Jim Cogley Reflections Tues 16 July – Mon 22 July

Information: For web-cam live services and recordings – ourladysisland.ie

Website for ordering books, psychotherapy and other details – jimcogley.com

Email: frjimcogley@gmail.com

Tue 16^th July – Father Issues

Writing about father issues I find more difficult than mother issues. My father died when I was eleven, at a time when I was just beginning to get to know him. Yet his life and death has had a profound influence on my life. His deep respect and love for my mother in particular gave me a childhood security that helped see me through my turbulent teenage years that were far from secure following his death. He had an amazing capacity for remembering people’s names. At the point where I was ready to benefit that gift he was gone, and I was left with a psychological block when it comes to remembering names. He was a man who carried quite a lot of anger resulting from unresolved grief and this often got displaced onto me being his only child. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see where that was coming from but it left me having to do a lot of inner work around my relationship to anger and coming to see it as a positive creative force in my life.

Wed 17^th July – Burdens not our own

With the benefit of hindsight I think that my father may have been jealous of me because of my close relationship with my mother. This I don’t judge him for but understand that it was something he never had since his mother died while he was still an infant. A succession of later losses that wiped out all his remaining family members while I was still an infant left him emotionally devastated. His capacity for work was impaired and many later told me that I never had the chance to know my father as the fun loving, generous, kind and light-hearted soul that he had been in his earlier years. While not aware of it until much later, it seems likely that I probably picked up on and carried some of that sadness as my own. From personal experience, I can really appreciate that the emotions a parent fails to acknowledge can so easily be carried by a child. Such a burden the child then carries through life believing to be his own.

Thurs 18^th July – Sudden death – A long time coming

Sometimes I think of my father as a man whose river of inner life became blocked in his forties. Tragic and sudden loss, plus compounded grief, took a heavy toll. Somewhere a light had been extinguished and was never reignited. His enthusiasm for living waned, as did his interest in work. He became quite overweight and seemed to sleep a lot. As a small farmer his heart was no longer in his work and the farm spiralled into debt. His inner life was mirrored in the animals under his care with an inordinate number of losses every year and constant ‘bad-luck’. When he died of a heart attack at fifty-six it was classed as a sudden death but more likely it had been a long time coming and the signs had been apparent for quite some time. Significantly it was his heart that attacked him since he carried such a heavy load of emotional baggage.

Fri 19^th July – Father Absence

I share insights from my own father story with the hope of offering an invitation to readers to piece together the jigsaw of their own father story. The all too common absence of the father relationship has long-term repercussions through life. A daughter is likely to carry her unmet needs from her father into her future relationships and possibly undermine what had the potential to be quite a good relationship. A son, in the absence of a good father relationship, can become a substitute husband for his mother and this can cause major problems in his marriage with his wife always feeling she comes second. This will leave him enmeshed in a maternal matrix from which he may never extricate himself enough to claim his own identity. This maternal identification, according to Carl Jung, can even give rise to bi-sexuality and even homosexuality.

Sat 20^th July – The Gift of Objectivity

A major role of the father is to provide objectivity for his child. This sounds a simple statement but has profound implications. Fathers are often far too busy to spend prime time with their kids. They may be unable to show affection or they may have been so crippled by criticism as they grew up that they lack the capacity to encourage. All too often after a break-up fathers are denied or given only restricted access to their children. The reasons may be well justified and discretion is necessary but the need of the child is to have paternal male energy as an essential component for their healthy emotional development. In the absence of this, that child is liable to emotional flooding through life and find it difficult to hold objectivity when difficult situations arise.

Sun 21^st July – Time Out and Re-Creation

The Bible opens with the Genesis story of God creating the universe in six days and then on the Sabbath we are told that he rested. Whether the term seven days represents thousands or even billions of years is not important. The point is that God took time for rest and recreation. If God the father had his time out, then His son in today’s gospel seems to have had more difficulty in managing his time.

The apostles had just returned and were full of excitement from what would appear to have been a successful missionary campaign. After Jesus heard reports of what they have said and done he says, ‘You must come away to some lonely place all by ourselves and rest for a while’. This was to escape the constant traffic of people coming and going which was so constant that the apostles didn’t even have time to look after their own needs. So together they get into a boat and aim themselves for peace and tranquillity in some lonely place. Their attempts are doomed from the start, the people are able to see where the boat is heading and they get there first. Rather than turn the boat around and play a game of hide and seek with the crowds Jesus seizes the opportunity to teach his apostles a profound lesson on the tenderness of God for his people. Not only is it possible for them to hear God in the quiet and silence, He is also to be heard in the urgent cries of his people. Yet Finding a balance is always needed.

One of the hardest words in the English language to learn is the word ‘no’. The urgent demands of life keep coming at us, and as the pace of life gets faster we are always in danger of trying to be all things to all people and losing sight of our own needs, and who we are in the process. An old Indian saying goes ‘If I can’t hear your ‘no’ then I don’t think much of your ‘yes’’. Those who never say ‘no’ fear that others are not going to like them, but in reality such persons are not respected any more than a doormat gets respected. In fact, the best way to improve the quality of what you do agree to is to use the word ‘no’ a little more.

The reason I know this so well is because of having learnt it the hard way. Ten years ago I suffered from a serious burnout episode that was directly related to not taking care of my own needs. Now with extra burdens of responsibility and being older I really have to be careful that I don’t fall into that hell of torment again. At this stage I am three times busier than when I was thirty, but I don’t see that as a virtue, or something to be proud of. Being too busy can be a way of running away from ourselves.

Especially for parents with small children, to have time for yourselves as a couple, and as individuals, demands a huge level of discipline. With kids involved in so many activities, many families could do with their own taxi service. For mothers to get away and stop being mother for a few hours let alone for an overnight takes a lot of courage. Many can’t do it, they just feel too guilty, but is it really a good for the kids in the long term, since they eventually must stand on their own two feet. Some years back I tended an old lady of 90 who was way ahead of her time and she used to say, ‘It’s a selfish mother that doesn’t take care of her own needs.’ There’s wisdom in that.

There is a story of a woman who was recovering from a serious illness. She dreamt that she had died and was met by an angel who asked her who she was? ‘I am the wife of the mayor of my town’, she replied proudly. The angel answered, ‘I didn’t ask whose wife you were, I asked, who are you?’ Again she replied, ‘I am the mother of six wonderful children’. Again, the angel replied, ‘I didn’t ask whose mother you are, I asked, who are you?’ Again, she replied, ‘I am a committed Christian who attends church regularly and I am very charitable towards those in need’. Yet again the angel replied, ‘I didn’t ask what religion you belonged to or what good you do, I asked, who are you?’ After seven attempts she woke up, but still hadn’t answered the question. The rest of her life was spent in search of the answer.

To move beyond being the mother or father, the provider the hard worker, the bust one is important for all of us, and the only way not to lose our identity in all that we get caught up in is to come apart and rest, to take time for ourselves. That’s why holidays are so important and its why we use the word re-creation it literally means the time we take to re-create ourselves. As anyone who works with tools knows the time we take to sharpen our chisels and look after our implements is never time wasted. On the other hand if we didn’t sharpen our chisels we would waste a lot of time using blunt tools.

Our worth as individuals can never be defined by what we do, because there will come a day when we may be able to do very little. To be a human being comes before being a human doer; it’s when we don’t get that balance right that we get into trouble and the time out we didn’t choose to take may no longer be an option, but be forced upon us. Usually it’s our bodies that eventually say ‘no’ because we have been saying ‘yes’ to more than is good for us, for far too long.

Mon 22^nd July – Closer in death than life

While working with a young woman, father energy became palpable in the room. I am not a psychic, but it definitely felt as if he were very present. This man had been a serious alcoholic and often had left his family hungry. He had never been emotionally present, or even physically present, for most of their special events. This woman shared the awareness of his presence so I suggested that he might have something to ask or say to her.  She sensed deeply that he wanted to apologize and needed to ask her forgiveness not just from herself, but also on behalf of her entire family. This she was willing to grant freely and later he seemed to be saying that he needed to tell her that during life he had been totally lost in his addiction. This was a cover up for a brutalized childhood and that she had never known him as he really was, or as he would have liked her to know him. He wanted to reassure her that in death she could get to know him as he really was and no longer through the distortion of alcohol.