Posts from — May 2008

After sitting here for a few minutes taking in the relief I feel that I talked about in my last post, I realized that I wanted to tell and process more of the recent back story of how it is that I can feel my brain working with me rather than against me.

When I spoke with Andrea on Tuesday, our focus was on how my aunt had not called me as she said she would to let me know how my grandmother did with her mastectomy. Andrea said something like – We really don’t need to spend so much time focusing on your feelings because they are familiar and instead we need to focus on helping you to be stronger and less vulnerable in this complicated family situation of yours.

This upset me more than I could say at the time or even during my post processing the situation. The part about not spending time on my feelings stung. At the same time I liked where we were headed. I was confused.

When I talk with Andrea on Friday, I’ll bring the hurt up because I want to be truthful with her. It feels better for me to be totally transparent with her than to hide anything. However, I think I’m way past the hurt because of what I’ve discovered from the situation.

I was hurt because I felt defensive. The old parts of me were upset and assuming she meant that my feelings weren’t important, that she didn’t care, that she just “didn’t want to hear it”, and so on. I felt like I had to defend myself from her and this “attack”. The old trauma was alive in me.

Another part of me was knowing how much she is on my side. How much she understands how sensitive I am and how she values my sensitivity even more than I can most of the time. How much she wants me to be able to use this gift in the world with ease. I knew she was offering me a pragmatic point of view if I were to choose it – that my family was so complicated that I needed a way to not get trapped in the complexity and take care of my emotional well-being.

Nonetheless, I feared her judgement of me. In the past when I have written by e-mail that I am worried about what she thinks of me, she always brings it up in a session for us to talk about and she’ll clarify how she feels. Other times during a session I will stop and note when I feel defensive toward something she’s said. It always feels good to air my feelings. I look back at previous years of therapy and wish I had known how to have said what I feared she thought about me because I KNOW that I was unconsciously defensive a good bit of the time and it interfered with my progress.

Andrea once told me that defensiveness is a relationship killer. I believe it.

As I say that, I realize that there is a distinction between being able to disagree and being defensive. Growing up I felt so often under attack for what I felt and thought that I assumed this defensive position. Attacking voices in my head got established that were in opposition to me. Those voices just reflected what happened to me in the world around me. One of my few ways of having a self was to defend myself against those voices. The problem was that I started to assume that other people, especially one of the people closest to me, Andrea, also felt like those voices did about me.

She and I have talked recently about how hard it can be to disagree when you don’t KNOW that people are with you, behind you, no matter whether or not they agree or disagree with you. So what I am finding is that as my defensiveness decreases, I can feel Andrea more with me no matter what, and I can be more comfortable disagreeing with her and with ideas I read in my favorite blogs, etc.

Anyway, back to my main point. This week I’ve been wrestling with the question – Is Andrea really on my side and can I trust her? Not at a rational level because I am certain she is with me but at the level within me where my defensiveness automatically kicks in. What’s been special about this morning is that I decided that Andrea is with me and that I want her with me more than I want to feed the defensiveness within. I am also saying is that I found a way to consciously intercept the defensiveness so that it’s not so automatic.

I had thought that if Andrea wasn’t encouraging me to feel my feelings around my aunt that she was also saying that I was bad and wrong for feeling so out of it and groggy. It’s so amazing how insidious my defensiveness is. Somewhere along the way I started to recognize that that’s what I thought Andrea was saying to me and that awareness made all the difference because it allowed me to tease out what is not true.

When I don’t assume that Andrea thinks mean things about me, I can feel close again to her. I can want to feel close to her. I can relax and surrender without having to know what I feel or what’s going to happen or how long the limbo is going to last. I can even disagree with her and consider what might be important about my feelings around my aunt.

I’ve got to write about something that is happening today and I just hope that I have the ability to put it all into words.

This week I’ve been groggy and out of it. It’s felt like there is something unconscious happening in my brain that is healing.

In the past I couldn’t just let this happen. I liked to be able to get my head around it. A while back I finally realized that the stuff that’s happening to me is so complex that I can’t understand it. Instead I have to be able to let go and let my brain work out things on its own.

Another challenge I have is around feeling things. To expedite things I’d like to be in touch with my emotions because I have experience of when I’m aware of what I’m feeling that things change for the better. But throughout this process there are times when I don’t feel anything. It took some assurance from Andrea to know that this is okay, but it has still been hard to accept.

Then we have the other huge challenge of it just being okay to feel bad. That took months to get a handle on. I would freak out every time I felt bad, even though it was kind of a relief to at least be feeling.

Well today something happened. I was writing to Andrea basically complaining. My allergies are bad, my body aches, and I’m in this limbo between my old consciousness of my life and the emerging consciousness of my life and it’s grating. I also said that there was stuff I was feeling but I really didn’t have any words for it. Then I said that I was really writing just so I could remember that she was there for me. I couldn’t try to make sense of any of it. I was just surrendering to it all and wanted to feel her presence in my life because that does make it all tolerable.

That was a big moment. I let go completely of trying to control things. I was trusting myself enough to know that I didn’t have to be able to explain everything for things to be okay. I was trusting myself to know that I didn’t have to try to feel more than I could actually feel. I was able to be compassionate towards myself enough to say that it does feel awful to be in limbo. Finally, somehow it dawned on me that what I really wanted was to just feel Andrea with me. Knowing that I was not alone allowed me to relax.

And when I say not alone what I really, really mean is that I don’t have that part of my brain criticizing me. I don’t mean a “gremlin” like we say in coaching criticizing me. I mean something a lot deeper, the part of my brain that developed to keep me “safe” at home. By safe I mean fused with my mother and doing my job of not causing and even reducing her anxiety. Instead my brain was working WITH me this morning and not to maintain the status quo of my family situation (even though I am 35 and thousands of miles away!).

There, I was able to write a pretty good approximation of how I feel this morning and what happened!

I feel a clarity and freedom of movement in my brain right now. Very little grogginess although something does kind of feel like it is tingling.

In the old days I would expect that I would go off and take on the world after this kind of a breakthrough, but it’s not like that now. I don’t feel like I have to do that. I do feel able to do more than I have felt able for days. But I can relax, savor this. I don’t have to get into action right away because I fear the boogeyman is going to get me. That’s the old way.