all the years of allowing her to treat me in ways that were thoughtlessly unkind, I was not actually helping her at all. I was behaving as if it were okay for her to demand more of me than was actually possible. Whenever there were misunderstandings, I had to apologise enough for all the hurts ever incurred, hurts that were not my responsibility. She even told me I was lying once, when I told her how I was feeling. If someone can't allow you to have your own feelings, then I guess it's because they're afraid of their own. My Christmas wish for her is that she will face her feelings and take responsiblity for them so that she's able to have loving and trusting relationships. 

Such a different Christmas this year! Hope you celebrate in a way that is enjoyable, creates more peace, more love and more yumminess! Love, Candice. x
Thank you Angels, for the love in my life.
On Waiheke, evening falls.