Tag Archives: compensation

Maybe They Won’t Notice!

I recapitulate another memory of the bad girl, the imp inside me. I am walking with three boys and my cousin. I am eleven and my cousin is a bit younger. The boys are a year or so older than me. We’ve all known each other our entire lives. We’ve played together since early childhood.

Gotta’ love it, the nature in all of us!
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

One of the boys nervously asks, “Do you know what this means?” He makes a rude gesture with his finger. Another of the boys asks if we know what fucking is. The others laugh, but I can see they are all very nervous. I pretend I don’t know what they are talking about, though I know everything. My cousin says she doesn’t know and I don’t think she does, she’s telling the truth. One of the boys pulls out a condom. I see it quivering in his shaking hand. “What about this? Do you know what this is?” I have never seen one before so when I answer that I don’t know, it’s actually the truth.

We are on our way down to the swimming pool. It’s nestled in the valley, a mile or so down from the mountain where we all live. We spend our summers there, swimming in the pool and sometimes the nearby pond, boating and fishing too. There is a cold mountain stream that runs near the pool. There are copperheads and other large snakes around the stream and up the slopes of the mountain that is covered with pines, maples, and oaks. Tall pines surround the pool too. We ride our bikes down or walk, sometimes a parent will give us a ride, but the pool is unsupervised, no lifeguard. Mothers come with small children during the day, but often it’s just a bunch of kids swimming, diving, playing. The fathers come down to swim after work.

Today is cloudy and cool, late in the day, perhaps early summer or late spring. No one is at the pool. It’s totally deserted, just the five of us, talking and joking around. One of the boys asks me if I will go over to the outhouse and dressing room with him, so we can try out the condom.

“No, of course not!” I say.

They try a few other tactics to get us to do something with them, but we stick together, wary of their eager energy. Finally they come up with the idea that we, my cousin and I, should swim naked for them. Skinny dipping! The thrill-seeking imp in me immediately agrees, the ecstasy of it, the cold water on bare skin, the heart-pounding experience of doing something forbidden! I just can’t say no, and my cousin is equally daring and agreeable.

We take off our clothes and run and jump into the pool with a shriek as we hit the cold water. Like three movie directors the boys stand beside the pool and instruct us. Do headstands, flips, back flips, they say. They laugh excitedly, telling us to go slower, so they can get a better look. My cousin and I know exactly what we are doing and what they are looking at, what we have between our legs, that place where the condom goes. They egg us on, but we soon realize that we have the power. They are mesmerized.

I don’t remember how long we stay in the pool somersaulting and showing off our twats, all of us laughing and having fun, but suddenly the boys take off running. With a surprised yell they scatter, running toward the stream, leaving us girls alone. We had been making so much noise that we didn’t hear a couple approaching, the parents of some friends of ours, out for an early evening walk. Suddenly there they are, standing near enough to the pool to see what we are doing. How long have they been there? Panic sets in. The looks on their faces says it all: BAD!

They do not leave. They go and sit on a bench by the pond. My cousin and I are naked captives in the pool, our clothes lying on the ground some distance away. We will have to get out of the water in front of this man and woman. We discuss how we are going to do it. We agree that “really fast” is the only way. We decide we will jump out of the pool, run to our clothes, grab them and run to the dressing room.

“Maybe they won’t notice,” I say, ever the hopeful one. “Maybe they didn’t really see that we’re naked. Maybe they didn’t notice.”

We do as discussed, hop out of the pool, run and grab our clothes and dash over to the dressing rooms. The man and woman sit on the bench and stare, their faces stiff with the kind of disgusted look that only disapproving parents can have. Of course they see us! We fumble with our clothes. Soaking wet, and no towels to dry ourselves with, we pull them on as best we can. We decide we will nonchalantly saunter past the disapproving couple, for they sit smack in our path, blocking the only way out. We are not about to head toward the stream and all its snakes as the boys had.

“We will be calling your parents,” they say, glaring at us as we walk by, as we say a friendly hello, as if nothing has happened, as if they did not just see us naked, as if they did not see what we were doing with those boys.

My cousin and I walk slowly, reluctant to face what we know is coming. Maybe, if we delay, our fate will shift, but we both know we have to face the music. My cousin’s house is closest so we go there. The news has already reached her mother. She is waiting as we walk in the door. She has company, so the company also knows what happened. One of the guests is a woman I have long admired, independent, tough, not physically attractive but I have always sensed her beautiful soul. One day I overheard her say, “What a beautiful child!” Now I am no longer her beautiful child. I am a monster. I am embarrassed and ashamed that she now knows the true me.

“What am I going to do with you kids? What next?” my aunt yells, but we see that she is laughing behind her stern look. “Get out of my sight,” she says.

We go to my cousin’s bedroom. That wasn’t too bad, her mother has a sense of humor, but my mother is different. I am reluctant to go home. The phone rings. It’s my mother, yelling at me to come home immediately. I can hear the cold, controlled anger in her voice. My cousin looks at me with big sad eyes.

“Uh oh, you’re going to get it, aren’t you?”

I walk home as slowly as possible, but eventually I arrive. I am ushered up to my room by both of my parents. They are dressed for the evening, my father in a suit, my mother in a flowery summer dress, ready to attend a party in the neighborhood. My mother is livid. I am spoiling her evening! I am an embarrassment! I am a disappointment! I am a stupid girl! Why do I do these things! How is she ever going to live this one down! What is she to tell people!

I am in tears, apologetic. I know she hates me, my mother hates me. Then I notice that my father, sitting on my bed, is covering his mouth. His shoulders are shaking. He’s trying to hold back laughter! He gestures to me to keep quiet. He doesn’t want my mother to see him laughing!

My mother delivers the punishment. I am grounded. I am not to leave my room for the next three weeks. I am never to play with my cousin again! My father shrugs his shoulders and with a goofy look on his face follows my mother out the door. I hate my mother! What a bitch! The boys don’t get into trouble; they get away with being boys. Girls are troublemakers.

I really was not allowed to play with my cousin after that. I would sneak off with her anyway, but I always got caught. My mother would find out, somehow, where I was. She’d call on the phone, anger in her voice, or she’d just show up and drag me home. It was an effort on her part to both keep me safe from my inner imp and to save her own face.

What’s the lesson in this recapitulation? There’s always a lesson.

Even as the imp inside me led me on another harebrained adventure, she also came to my rescue. The skinny dipping and the subsequent discovery by the man and woman saved me from some other fate, perhaps being raped by three oversexed boys. It’s interesting to note that though I was, at the time, being sexually abused by a grown man and his cohorts, whom I could rarely deflect from their evil intent, and amnesiac to that side of my life, I had no problem saying no to these boys. Perhaps it was the experience of discovering normal preadolescent sexual energy, power, and excitement that spurred me to engage in precocious exploration. The other side of me, the abused girl side, was deeply hidden, unconscious inside me. She never showed up alongside the imp.

These boys were friends. We’d all been naked together in the past, playing caveman and cavewoman in the woods, building lean-tos and acting out what we thought were primitive man woman relationships. But those were more innocent times. We were all younger then, exploring our bodies in childish, nonthreatening ways, showing each other what we had inside our pants but never really intruding on each other, except with minor touching. Innocent enough, but I instinctively sensed something else going on this time.

The boys, though gawky and nervous, were looking for some other experience, a willing participant to try out intercourse for the first time with. I was not willing to go there with them, but I also had to accept the power in the pussy, so to speak—oops that imp again!—for once in the water it was very clear to me that I was the one who was really in control. I had what they wanted. It was a personally powerful moment of acceptance of my female enticement. Even though I was not using it for sex, I was using it to control three boys who thought they wanted an experience of it. I was totally in control. My mother was right, I really was a bad girl, a dangerous imp.

I am once again thankful for the imp inside me who teaches me and instructs me as I make my way through life. As a child, under the dominance of my parents and their expectations, and as a child who was sexually abused, I nonetheless had other formative experiences throughout my childhood; the imp inside me made sure of that! She had a knack for showing up at just the right time, offering salvation and adventure, and I could never refuse. She continued to offer the thrills so badly needed as compensation for a traumatic childhood.

Beyond compensation, she led me into the normal unfolding of becoming a sexual being, discovering indeed the power of the pussy or, in the deepest sense, the power of the feminine—Yin, Female Nature. I am forever grateful.

A blog by J. E. Ketchel, Author of The Recapitulation Diaries

Shame On You!

I was way ahead of my time! Who knew salty chocolate would become so popular?
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Shame is multilayered and multifaceted. It may be aroused by the thoughtless, unfeeling actions of another, or taken on due to a distorted, untruthful view of the self, the world, and reality. It may be instigated by a part of the self that knows better but goes ahead and does something shameful anyway.

It might only show up occasionally, when one is reminded of something one has done, not done, or had done to one. It’s an amorphous, shadowy, dark thing that’s hard to shed, and even harder to reckon with. It’s a bit like wrestling with an invisible opponent, because who can really see it? Except when it shows up, it is largely nonexistent, but say the word, “shame,” and you can feel the red heat of it spreading like wildfire.

In the story I am about to relate, having to do with a death and a chocolate cake, my own actions led me to the awareness of a deeper part of myself, a self I was not fully aware of, a part that apparently wanted me to know of its existence. In deep shame, I discovered something about myself that was shocking, abhorrent, sinful, despicable and mean, the epitome of sinister—all living within me!

Last week I wrote about the thief who lives inside me. It’s funny but I never felt ashamed of her, nor did I suffer shame around her actions. She was pretty straightforward and known, active often enough. I knew of her, the opposite of my good side, as we lived pretty much side by side, navigating life together, making decisions and choices, trying to figure out how we were going to reconcile with each other. The image of a good angel on one shoulder and a bad angel on the other comes to mind, both of whom constantly vie for attention. What I write about today is more covert, darker, hidden in the recesses of my soul.

It was 1966. I was 14. A good family friend had died, a man, an artist whom had taken an interest in me for my artistic abilities. He had a wife and a daughter. The daughter was 13 years older than me and also an artist. I considered her to be a mentor. When I heard that the man had died I was sad and wanted to do something for the family. It was in my nature to be generous and giving to others, in small personal ways, sending letters, making paintings and drawings, giving little handmade gifts.

At the time of the funeral I was visiting my cousin. She and I were not invited to the funeral; no children allowed. It was to be a small affair with the mourners invited to the family home afterwards for refreshments. My aunt, my cousin’s mother, would be going to the funeral and to the gathering afterwards.

I suggested to my cousin that we bake a cake for the gathering. My aunt thought it was a very nice idea and agreed to bring it with her. My cousin didn’t really understand my need to do something for these people whom she had no personal connection with, as I did, but I insisted. I had to do something, and in the end she was willing to join me in the project. So we set about making a cake.

We picked a recipe for a chocolate cake made from scratch. I was in charge of reading the recipe while my cousin got the ingredients together and measured everything into the mixing bowl. Everything was going along well enough as we came to the last ingredient in the recipe.

“¼ cup of salt,” I read to my cousin.

“Are you sure? That sounds like a lot of salt,” she said. I looked again.

“No, that’s right,” I said, “¼ cup of salt.”

“Check again,” she said.

I did. I saw the same thing every time I looked at the list of ingredients in the recipe: ¼ cup of salt.

“Okay,” my cousin said, a little warily, “in it goes, ¼ cup of salt!”

We mixed everything together, poured it into a baking pan, licked the beaters, and gagged! It tasted horrible! Too much salt! I went back to the cookbook, sure I had gotten it right, only to discover that I had read it totally wrong! It actually only called for a ¼ teaspoon of salt! My dyslexia had screwed things up royally.

We didn’t have enough eggs to bake a new cake, nor did we have the time, as my aunt would soon be heading off. We made an executive decision to bake the cake and see if it improved with heat. No deal! What should have been a thick and fluffy Bundt cake came out as flat as a pancake, looking more like a brownie than the grand cake we had envisioned! We debated over whether to cut a piece and taste it to see if it had indeed improved with baking.

“Do you think anyone would notice,” my cousin asked, “if we just cut a little piece?”

“Yes,” I said, “it would spoil the whole cake. We can’t send a cake with a slice taken out of it. Let’s sprinkle it with confectionary sugar and just hope for the best. Maybe no one will notice.”

For good measure, I topped it off with some purple violets, picked from outside the kitchen door, poked into the center of the cake. When we sent it off it looked perfectly fine; though a thin, dense cake, it looked rich and dark.

For the rest of the day my cousin and I were in agony. Though we laughed hysterically and somewhat meanly at the thought of people actually eating it, gagging as we had, we also knew what we had done.

Would they actually serve it? Would anyone eat it? What would they do or say if it turned out to be as bad as we expected it to be? As generous and thoughtful as the gift of a cake had originally been, we knew we had decided to test the fates, that a part of us was willing to risk all for a bad cake!

It did not go well. My aunt returned and confronted us. No one could eat the terrible cake. Did we know we had made a bad cake? We pleaded and pretended ignorance. But we knew what we had done and we also knew we would have to live out the consequences of our decision.

The story of the bad cake did not end there. The widow wrote my cousin and I a note thanking us for sending the cake; it had meant a lot to her that we’d been so thoughtful. She had served it with whipped cream and berries, but no one could eat it. “Was that some kind of joke?” she wrote. When I read her note I could feel her pain. I could see her preparing to serve the cake, all dolled up with cream and berries, triumphantly placing it on the table next to the coffee and tea cups, a nice gift from two sweet young women, and I felt terrible.

I was old enough to know that my actions had hurt a family that was suffering greatly, people I truly liked and admired, people I really did care about. What I had done had put them in an awkward, uncomfortable, if not mortifying position at a time when they were deeply grieving the loss of their beloved husband and father. It was a cruel joke to play on anyone, because the truth was my cousin and I did treat it as a joke, and a very bad one at that.

I don’t think the story went much beyond that small group of people who actually tasted the cake or were present at the cake eating. I have no recollection of being scolded by my parents, as would surely have been the case had they known about it. But I did have to live with what I had done, with the sinister character who lived inside me and did mean things to other people.

As I recapitulate that day, I realize it was mostly my decision to send the cake off, clothed in its beautiful sugar and flowers, like a poison apple looking all shiny and delicious. I truly did want to be generous, but there was another part of me, an imp in me, who was angry for not being invited to the funeral. I understand now how she was compensating for my ego attitude that said I must be gracious and giving when in fact I was really pissed. A year later the same family had a wedding, the daughter got married, and once again, no kids invited. Once again I was pissed, though I did not make another cake!

I came to recognize and know this dark little imp better over the years, as she popped up often enough, a troublemaker, an energetic entity who lived inside me and was daring enough to do some pretty harebrained things. She pushed the envelope on many an occasion, challenging me to go beyond my normally good self, granting many exhilarating experiences in return, those blissful moments of highly intense energy like nothing else in the world, and her voice inside, goading me, saying, “Are you going to do it? Really? Come on, do it! Do it!”

Yikes, the shameful things I have done! And once done there were those deeply embarrassing consequences to contend with as well.

The imp inside me is still active and she can still lead me into bad places and many experiences that I would otherwise avoid. But I am thankful for her now, grateful for how she leads the way into those numinous experiences of joy and excitement, those exhilarating experiences of life that I would otherwise never have had the opportunity to taste. Oh, the lessons I have learned!

And I deal with the consequences of my actions in a more mature way now too, seeing how everything that I do, good and bad, offers something, is part of the whole package of who I am in this lifetime. It’s all  part of the grand unfolding of me and my life, leading me toward the greater fullness of who I really am, both good and bad.

When C. G. Jung had to face the impish side of himself he just allowed himself to cheat! He was known to cheat at all the games he played with his children, and even some adults. He couldn’t help himself!

If you want to achieve any kind of wholeness you really do have to live the fullness that you are!

Recapitulating the shame of it all,

Jan

A blog by Jan Ketchel

Author of The Recapitulation Diaries

Chuck’s Place: Compensation

Compensation is the action of balance. In everyday life, we work—we give of our energy and are compensated with wages. Hence our efforts are compensated or balanced by stored energy—money—that we are then freed to use as we see fit.

We are all guilty; we all compensate... - Art and Photo by Jan Ketchel
We all compensate…
– Art and Photo by Jan Ketchel

Psychologically, compensation operates as the balancing agent of the unconscious to our conscious decisions and actions. If we spend our day studious and bored, our dreams may compensate by taking us on faraway adventures. In this way our conscious life is compensated—balanced—by our unconscious adventures.

The more extreme our conscious attitude, the more extreme our unconscious compensation. If we insist on keeping ourselves in flighty behavior, the unconscious might compensate with a bad mood, a depression, or a physical fall, bringing us back to earth.

This same compensatory mechanism operates on the world stage. When the ruling attitudes become extreme in any direction they are compensated by a counter movement of equal and opposite energy that reacts in its own destructive wake.

If we accept the premise that the world is an interdependent whole, then outbreaks of behavior, such as the recent horrific tragedy in Paris, should be explored as a powerful compensation for an equally imbalanced ruling principle, not necessarily within Paris or France but within the prevailing governing attitudes of our times around the world.

I have often proposed in my writings that ISIS is not simply a coincidental acronym for the Goddess Isis, but in fact has become an agent of the dark side of that Goddess, constellated from the depths of the collective unconscious. This would suggest that the ruling powers of our world have gone so far from valuing the sacred feminine Mother Earth that she is now activated, from her destructive side, to bring down the ruling order.

As we face the reality of the condition of our world, where the earth and the environment—the purview of the Goddess—have been completely denigrated, threatened with extinction, it becomes clear how a wrathful Goddess might invoke such ruthless destructive retaliation upon civilization itself.

Of course, this compensation cannot be allowed. ISIS must be stopped. But how? The outrage evoked by the destruction caused by ISIS sounds an appropriate battle cry. Nations will join forces to defeat this devil. But how? Seal the borders? Too late and, furthermore, ISIS infects many homegrown disenfranchised youths who can find no meaning in the world as we know it, though they do find meaning in bringing it down. What battle plan for this insidious entity?

We must face the individual shadow to destroy the collective shadow... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
We must face the individual shadow to face the collective shadow…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Every individual is a hologram of the entire world. Each and every one of us, in the microcosm of our lives, has a ruling ego attitude that is being compensated by our unconscious forces. Each and every one of us must study our conscious decisions and behaviors. Where are we neglecting the true needs of the Goddess? How are we out of synch with Mother Nature?

Are we so obsessed with the digital world—which is a purely masculine abstraction—that we have lost touch with our physical bodies, our true nutritional and self-care needs?

Have we so abandoned our instinctual selves and instead turned ourselves over to the Goddess Amazon.com?

Have we so abandoned human eros and squeezed it into Match and Tinder?

Do we listen to the wisdom of our birthright—our dreams—or have we completely shifted our connection to wisdom to the great god Google?

Are we so enamored by the glitter of consumerism that we cover over true need with empty objects?

We must study the nature of compensation in our own lives. If we are ridden with anxiety, fear, compulsions, and moods, these are compensating clues as to the problems in our conscious ruling attitudes. If we can humbly see the one-sidedness of our ruling attitude and change it, we will change the wrathful compensation of the dark side of the Goddess within.

If the truth is that there are very painful feelings or inconvenient truths that our ego has been avoiding, resulting in dastardly unconscious compensations, if we then turn around and face the unfaceable—mourn a deeply imprisoned feeling, for instance—then we completely shift the inner balance.

If the ego can align itself with the true needs of the self, the Goddess Isis can usher in a renewal, a new stage of fertile creation and meaningful life.

That’s the compensation we must seek now, the compensation of renewal over destruction. We are all empowered, and charged, to arrive at proper compensation within ourselves. This is how we will change the world for the better.

Some day... a world of light... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Some day… a world of light…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Of course, there will be necessary responses to the intolerable violation of innocence in Paris. But if we are not careful we might find ourselves drawn into a purely scapegoat compensatory reaction that actually plays into and empowers the reach of the collective shadow that now threatens us.

If we collectively face the compensatory relationship within ourselves, we can shift the balance of the forces that threaten us and restore calm to the world. Ultimately, love is the key. Love rejects nothing. Love faces the truth, Love restores proper balance. Love is always the answer.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité,

Chuck