My Journey Toward Healthy Psychological Attachment in Adulthood

As I becoming more sophisticated my relationships with people, I am feeling more able to go through my inboxes and clear out old messages.

You see it used to be that I had all of these different kinds of emotions swirling about that were difficult to manage as I processed my inbox. I am a fan of Getting Things Done and so I do care about “processing my inbox”, thinking through consciously what I am going to do with my e-mail and making decisions. However, I felt like I didn’t always know what to do with the feelings that would emerge from e-mails from some folks. I didn’t trust my feelings. I didn’t know how to cope with the negative feelings I would have about people and I felt obligated to them more than my feelings at times. This left me at a loss of how to be true to myself. I was still caught up in being pleasing to other people more than feeling confident in my ability to please myself and to communicate that.

I am considering how I want to go forward with this emerging desire to clear out my inboxes. I know for sure that I don’t want to just close my eyes and delete everything. I would miss out on the opportunity to get to sort out some of these old, swirling emotions. At the same time I don’t want to sit myself down and make myself do this so that I could have the satisfaction of just being done with this.

Instead I want to know that by Thanksgiving that I will have gone through all of my inboxes. That will give me time to do this but will also give me time to share and discuss with my therapist any noticings I have about how it is to engage with the confusions of the past that these e-mail brought up in me.

In the mean time I will go through my current e-mail daily, slowly and consciously, and perhaps even building the muscle for looking back at the past.

It was an interesting day yesterday at work.  I was so ragged that I had my guard down.  I think this was a good thing.  I said some things in our first staff meeting during my tenure that directly contradicted my boss.  In this crowd no one disagrees openly.  If I hadn’t been so tired, I think I would have been more attuned to following the rules.  It was okay.  He trusts me.  I was making what, at least to me, is an important point – there are ways we can use our financial resources to serve our agenda and we should keep our agenda in the forefront of our minds.

I am a little weirded out, meaning nervous, that I said that this morning, but I am less weirded out than I would have been in the past.  I am much, much more anchored in my private life than I ever have been before.  It’s a relief.

I probably need to stop writing this morning and go about getting into my home life rather than just reflecting and processing.  I am still figuring out how much plain old living I need to do and how that nourishes me and how much thinking helps me move forward.  I survived in the past by thinking things through.  So I totally default toward reflection, but I also know that getting what’s in my heart and trying to take shape into some collection of words helps me with the just living part, too.

So I guess I will keep writing.

I have been reflecting on something David Brooks wrote about in relation to Elena Kagan and her Supreme Court nomination:

About a decade ago, one began to notice a profusion of Organization Kids at elite college campuses. These were bright students who had been formed by the meritocratic system placed in front of them. They had great grades, perfect teacher recommendations, broad extracurricular interests, admirable self-confidence and winning personalities.

If they had any flaw, it was that they often had a professional and strategic attitude toward life. They were not intellectual risk-takers. They regarded professors as bosses to be pleased rather than authorities to be challenged. As one admissions director told me at the time, they were prudential rather than poetic.

If you listen to people talk about Elena Kagan, it is striking how closely their descriptions hew to this personality type.

He goes onto elaborate how Kagan has not distinguished herself by taking controversial stands in her professional life.

I am not writing this because I agree with Brooks’ description of Kagan.  I don’t know enough to have an informed opinion.  But I do relate on a guttural level to his description of Organization Kids.  I relate to trying to do well, to please authority.  It often feels hard-wired in me.

This must be why I have been so fascinated this spring via my writing here with being a jerk.  I want this muscle so badly.  I want to be able to survive being controversial.  I so admire this in others.

I have also been reading my favorite writer on the emotional needs of children and adolescents and how to give them the parenting they need – Carl Pickhardt.  He won my heart originally with his insightful book The Future of Your Only Child, and last week I appreciated him all over again with his book Why Good Kids Act Cruel.  It’s about social cruelty and bullying, but it’s really more about the developmental tasks early adolescents need to face and succeed at in order to make it to healthy adulthood.  He explains how parents can help adolescents navigate this time of life.

Then this week in his blog he talked about popularity.  He concluded with this great summary of the costs that can come with being popular:

• Popularity requires pleasing – you must strive to be nice to people who you want to keep liking you.
• Popularity brings pressure — to belong you have to conform, being like, behaving like, believing like other members of your group.
• Popularity takes being current – you have to look cool, keep up with what’s happening, and stay cutting edge.
• Popularity is precarious – people can vote you in and they can vote you out, and “elections” can be held at a moment’s notice when you accidentally offend or someone “better” comes along.
• Popularity is partly unpopular – while some people admire you, others envy you, can get jealous, and want to bring you down.
• Popularity attracts imitators – people act like you so they can be liked by you, and liked by others by acting like you.
• Popularity breeds insincerity – you may often fake being nice to people, and people may often fake being nice to you.
• Popularity is confusing – sometimes you wonder if people want to be your friend because of who you are or because you’re popular.
• Popularity attracts attention – you are noticed more, judged more, your flaws and failings are more closely observed, and you are more gossiped about.
• Popularity is competitive – since so many people want to be popular, you have to perform your best against your rivals every day.
• Popularity can go to your head – popular people can believe their own reviews and act special or entitled, injuring friendships they thought secure.
• Popularity can be limiting – the more you invest in popularity at school, the less you are likely to invest in creating a social life outside of school.
• Popularity can be demeaning – people who pursue popularity will sometimes accept mistreatment from more popular people just to be accepted.

Most important, popularity and friendship are not the same. Popularity is political; friendship is personal. Popularity is about rank; friendship is about relationship. Popularity is more casual; friendship is more caring.

I look at this list and I cringe as I recognize how I have borne many of the costs of trying to be popular.  At the same time it is such a relief to see this all spelled out and know there is another way.  Out there in our culture there’s talk of “people pleasers” but I never quite got that that was me.  I was so steeped in it, but looking at this list I get it.

The cost above that really gave me pause was the one about popularity breeding imitators.  Over the last couple of years I have been noticing how I adopt other people’s habits – the phrases they use, the intonations, etc.  I am so influenceable.  I know I do this so that I can fit in.  I also know I did this as a child because I was looking to the outside world for how to act, how to behave.  Not a completely bad thing, but I’m an adult now.  I want to grow out of the habit of modeling myself after others so I can be liked and fit in.  I want to be able to hold onto what makes me, me.  I don’t want to adopt who other people are so I can fit in.  I know that I did this when I began my new job.

I also recognized parts of me in the statement that popularity is competitive.  He says that everyone wants to be popular and so “you have to perform your best against your rivals every day.”  I never consciously thought of other people as my “rivals” but I recognize the insecure part of me that has feared not being at my best because I might lose my standing in my world.  Oh.  That’s not a pretty thing to see in myself but it’s so true.

Andrea and I talked this week about how I learned working with customers in the family business how to get along with almost anyone and how I ignore people’s poor behavior toward me and relentlessly remember the good in them.  I know that this is often what happens to a lower ranked person in a relationship.  So I recognize that I have paid the price of being nice to people to keep them liking me as well.

I can see that I have been a victim of unpopularity, but I  hadn’t recognized how much I was living my life according to the codes of popularity and in doing so being a perpetrator, too.  In this way I really relate to what he says about popularity being fickle and that “elections” can be held and a moment’s notice and the tides can change.  This is ugly, and I recognize myself here, too.  Very well.  I know the instinct/desire to not be caught in an unpopular relationship or whatever so very well.

It’s such a relief to have him identify these things and just by being more aware unhook myself from this way of being.

I love the work of Robert Fuller who thinks deeply about the abuse of rank in his book Somebodies and Nobodies.  Pickhardt and Fuller’s work dovetail nicely together with Pickhardt reflecting on how to help kids develop as strong individuals so they can grow into who they really are and Fuller pointing out how in the adult world we are all somebodies and nobodies in different circumstances and we need to be very conscious of treating all with dignity.

My young parts have always been soothed by Fuller’s work, getting intuitively what he is talking about and grateful someone was taking a stand against poor treatment – completely unaware at the time how poorly treated I had been.  My young parts are now glad Pickhardt has shown her how she can step away from the kind of thinking that kept her trapped.

In my workplace I often feel like an early adolescent.  I want to be liked, I want to be popular, I want to be admired and followed.  I fear being excluded.  I fear being gossiped about.  I want to be with the in-crowd.  I knew I needed a year of relatively low stress work so that I could confront these kinds of feelings.  When I decided this a while back, I didn’t know what these feelings would be, but now that I am here I recognize them.

I am so, so glad to be right where I am in this life, learning what I need to be learning.

I wonder in another year how it will feel to be me.

One of the trickiest things for me about differentiation and becoming healthily attached has been to learn that people don’t have to understand me.

Andrea and I first talked about this a couple of years ago.  I don’t remember how I received the news about this truth.  Perhaps with denial and a bit of relief.  Regardless, I keep feeling a ton of relief that I don’t have to get people to understand me.

Here’s what I’m finding about understanding and attachment.  In my old life I was not securely attached.  I didn’t have a strong, internal, safe home base to return to in my head and heart.  As I am beginning to feel more attached, I would even say in the past the cells of my body felt different.  I was simply more unconsciously nervous and anxious.  But of course I needed somehow to feel safe and secure, and being hopeful I looked to my work relationships which were the primary relationships of my life for that feeling of attachment.  (Working in the family business growing up, I also felt most safe and secure while working so this naturally extended into adulthood.)

But I remember to way back past times and to times just this past week when I would seek understanding from my coworkers.  I’d want them to know me.  I wanted them to understand me such that they would be nice to me.  I wanted them to protect me from feeling so alone, by having their companionship.  That last bit is very, very true.

Years ago Andrea pointed out to me that this kind of emotional orientation would make me more fused to the people in my life.  I would then become dependent upon getting them to understand me.  It could be really distracting and pre-occupying.  That was why, cultivating the secure attachment I never experienced as a child through our therapy relationship was so important.  Doing so would help me be emotionally robust.

This week I did something really dumb.  I left my keys on top of the car when leaving for work in the morning, we drove away, and the keys fell off.  I came into work and told the story.  But as I was telling it, I was telling it not just as some casual story.  Something had triggered me to tell it and seek comfort, safety, understanding, and approval.  It took me back to who I was ten years ago.  I was telling it to someone who works for me and that brought up a whole host of uncomfortable feelings about looking incompetent in her eyes, etc.  I also felt really vulnerable because my needy switch was turned on.  I started the morning needy and stressed, but another coworker can kind of bring out a weird feeling of incompetence through her excessive caring.  Not sure if that makes sense.

The long and the short of it is that I went home that night recognizing that I had felt really alone that morning and that I had been looking for my coworkers to help me not feel alone.  I mean here that I felt an existential kind of alone.  It was a relief to be able to see that I didn’t actually need to look to my coworkers to soothe me.  It wasn’t like the past where work was all I had, where home wasn’t a safe place to be, and I was incapable of soothing myself.  In the present my husband and Andrea are there for me.  I can count on them to help me.

So yesterday I was worn out at work, running ragged.  As I was being compassionate with myself, remembering all the reasons I am running ragged, it was reassuring to me that I no longer had to have my coworkers agree or affirm my compassion for myself or give me compassion where I had none for myself.  I could understand and be gentle.  And I could understand and be gentle with myself because Andrea and my husband are there to help me when I forget.

(I do want to say that my husband is not helpful like Andrea is.  It’s different.  He’s a guy and not a parent-like figure in my life as Andrea is.  Sometimes he says the wrong thing (Andrea does, too) or, appropriately, is not concerned with how to help me grow.  He’s into his own life.  Somehow this difference is a feature not a bug.  At the same time he can be so wonderfully supportive and it seems like I am learning more about how to open my heart to that and to him.  Hopefully more about this in another post.)

My point is that I LOVE that I am becoming less dependent upon those in the periphery of my life to understand me and able to use and take even greater advantage of my close attachments.  It makes life a lot simpler.

Last night I came home from work exhausted.  I had learned a lot in my new job.  We are at the busiest time of year so I had a weird mix of learning my job and doing a lot at a critical time.  Also a coworker was sick this week and I could tell I was close to getting sick.  Allergies are high.  Psychologically I am growing exponentially.  And I was really glad to be home with my husband – looking forward to experiencing myself with him anew given all I am learning.  This combination lead me to a big huge meltdown and it felt good.

I paged Andrea because this was so huge that I knew I needed help.  As I often do, I had no idea how to get her help or have her help.  I was telling her things and then I stopped and said I’m so tired I just can’t tell you about all of this.  Then she said – ah, yes, you need rest, you need sleep.  That freaked me out.  I didn’t want her to leave me alone to sleep.  Of course I said something about that.  In hindsight I doubt she was going to hang up at that moment, but it’s in those moments that I feel anxiety that I will be left alone to cope.

At one point I want to tell her about being so glad to spend the weekend with my husband especially because something is different within me.  I start to get the words out and I begin to cry uncontrollably.  I tell her something like – this is good stuff I want to tell you even though it doesn’t sound like it.  She understands and I lose it for several minutes.

After the sobbing subsides she says something that made so much sense.  She said – sometimes it can feel so good for the crying to match the level of feeling we have inside.  Oh yes.  I really, really needed everything inside of me to have some form outside of myself.

Wow, a lot has happened for me lately.  My dear grandfather passed away the third week of March.  He was very peaceful at the end and in the company of my grandmother, aunt and cousin.  I got to speak to him by telephone and even though he couldn’t talk my grandmother said that he physically responded to what I was saying.  He felt so present to me as I heard his breathing change.  He had been sleeping off and on.  In my last moments with him I told him that I would just be there with him, that I didn’t have anything more to say but that I just wanted to be with him.  He dozed off peacefully.  I had two such conversations with him before he died two days later.

Digesting this has been interesting.  I mostly feel very much at peace with his death.  I was aware as he was dying that I had begun this intensive and very focused time in therapy as I began to realize that I would not have his love and support, that he would die and that I would not have him as a ballast in my life anymore.  As he was aging, I was seeing my parents more clearly and that brought up significant traumatic responses within me.  It was a surprise, then, a few weeks ago when I found myself at ease with Grandpa’s passing.

I was most scared about seeing my parents.  Perhaps more on that later.

While I have not had existential anxiety related to Grandpa’s death, his passing is something that I am still assimilating.  It hasn’t hit me completely.  Last night it dawned on me that I would never again get to have an experience with him.  My real life experiences with him are over.  Of course, I will be re-experiencing him over and over again in my heart.

Just after I got back I was offered a job – a nice promotion over my temp job within the same department.  So that was a lot to absorb all at once.

And I feel like I am on the cusp of a deeper and more nuanced understanding of what it means to be differentiated from people.  My relationship with my husband is prime testing ground these days.  I am reluctant to blend too much with him.  I am feeling a need for distance I suppose so that I can know myself more and become close again without losing myself.

It’s an utterly fascinating time.

And a post memorial service e-mail from my dad had me reeling for a few days after months of not reeling from things.  I was blown away by the emotionally incestuous nature of his expectations of me.  I felt utterly responsible for him.  I felt fearful for his well-being.  I felt awful for turning my back and knowing that I indeed need to turn my back in order to be a healthy child.  I felt very enmeshed with him.  I felt scared for my own well-being.  I had a hard time finding myself again.  But then I did.

All of this sense of myself as being a separate person or not is also playing out at work.  I am watching closely when I feel the urge to fit in and be like everyone else.  I am so fortunate to have my own office with this new position.  The physical structure of having space of my own is helping me to remember who I am and that I am distinct from the mindsets that others have about themselves and the work.  It’s an odd experience to not be trying to compulsively fit in all the time.  I still catch myself wanting that in a reflexive kind of way – not that wanting to fit in is a completely bad thing.  To some degree it’s a great thing, I’m just finding when it is that I go too far with the desire to fit in.

I am also really aware that my work colleagues do not have to be my close personal friends.  It is enough for me that I respect their work ethic and their care for the department.  It’s a huge relief that that’s enough.

Another interesting thing is that I am aware that as time goes on that I am getting to know both their good points and their bad points more clearly just as they have a chance to get to know my good points and bad points better.  As I come to see them with greater clarity, I can feel my acceptance of them as they are – good and bad.  It’s a great feeling – that acceptance.  I love knowing that to some degree they will have to come to that same level of acceptance about me.  I say that because I see that they have come to some place of acceptance with their other coworkers so I know they will with me, too.  They may complain at times, but there’s both acceptance in their complaining and I can see that at least for one person her complaints are just a feature of who she is.  It’s also been a relief to be able to remember that people may not even be able to see meclearly – that I don’t have to agree with their assessments.  I don’t have to have them understand me.  They can get me wrong.  It doesn’t really matter.

Things are so different when I don’t have to compulsively look outside myself for validation and acceptance.

In my last conversation with Grandpa, I told him that I was happy.  I think I said something like it seemed like he stuck around to make sure I was okay and that he could let go because I’d gotten enough to a place where I was deeply, deeply happy.  I am so glad I told him this gist of things.  I wanted him to know without a doubt that I would be okay.  We never spoke about the challenges I had with my parents, but I think he knew.

I’ve got a lot of stuff I am wanting to experience and figure out this year, things that I hope that being back in the work world will help me to sort out.  I am so grateful for the stability and certainty that this  job will offer.  I am grateful that I no longer need to live with uncertainty about this big component of my life.

Recently at work I was talking with a co-worker about work styles and sucking up to the boss.  It was kind of neat for me to be able to say that it is totally natural and authentic for me to be a suck up.  I’m not sucking up on purpose.  I like people, and I can easily find something to like about most people.  What I also know about myself is that sometimes I don’t know how to be challenging to someone in authority.  I admire people who easily challenge those in authority.  Sometimes they also do that reflexively and that’s not a good thing, but I still respect the instinct.

Anyway, it was really fun to be able to have that conversation with my co-worker and know who I am and not be ashamed.  I like my co-worker, too, so I could also say that I’m hoping in the coming year that I can practice being more of a jerk.  She assured me that if I stayed around here, I’d get my chance!

I even said that I would know that I’ve had a good year if someone called me a jerk behind my back.  Oh gosh.  Why do I say these things?  And then why do I confess them here?  Well, because I really do want to be free to be myself.  I really do want to stretch into places I’ve thought were off-limits to me or way too scary.  Of course, I want people to call me a jerk because I’ve done something I think matters but they don’t.  I don’t want to be a jerk just for the sake of being a jerk.  Maybe that’s not even true.  I really don’t want to be so careful, and sometimes I am going to flub up massively.  I want to prove to myself that I can survive being a jerk.

I must really want this jerk-dom because it sure pops up in these posts every once in a while.

I had something embarrassing to talk to Andrea about last night.  It’s less embarrassing now, I guess.  I don’t actually feel completely resolved about it, but I want to write about it here to see if I can make sense of things.

What’s most embarrassing about it is that it is such a small thing – at work I want people to recognize me for what cool lunches I bring.

I just wrote about wanting to settle in more with Andrea, to experience how much I am cared for.   I think this is somehow all related.  Perhaps it’s related because I actually do know what it feels like via Andrea to be cared for and I want this with these folks, too, in this little way.  This feels right to me.  I want people to know me.  There’s a very young part of me that wants to be known for how cool I am.  This is different from being accepted.  Perhaps this is why I feel so shy about this.  It’s new and different.  It’s not about wanting to be accepted or fitting in.  I think I feel that enough at home and with Andrea.  I feel shy, perhaps, because it’s this new feeling of wanting to be known.

When talking about some of this last night with Andrea, I was also thinking that I want to be known for the crummy stuff, too.  It keeps being a stronger and stronger fantasy that people talk about me in front of me or behind my back about the stuff I am awful at doing and being.  I can picture myself being okay with that.  I imagine myself smiling and nodding.  I imagine myself being content with who I am because I do indeed know that I also have good points.

My husband had a colleague once who would purposely do things horribly that he never wanted to be asked to ever do again.  He would spend too money.  He would do things that obviously somebody else would think you shouldn’t do.  He’s so my hero in this regard.  He’s the antithesis of me.   Andrea and I were talking about him last night and she used the word arrogant to describe him.  Immediately, I laughed because in my therapy it seems like healing for me comes from embracing all the bad, off-limits things.  I so deeply want to become arrogant now.  I want the freedom to be arrogant.  I want it to be an option for me.

Well, that’s about all I can handle of arrogant talk for now.   Well, I will say that I asked Andrea if she would be there for me if I made a mistake and was too over the top arrogant – like I could ever even begin to try to be arrogant!  She said she would, of course.  Anyway, this is a topic for another day.

Maybe things are hanging together.  Perhaps I want to feel experience more how Andrea cares for me (as in my last post) so that I can feel the freedom to not have to be so careful, good, and non-offensive.  Still not sure how this connects to the young part of me that wants to be known for my great lunches except that I think she wants to be seen in more real terms.  I no longer just want to be accepted or to fit in.  I want to be known for who I actually am.  My lunches are a symbol of that.

Before signing off last night Andrea and I talked about how I hope to be able to feel looser in my relationships.  I told her that I go back and forth in believing that it will ever be possible to feel looser, to be able to be known for who I really am and be able to relax.  I said I wondered if I was just striving for perfectionism because where I am isn’t too bad but looser is really what I want.  What if I just am rigid?  She said that indeed I could have looser but that of course it’s so much easier to have what I want when I can accept right where I am.

So I sign off right now remembering how much better I felt a few weeks ago when I could say that of course given where I came from that I would feel ashamed.  Of course, I have felt rigid inside given my past.  Of course.  And this is me.  In my odd fantasy people can talk about me and say that there’s this funny rigidness about me that’s obvious at different times and in different ways.  Because that is simply part of who I am.  Along with making great lunches!

I talked with Andrea again last night for our regular session.  I’ve been worried going back to work that things would feel between us like before, that I would be “all business”.   What I mean by that is that I would be in a mindset where I would miss her emotionally.  When we first got on the phone, I could really tell how much she cares for me.  I did notice that there was this familiar inability to let that sink in.  What was different was that I was profoundly aware that I was missing out on her.   That was nice.  All I can do is trust that this will keep changing.

Things have been changing at home in terms of my attachability with my husband so I expect that soon enough I will feel it more with her, too.  It’s funny how I grow with these two.  Some times I can grow more with her and some times I can grow more with him.  Another good reason to not depend exclusively on a husband.  I also feel so grateful that I can grow in my relationship with my husband.  Anyway, I’ve noticed myself feeling more settled with my husband, more able to “find” him, know that he is there, know that there is a familiar road back to him.  This describes what I am seeking more of with Andrea.  Of course, I couldn’t get as far as I have without being able to “find” her, but I want to find her more.

Hmm.  It is kind of helpful to think of this through the metaphor of a road or path.  In the past it was kind of like I was dropped off in the middle of a clearing at the beginning of each session and I spent a lot of time looking for her.  She was there, but it was more like we were both in this wilderness area by ourselves but talking to one another by shouting, are you there?  That was probably on a good day.  Days when we were checking in.  I remember those days when she would want to engage me further, when she would be seeking to engage me by noting that it felt like I was doing therapy by myself and I couldn’t believe we weren’t.  I think I was just glad I knew she was going to be in the clearing with me, even if we were off by ourselves in completely different parts of the area.  That was enough for me.

But it’s not enough now.  I’ve been noticing this at home.  Sometimes on the weekend I want to enjoy my husband more and I get kind of cranky if I am thinking I will go off and do my own thing.  I don’t want to.  I do want to do whatever I was planning to do, but there have been times when I don’t want to do it by myself but I don’t even know or recognize that this is true for quite some time.  I have to get angry and perturbed and spend some time getting to the bottom of those feelings before I know that I just want to be with my husband going about daily life together.  Interesting.

There are pathways in my heart that I am getting used to traveling with my husband and even bits of my life that I do by myself but that I know my husband is with me.  I have been marveling about how neat it is that I go to work, this new environment, but that I get to go home to a place where people know me.  When I say “people”, I must mean my husband and Andrea.  It didn’t used to feel that way.  I was by myself.  I seemed happy by myself lots of time, but that was just because I didn’t know any different, but as I got older, happy by myself got to be very difficult to sustain.

So I think what happens more with Andrea right now is that I know how to find my way to the clearing.  The path there is worn.  I know how to find her in the clearing.  The paths we take together are more worn and clear.  What I hope will be different is how I feel when I find her, how I feel before I get to the clearing, and how I feel as we are walking those paths.  I think of those times when I take a hike and in my head I am all about the exercise but I haven’t stopped and let myself be with the beauty around me.  I haven’t settled in.  I want to keep settling in with her.  I want to relax more with her.  I want to fully take in how much she cares about me.

That’s just not possible right now.  But writing about all of this is a good sign that one day it will happen.

So I found and started a temp job this week.  These past couple of weeks I’ve been full on looking for both short term work and long term work, and it’s been wonderful to stop doing all of that and just get settled into my short term job.  I will most likely be able to have it until I find permanent work.  What a blessing.

It’s been fascinating to wake up every morning and feel so different inside.  This morning, my third morning getting ready for work, I was most aware of how I am not existentially afraid.  At some point in the last couple of years I recognized that I had been waking up feeling scared every morning.  I guess I was aware that had happened as a child.  Perhaps a couple of years ago I realized I wasn’t waking up in existential crisis then.  It’s super reassuring that with a couple of days of work under my belt that I can feel so different even now, even returning to work.

I figure I need several weeks of adjusting to full time, in an office work before I start looking again for long term work.  I have a few applications out there and they just need some time.  I was saying to Andrea that my old instinct would be to let myself let out a big sigh and let go of the pushing toward a long term goal and then pick it up again in a forced kind of pushing way.  This time I’ve decided that I will slow down and just be where I am right now, with a different perspective than a big sigh might suggest.  I guess I mean the perspective of where I am is enough and so I can enjoy this rather than be preoccupied in the back of my head still with where I have yet to go.

I thought that the desire to look for a long term job would naturally build within me again and when it does I will go with it.  I don’t have to push myself.

This, I guess, is linked back into the feeling of not waking up in existential crisis.  I do not fear for my life and so I don’t have to anxiously look toward the next great thing.  I don’t have to wake up in the morning anxious.  I don’t have to expend energy calming myself down which really was about making sure I didn’t feel what I really felt including deep rooted shame.

My life is so much busier than it has been over the last several years, but it feels good.  Years ago Andrea said that it sounded like I wanted my life to hum, to be able to go about life without much dramatic interruption.  That was true.  My life is beginning to hum.

Throughout this process I have listened to and recognized the needs of the various ages that live within me – the infant, toddler, child, pre-teen, adolescent, and twenty something.  Throughout this I was aware that I wasn’t really listening so much to the “current me”.  (Well, of course I was, kinda, but often current me was not as helpful for understanding myself as my younger parts.)  What’s significant about this is that I think I got kind of stuck in my twenty something self.  Plus as I learn more about adolescence by reading Carl Pickhardt’s great blog Surviving Your Child’s Adolescence, I have come to understand that there is a late adolescence that goes until about 23-25.  Since I was so delayed in getting into adolescence, it makes sense to me that that stage would have gone even further into my twenties for me.  Since I missed so many key developmental stages as a kid, it also makes sense that I kind of just got stuck there in late adolescence because I just couldn’t fully move into adulthood without getting the things I needed out of all the stages of youth.

I say all of this to talk about shame and my twenty something self.  This morning was in bed, reflecting, cup of tea in my hands, and in a mindset where I could be compassionately with my twenty something self.  I’m in the middle of a job search now, and there have been times recently where I have been jolted out of the reality that I am not that twenty something person any more.  I should be making lots more money than she made.  I have incredible skills that were undeveloped, untested or unrefined back then.  I am really different from her.

It was making sense to me, though, that it was hard for me to see myself as different from her.  I do think that I was emotionally suspended in my twenties.  That’s what caused me to have to stop and take a look at my life these last couple of years.  I could DO all of these things and test those skills, refine them, develop them and all that in my thirties, but there was still this huge emotional intelligence piece that I was missing, that made all of these great things about me kind of moot.

That brings me back to the shame.  I was remembering this morning that my twenty something self couldn’t take some entry level jobs that she would have loved because she had to make a certain amount of money because she absolutely could not have a roommate.  I knew that I was so emotionally unprepared and unable to live with anyone else, except for someone I was romantically involved with (because there was hope that I would feel loved but that went miserably for me, too).  I remember thinking about where I would live and decided that it would be in the same complex as my boyfriend.  I was so ashamed that I couldn’t live somewhere on my own, but I now recognize that I was also so lonely that I couldn’t live in an apartment complex by myself.  I had no peers of my own in my life, just my boyfriend’s friends.  It was hell.  And the feeling I couldn’t let myself feel at that time was shame.  I also couldn’t let myself feel my loneliness because  then I would feel ashamed.  But if I had been able to feel how lonely I was, I might have been able to recognize that I needed help.  But then I was so ashamed that I couldn’t say I needed help.  This was true even though I was trying out therapists at the time.  I was so turned upside down inside.

So today it is such a relief to feel what couldn’t be felt before.  It’s nice to be able to know that there is a current me who is distinct from that twenty something self.  It’s nice from a post-traumatic stress perspective that I can distinguish that the present is distinct from my twenty something past.

My job search has helped me to confront that and solidify within me that distinction.

There’s a ton of growth that’s happening each and every day these days.  I’ve stopped trying to keep track or keep up.  It’s nice that I finally have this kind of momentum.  It’s nice to give in and just let myself be changed.  And it’s nice to pause a bit and write about a slice of what I notice happening.

Who’d have thought this would be true?

But it has been incredibly freeing to understand that my shame is understandable, of course I would feel it, and being ashamed of feeling ashamed is just plain unnecessary.

I had been feeling anxious off and on this past week and at least for now that anxiety has disappeared.

It had been a while since I had checked in with the various ages of myself to see what they were feeling or needing, but I did this over the weekend and it made a difference.  Since recognizing that of course I would feel ashamed for being so backward, awkward, unkid-like, and generally un-mothered, I have had memory flashes of what it used to feel like and have been able to identify for myself that what I felt at those times was shame.  I couldn’t acknowledge the shame then.  I couldn’t even say that there was something wrong.  So it means so much to me now to be able to name that feeling.  I remember not wanting to feel ashamed because I didn’t want to hurt my mom.  I knew things had been hard for her and I didn’t want to add to her troubles.  I didn’t want her to feel shame because I felt shame both about myself and her.  Goodness, what a mess that was.

And yet here I am today and I am calm in a really precious kind of way.  Precious perhaps because I’ve been so controlled by that shame and now I am not.

Recently, as I have embarked upon a job search, I’ve used a trick at times that has been incredibly helpful to me.  It used to be that I just didn’t allow myself to feel my feelings, but now I do all the time.  That can pose a problem when I’m not exactly sure how to be with those feelings.  So I’ve used a trick.  I tell myself, “Ah, you’re supposed to be nervous.”  Immediately, everything makes sense.  Nothing more needs to be done.  I just get to be nervous.

My job search has progressed and I have moved along and encountered more challenges, challenges that are above and beyond my capacity.  This is super tough for me because one of the things that was a solace to me as a child was that I was fairly competent – not at being a kid (!) but at getting along in the adult world.  So here I am now, not getting along in the adult world so much because I never got the stuff I needed as a kid, and it feels awful.  I am ashamed.  Deeply ashamed.  So Andrea suggested that I use this trick again, but then tell myself, “I am supposed to feel ashamed.”

It’s such a relief to phrase it this way.  My job as a kid was to not feel ashamed of what I was missing out on and so it’s such a relief to say and assure myself that I am actually “supposed” to feel this way.  It’s only human.  It’s the only way I could reasonably feel.  I get to live reasonably now.

At the end of our session today, Andrea asked me if I felt more organized.  I paused for a while.  I told her that I think feeling organized is so new that I’m not exactly sure that I could tell.  But I did say that I do feel more compassion for myself.  That is a very organizing thing.

It’s dawning on me as I type this that it is also very organizing to have a place to put all that shame, into a “supposed to” category.  Before I didn’t have a place to put that feeling.  I could deny it, but the feeling never got to settle in somewhere.  I could feel bad about feeling ashamed, but that left me feeling stirred up not relaxed.  Plus I don’t feel bad about myself like I used to so the “bad” category didn’t feel right.  But “supposed to” just works.

I had a really interesting situation with my mother-in-law over the weekend that I didn’t write about.  We were talking about my father-in-law and she said that she thought that my husband was so lucky to not had to wonder if he was loved by his father and how he really didn’t have a lot of unresolved issues.  It was awkward for me because I see things differently.

But of course I almost instinctually agreed with her.  I tried not to, but I didn’t want to pick a fight.  I was disappointed because I felt roped into protecting her from feeling bad, the same thing I did all the time with my family, but I also kind of knew that this was just a bad situation to be in.  We only had a few hours left of our visit, I could be so misunderstood if I didn’t explain myself well, and I sure didn’t want to upset the apple cart.  I thought about it later and I realized that if there was a good time in the future I could imagine myself revisiting the topic easily by saying something like – you know when we talked about this, well, I was uncomfortable disagreeing with you at the time but I think actually…

It would probably be INSANE to try to revisit this with my mother-in-law but I value being real so much that I would consider it if the right opportunity emerged.  I was sad that I couldn’t say what I think because it did kind of feel like she might enjoy having things be turned upside down a bit.  My sense is that she might be able to cope with a little bit more real-ness.

Talking to Andrea today, I realized that I am really glad that I did agree with her.  Andrea asked me what I would have liked to have said instead, and I realized that I just wished that the whole situation had never emerged!  It was enough for me to say to her that I thought she should ask my husband for what would help her rather than wait for him to offer.  We shared a real moment together.  That was good.  We probably don’t have enough relationship history for me to not have agreed with her on the first point.

To help me understand what happened in that interaction, Andrea told me about some research that’s been done around relationships where they have been able to predict what will happen when people give other people certain cues or make bids.  She says it’s like we’re pre-programmed to respond in predictably in certain ways with reassurance, agreement, etc.

Practice knowing yourself, psychotherapy, and/or really great parenting/education/cultural surroundings, can help a person have more mental freedom to actually make choices rather than just have those automatic responses to bids that other people make hoping to get a specific response.

So what was happening for me in that moment was that I could recognize that she wanted me to reassure her and I was instinctively responding to her in that way.  I was able to know that I didn’t agree, but I wasn’t entirely free to choose how I wanted to respond, including what what I did choose – to humor her.

I probably did the best thing in the end.   But it’s really interesting to have the chance to be aware that I can make choices.

Well after such a great trip where I learned so much about myself, today was a little tricky.  I couldn’t take any new information in and I didn’t feel able to create anything either (like clean clothes, muffins or the like).  I couldn’t just sit either.  I needed to move and so I was grateful to be able to run an errand and drive for a while.  It felt like my thoughts needed a chance to gel and settle within me.

I even paged Andrea because I needed help.  I’m getting good with this paging thing and the uncertainty of what she has time for.  She said that she just had a few minutes between meetings and I was able to work out what that meant I had 4 minutes and so I went for it.  I got something out of it.

She said something to me in our four minute conversation about how so much more was organized within me.  She hasn’t used that word – organized – for a while and it felt so right.  I have a self that is so much more organized and not just a huge pile of things inside competing for attention and especially my anxious attention.

I knew I needed her today to hold all of the stuff happening to me.  It felt really nice that she did hold it with me.  I asked her, it’s okay that I’m so much more organized but then I get to the end and I just can’t handle it all, right?  Of course, she said yes.

In the middle of so much internal change I often complain that I just don’t have my head about me.  My brain sometimes feels like it’s off somewhere inaccessible to me.  Well, I don’t have my head back quite yet, but I hope some sleep and some nice time at home with my husband will mend that.  I remember when this wasn’t enough, that it was in fact terrifying to be this in limbo.  But today it feels okay.

It would feel so grounding if I could start a load of laundry or do some dishes, some routine chore that would stimulate oxytocin.  Maybe I’ll get lucky and that will be possible.

Wow.  My husband and I are back from a week spent with his parents who are spending the winter relatively near by so that they can be closer to some of my mother-in-law’s relatives who are not well.  Turns out that they are kind of helping her out more than she is them because my husband’s dad keeps deteriorating.

Needless to say it was an emotionally intense weekend.  I knew conversations about my in-law’s future we ratcheting up and my husband keeps being fairly oblivious to the urgency.

It’s been an interesting conundrum for me because there are just so many places where I could fall into my old patterns:

• I could try to push him into caring for his parents in spite of his ambivalent feelings because it would relieve the tension I feel around not being sure about how or if I will be there for my parents.
• I could do what his mother did – care for her mother-in-law in a super selfless way and not have support from my husband.
• I could care for his parents even when I don’t have strong bonding feelings toward them myself just because I want to be seen as a good person.
• I could step in and take care of them because I want to protect my husband and my in-law’s from feeling bad that he’s not taking a more active role.  Protecting people could come so naturally to me.
• I don’t want to urge my husband to do something I might not want to do.  It might be tempting to tell him what to do/what he should do.  (Ugh, that sounds so disrespectful, but I’m capable of that.)
• And there are probably a bunch of other things.

I’m actually pretty pleased with how I theoretically decided to handle things.  I’ll say more in a minute how it worked out in practice!

• I decided that I would ask him at key times – when we travel to see them only – about what his thinking was.
• I decided after our Thanksgiving trip to visit my in-law’s that as much as I wanted to feel close to his parents that I didn’t.  I didn’t have overwhelming feelings of my own that had me want to dedicate a good chunk of my life to looking after them, but that I was motivated to support my husband in looking after them.  Doing so would be fun simply because we’d be doing it together.
• I decided that my husband would need to take the lead on deciding what was important to him around caring for his parents.  I might think that he “should” do certain things but that I would leave that to him to decide what that was rather than get involved.
• At the same time I realized that I cared a lot about my husband using this time to work out within himself stuff about his father who has some significant character deficits which have been enhanced by disease.  We hope to have children and I have a desire for my husband to come to terms with his father’s limitations, to recognize and mourn those losses, so that he will be able to be conscious as he is a father of the impact of the fathering he received on him.  As painful as it is, I think it’s a gift to work this stuff through with a real live person and not just a ghost.  My father-in-law will not be with us that long.
• I also decided that while I wanted the above, that I could be obsessed by having it.  I could think that my life with my husband would be ruined if he did not do this work.  Doesn’t that sound like enmeshment on my part?!  So I also decided that I needed to focus on myself and my own issues which are significant enough!  I would not let myself talk to my husband about this after our trip for a month.  I even set it up on my calendar so that I would know when a month had passed.
• I also felt really worried that if my husband’s parents were more a part of our lives that our life would begin to feel small and that my husband would go back to acting with them as he did as a child because he does revert some today.  It’s hard not to.  Kind of like the thing above I decided that I could obsess over this and put a lot of energy into trying to get him to change.  Oh goodness, I could do this so easily.  But I decided instead that I would concentrate on living a great life myself and together with him.  If that reverting did happen, I figured he would work to grow out of that because he would like living from the place of adulthood with me far more.  I was really pleased that I figured out a way for me to manage my anxiety!

So we were there in Tennessee.  As I have shared here, I was struggling with anxiety/manic-ness last week as I have been confronting returning to a more regular life.  There has been a lot going on.  On the drive back last night, it dawned on me that while I was fairly relaxed about our trip that I had been feeling anxious about it, too.  I’m pleased to say that I not only survived but it was a great trip.  Back to the bullet points, these were some of the highlights:

• For a week or two leading up to the trip I worked on scanning some old negatives for my father-in-law.  I then organized them and put them into a nice format on a DVD.  It was interesting that I did this because I find him so hard to connect with.  I kind of worried that I was doing something I do often – keep trying with someone when I really need to wise up and give up.  But I decided that I was doing this project enough for me – I love photos – that I would be emotionally safe.  Sure enough he had no concept of what I had done, the amount of time, and he kind of ignored them for a while.  It was interesting to watch myself.  I was emotionally safe, but I did feel this internal frustration.  I was sad that I had to resign myself and that my husband and my mother-in-law also had to resign themselves to not being able to really enjoy my husband’s dad.  I wished my husband could have said something like “I just hate it that dad can’t appreciate the nice things people do for him.”  I felt alone in that moment.  I hated the situation.  And, I knew that there was nothing else to expect.  Later my husband and father-in-law were looking at the photos together and my husband was getting a chance to know his father more as they looked at the photos.  That made me super happy.  My husband later said that it was the kind of experience that they rarely had.  And I was glad that I hadn’t hidden from the wide range of emotions I’d had.
• For the most part I stayed pretty true to my decision that I would follow my husband’s lead on what would be the right amount of caring/involvement with supporting his family.  I was kind of waiting for his heart to kick in and motivate him to speak up and offer some ideas/help.  But it never happened.  I hate to say this but very recently this would have had me be undone.  His failure to do this would have sent me into a very freaked out place.  I would have hated that he was so flawed in this way.  I would have felt scared that he would be undependable emotionally.  I would have wondered what this MEANT about him as a person.  Blah, blah, blah.  In other words it would have been more about my unresolved feelings/trauma around my own neglectful parents and not about him as a real live person.  I would have needed him to be a certain way for me to be safe.  So it was really cool to not flip out and to be able to just be with him.  After what I had re-confirmed around his dad and the photos, helped me to recognize that it would be super hard for his heart to suddenly appear as a driving force in this situation because his relationship with his dad would not naturally inspire his heart.  Related to his dad, his heart probably knows resignation more than inspiration.
• What was a surprise, though, was how much more connected I could be with his mom.  I think since I’ve worked out a lot of my anxieties in the situation and I have given up hoping for his parents to be the in-laws I always hoped for, I have made more room for what is actually there.  And, not needing to control my husband helps a whole lot, too.  So she and I had some great talks.  It was really nice to be there for her.  I really respected her for the things that she could share with me, the feelings she had and that kind of thing.  I felt more close to her than before.  I found myself wanting to help her more directly.  That was nice.  I’m looking forward to sending her a care package of stuff.
• Still I was able to not take over and still recognize that I wanted to follow my husband’s lead.  I cared more but I knew I would be motivated by something not so healthy if I suddenly offered to do a bunch of huge stuff to help them.   So I did something totally unexpected.  My mother-in-law and I were hanging out and I asked her if I could give her some advice about my husband.  She said it would be okay, and so I suggested she ask him directly for what she wanted from him.  I said something about how if she were to wait for his heart to kick in that it wouldn’t happen, but if she asked him for specific things that he would then be able to figure out if he could do them or not.  He probably would.  I guess I really needed to say that because it was just true and it seemed like naming it would help.  I think I needed to also kind of say that I wasn’t going to step in the middle of things.  I didn’t say that exactly, but I guess I did intimate that I thought this was between she and him and that I wasn’t going to be filling in for him.  On the way home I did reiterate to him that once he decided to what degree he wanted to be there for his parents that I would be there to help him.  This time and once before when I said this he has let out a little sigh kind of like an – oh shoot I can’t run away from this one! – and I LOVE that I’m okay making him sweat a little.
• Also on the way home, we were talking about this stuff.  I’d asked him some questions about what he was thinking about this trip, and he kind of came up blank.  I was sitting there having a bit of a mini freak out and thinking that after all that had been said this weekend (we’d had a good conversation with his mom where she’d talked a good bit about her options) that he had nothing to say.  I knew I needed to keep my mouth shut.  I knew I needed to deal with my own anxiety.  So I kept quiet and immediately imagined talking to Andrea and telling her about all of the feelings I was having – the real and exaggerated anxiety, the challenge of not overstepping my bounds, how lonely I felt in that moment, all of it.  It felt good.  I knew I didn’t have to say anything and I could let my husband just be where he was.  Then he asked me a question, inviting me to tell him some of my thoughts.  Then it felt appropriate to say more.
• To my surprise I also said something that came out of my mouth without a lot of preprocessing.  I told him that I cared that he make his own decisions about this but that I also felt like there was a role for me in helping him to work through this, that I thought that he might not be able to get his arms around all of this now while it was happening and that it might be easier to just turn away but that 10, 20, 30, or 40 years from now that it might matter to him how he handled this.  I told him that I thought I might be able to help him a bit with this stuff just by asking him questions and revisiting this occasionally.  It was kind of neat that this came out of me.  Andrea and I had talked a long while back about how it’s okay to help your partner out.  Those boundaries are kind of fuzzy for me.  When am I helping out and when am I involved because of my own anxiety?  I guess I’d worked this out some so that I could say this to him and that being involved in this helping kind of way could feel good to me, to him, and to the relationship.  It’s a pretty subtle thing.  To even know that he needs me means being able to be with a wide range of my own emotions.

So anyway, it was a very interesting weekend.  There’s much I’ve left out.

I have been eager to get out in the work world.  Thankfully, I recognized that today was not the day to begin a temporary job so I will wait until later in the week to do that.  I’m glad I gave myself time to digest all of this.  At the same time I took a walk around my yard this morning and felt the urge to get to gardening.  I realized that usually after an emotionally intense and complicated weekend like this that it would usually be a good week before I’d be able to let go and get into something mindless like gardening.  But I really felt the urge to keep on moving through life.  This weekend didn’t take everything out of me that I had, like it would have in the past.  I want to keep on living, keep on muddling through.

Thank you for the chance to share this with you.

So I’ve had a couple of remarkable weeks ending about a week ago where this attachment stuff was just blowing my mind.  My relationship with my husband has been off the charts.  I have felt able to be so close.  My heart has been open in ways I never knew was possible.

And then I talked to my grandmother about my grandfather’s impending death, then the uncertainty about my next appointment with Andrea happened, and it seems like there’s been other stuff.  I’ve been struggling with anxiety.

Andrea asked me a great question today.  Did I think it was existential anxiety or life anxiety?  I decided existential anxiety.  It was nice to think of it just being life anxiety.  Of course, it is life anxiety.  How could it not be?  And that’s okay with me.  But the existential stuff is trickier.  It doesn’t feel good at all.

And I am happy.  But I have a deeply happy disposition.  It’s deceptive.  Just because I can find joy in things does not mean that I am healthy.

So Monday night I am working on a project for my father-in-law.  It’s getting past dinner time.  I haven’t eaten.  I keep working on it.  I’m a touch manic.  I know I have to eat.  Nothing I have at home will do.  So I get in the car to go get something.  My husband is out at a work meeting.

I am driving to my desired place and it dawns on me that I am a bit manic.  The fact that nothing at home will do was a huge sign for me.  I couldn’t care for myself by making a meal – I needed someone to take care of me.  I couldn’t be bored – my food had to stimulate me.   It was actually impractical to drive to get food.  It would have been much easier for me to make myself something.  But I couldn’t.

This was really painful.  I feel the pain all over again.

So I told myself that all I needed to do was notice what was happening.  That helped.  I could also understand why I was anxious, that all the things going on had me feel anxious and this felt merged with my experience of existential anxiety.

The next morning I spent some time thinking some about the why’s behind the anxiety.  That morning I knew I had a lunch with someone I’ve known for quite some time about something she’s helping me with.  I realized that I wanted to tell her what was up.  I wanted to have fun with her, but it seemed like I would be being fake if I didn’t mention how preoccupied I was by life events.  So I mentioned it, and it was really soothing.  She gave me some good advice and then we got down to our fun work.  The mania holds its power over me when I have to pretend that I don’t feel something that I do.

At one point I’d written this post in my head and it had a series of ideas that fit tightly together.  Those ideas have now faded from my memory so I am going to wander a bit now.

In talking with Andrea yesterday briefly, she said to me that it felt like a really long time since we spoken.  While it had just been a week, a lot had happened.  She said she felt sad for herself that she was missing out on what was going on.

Today she checked in with me about how that was for me.  She wondered if I felt like I had to protect myself from her when she said that.  Because this was about her talking about herself, experiencing.  I didn’t think so but I was intrigued by the question.  Of course, my mom was so overwhelming to me and I did have to protect myself from her to keep myself from being so enmeshed with her.  But I was already enmeshed since I had to protect myself.

Anyway.  I’m totally rambling now.  I suspect that in a few months these questions, thoughts and feelings will work themselves out.  I think what is different is that I am learning that I don’t have to protect myself so much from being overwhelmed or subsumed by people and experiences.  Of course the death of my grandfather will be a big deal and it’s looming nature is hard for me.  I think the feelings I fear being overwhelmed by are connected to realizing that with my grandfather’s death my biological family will mean less to me.  I keep trying to fit myself into that family.  I hope against hope that things will be what I want them to be when really the members of my family will be who they are.  It sucks that I don’t like who they are.

That’s really the hard part.  I don’t like who they are.  They are not my kind of people.  I keep trying to make them into my kind of people but they are not.  My grandfather is.  My grandmother kind of is.  But everyone else?  Not my people.  I have to repeat this.  I have tried over and over again to deny my feelings.  For the longest time I didn’t even let myself not like them.  I thought I was the weirdo.  But it’s not about anyone being a weirdo – I don’t fit with them.  I don’t respect them.  Not because they do awful things but because I value different things.

I’m not quite ready to reject them.  I don’t see any other alternative.  To be close to them I would have to make a lot of effort, try to turn myself inside out to be liked and then they still wouldn’t be capable of really appreciating me.  By reject them, I do mean reject them as people.  I mean reject them as people I care about making an effort with.  I will always care, but they will not be people I am chummy with.  I so wish this were different.

I am generally so hopeful.  I want to have hope in people.  But then I remember, especially with family, that if things could be different, they already would be.

There’s a point I get to sometimes in my heart where I feel so relieved because I glimpse how much better things are, for all involved, when I look after my own interests instead of others’ interests.  It allows more freedom for everyone.  I think these glimpses were part of what helped me have such a great couple of weeks of the year.

Anyway, lots going on.  Lots being woven together without being very cohesive.  I am really curious about this notion of not having to protect myself from Andrea.  I think that feeling/capacity to not have to protect myself from people and life was what made the first two weeks of the year so glorious.  My sense of self was strong.  That is good for me.

Well, no more rambling for now.  I like me, even in the middle of this very much in progress mess where I’m so in between old habits and the new emerging ones.

Enough for tonight.

Today I did something I’ve never done before.  I turned down a job.

I’ve been interested in going back to work and only became serious about it a couple of weeks ago.  At first, my dream job literally was shoveling horse poop.  I love animals, would love to work with horses, and thought that this transition back to the working world would be a perfect time to do something like this – a dream job – believe it or not.

Well, somehow my interest in that faded and I thought the next best thing would be helping folks out with their groceries at my favorite supermarket.

Somehow as I got back into the swing of things, that began to seem ridiculous.  I wanted to do more.  I wanted to make more money.  Suddenly administrative assistant positions seemed like a good fit.

But then that seemed dumb, too.  I am way overqualified.  It felt like I was selling myself short.  So now I am looking at some more professional/managerial level positions.

I interviewed today for a position that involved a lot of supervising.  Of 41 people.  I really, really wanted to want the job.  At first I couldn’t believe my ears.  I had not exactly applied for this position but it was the position that they offered me.  I had to be sure that I heard the title correctly.  And I didn’t want it.  I knew this.  Almost from the beginning.  There would be no room for error, a ton of driving, multiple layers of supervising, and I could feel myself just feel yucky inside.  I just didn’t want to do it.  At about minute five I realized that I could gracefully express my hesitance by saying something about wanting to explore if this was the best fit.

Somehow those words came out of my mouth and we decided we would talk about it at the end.  And so we did.  They needed to make a quick decision and so I couldn’t mull this over.  I had to decide in the interview what I thought of it.  I expressed my hesitance, they said that they were really disappointed that I thought it wasn’t a good fit, they wanted to hire me, but that my judgement was the most important.  They told me they were really grateful for my candor and that they would like to be in touch again when another position comes up that would be a better fit.  That delighted me.  I didn’t have to fit myself into some narrow opportunity.  We could work something out that might be good for me.

When I got home, I was uncomfortable.  I was wondering if I made the right decision.  I kept saying to myself that there’s a lot going on and this job just didn’t feel good to me.  I would hate to feel the pressure of this job and then be confronted with my grandfather’s death, for instance, given that this job has little leeway and you deliver immediate results or you’re out.

But really all that justification is stupid.  I didn’t want it.  The old parts of me were drawn toward pleasing these people and having them accept me because I accepted their job.  That was the part of me that was feeling like I had to justify my decision.  The old parts still couldn’t quite understand why I didn’t do that, why I didn’t just go ahead and stretch.

But that’s what I’ve learned all along in therapy.  I stretched/was stretched too far, too quickly, when it wasn’t in my best interest when I was a kid.  I tried to be all grown up too quickly but I never was able to know who I was and what I needed.  Today I knew what I didn’t need and could act on it.  I earned my own respect.  I just so happened to earn my interviewer’s respect as well.

I talked with Andrea a bit after I returned home.  She commented that I didn’t have to merge with them.  I could remain differentiated.  I don’t think about emotional fusing so much at work, but it’s true.  If you emotionally fuse in your personal life, there will be emotional fusion happening in your work relationships.

I managed to stay differentiated, stay true to myself, even as I was contending with some manic-ness.  I am pleased.  I figure the old ways, the manic-ness, is a well worn groove.  As I get out in the world, it is going to come back.  I just need to keep knowing what’s good for me and act upon that.  More on beguiling mania in a bit.

It kind of sucks when you know yourself so well.  Or at least when you catch yourself not knowing yourself so well.  Well, maybe it’s not so bad.

There’s a great quote by Alice Miller that I have on rotation in the side bar of this blog.  She says:

“In the majority of cases, it is a great relief to a patient to see that she can now recognize and take seriously the things she used to choke off, even if the old patterns come back, again and again, over a long period. But now she begins to understand that this strategy was her only chance to survive. Now she can realize how she still sometimes tries to persuade herself, when she is scared, that she is not; how she belittles her feelings to protect herself, and either does not become aware of them at all, or does so only several days after they have already passed.”

The part that resonates today is the part about, “Now she can realize how she still sometimes tries to persuade herself, when she is scared, that she is not; how she belittles her feellings to protect herself, and either does not become aware of them at all, or does so only several days after they have already passed.”

A few minutes ago my husband was inspired to go out for a walk.  Last weekend I would have eagerly have joined him and the fact that I had no interest in walking and especially walking with him, had me check in with myself.  I realized that I felt too pre-occupied to join him.  What has felt so glorious these last couple of weeks as much of my hard work has come together and felt like it was real, is the feeling of not being pre-occupied.  But today I am pre-occupied.

It’s not that I think being pre-occupied is necessarily bad.  In fact, I have some good reasons to be pre-occupied.  Besides the anxiety I am working out in my relationship with Andrea, there is a far greater event in my life.  I spoke with my grandmother this week and learned that she is coming to see that my grandfather may pass away soon.

That’s a big deal.  That’s pre-occupation worthy.  I don’t even know what to feel about all of that.  That’s okay, too.  Sometimes we can’t know what to feel.  But I am destabilized.  I feel existentially anxious.  In the last year I’ve come to recognize that I used to live every day of my life as existentially anxious.  I don’t know how the heck I did it.  Thank God that started to unravel.  Now that I know what it is, it’s almost intolerable.  I am so glad I recognize that life doesn’t have to be like this.

And I want Andrea!…Well, saying that sure made a difference.  I remember times when that would not have begun to be enough to help me feel better.  I took a minute to remember that the young parts of me can imagine cuddling up to Andrea, feel her wanting to help me with the big emotions that have no words, and just be with me.  She can help hold those emotions.

Even though I have come so far in the last few weeks, doesn’t mean I have to now suddenly be alone or be all brave and adult and not turn back.  I also get to still be needy.  I still get to be human.  I can be that little girl who was a big girl but still needs to return home to feel recharged and nurtured again before taking another big step out in the big, wide world.

This past week my mom had a birthday.

A couple of years ago this day was cause for an extended conversation in therapy about how to recognize it.  At the time I was struggling with how to authentically be a daughter and go about the niceties of life with my parents while being true to myself.  I didn’t want to wish her happy birthday because I needed to fulfill my role as primary giver of assurance to my mother or because I was scared that if I didn’t have some illusion of relationship with my parents that I would be swallowed up by the earth and die.

It was tricky.

What I came to was that I could authentically feel some gratitude for my mom because without her, there was no way in the world there could have been a me.  That was all the genuineness that I could muster.  And it was enough.  So I sent her an e-mail wishing her a happy birthday.

Last year I did nothing.  I said nothing.  In the year prior I had made some efforts at communicating what was happening with me, and I had set some boundaries.  However, my parents weren’t able to respect the boundaries, and they responded in predictable ways to my communication efforts.  It was incredibly painful for me to realize that they would continue to treat me the way that they always had, and that they wouldn’t and couldn’t ever change.  I was in the process of struggling to accept this when my mother’s birthday rolled around.

So I decided to ignore it.  I ignored Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and my father’s birthday, too.  I’m glad I did.  I was too undone by my feelings about my parents.

But I’m also glad that I e-mailed my mother this year and wished her a happy birthday.  I prefaced my note by saying – “I still need to limit my communication, but…”  And I simply wished her a happy birthday.

This is a really important thing to me.  I’m proud of myself because I’ve managed to do better than my mother ever did with her own mother.  My mother holds a grudge against her mother to this day.  Her mother has even been dead for years.

I used to think that somehow if I was a good daughter and worked really hard at my relationship with my mother that we would avoid the mess that my mother and grandmother had in their relationship.  I wanted to save my mother that pain and anguish.  Eventually, though, as I was more myself, I began to see that I would disappoint my mother just by unselfconsciously being me.  She would feel scared and threatened and signal to me that I should not feel so free to be me so that she could feel safe with me.  It took a lot of support from Andrea to allow myself to see this clearly.  Each time I caught a glimpse of this I would be out of it for days.  It was that scary to recognize that my mom didn’t and couldn’t let me be myself with her.  I would have to be myself without her blessing.

Also devastating was that I had to recognize that I couldn’t make my mom feel better about her relationship with her mom by pretending that we had a good relationship.  She played a role in the mess with her mother, and she was playing a role in the emerging mess with me.

So what to do about how to be in relationship going forward.  Well, I hope a year from now that I’ll have more of a feel for that.  It’s hard, if not impossible, to be in a real relationship if you have to pretend for there to be peace.  So our relationship will be limited out of necessity.  For right now what I have said to them is that I need space because there are things I need to learn that are hard to learn if I am in communication with them.  Or something like that.  I think I’ve been a tad more diplomatic.  Sadly, I have come to accept that they will not be able to be parental toward me.  Their needs and their anxieties will always be in the forefront.

I also know that I can’t set boundaries and expect that they will respect them.  I would not be in this predicament if they could respect my boundaries.  When I e-mailed my mother wishing her a happy birthday this year, I knew I had to assert the boundary right up front.  In the past I would have feared offending her.  Until just now that thought never even crossed my mind.  I’m glad I could assert my boundaries so unselfconsciously.

There’s this family systems theory well articulated by Harriet Lerner in her book The Dance with Anger: A Woman’s Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships that cautions against “cutting off” from one’s family.  Cut off’s are when you get so angry that you decide you just can’t handle the family member any more and refuse to talk to them.  And refuse to process the upset at least within yourself.  Cut offs are so harmful because if the underlying issues are not addressed they will pop up somewhere else within the family system.

Of course, cut offs are completely necessary when physical or emotional abuse is so intense that your well being is threatened.  Even within those circumstances, the victim still needs to come to some kind of mature, adult internal reconciliation of the relationship or else the unfinished business of that relationship will pop up in other areas of their family life, most likely unconsciously in their relationship with their children.

This is exactly what happened for my mom.  She cut off from her mom, never got at the heart of her anger with her mother, and was unequipped to have a real relationship with me.  She lost out.  I lost out.

So I think about this really seriously for my own future and the relationships I hope to have with future children of mine.  In the coming year I don’t know how I will make real the feelings that seem to be reconciling themselves within me about my mom and parents, but I’m glad that I could genuinely wish my mom a happy birthday.  I will never purchase her a card that extolls the virtues of her amazing mothering, but I am not pre-occupied, consciously or unconsciously, by her failings either.  This is enough.

It will probably be too hard for my mother to find peace with her mother or with me, but I KNOW that if she could find the words that she would not want me to suffer as she has.  I suppose this is what I am celebrating in wishing her a happy birthday.  Ironically, I must reject her, even the frail wounded child self of hers, in order not to suffer and to be able to celebrate her.

I’m really proud of myself.  I may have crossed a line with Andrea.

I’m too uncomfortable to give much detail.  I will say that in working out the financial elements of our relationship I may have asked for too much.

In the new year things SUDDENLY seemed to come together for me, and I have felt incredible ease and relaxation.  Until this happened!  One of the huge results of my work has been that I don’t feel existentially fearful or anxious.  Until this happened.

Since a therapeutic relationship is a real relationship but unlike any other relationship, you don’t have the same kinds of every day things to relate around.  I pay her to keep the relationship about me so we can stay focused on my healing.  There are not a lot of mutual things to share in real life.  But there are the little things of a therapeutic relationship that can be important and have meaning to talk about – how it feels waiting in the waiting room, what it’s like when she greets me, how we end the session, what it’s like to page her for extra assistance in the week, and money.

I’ve had lots of experience with her talking about the first bits.  I’ve gotten so much out of that.  I remember talking about the challenge of paging her and how it’s not like a regular session because she’s not prepared for me, in the mindset for me.  It can feel risky to want and need her outside of our regularly scheduled times.  That conversation changed everything for me, and our relationship grew exponentially in trust when we could talk about that.

But money.  We have struggled over the years talking about it.  We’ve made a lot of progress.  It has felt great to receive her understanding about how hard it is for me to talk about.  I vividly remember an experience where I felt really great explaining myself and some frustration I felt about how I worried she misunderstood me.  I was blown away that she wanted to know.  Since then she has referenced that frustration and assured me that she cares that I am sensitive in some areas.  That was amazing.  Still I and our relationship has a bit to go when it comes to money.

So earlier in the week, after asking for something that made me uncomfortable, I immediately wanted to retract my request.  I felt incredibly ill at ease.  All of my good feelings of the past few weeks disappeared.  My heart ached.  I kind of returned to my old manic habits.  Well, I didn’t return to the habits but I felt the kind of anxiety I learned to identify when I was manic.  It sucked.

I actually found another way around the financial situation so I didn’t need what I asked of her.  Thankfully I could do this and relieve my anxiety.

What I am proud of is that before e-mailing her to retract my request, I stopped and opted to take a different tact.  I decided to wait until we could talk about the situation so that I could see, without interference on my part, what her reaction was.  While this whole situation does leave me existentially anxious even to this moment to some degree, I am in a relationship with her that has proven over and over again to be safe.  (I am glad I reached back inside of myself and could remember that.  That’s just the kind of thing that can be super hard to recollect in moments like this.)  What if I stopped assuming how she will respond?  The beauty of my initial request to her was that it was authentic.  I was making it because I trusted myself and because I was sympathetic to myself.  So I don’t want my anxiety to have me backtrack on that.  And I want to use this experience to learn how to be okay with the not knowing of how she will respond and build confidence, if necessary, around how to work things out in a relationship if I cross a line OR EVEN if we disagree over whether I crossed a line.

So I decided to wait until she e-mails me.  The unpleasant thing is that I haven’t heard from her.  I think she would have replied by now except that I imagine that she is involved in disaster support efforts related to Haiti since she once told me she has responded to past hurricane  tragedies as a mental health professional.

This sucks for me except that one of my favorite thinkers Clay Shirky posted his “A Rant About Women” yesterday, and his words have become like the strong voice of support I would hear in my head or in real life from Andrea if I were facing this issue with someone other than her.  What he wrote nearly echoes what Andrea and I have been talking a lot about lately in therapy.  Here are a few excerpts (without a lot of his interesting context well worth reading):

And it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.

What was so interesting to me is that here Shirky identifies exactly what I was fearful of – that Andrea would think that I was narcissistic.  Even a little bit.  Even temporarily.  I was worried that suddenly all that she knew about me would be forgotten and lost.  All that history gone because of one bold request.  And this fear shook me.  Rattled me.  Even though she and I have so much amazing history between us.  Even though she has encouraged me to spend a couple of years being a bull in a china shop, pushing the envelope on what I think is acceptable, and getting a truer sense of what is rude and less acceptable instead of automatically self-censoring.  Even though she has explicitly said that people easily forgive their friends who are obnoxious sometimes.

More Shirky:

It’s tempting to imagine that women could be forceful and self-confident without being arrogant or jerky, but that’s a false hope, because it’s other people who get to decide when they think you’re a jerk, and trying to stay under that threshold means giving those people veto power over your actions. To put yourself forward as someone good enough to do interesting things is, by definition, to expose yourself to all kinds of negative judgments, and as far as I can tell, the fact that other people get to decide what they think of your behavior leaves only two strategies for not suffering from those judgments: not doing anything, or not caring about the reaction.

Andrea and I have been talking about this exact thing.  In my family I “pre-managed” everything so that I would be within safe limits to have my mother’s affection and support.  I could make life safer for myself by not being too much of this or that to reduce my mother’s ire, but I’m an adult now.  Now I can relax.  Now I can trust that my judgement is enough.  I don’t need my goodness or value or wonderfulness reflected back to me by everyone in the outside world.

This is why I am so passionate about “becoming attachable”.  When I am attached, I have this capacity to take the nurturing and love and support that I have internalized from Andrea and fend off the sense that I have to conform to others.  When I am attachable, I have a place to go to in my heart other than having to seek the approval of the masses or even Andrea.

I’m in a little mini-crisis right now with Andrea where my sense of attachability and my sense of self is being tested.  But this mini-crisis mirrors the individuation process of adolescents.  I’m pushing and testing to see if I can be I can be myself, my authentic self, the self I trust, take big risks with my nurturing parent figure, and still survive.  Like more mature adolescents (not just younger adolescents purely wanting to distinguish themselves from their parents), I am hoping that I can be my big, bold self and still be loved and accepted even if I am not the same as Andrea, even if I offend.

The answer to this question about my relationship with Andrea is an unequivocal – yes.  I actually know that that’s true if I can relax long enough to remember the history of our relationship.

Really, the more important question I am trying to answer is – can I be my big, bold self and still be loved and accepted within myself.  This is where the neurons in my brain are learning to connect.  I think I’m pretty close to yes, but it sure will be nice to be talking this out with Andrea and to not have to work this all out by myself.

In the mean time I’m glad Clay Shirky ranted.  He helped.  And I feel freer to go off into my weekend less pre-occupied and more capable of enjoying life with my husband.  That’s what I want.