“They Don’t Have to Understand Me”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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