Once upon a time, on an island far far away, a little girl named Dolly lived with her Dad. Dolly so loved the ocean because the other little girls on her island were mean and she wanted to sail across the ocean to get to a new land.

One day when she was old enough, her Dad taught her how to make a sailboat and said "If you want to sail across the ocean and get away, then you have to build your own boat."

Dolly said: "Okay, I can do that."

Her Dad didn't like the ocean and never ever made a sailboat before for himself or his daughter. So he did not actually make a boat for her. Rather, he showed her how to do it herself. He taught her about what materials one can use to make a boat, how sails work, about the wind, about how to navigate with a compass and all of that. Dolly paid close attention and to everything her Dad taught her. Then she started making her boat. After one week, she had her boat made. She was so happy. She told her Dad she was done. He said "So are you off to the new land now?" Dolly said: "Yup, Mmmm hmmm."

They went down to the ocean, she got in the boat, and her Dad pushed her out into the ocean. And off she went. She went about 50 feet when the boat started sinking. Dolly had to climb out of the boat and quickly swim back to shore.

Dolly was sad. She said "I spent a whole week making that boat and it didn't work! A whole week!"

Her Dad said "Well, you will learn what you did wrong and next time you will build a better boat."

So, Dolly went to work on the next boat. She realized that since her first boat sank that there must have been holes in it. She made the first boat out of bamboo. She was very clever and decided she was going to fill the gaps in the bamboo with something to keep the water out. She looked around to see what she had available, and decided she was going to lather on lotion in between all the seams.

Dolly was all proud of herself. She was smart because she even used lotion that was made with lots of oils and would not wash away with the water.

With her boat all made, Dolly and her Dad again went down to the ocean. She got in her boat, and her Dad pushed her out. And off she went. This time, the boat went out 500 feet before it again started sinking.

Dolly couldn't believe it. She had to again get out, and again swim back.

Dolly was a really good swimmer, so it was really not that big a deal.

She came back to the shore and she said to her Dad: "I spent a whole month making that boat and it didn't work! A whole month!"

Her Dad said "Well, you will learn what you did wrong and next time you will build a better boat."

So, Dolly went to work on the next boat. She figured out that the lotion wasn't enough to keep the water out. So, she looked around to see what could fix it. They didn't have much, but she found some beef jerky. She thought that if she filled the bamboo gaps with beef jerky and then the lotion that it would make a really good seal and that would work.

With her third boat all made, Dolly and her Dad again went down to the ocean. Again her Dad pushed her out. And off she went. This time, the boat went out 2 miles before it again started sinking.

Dolly swam all the way back in just a few minutes and said to her Dad: "I spent a whole year making that boat and it didn't work! A whole year!"

Her Dad said "Well, maybe you need to do something really different."

Dolly said: "Like what? If I keep trying to make new boats and failing it will take my whole life and I'll never get off this island."

Her Dad said: "You are your own boat. Did you ever wonder why you can swim so fast and so far?"

Dolly said: "No."

Her Dad said: "Because you are a mermaid. You can swim to any land you want, and come back again and visit me."

And this is what Dolly did. She lathered herself with lotion, ate some beef jerky and then swam away.

This story was written "free form" (not edited and just written as if it were being spoken). It was done on the same day as the art piece I wrote about in Unity. It was for my daughter who loves me to tell her creative stories. Recently, I have been asking her to come up with three items she wants in the story, which makes it a bit easier for me to write them. Maybe in a follow-up post I will provide some context. But, for now, I will let the story stand for itself.

Welcome to Activity No. 15 of the Expressive Arts Carnival for the month of January 2012. Thank you to all who participate and a special welcome if you are new!

This month's theme:

If you have questions on this theme, please ask them in the comments.

Entries are due by Wednesday, January 25, 2012 and will be published shortly thereafter.

You may also feel free to send me a link to a page hosted on your own site (or blog), if you have one. If you do not have a blog post specifically on your entry, and you do have a blog, please tell me if you would like a link to your blog in the carnival. It is important to repeat that nobody is required to have a website in order to participate.

To submit an entry use this link to e-mail: paul@mindparts.org

Please use "EXPRESSIVE ARTS" in the subject heading to help me keep track of submissions. Every submission will receive an acknowledgement of receipt. If you do not receive one within a day or two, then please follow up with me.

If you have questions or need clarifications, direct them to me by e-mail or ask in the comments here.

I am still working at trying to find ways to deal with what I have termed a psychological suicide attempt. I keep telling myself that if one is lucky to survive such attempts, there is the opportunity for recovery and healing.

After my pre-Christmas hospital stay, I arrived at a solution that I needed something new in therapy. I felt I needed new forms of expression, that I had outgrown the art and music and writing and now needed to focus on physical means of expression.

I find myself back in the hospital again prompted by a similar "attempt." The fact that I only managed to stay out of the hospital for three days has compelled me to take a close look inside.

On the surface, it seems that I am doing all the right things. So, it was natural for me to seek an additional tool or pursue a new direction.

I quite quickly found here that I had not at all outgrown art and music and writing as expressions that lead to learning and healing, but that I was doing them in an isolation of sorts. I would not at all go so far as to say I was merely going through the motions. But it has been something akin to that. I thought I could get all the healing benefits from what I used to do, but with significantly less effort. What made it hard for me was that it was rather easy to convince myself that there was no decrease at all in effort.

I will take my paper journals as an example. I have done art (and writing) in paper-based journals for years, but my output has dropped to nearly zero for well over a year. I had found a new tool. I used electronic system maps. Additionally, the monthly word counts in my private electronic journal began to jump significantly. Looking at this globally, the effort was merely shifted. But, really, what had found an easier way to work that gave me far less information and was far less helpful and far less healing.

My therapist brought me a couple of my older journals from a few years ago, and I was just immediately floored. The 120 pages in each were filled in a matter of weeks, with art, with statements, with dialog, questions, answers, pain, joy, anger. There was a huge amount of information and expression. Most of it was extremely hard to see and read. And every page was eye opening.

I realized that I was not doing that now. So, I decided to dedicate more of myself to this type of work. I know that means not just here in the hospital, but out in my regular life. And I also know that may require some sacrifices.

Yesterday, on a weekend day without any groups, I was here with a friend I have known for a long time. We were talking about using art as a means of expression and healing. We decided to do an "art therapy" group together. I came up with the directive: "Draw about your major obstacle facing you right now."

I drew about the divide between the two "camps" of me.

In the "left camp" are the parts of me who are very comfortable with all the healing language. We know what those words are. We use them all the time in therapy. The left has seen enormous growth. There has been a huge surge in functionality. I am able to juggle work and family and therapy. I have achieved major accomplishments at work that I thought I would never achieve again. I have become completely reliable at home, and taken on more and more in my community. Who can have a problem with that? The left paints a very nice picture for the world that is "socially acceptable" and "socially appreciated." Of course, it is very appealing for me and easy to use that growth as the measure of my progress.

If the "left camp" was the totality of who I am or even the great majority of who I am, there would really not be a problem. But, it is a fact of my life that there is an enormous "right camp" that needs to be attended to at least as much as the left. And it has not been. The result of such complete focus on the "left camp" lead to huge jealousy and anger from the right camp, and that lead to a serious lack of safety.

The obstacle, for me, is getting some communication and collaboration over that divide and over that bridge. The path is the art. The expression.

In the image, the "right camp" is straining against the river. Overflowing. Looking for a way across. Trying to communicate. There is huge effort from the right. I know it is easy to say that the actions of this camp are so harmful and hard to imagine that they want any help. Our focus has become only about stopping the actions. But that is an approach they cannot understand. It is a mismatch of language.

The only way to heal is to give the "right camp" a path. A new outlet. Or a new lease on old outlets. By the "left camp" being more accepting and understanding that the "right camp" is as much a part of us as any other. The irony in all of this, is that the "left camp" fully knows life is not perfect. The left expends so much energy to keep everything contained and looking good and strong.

Balance was my word for 2011. In many ways, there has been balance this year. But the balance has been so precarious. The balance came at a huge cost as it was achieved merely through division.

For 2012, we need a new word. Balance is still the goal, it always will be, but we will achieve it through unity. For me, unity does not mean we will all be one. Unity means more about being on the same team. United. Working on the same goal. Supporting each other. Harmony.

I have hurt myself, sometimes quite seriously, many times. It is difficult to rank serious self-harm and suicidal events because one must take into account both the physical and psychological damage. But while there is a good deal of subjectivity involved, there is no question that what I did to myself last week ranks up there as among the most serious in my lifetime.

Physical damage is what most use to rank such events because it is quantifiable. Like many others, I have taken dozens of overdoses over the years. Two of them were clearly different from all the rest. They were the ones which were especially calculated. They involved taking many times the lethal dose. And they were preceded by taking sedatives so that I would not be able to change my mind and go to anyone for help afterwards. Those were obviously serious physically and I was lucky to have survived them many years ago.

Hurting myself in the present often involves recreating the past by finding others to hurt me, either virtually or in real-life. This has gone on for years, is often an instinctive response, and is something I am ashamed of. It has been damaging because I have perpetuated the abuse done to me and has led to all sorts of problems. What makes it difficult is that most of the problems are psychological and comparatively easier to hide.

As I have healed, the more I appreciate the extent of the psychological damage of this kind of self harm. To put it into some context, long ago when parts of me were much more separated, these self harm events were more isolated. While it undoubtedly caused psychological damage, those hurt parts had little or no understanding of where their distress was coming from.

Without question, increased awareness and internal communication—whether one has dissociated identities or not—are necessary components to healing and tools to help keep us safe. But there are no guarantees of safety. When safety is breached, the increased awareness leads to a totally different perspective of the effects of this type of self abuse.

What happened last week was arguably, for me by my own scale, the most serious event of its kind ever by many measures. To call it self harm or self abuse is not even adequate. Self harm was the terminology I used a decade ago. Self abuse was the terminology I began using a few years ago. What happened last week was a psychological suicide attempt. I think it is important for me to be as precise as possible and not cloak what happened with more polite terminology.

A couple days ago, I did an analysis of both the events and feelings which has led me to label what happened in such a unambiguous way. While a lot of the actual events are lost or in flashes, I have enough information to know that what happened was in a totally different class from past events. I also have hard data. I had numerous entries in my private journal, text messages, and phone logs in the hours leading up to what happened. I have a perspective that is much clearer than any similar event before.

But the saddest piece comes not from the actual harmful events. Not from what was done to my body or done to my psyche.

The plan from the night before was to be admitted to the hospital, where I am now. I had become too unstable, too fragmented, and too much at risk. I told my therapist I needed some time to tie up some loose ends at work and do some last minute preparations. I was to be in hospital admissions by 6PM. That was the agreement I made.

It turned out that I was not grounded enough to be trusted with such an agreement or such an amount of time on my own.

I know there was internal conflict about getting hurt that day. That conflict usually is what keeps me safe. But there was very little sense of reality and no sense of ground. And, so, "safety" and "getting hurt" existed as their own isolated parallel threads. That dynamic of polar opposites existing simultaneously increased the safety risk manyfold.

At one point, I was at a tibetan arts store to get my wife, who is into yoga, a Christmas gift. Amidst all the confusion and fragmentation, at 1:45PM I wrote these words in my journal: "Healing. Went to the tibetan store for a present. Big shift now towards safety. But confusion and conflict too." That nearly led to a change of course to not get hurt. But it was not enough.

At the store, I also searched for a gift for my therapist. I thoroughly explored the shop and what I found for her was a compassion stone. It is a small stone from India with the "Om mani padme hum" mantra on compassion in Tibetan script . This is sad because it is proof that there were enormous coexisting efforts to be safe and also to be hurt.

While it certainly feels like my "gift" to my therapist is tainted, I hope we can take from this something positive.

This stone, then, obviously has critical significance. It perhaps should sit in my therapist's office, or be accessible to us. We should use it as a reminder of how the desperate effort to be safe and compassionate was destroyed—within minutes.

For me, that stone will probably be my most important icon in the world. It is something tangible from that horrible day. It will mean more to me than the medical records I have from the major overdoses. More than poems I have written from long ago about sad events and abuse. More than any art work I have made. Even more than records I have from the Catholic Church.

That stone represents the fact that I made a choice. That stone embodied all of my hope. It embodied all of my compassion. And I, and I alone, made the choice to destroy all of that.

I will never forget that.

And now I have to pick up the pieces and recreate what I have destroyed.

My records say I wrote this poem in 1993, nearly 19 years ago. It is incredibly difficult for me to realize that so long has past. But it has.

I learned three huge lessons that I could not possible have had any perspective on back then.

First, that only I can rescue myself. I probably had heard that many times, but it had absolutely no meaning for me. Now, I know I can have help, and often a lot of it. And while, in the poem, I found my own arms useless, ultimately I end up in a far better place when I am holding myself.

Second, back then I only saw undesirable parts of myself as enemies. This did not come up in the poem, but this was a fact of life for me. I had zero compassion for myself. As compassion grew, the drive to keep parts isolated from one another lessened.

Third, that it is possible to cultivate hope. I was totally lost back then, had zero hope, and clearly saw myself mostly as a victim and not empowered.

These three are tightly coupled and I have come to believe that these are the main ingredients needed to heal. At least that seems to be the case for myself.

I suppose what I wrote about back then was the best I could do: hold on, without knowing why, even though I thought there was no point to it.

As I reflect on what I wrote so long ago, I do have a sense that I have come a long way. But many of the same struggles remain. I will often find myself in a state where every word of this poem is an accurate representation of the present-day moment. But what is different now is that it does not remain that way.

While it was undoubtedly not a good position to be so constantly in a state of hopelessness, it was sort of comfortable for me in a sad kind of way. Now there is a new challenge, namely the delicate dance between hopefulness and hopelessness.

In order to progress in my healing, I have to face inconsistencies, conflicts, and dilemmas head on. That is the friction of healing I often write about. It is the hard work of healing. And that hard work is not optional.

Sure, I can be knocked down, and that happens all the time. But now when I get up it is often with purpose. I now know why I fight. I have long thought that I fight because of my wife and kids. Of course that is part of it. But I truly fight for myself. I fight to heal.