Posts from — November 2009

It’s been a while since I’ve written.  One huge side effect of this feeling better is that it has had me return to the truth of how my life was before I felt SO MUCH BETTER.  In the process I have felt awful.

A lot has been written this week in the field of psychology about how plastic the brain is.  I would completely agree.  Mine is feeling very plastic, perhaps even gooey, but it’s still not easy to make changes.  There are emotions that go with this.  There’s loss, grief, relief, disbelief at how one coped, disbelief at what you’ve discovered is true, and more.

Not sure I can be so coherent today as I write.  Guess I haven’t felt that way in a while!

I had a session with Andrea today and one way she helped me cope with all of these changes was to have me imagine myself as a toddler being introduced to a new life on a new continent.  As always, she pointed out that I would not have to face this new life on my own, and there would be a lot to face.  Everything would look different.  My high chair would be different, the food I eat would be different, my family’s schedules would be different, the language around me would likely be different.  This helped my current me self feel really well taken care of, because I was known and understood for how things would feel to my young inside parts.

I feel like I am leaving some things out in the middle, like an explanation of radically things are changing for me.  But it’s hard to put words to.  But it’s all about how I feel about myself on the inside.  All of my assumptions about who I was have changed because I can see my family more clearly.  I wish I could say more but not yet.

Anyway, about being a toddler.  Andrea reminded me that I might need lots of naps as I adjusted to this new reality.  I always like hearing this.  I liked how she encouraged me to reach out to her whenever I needed her.  We know I am an eager child, one who wants to socialize and be a part of things, and it’s reassuring to me to think of her being there at every turn.  This isn’t new.  I’m a little embarrassed I am talking about this yet again but it is part of what changes everything.

I have had moments where I have felt completely numb this week.  Things were too much.  It was shocking when I realized in a new way how alone and compromised I was.  It is still kind of wild to feel pity for myself and then the relief that comes with it.  It is such a relief for my habitualized coping mechanisms to serve no possible purpose anymore.  And then I feel sad all over again as I get it more clearly what I had been hiding from myself for so long.

The only antidote has been the joy my wise cracking husband brings me and remembering Andrea will help me.  It is so wonderful to be able to be changed and made better by their presence.  I keep being surprised by how solid family can feel with my husband.

I did have some moments of being ready for and wanting to feel better today.  They had to do with my multi-acre garden which I have been trying to conceptualize for quite some time.  When I was feeling GREAT a few weeks ago, I read a design book and was able to really register and apply what I was learning.  Over the summer this had been really tricky the few times I had attempted what was then a feat.  Since then I’ve been dreaming of how I want parts of the garden to feel like, asking do I want this area to recede into the background or pop out at you.  I also have been able to conceptualize colors and how our existing trees and plants will flower throughout the seasons.  I also have spent some time eliminating possible plants given our environment and the impact of four legged creatures on them.

And, there’s one spot in the yard that I had a very clear idea of.  My favorite plant source is closing soon for the winter and I knew that if I wanted to bring my vision to life this year that I would have to get myself in the car and go.  So I did.  It was a great feeling to know that I wouldn’t sell myself out of that dream.

Andrea and I talked about that – about how my vision involves a plant I don’t even like a lot and colors that are not my favorites – and how this felt good.  She said something about how I seemed able to make decisions about what I liked and didn’t like all the while managing my ambivalence.  I saw that, too, but said that I used to work really well with constraints.  I made the most of the opportunities presented to me so what made this different, I wondered.  She said yes I did work very well within constraints but that what was different was that I had put in the “I” into the mix.  This is true.  Like I don’t like so much pink but I am not going to cut down these trees either.  It was much easier to accept what I didn’t like and move on and create something that I do like with what exists.  I didn’t feel this uncomfortable, unidentifiable, unallowable feeling of distaste.  I can cope with distaste.  I know I am safe feeling distaste (more on that later).  That makes it possible to work with this massive landscape of mine.  If it were a smaller space, I might have more leeway in removing or changing things.  However, that is completely cost prohibitive here because I am unwilling to spend huge sums of money removing trees that are essentially good trees.  It also is prohibitive on a time basis since I don’t want to wait for new trees to grow up.

Life is so much easier when there’s nothing in the way of my knowing myself.  It frees me up to be an adult.

Anyway, I’m going to take one of those naps/sleeps I was talking about above as I feel like I am rambling.

I’ve had some really interesting and exciting couple of days.  I have really enjoyed myself.

Yesterday I had a full day.  Then this morning there was a plant sale going on and I invited a gardening friend of mine to check out the sale with me.  We went.  On the way back I was exhausted.  I hadn’t eaten.  I thought that I would bounce back after eating.  Not so.  I took a nap.  I thought after two hours I would feel good again.  Not so.

So I did what I always do in a moment like that.  I e-mailed Andrea.  As I was writing I realized that I felt overstimulated.  Just having that word felt like such a relief to me.  I wrote that what I wanted to do was putter around the house, that that might be calming and soothing to me.

As I was loading the dishwasher, I also imagined her really understanding my overstimulation, wanting to be able to soothe me and help me feel better again, and knowing that she wouldn’t leave until this was done.  That felt really, really good to me.  I also knew that she would be able to understand this from a young child’s developmental perspective and that in turn added to the compassion that I felt for myself.

Today was a big day in another way.  I usually have an appointment with her today and I am transitioning to talking just once a week, from two times a week.  I am certain that this is factoring into things as well because it’s simply a huge change in our therapist/patient relationship.

Ironically, I had actually been looking forward to just one appointment a week because I thought it might be interesting to see what it was like to have a less stimulating week therapy-wise.  It is clear to me that I keep needing her in my head, if not during an appointment, to help keep my feet on the ground, to help me manage all the wonderful stimulation the world has to offer.  I have a feeling I will have more to say about this later on.

It was nice just now to be able to know that I felt overstimulated, to feel compassion for myself, to know that I was deserving of care, and to have the tools to settle down.  Or at least mostly settle down.  I could still be a little bit more relaxed.

Last year when my cat had to have surgery, there was a moment when I was in the surgeon’s office when I feared that the doctor would think I was crazy and that somehow they would be able to see this through my attachment to my cat.  It was comforting to me to recognize that I was indeed crazy, that I really was struggling with some significant emotional issues and that I had a troubling past and the effects of that past were coming to roost.  I was doing my best to cope with that.  So at least if people judged me for being crazy, well, that didn’t give them undue power over me.  I knew I was struggling.

Those feelings and doubt were aroused within me again today when I took the same cat to the vet.

And this time I see something that Andrea and I talked about a little a while back a bit more clearly.  There was a time a year and a half or two years ago when I started to have a really hard time with going to the doctor.  I had some issues of my own and I struggled with taking my cats to the doctor.  First, I felt anxious about what might be found when going to the doctor.  Second, and this has been the most enduring issue, I was so worried that I was making a mountain out of a mole hill.  It’s related to something I’ve been revisiting this week – my need to feel like I am doing the right, most conscientious thing.

The trouble with this last bit, of course, is that with health related issues you simply cannot know.  There is really no right thing to do.  If are concerned about something and you don’t have it checked out, then it could turn into something and you catch it too late.  If you are concerned about something, investigate it, and discover that it was nothing, you can feel like you were worried about nothing and too hyper-vigilent.  For me who likes to do the right thing, this is confounding.  There is the likelihood that I will judge myself as “bad” either way I go.

A while back, Andrea helped me by helping me to see this conundrum that I was in as I talked out all of my feelings.  I didn’t quite get how this problem typified the stuff that was truly making me crazy.  But I was soothed by the idea that some things like health issues just can’t be understood ahead of time.  There simply is no right path.  You do just have to awkwardly stumble forward.  It was comforting to me back then to know that I could stumble forward, that she would be there with me so I wouldn’t have to stumble alone, and that she wouldn’t judge me or think that I was bad for not knowing the answer ahead of time.

So today with my cat I was stumbling.  I didn’t know if I had waited too long to bring him to the vet or if I had brought him needlessly.

And I was again conscious of my anxiety and how afraid I was that they thought I was crazy.  I understand now that I was afraid they would think I was crazy because that compulsion to do the right thing was so strong within me.  I wanted to be sure I did the right thing because I am deeply afraid of being seen as “bad” by these people.  I really like and respect my vet, and so it might be even more important to me that I be seen well in their eyes.  Not wanting to be seen as bad has been this huge, unconscious obsession for me.  In the absence of a solid sense of attachment, I work hard at not being bad.  As a child I was terrified of being bad, of crossing a line where I would be in that category.  If I was “bad” (meaning overwhelming to my parents in some way), I would be abandoned.

So today I worried about people thinking I was crazy.  In fact I was overcome by the crazies.

And now I am better.  And now I remember all the times Andrea and I have deconstructed this stuff.  However, I’ve never been able to do this as easily on my own or as clearly.  Often I would feel this confusion in my head, meddling dissociation.

I expect that I will have many, many more episodes like this as I keep feeling better.  I expect I will come across situations that I have faced before, feel emotions, and have to work through them.  Some scenarios will feel as blissful as they did last night where I could pop out of a funk with no effort.  Others scenarios involve such entrenched feelings that I will have to work harder to tease things out.  I am just so grateful that my dissociation has eased and that I feel safe enough right now to be able to think things through without having to turn away from my pain.

Sometimes I can recognize how much I am challenging my status quo.  This helps me have compassion for myself.  My family really resisted me differentiating from them.  So it’s a huge deal to challenge my old assumptions in my head.

Last night I was feeling low or something.  It was so bizarre because I simply couldn’t get depressed.  My insides, body or mind or both, simply would not let me.  It was nothing that I did.  It just was.

The weirdest thing about what’s been happening lately is that I am discovering how depressed I was by how not depressed I am.  I just lived depressed until I couldn’t anymore.

I was thinking about how things started changing for me and I became aware that there was a problem.  Before I stopped everything and began this sabbatical, I would go on these trips back home.  I would go for a week and then I would return to my current home and be out of it for a week or two.  Then I would make a trip back home and I would be out of it a week or two before the trip and then a week or two after returning.  It was horrendous.  There was so much steeling myself and recovery involved.

What I am beginning to recognize now is that my whole life had these patterns of steeling myself for what was ahead and then having time to myself to recover from life.  Perhaps this is the weirdest part of what I am discovering about what is new for me.  I don’t have to recover all the time.  I don’t have to gear up for things.  I am just so much more available for living.  This is taking a whole bunch of getting used to.

So this takes the form of having a full day and still being able to putter around the house doing laundry, emptying the kitchen sink and the like.  Yesterday I went out to do some winter clothes shopping.  I noticed this tiny, small change.  Instead of kind of sighing and just being glad that I had dressed and was about to get out of the house leaving things in disarray, I had the energy to and I really wanted to pick up the clothes on the floor and put the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher.  I realized in that moment that I had been feeling this huge burden around getting out of the house in the past.  It’s so hard to describe.  This will have to do.  Well, it was like I had to “try” so hard.  Oh gosh, it was painful.

Last night I faced another small situation.  I had put a pillow that had been soiled by a cat in the washer.  I hadn’t wanted it to contaminate other stuff so it was by itself.  This meant that the washer was unbalanced and it would require me to sit on the washer during the spin cycle.  A pain in the ass, pun intended!  (Oh, I guess I could have put old towels in there.  Anyway…)  I was thinking about how hard this would have been for me in the past.  The pillow would have ended up getting moldy.  I wouldn’t have had the attention span to complete this, even though my life is really uncomplicated.  As I am sitting on the washer, I remember how I used to play this “counting game” with myself.  To get myself to pick up the house I would negotiate with myself how many items I would have to pick up.  It was the minimum.  If I built up enough momentum and was enjoying myself, I could continue, but if it was too much, well at least I had made an effort.

It was such a funny thing to remember because I can’t imagine having to manipulate myself in that way anymore.  Even weirder is that I don’t think I’m going to back track.  I feel 70% or so better and I don’t have to worry about feeling 50% some time soon.  In the past when I would feel good, those kinds were kind of elusive so I would use that spurt to its fullest.  I now see why during this sabbatical there was a kind of funny call to action when I felt good.  It was weird to sit around and enjoy myself.  I was like I was primed to make the most of that time.  There was an urgency and a preciousness to those moments.

The other kind of nice thing is that I have no idea what was going on last night that had me feel low.  I just didn’t have to know.  I’d like to know and understand but I bet I’ll see a pattern in a few days or get to know “low”.  It may have just been that I was tired or that I was discovering a new part of being human.  Sometimes we just feel low.

It wasn’t long before I felt better.  I watched some TV and then I wanted to putter around with some of the stuff on my to do list.  Bizarre for me because I was doing this at 10pm, an impossibility at any previous time in my life.  I would have needed this time to recover.  In the puttering around I got to enjoy my husband.  I could enjoy his sweetness and the sweetness of our marriage.  Of course, at some point I imagined Andrea with me, wanting to understand what I was feeling, able to soothe my low feeling self, letting it be okay if I didn’t know what was going on, welcoming me into her arms and giving me a hug because she knew that often makes me feel good, and being someone who would not be overwhelmed by my needing her and my not feeling so great.  It was nice and this makes me cry right now.  It feels so good now.

Last night at some point I was sitting on the sofa and I realized that my body and head could not be depressed.  I guess I was sitting in a place that was familiar and that I had felt myself feel rotten and sink into depression while sitting there before.  I just couldn’t sink that low.  I did nothing to prevent it from happening.  It just didn’t happen.  Wow.

So here I am today just taking life very slowly.  It is enough to just take all of this in.

I also want to thank two of my readers for your recent comments.  I am so self absorbed lately that it’s a bit tough to take in things from outside of me.  At the same time it’s neat to know that you are celebrating with me.  Thank you.

Wow, what a session I just had.  I need to get this down “on paper”.  As always it will be stream of consciousness.  As always I worry now about being able to fully capture it!

I am left with these incredible feelings of peace and hope and a deep, deep knowing that I keep being on the right track.

Before my session I felt tired and sleepy, like I knew there would be some heavy duty lifting and I was shutting down a bit.  I thought a lot about something Andrea said last week that I finally really, really got in my bones.  In the early days I showed up to therapy, did my work on my own and let Andrea watch as I did it.  But I was not in the experience of therapy together with her.  That same session we talked about how neat it is with us human beings that we can be together and not know what’s going to happen when we’re together and that there is fun and enjoyment in being together as the adventure unfolds.

So I was thinking about this.

Heck, I can’t really retell this chronologically so I’ll start at the end.

We had talked about something that had really stirred me up inside.  We were talking about my pre-teen and feelings that she had that she had to deal with and cope with in the past that were really about the infant inside of her being terrified.  Oh yes, I remember and I am starting to feel bad again!  I could feel the anxiety in the tops of my legs.  We were talking about how I have had this feeling as it relates to friendships where I think I am supposed to do the right thing, that there is a right thing to do.  It’s an awkward feeling to have these days because that feeling doesn’t fit with the rest of the new life that is emerging for me.  But I do feel it.  The infant in me would have been terrified when she was little because there was a right way for me to behave for my parents, things that would generate their affection and things that would overwhelm them and have them abandon me.  So it is a very real feeling for me today to come across this feeling.  I have typically focused exclusively on doing the right thing rather than even considering what I think or feel because there is this huge existential need to ensure my safety and not be alone.

I had this feeling come up earlier in the week when I left from my pilates class and was saying goodbye to a very, very casual friend of mine.  We’re not that great of friends.  I would like to be friends some more, but that day I really didn’t want to be chit chatty.  I really wanted to do my own thing and remember that I really don’t have to care about other people.  I’ve been really relishing the job of the pre-teen to be self-absorbed in her own world, doing things only for her pleasure as a way of getting to know herself, etc.  So on the one hand I had this very genuine feeling of not being interested at that moment in cultivating this friendship and at the same time these feelings related to thinking that there was something “right” I was supposed to do in that moment that was accompanied by a sense of urgency and to my surprise terror.

So we were talking about this anxiety and we were near the end of the call when we did this amazingly interesting imagining of having Andrea with me in the midst of this awfulness.  She talked about this being the kind of moment where I needed her with me because being alone with these feelings is so toxic to me and that this could be a time when together I could discover that I could feel better again.  She asked my pre-teen self what she might like to do together – ride bikes, read aloud with one another, read separately together, make something in the kitchen, take a walk, etc.  I decided it would feel really good to make something together in the kitchen.

At this point I am thinking that it’s already late in the call.  She can’t really be serious about continuing, but she does.  I feel so much relief because I feel so anxious.  I won’t have to deal with this by myself.

We talk about what to make, what I’d want to do, what I’d want her to do.  I tell her I want to make a soup, a pureed soup, something with a nice, unexpected spice.  She asks if I want to choose the spice or have her choose it.  I want her to choose it.  But I want to puree the vegetables.  Aah, she says because you like that.  Indeed.  We work out that we’ll both wash and chop the vegetables.  I suggest that and it feels so good to do together.  Something not so nice that we do.  She offered to just let me puree the vegetables but I wanted something more.  I wanted to do more.  I see now that I could have just sat at the counter and watched her do this and allow myself to just step in for the fun.  But that wasn’t what I wanted at the time or what felt nice.

Then she asked me about getting the vegetables.  Should we pick them from the garden together?  At first I wasn’t so into this.  In real life I actually resist picking vegetables that I grow.  Anyway, in a flash it felt like it would be really nice to go outside together.  I could go outside and be out there with all that space around me and feel awful and uncomfortable and she could be with me in the middle of all of that.  I could calm down while we pick.  (And maybe I would let her do the work while I vented!)  As I was imagining all of this, it felt so good to have this time outside to relax some, to have things unfold in stages.  I could then picture coming inside and being able to experience another layer of relaxation as we worked together to wash and prep the vegetables.  And yet another as we waited for them to cook.  I could imagine myself feeling really good and relaxed by the time I got to puree the vegetables.

For some reason I still feel a little unnerved now as I retell this.  I paused and imagined Andrea with me and I feel better now.

She asked me at one point if I could feel her enjoying me and we talked at some length about how I did but I was caught up at this spot where I am so enamored with the feeling of being safe and relaxed that I can’t quite go to the next level of enjoyment.  I thought that was kind of interesting.