Posts from — February 2010

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.