240200368

After having read hundreds of psychology and self-help books, attended a number of self realization and self transformational workshops and participated in years of private and group therapy I have come to believe there is no simple or quick solution to serious psychological problems that are the result of damaging relationships with one’s caretakers in early childhood. My journey has been a lifetime struggle to resolve serious wounds that were incurred in the first dozen years of my life. Neglect, abandonment, physical, sexual and emotional abuse from the people I first loved distorted my self-image, diverted my energies from career fulfillment and destroyed my ability to enjoy intimate relationships for a large portion of my life. Although sometimes I wonder what my life had would have been like had I had a more propitious environment which supported a comfortable realization of myself, I am not bitter about my journey. It is what it is. In every life I believe there is a call to the hero’s journey, an impulse to confront some challenge that draws one out of one’s comfort zone and enter a place of confusion and danger to achieve or acquire an important goal or gift. We can either accept that call or run away. I’ve tried both in my life. Luckily, however, from an early age I was inspired by exceptional individuals who left a record of their struggles to unearth and embrace aspects of their humanity that they had been disconnected from by the environments or the cultures they had been brought up in. More often than not these people were artists in one medium or another. Poets, playwrights, novelists, composers, choreographers and painters all hinted at, or outright acknowledged, more about the inner world of the human condition than was mirrored, modeled or mentioned in the house, school or church where I was raised. The artists that I stumbled upon helped me see that sadness, anger, fear as well as sexuality, love and joy were all natural and necessary feelings in the human experience. In these works of art I found a reflection of my innermost feelings that I was largely disconnected from because the adults that I looked to in my life were doing all they could to protect themselves from the vulnerability of these emotions through addictions and defenses of one sort or another. My first hero was Abraham Lincoln who I revered for freeing the slaves. But in the years that followed I began to see that the enslavement we were all subtly subjected to was to a picture of life painted by the frightened that relegated the vulnerabilities and aspirations of our deepest humanity to the prison of addictions, self destructiveness and personal stagnation. That is when I began to see that artists armed with the greatest weapon, the creative impulse, were waging war against the tyranny of self deception. Of course many of these artists suffered in their and for their struggles but it did not make them any the less heroic in my eyes. They were not perfect but I began to see that imperfection was an inevitable and intrinsic corollary to the experience of a truly human life. I wanted to become an artist because I saw that they had a tool that would help me unearth, they had a compass to help me navigate, they had a weapon that would help me fight, my way into my own heart. In the years since, when I haven’t been incapacitated by depression, I have looked to know, embrace and accept myself through the writing of songs and poetry, and the painting of pictures that come from deep within my soul. I also have written a memoir of my own idiosyncratic journey towards healing and wholeness in the hopes that it might resonate with others that have felt equally alienated from their environment or challenged to embark on the heroe’s journey to embrace their life. The memoir is called Forgive Myself, a title taken from a poem by William Butler Yeats called Dialogue of Self and Soul. The last verse of the poem says: “I am content to follow to its source Every event in action, or in thought; Measure the lot to forgive myself the lot! When such as I cast out remorse So great a sweetness flows into the breast We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blest.” I have a website where my art can be viewed and more can be learned of my book. It is www.bruce-morse-gallery-of-dreams.com or brucemorsegalleryofdreams.org. Click here for the Bruce Morse Gallery of Dreams
..

  I edited my profile with Thomas Myspace Editor V4.4 (www.strikefile.com/myspace)   I edited my profile with Thomas Myspace Editor V4.4 (www.strikefile.com/myspace)
View my page on Book Marketing Network
View my page on Inner Child Healing