Posts from — January 2010

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.