Chapter 1 | How It All Began

From Untangling: How You Can Transform What’s Impossibly Stuck
by Barbara McGavin & Ann Weiser Cornell

Published August 15, 2024

It was September 1994, and we—Barbara and Ann—were about to lead several Focusing workshops in the softly rolling hills of Devon, England, and the lush green of County Wicklow, Ireland. We had become friends through our shared interest in Focusing, and now we were going to teach together. But there were some important things we didn’t know about each other.

Ann didn’t know that clever, competent Barbara struggled with feeling hopelessly inadequate and inferior no matter what she accomplished. She didn’t know Barbara lived in fear of being knocked off her precarious perch by debilitating depression and excoriating self-criticism.

Barbara didn’t know that cheerful, friendly Ann was getting drunk three or four nights a week and telling herself that this was normal, while at the same time anxiously worrying about whether she might actually have a serious problem.

We each struggled silently and not very successfully with these painful issues, even though, as international experts in a healing personal growth process, we were supposed to have our own lives pretty well in order.

But soon, for both of us, everything was going to change…

Ann

On September 12, 1994, the very first thing I did when I got off the flight from California to England was to buy a bottle of wine. I made my way to Bath, where Barbara and I met up and had dinner together, and then I said I needed an early night. I lied. The truth was that I wanted to get back to my room at the B&B and be alone with my wine. By the time I went to bed, the bottle was two-thirds empty.

The next day, Barbara took me on a sightseeing trip to the nearby city of Wells. The cathedral was magnificent, and the area around it was charming. As we were walking back to the car, we passed a community theater at the edge of town. I pointed out to Barbara that they were putting on Trial by Jury and The Pirates of Penzance, my two favorite operettas by Gilbert and Sullivan. But I couldn’t even imagine that I could come back to Wells later to see them. Instead, as we passed a wine store, I excused myself and went in to buy another bottle.

The following morning I was on my own. I decided to go to Glastonbury. I walked on the Tor, visited the ruined abbey where King Arthur and Queen Guinevere are said to be buried, and sat by the Chalice Well. It was a lovely day.

After lunch, a voice in my head started up, saying, “Now let’s get back to the room and drink.” Another voice countered it with disagreements and anxious worries. They made a familiar cacophony, those two voices—an argument that could only be silenced by getting drunk.

Trying to escape from that inner argument, I found myself in a bookstore. Unusually for me, I roamed the aisles restlessly, not seeing any book that attracted me. When my eye fell on a book about alcoholism, I picked it up. As I turned to its self-diagnosis questionnaire, my thought was, “I’ll prove to myself I’m not an alcoholic—and then I can go to my room and drink in peace.”

I started down the list of questions… and I saw myself in every word. Do you buy ahead to protect the supply? Um, yes. Do you gulp to get high faster? Yes to that too. Obsessing about drinking? Just what I’m doing right now. Drinking alone so that no human relationship would get in the way of my relationship with the alcohol? I had to answer yes to every question.

I stood in the bookstore with my whole life spinning around me. The argument had ended. Now what was I going to do? I couldn’t just go back to my room and drink. But it felt like I had lost my best friend, and I had no idea what would take its place.

Then I had a wild notion. It was almost as if the idea came from another version of me. “If I were a different person,” it went, “I would figure out a way to go to Wells and see those Gilbert and Sullivan plays.”

And that is what I did. By 8 PM I was in Wells, filled with delight and joy, watching the plays I love performed with all the verve and spirit of a community troupe… and I wasn’t missing drinking in my room at all. For the moment, it seemed I was free at last.

But as every person who is addicted to something knows, stopping is only the beginning.

The next day I woke up full of shame, uncertainty and doubt. Barbara and I drove to the retreat center near Exeter to teach the first of our workshops. I got up the courage to confess to her how often I had been drinking in the evening to get drunk, that now I had stopped, and that I felt terribly ashamed and untrusting of myself. I felt I had been fooling myself for years… and I wasn’t quite sure anymore what to trust.

Barbara said, “Why don’t we do some Focusing?”

Barbara

When Ann told me what she was going through I was moved by the obvious pain she was in. Focusing hadn’t made a difference with Ann’s drinking, but it had helped in so many other areas of our lives. Maybe together we could discover how to make it work with this as well.

In every free moment when we weren’t teaching—early morning, after lunch, in the evening—we traded Focusing sessions. After every session, I made notes on what I was noticing in our process. Each pattern I saw generated a host of further questions and avenues to explore.

Ann saying she had been fooling herself got me thinking. It’s common to speak like that—“I have been fooling myself”—but really, who is fooling whom? Were there parts of her operating outside her awareness? I was pretty sure there was a part of her that still wanted to drink. Would it be a good idea for her to get to know that part better?

Ann

Barbara encouraged me to turn toward the part that wanted to drink. I could definitely feel it was still there. I started to realize there was also a part that was terribly anxious and wanted to control the drinking part, to lock it up and never let it see the light of day. There was also something else I could feel that wasn’t either one of those parts. It was like some kind of “me.” It felt like a “me” that could be an attentive and compassionate listener to each part without taking sides.

Being an attentive and compassionate listener with both the part that wanted to drink and the part that wanted to control it, I was able to learn more about them. I discovered that my drinking had started as a way to be close to my alcoholic father after he died, when I lacked the inner resources and support to grieve for him. It was also a way to numb and distract myself from the complicated feelings of grief for a father I still felt ambivalent about.

I also learned, to my surprise, that drinking was a way to access qualities that had been shut down in my childhood: being spontaneous, being creative, being sensual, being goofy. As a kid, I’d been scolded and shamed for my exuberant liveliness, so I’d covered it over with being “good,” being cooperative, following the rules. Drinking was a way to break free for a few hours, but button everything up again the next day.

As Barbara and I continued to work together, I could feel myself being more expressive, more spontaneous, more exuberant, without needing to drink to get there. I was amazed. I thought that addressing my drinking issue would only bring more feelings of shame and humiliation, but I was actually becoming joyfully and fully myself.

It was like expecting to find coal in my Christmas stocking and instead finding jewels. There was treasure—the treasure of regaining my aliveness.

Barbara

I found what we were doing absorbing and fascinating. I took the opportunity to do Focusing on my own tough stuff. I was sure there were hidden parts doing things in me too, and I wanted to know what was going on.

I remembered the inner work I had already done on my own suicidal depression, and how I had created a compassionate inner relationship with the part of me that wanted to die. I no longer felt the pull to escape my life through death. But there were still times when I sank into a dark depression with a painful sense that I wasn’t worth the space I was taking up. I knew I still needed to give more caring attention to those kinds of feelings in me. It would be great if that too could change.

Our sessions grew deeper and deeper. We found we needed to develop whole new ways of being with our confused and confusing parts. The work itself demanded a stronger and more precise kind of inner relationship. After every session, we would pull out our notebooks to capture what had happened and what we learned about our process.

When we engaged with our toughest issues, using everything we were learning, something started to happen. Whatever seemed to be an unbearable, shameful problem—wanting to drink or eat, feeling blocked about doing something, being obsessed with someone, feeling inadequate and useless—turned out to show precisely where the riches of our vibrant aliveness were to be found. It was like a treasure map.

The recovery of our inner treasure—our aliveness that had been frozen and abandoned—occurred over and over in those intensive few weeks.

Although we were already noticing some extraordinary changes in ourselves, it all felt new and not yet solid. We thought we should keep what we were finding to ourselves until we felt more sure about it. But our workshop participants kept asking us questions we could only answer by drawing on our newest discoveries. We would look at each other, wondering if we should say something, but it just didn’t feel right to hold back what we were discovering, raw and incomplete as it was.

Our participants were eager for more and kept asking us when we would do a retreat on this work. By the following summer, we held our first workshop based on these new discoveries. We called it Treasure Maps to the Soul.

We also started writing this book. But there was so much we didn’t yet know. We needed to teach and work with others, do our own work, and learn a lot more before we would be ready to share it with the rest of the world.

Over the years, we started to call the impossibly difficult life issues Tangles. Hence we call the method we developed for engaging with those issues Untangling.

We have created a theoretical model to describe what is happening in Tangles, but the theory didn’t come first. Experiential process—ours and our students’—came first. Our amazing and courageous students have given us many rich opportunities to develop the Untangling method and theory. At every workshop we continue to learn so much more about what Tangles are, how they form and how they can untangle.

In this book, you will find stories of what we did and how we changed. Ann’s struggle with drinking is now far in the past, and so are other Tangles that turned out to be connected with that: a block to being authentic and a terror of interpersonal conflict. Today, she feels a calm, balanced confidence in just about all situations, even the tough ones. Barbara no longer falls into dark depressions. Her self-criticism has faded away so much it is hard for her to even remember the last time she was hard on herself. She moves through her days with curiosity, openness, and a willingness to be present to whatever occurs.

Life continues to be more and more fun and flowing for both of us, every year. It has greater challenges as well as accomplishments. Above all, our connections with others have become much richer and more rewarding.

Here is our message to you:

By turning toward the most hopelessly stuck and painful parts of your life with compassion and curiosity, you can live more courageously, creatively and authentically.

That’s what happened for us. It’s what we want for you. In the rest of this book, we will show you how.

© 2024 Barbara McGavin and Ann Weiser Cornell

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No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher.

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