My Journey Toward Healthy Psychological Attachment in Adulthood

Where to begin about what happened with my family this weekend?

What happened is that my cousin’s wife facebooked me this weekend offering to keep me informed about the health of my grandfather – did I know what was going on?

Come to find out he has pneumonia and the doctors want to insert a feeding tube.  His swallow reflex is not working due to his Parkinson’s and a series of recent strokes.  The tube is supposed to help him have food to regain his strength and they should be able to help him retrain his swallow reflex once he feels better and remove the tube.  This is a very brief summary of the events.  It was my grandfather’s decision regarding the feeding tube.  The other option was to have him go home and die in a hospice/palliative care scenario.  He decided he wants to stick around.

Of course this was a big deal.

It evoked a lot of emotions within me around my grandfather who gave me such an important outside perspective on myself that I desperately needed.  My relationship with my grandparents showed me that things could feel different than they did with my parents.  It was enough for me to want to strive for something different for myself.  Just last Friday Andrea and I were talking about how when I would visit my grandparents it felt good to just be with them because they were capable of enjoying me and delighting in me.  I didn’t have to take care of them like I did my parents, and I didn’t have to cope with my mother’s self-hatred oozing out on me.  We could just be together.

As I was processing what I was hearing from my cousin and later my aunt and researching on the internet, I was coming face to face with the fact that my grandfather’s body is shutting down, if gradually.  He won’t be around for another couple of years.  It will be much shorter than that although it appears he will be around for a good bit yet.

As I came to terms with this, I realized how capable I felt about myself compared to how I felt when I began this sabbatical.  Had I not worked on becoming attachable, I would have been devastated my grandparents’ aging.   I remembered how it felt as I began to realize that things would be different for me within my family without my grandparents.  My anchor would be gone and I guess I knew on some level that that anchor had never been established firmly within myself.  It had never solidly and dependably transferred to be within me.

So it blew my mind this weekend to realize just how much I am solid and sturdy within me myself now.  It was another experience that set me back on my feet, taking some getting used to!

There were other moments of awareness that things have changed for me.

My cousin’s wife reached out to me!  That in itself was phenomenal.  I was so segregated from my aunt and uncle’s family by age (my cousins are 5 and 10 years younger than I am), gender and my loyalty to my parents.  It was like I wasn’t supposed to enjoy them and certainly not to be in relationship with them.  Recently something changed in the family dynamics such that my cousin’s wife reached out to me.  Something changed within me.  It may have been possible because I wrote a note to my cousin and his wife a few weeks ago about some tough times that they were having and just saying that I cared.  But I’ve kind of made random outreaches before.  I think it was more that I have differentiated enough from my parents that my family can reach me, get through to me.  There’s a me to get through to.  If this makes any sense.  I would love to know more about all that unspoken family systems stuff.

Anyway, that was remarkable.

Then the next day my aunt e-mails and reconnects.  I write her back and outline what I am feeling and desiring as it relates to my grandfather and being able to visit.  I can articulate what an important role he played.  I can say that I want to be sure to visit soon. I also say I am well enough to make the visit to be with him, but not to be with him and interact with my parents.  Then I ask for her help.  I ask if she could be my advocate in keeping my parents away while I visit.  I am blown away by how the words come straight from my heart and out onto the page.  I am remembering how in the past I would have obsessed for days about just the right words to use.  Along the way, I am deciding how much to say and even whether to say as much as I am saying.  I realize that I am my own person and it doesn’t really matter how she responds.  I know I am solid and that leaves me feeling so free to be me.

I wrote the e-mail in the morning and as the day wears on (I had not slept the night before) I nap and decide that I will travel out Tuesday.  I was waiting to get a reply to my e-mail from my aunt before finalizing my plans.  When I don’t hear from her, I call.  Of course, I’m kind of nervous but not much.  I just pick up the phone even though we haven’t spoken for a couple of years.

So we talk and it is easy.  I am saying things that are difficult to say about why I have been out of touch, but somehow it’s okay.  I am listening to her and still able to be able to distinguish what I think and what she is telling me about stuff.  I guess that’s normal but that’s a big deal for me, especially with family.  It could be so tempting for me to be so well received by my family that I would feel compelled to act in an enmeshed way and give myself over to them.  But that didn’t happen.

I also asked about my grandfather’s will to live but I didn’t quite use such gracious words.  I said it more awkwardly so it came across more as if I was saying why keep persisting so hard when he is approaching death.  I sensed something in her reply so I found a way to express myself more clearly – I wanted to understand what was important to my grandfather, what held meaning in his life these days.

In the past when I would have made a gaffe like that I would have been so upset that the other person responded as they did.  I would have feared their misunderstanding of me and ultimately felt really alone because they didn’t know who I was just because of the poor words I used to express myself.  I get the heebie jeebies just thinking back to old past experiences.  A few months ago it started to dawn on me that I might say things (especially poorly), people would misinterpret them, but that didn’t mean that how people responded to what I said defined who I was.  I just didn’t have a stable sense of who I was.  Who I was constantly had to be reflected back to me.  Ugh.

When I was talking about this with Andrea, she told me that this is what’s so awful about enmeshment.  You have to depend upon other people to understand you in order to even exist.  Yet you can never control whether people understand you or not.

So that I found my way around my gaffe with my aunt was a big deal.  Because it was okay with me to ask what I was asking about my grandfather, I found a way to ask it that really conveyed what I meant.  I could recover rather than be stymied by feeling bad about myself.  I said something like – “it’s an awkward question to ask…”  And I was okay.  It was like magic, too.  Once I got how I felt inside about myself straightened out, all the words came.  Naturally and with ease.

More on in a bit.

Oh my gosh.  This is such a weird thing for me to talk about and write about.  I feel kind of embarrassed, but if I were on a similar kind of journey I would feel so relieved if someone else wrote about this.

It’s the Monday morning feeling.  I have had countless Monday mornings that pan out the very same way.  Something happens over the weekend that blows my mind and moves me closer toward sanity.  I feel so incredibly good and different.  Then Monday morning rolls around and I can barely move!  It’s like everything stops.  I still feel great but in the early days of my sabbatical and to some degree now I would really mess that all up by wondering why I couldn’t actually do anything, like go about living my life again come Monday.  So I would stress and stress over that instead of just appreciating that a lot had happened and give myself time to integrate what I have learned.

Using the past as a guide, it will be later today (if I am lucky) or even Wednesday before I am fully moving along in my life.  After all this time, that is still hard to accept.  But it’s true.  I can harangue myself all I want about not getting into action and living my life in these wonderful new ways I’ve just experienced but that just delays the integration process.

So here I am this morning, copping to the realities, and submitting myself to this process I’ve discovered that works for me.

A couple of summers ago I was really into the notion of submission.  I liked idea of submission a bit more than surrender.  I would think of submission and feel a kind of relief like I would see on The Dog Whisperer when a pack leader was in charge and the dogs calmed down.  I imagined being able to feel that kind of submission to Andrea.  I wanted to let her tame me.  (Well, that sure happened.)

I’ve been thinking off and on that a massive project like my recent patio set painting project and my current home inventory project involves a fair degree of submission and maybe that’s why I’ve liked them.  It’s so daunting, boring, tedious that at some point all you can do is just give in and keep slowly moving forward.  I am more than 50% done and so I can feel the momentum building, but to get here and to finish I will have to keep giving myself over to the work and just not fight it.

There is something so deeply satisfying to me in that.  It makes me want to choose more meaningful things to give myself over to!

Like those dogs on the Dog Whisper, as a child, I didn’t have anyone who was really in charge of me.  I had someone whose emotional life ruled my emotional life, but I didn’t have anyone who was thinking with any degree of consciousness about my needs or who even have the patience to teach me the little things like how to tie my shoes or shuffle cards.  I took care of myself and so it means a lot now to have that place within me that is practiced in a healthy kind of submission and trust.  I suppose it’s really enjoyable now to recreate that sense of submission with these big projects.  In contrast to the past maybe now I am more emotionally flexible and able to move in and out of my drive toward completion with more ease and deeper enjoyment.

So in my last post I talked about how I stopped myself from driving myself endlessly on this home inventory project because it didn’t feel right but how I also didn’t know exactly how to relax once I had stopped.

I talked about how I thought my sense of attachment to Andrea made the difference because I know that she just likes me and cares about me.  But attachability in that moment is something more for me.  Because I felt attached to her last night, I could stand the uncertainty I felt about what to do next and even what I wanted as I am not sure I knew much more than that I wanted to chill for a bit and not drive myself endlessly.  I had Andrea inside of me so I could stand all of that tension.  I suppose I spent quite a long time just feeling at ease.

I say suppose because I think this was happening unconsciously.  Only now can I look back and tell what I was feeling.  That was different, too, because I wasn’t feeling with existential levels of anxiety such that I would notice what was going on.  I was just there, fairly relaxed but still unsure of how to engage with the world in a fully relaxed way after having been so driven.

Anyway, it seems like an important distinction to make.  Attachment to Andrea made it possible for me to stay quiet and slowly find my way into an even more attached state with my husband.  I don’t think I am as healthily attached to him (in a husband kind of way) as I am to Andrea (in a nurturing parent kind of way).  I say this because I was surprised not quite shocked to feel the connection with him once I began to chit chat.  I don’t yet take it for granted that this intimacy is always in the realm of possibility (if we are both not distracted).

Enough on this for now.

So I am feeling so much better.  Things look differently to me as I go about my everyday life.  I’m still suspicious of myself sometimes.

I have been working on this home inventory project for insurance purposes that I have wanted to complete for two and a half years.  A while back I’d had some false starts using different software than I am now, but recently I got all the kinks worked out, found the software I wanted to use, even recovered from losing some data I entered, and now I am really on the path to finishing this huge, massive project.

I’ve become driven to complete it.  Each night I have my lists of what to do the next day so I can easily find my place and keep working.  It’s Saturday today and I was bright eyed and bushy tailed to get up and keep working.  I probably have another 3 or 4 days of work.

Along the way I’ve asked myself – why oh why do you care so much about this when there is so much work involved.  Why am I so driven?  The best conclusion I’ve come to is that I just like having stuff like a home inventory done.  I like finishing things that take massive effort like the patio set, like the 14 or so scrapbooks I’ve finished.

I have learned to be suspicious of manic-ness.  So of course I’ve wondered if this is manic-ness or just that I am driven.

I am excited.  I can see the end in sight.  When I was manic and felt excited, the excitement felt like a nervous excitement, jangley.  I am not nervous excited.  I do feel good deep down inside.  I feel that when I breathe.  I kind of wonder if I am excited because I have the chance to apply myself to doing something tangibly productive.  I haven’t had much of that this year.  As I sit here and think about this, I have a kind of relaxed, resigned feeling about my self-examination.  I’m not itching to get myself to stop or get on with it so I can work on my project.

Last night I wanted to keep working, too, but I also held off because I was tired.  I figured I would get more done if I stopped and began again in the morning.  I was kind of reminded of my other detailed, organizational projects I’ve done over the years like tagging my photos with keywords.  There’s this funny appeal for me to projects that are boring, massive and detail oriented like this.

What was nice about last night was that my husband had come home from work and we were sitting together in the living room watching TV and working on our respective laptops.  I had been in my own world.  He was in his.  Eventually, we really came together.  As the evening wore on, I was chatting up a storm.  In the old days when I was manic, I wouldn’t have been available for casual chatting.  I would have been super focused on what I was doing, even when I had down time.

Last night I was aware that I felt like I was on the fringe of that possibility of having an open heart and be able to relax away from my project.  By on the fringe I mean that I had stopped my intense work on the project because I knew that was good for me but I still didn’t know how to exactly let my drive go.  It was like I was shy with myself and with my life.  It’s an odd question but it was like I was wondering – did my life want me in my non-driven state, was I welcome after having been so driven?  Could I switch from being really on to not wanting to be on and find a new groove?

Yeah, that’s it.

I’ve been thinking about the source of my drive which I imagine to be working in my parents’ printing business where there would be large, massive projects that would have to be finished by a deadline.  Often boring the only way to complete them was to work steadily, measure your progress, and take advantage of the good feelings of momentum toward completion.  I would have been lauded for being a good worker but I wouldn’t have been lauded for being me in all of my other ways of being.  In our daily life you relaxed when you finished your work.  The worked loomed in your head until it could be completed.  My family couldn’t relax in between.

So it makes so much sense to me that I would have metaphorically been standing on the edge of relaxation, hoping to be invited to join the party and not being completely sure what parties like this were like.  But I did stand there.  Hoping.  And I did find an immense amount of delight chit chatting with my husband.  We both felt so open hearted and close to one another.

I’m not so sure about this drive thing and it’s future place in my life.  I’m still a little suspicious of it.  That served me well yesterday because it had me consciously stop.  I certainly don’t feel the old nervous excitement of my manic days, but I also don’t completely trust myself either.

The antidote to lack of trust always has its source in my attachment to Andrea.  I guess what that means right now is remembering and feeling how she wants to be with me, discovering who I am, and just being.  I am safe with her even when I am angry with her.

I hope for today that I can be flexible with my drive.  Looser.  Not so rigid.  Yet still disciplined enough that I can finish this project and move on to some of the more fun things I want to accomplish.  It’s odd but what makes the difference is if I approach this project with a “hard heart” or a softer heart.

So I just had a session with Andrea and I was so totally chilled out and unactivated.  I had nothing really to talk about.  Even things that did happen I wasn’t so interested in talking about.  In fact I was most interested in talking about how I had not felt existential anger and so I had to kind of manufacture how I felt.  I knew that I cared but I didn’t CARE.

And so that’s kind of how our session was.  There were little things I wanted and needed to say.  But there wasn’t much to say.  I even questioned if something was amiss.  But I don’t think so.

The best part was talking about how Andrea could be with me in this place.  I imagined her sitting with me in my living room, totally comfortable.  She also said that one of the important parts was not just that I wanted her there and that she could be there when I needed her but also my my knowing that she wanted to be there with me and was eager about hanging out together.  That feels really good.

As I reinvent the friendship part of my life, that is really what I want.  People who feel comfortable just being together, who want to hang out with me, who can relax enough to chill with me, who are available for friendship, who seek friendship out on a regular basis, and who know they need friendship and my friendship in particular.  It’s a nice thing to think about.  It adds even more peace and warmth to the calm, chilled out, boring as in no drama way that I feel right now.

I’ve known for a while that as my life gets more boring that I would be closer to the end of my intensive work.  I can tell I’m getting there.

It will be time soon for me to find a job again.  Yay!  I’ve been a little nervous about that in that a few weeks ago I wondered if I would be ready, blah, blah, blah.  The other day I was wandering around the grocery store of all places and was thinking how glad I am that I am not stressed about finding a job or pushing myself to be ready for a job.  I really want the chance to finish this process and get to the point where it feels like it’s time to get a job.  I didn’t want my feet in two worlds – finishing up the bulk of the work of my sabbatical and looking for a job.  It seemed wrong.  Like an old pattern of thinking ahead too much.

But what I’ve found is that I trust myself to get a job and I trust myself to finish up the big work of my therapy.  I’m not ready to look for a job.  I will be ready when I am ready.  It feels really good today to know this about myself.  It feels really good to be imagining some kind of end.

The feeling I have inside myself is so interesting.  I can’t get over it.  I’ve always had to think so many steps ahead of myself.  It just feels so good to trust myself that I don’t have to do that anymore.

But it all feels so weird to not be upset, worried, anxious, or just plain crazy AND to know that this is somewhat permanent.

I’m sitting here this morning feeling kind of peculiar.

After my last session (that I haven’t yet written about) I was confronted again by the massive impact that the oppressive unspoken rules of my family had on me.  At the beginning of my sabbatical I would have been floored by this and retreated to bed for several weeks.  It was just that difficult for me.

Right now I kind of have two levels of feeling – the sadness and shock that comes from the realization of this massive impact and the feelings of tremendous relief that I don’t feel depressed only sad about all of this.

It’s a lot to put together in my psyche right now.  I do feel so much better inside.  I have this new sense of myself that is solid and dependable. I have been feeling a lot of freedom as I learn to depend upon my sense of my choices rather than looking constantly outside of myself for validation.  It’s exciting to keep learning about how my old ways of being, the only ones I knew, are so out of date and learning new ways to go through the world.

But I’m having a hard time getting my hands around my past.  How in the world did I survive?  Yeah, it’s kind of coming to that point where I have my feet enough inside my new world that now I am looking back and I can’t believe I made it.  And that brings up lots of emotion.  Tears come to my eyes.  And also underneath the disbelief that I made it is more feeling that’s so much harder to be with.  Feelings of betrayal – how could my parents have done all that they did to me?  How could they be that selfish and that ignorant?

But then I am also kind of sitting here saying to myself that I just don’t care.  I feel released from the old enmeshment that used to have me care.  I don’t care about feeling so bad or getting to the bottom of my feelings.  I guess I don’t care because my parents aren’t that important anymore so I don’t have to care.  If I were still so enmeshed, I would care because my life so depended on my relationship with them.  Being more differentiated, I can go on living my life.

…

I have just had another session with Andrea and we talked about this.  It was kind of confusing.  But I’ll see what I can work out by writing.

First of all, what I wrote above now makes a lot more sense and even feels really brilliant on my part!  It is true that now that I am more differentiated, I don’t have to care as much about the tremendous, almost unmanageable feelings of my past.  I am more normal now in that I’ve been able to have that healthy separation that happens for most people during adolescence but that never happened for me.  So my feelings about the past somehow don’t have to live as strongly in me now because now I am not tied to my parents like I used to be.

And I really did need to have Andrea’s help today with those really big feelings as I felt them in the present.  I’m surprised by how little it took to have me feel better.

Part of how she helped me was by getting me to figure out what parts of me were hurting.  When we were speaking, my child and toddler parts were most affected, feeling sad and angry that they could not be themselves.  As we spoke, older parts of me also needed help because they didn’t know how to go on with their anger.  Andrea helped my young parts remember that they are no longer living through what happened in the past and so they don’t have to worry about feeling all that bad stuff again.  She also acknowledged that my older parts had to face not just living through the difficult times but the consequences of those difficult times.

As I’ve been writing this, I’ve felt a little embarrassed because things that used to trouble me so much now appear to have had this really easy resolution.  It’s like – oh yeah, duh.  At the same time I think it’s also really fascinating how therapy can make things suddenly be easy when the things that need to be healed heal.

A while back Andrea and I were talking about hope and how when you are securely attached you feel hope.  She was saying that she hoped that I trusted her enough to feel really attached to her so that I could experience hope.  I’m not certain of the context but I suspect it was around the time we were talking about my anger toward her.  She would have said this because she hoped I could tell her the difficult and painful feelings I had about our relationship in the early days.

The other day I was musing on how hard it is to take things slow sometimes.  Sometimes a part of me feels really ready to move forward but another part of me is not ready.  I realized that it’s hard to go slow when I don’t trust myself.  When I trust myself, I can accept whether I am moving slowly or quickly.  I don’t feel fearful.  I don’t feel fearful because I am securely attached to Andrea and able to feel deeply hopeful.

It’s been feeling like my healing and recovery have been building a huge amount of momentum.  I recover from things more quickly.

1. Even a month ago I was taking long naps.  This afternoon I took a nap thinking I would be out for a while.  Instead I catnapped and then was awake to enjoy more of my novel.
2. The other night I was really quiet and introspective on my way to a chick flick fundraiser.  I was pretty sure I would still feel that way on the drive back.  Instead I found that fun loving place within me on the drive home and rocked out to some music.
3. I said something to a friend that maybe wasn’t the most thoughtful or considerate.  It wasn’t so significant that I revisit the comment with her.  I remembered that some times it can be okay to be a bit like a bull in a china shop and that people forgive people who are loud and boisterous.

Life just doesn’t feel as serious.  I am finding my way back to me and my life more easily.

Well, I feel tremendous after having gotten up and written this morning and gone back to bed for a bit.  Tremendous.  Like I am at a new neutral, starting from place.  I am stunned I feel this good.

All week I have felt better despite being tired.  Every week it feels like I make huge progress in my healing.  But today feels different.  Today feels like I have more of my head back.  Throughout this process there have been huge chunks of time where it has felt like my head was occupied, doing the work of therapy.  Today not so much.

Also throughout the last three and a half years I would feel better and I would want to push myself back into life.  Looking back to three years ago when I would want to do that, it’s clear that those attempts were premature.  It’s not as obvious sometimes recently that I still need to wait and give myself time to come back even though I do feel tremendously better.  I even let myself experiment a little bit with pushing myself this week.  I’m not sure it worked so well.  I guess really it didn’t work because I do truly feel so much better today and no amount of pushing or forcing myself could have gotten me here.

That said I did notice moments when I genuinely wanted to be more engaged in life.  I took a nap yesterday before going to a charity dinner and I got up earlier than I normally would have, got ready, and had some time to spare.  So I spent it tidying up around the house.  It was nice to not have to sleep so much.  It was nice to feel that deep down desire to care for the house.  That wasn’t pushing.

I do kind of wonder if there’s a neuroses still behind my current desire for pushing as there was in the early days.  Well, I am sure it’s the same old stuff.  I love the quote that pops up on the sidebar of this blog by Epstein that says that it’s not about getting rid of our neuroses it’s about being able to cut a path around them.  I would also say that the pushing is part of my eagerness for engagement with life.  Frankly, that’s part of my neurosis, too!  Anyway it’s all interesting noticing, and I am looking forward to seeing how the day unfolds.

It’s five in the morning.  I’m not asleep.

For the last six weeks or so I have woken up consistently at 2 am and then at 4 am.  In the early days of this and probably since the beginning of the summer I have prided myself on my ability to check in with my various parts when I wake up to see what they need and then I would find myself going back to sleep.  Recently, though, I haven’t been able to discern anything that they have needed by doing this exercise just in my head.  So I’m going to try checking in with them via writing in this blog.

Infant – Sleepy, at ease, maybe feeling something because an older part of me is feeling something.

Toddler – Cranky, feeling caught between wanting to try to go back to sleep and writing things out here.

Child – Concerned for my kitty when I hear him meow in the night.  I wish my kitty could sleep with us in our room.  Then I’d know he was happy.

Pre-teen – Frustrated and pissy.  Sleep should not be a problem for me.  So much is happening for me I need my sleep.

Adolescent – Rage.  Big, huge, fills the house rage.

Twenty Something – A huge desire to write and write and write to consolidate and keep making sense of my story and all that I’ve learned these last three and a half years.

Well, I’d say that was productive!  I had no idea my adolescent felt so much rage.  I’m getting chills as I write this which means that I am onto something.

Her rage actually has something to do with the cat, I think, but it’s more general, too.  I don’t know accurate this is or what this really means but I think she’s really frustrated by her cat’s neediness and her sensitivity to her cat.  She hates being woken up by her cat.  She hates that she can’t tune him out.

Oh, this is weird, but it’s almost like she’s wanting to separate from her cat as if he were her parent and she the differentiating teenager.  Her cat has been so dear to her, but he has felt really clingy lately which reminds her of her mother and her duty to take care of her mother.  She doesn’t know how to change that relationship with him.  She thinks of the Dog Whisperer and knows what to do if he were a dog, she would step more into a leadership role.  But he’s a cat.  I suppose that means that more sophisticated messages can be communicated.

She’d been thinking about this earlier yesterday, that something in their relationship needed to change, that she wasn’t who she used to be and that their relationship, oh this does sound nutty, but that their relationship didn’t feel healthy anymore.

So in pursuing this line of reasoning I don’t want to step over my child’s desire to be sure he’s okay.  I’ll come back to that some other time.

To clarify, it’s now me talking and not a part of me expressing herself.  Although I just got the sense that I want to ask my adolescent questions…

Me:  Does this feel right, what’s been written here?

A:  Yeah, but it’s not so much about Bolder.  My rage, anyway.  Feeling his clinginess just sets it off.  I do think what was said above is true, that I am changing and wanting to change in my relationship to him.  And that’s a kind of change I want all over in my life.

Bolder got through to my heart in our early days together as no one else could.  His faithfulness and frankly his seeming dedication to me made a huge difference in my life.  I was the one who was always attuned to other people.  It was remarkable to have this being in my life who was so obviously attuned to me.  Eventually, his attunement to me helped me learn and value being tuned into myself.  It’s always been remarkable how he would appear out of no where when I felt bad.  He helped me notice that I was feeling bad and gave me lots of comfort in the actual moments of feeling bad.

I cautiously say that he feels clingy and this reminds me of my mother.  That’s a projection clearly.  I do want to see him as a distinct entity.  And, it is useful for me to say that his dedication and attunement to me does feel stifling to me right now, like it would for a teenager.

Me:  I’m noticing something, too, that you as my adolescent are talking from an adolescent point of view but you also sound a lot like current me.  I wonder if this is a sign that my parts are integrating some.

And I want to say from my nurturing parent perspective that this is all really healthy to be changing.

A:  Whatever.  No I’m kidding.

Me:  And I know you know this but I think you need the nurturing parent part of me to say this to you – Bolder will grow and evolve with you.  As will the other parts of your life that your relationship with him symbolizes will grow with you, too.  And you get to set boundaries with him and all over your life.  I think actually you are setting boundaries in your life in that you don’t think anymore that you have to like everything and everybody.  That’s a huge boundary.  And with Bolder you don’t have to like everything about him.  You get to be annoyed with him.  You get to say enough.

A:  A part of me felt really good about that last bit.  He has been amazing to me and for me and so I have felt guilty feeling annoyed with him.

Me:  And like with everything else in your life right now you’re increasingly able to feel real in your feelings.  He has been a really nurturing force in your life.  He was able to be with you in ways your parents couldn’t be with you as sad as that sounds.

A:  So there’s a way that I’ve protected him from my negative feelings just the way I protected my parents from my negative feelings.

Me: Yeah.

A:  And it has an impact on his attachment relationship with me.

Me: Yeah.  You’ve noticed that he seems insecurely attached lately.  I know it’s weird that he kind of flips between being your parent and your child.  That’s the lucky thing about him being a cat.  They do kind of flip around in their roles.  Well, some of them.  Essentially, regardless of what role he plays, you do have a relationship with him and your state of mind is going to shape that relationship.  Your frame of mind is changing and just like any other relationship that will change the dynamic between you.

A:  I feel nervous about leaving them in a few weeks for some travel.

Me:  Well, I think you can handle it like you would with Andrea being gone.  The most important part of this is being real about how you feel.  That you have a relationship with them, especially since for the last three years you spend most of your days at home with them.  That you will miss them and not miss them.  That you care that they will be lonely because you know that they will be.

A:  ”That I care that they will be lonely” is different from feeling guilty that I have left them.

Me:  Yeah and it’s a really different energy.  It’s an important distinction.

A:  Oh, and I’ve kind of been wondering in the back of my head why this matters to me now.  I’ve gone on so many trips before, and I have even traveled for weeks on end.  What’s different is that I am actually letting myself feel more, and so I’m having to work out how to deal with my feelings.

Me:  Exactly.  And so some of your old ways of seeing the world are also coming through, too, like how you often get enmeshed in your relationships.  It doesn’t feel healthy to you anymore.  It feels healthier to acknowledge all of your feelings, your deeper feelings as well, not just the surface feelings of guilt.  I think there’s more to learn here and talk about with Andrea.

Anyway, I’m wondering about your rage and how you’re doing with that right now?

A:  I got chills again this time as I was thinking that it had largely dissipated.  I’m kind of amazed that I could learn so much from my cats, and I’m glad the older, wiser parts of me really support me in paying attention to this relationship.  I feel sleepy in a way I wasn’t a few hours ago.  I’m going to see if I can get a couple more hours of snoozing.

Me:  Good

Just before I spoke to Andrea earlier this week, I started a decoupage project I’d been a little anxious to start.  It was something I’d never done before, and I cared about it so I put it off until I had more of my wits about me and was less on another planet with my therapy work.

It was a really simple decoupage project.  I have a beautiful tray that had some finish on the bottom of it that had begun to chip.  I love beautiful papers, colors and designs.  So a friend of mine and I had found some paper that I would “decoupage” to the bottom of the tray.  I put decoupage in quotes because it was super simple.  The only catch was that the patterns of the paper did not match up.  I guess I was a little nervous about how that would all work out.

In the end I realized that if I cut around the design on the paper on one sheet and then lay that sheet over the other that it would look better than just laying the sheets on top of one another.

So I did this, and it worked to my satisfaction.  Now I could have been really fussy about the whole process, working really hard to cut around the design just right and spending lots of time doing my absolute best to match things up as much as possible.  But along the way I realized that this strategy would be good enough for me.  I would see the tray in use and from the distance I would see it the tray would look beautiful to me.

As I was decoupaging, some of the edge crinkled and formed a really uneven line.  That I knew would drive me nuts! I needed to correct it or else I would be so unsatisfied with the project that I would cringe inside every day because I will see and use this tray nearly every day.  So I decided to find a fix to that.

I told Andrea about this and she jumped up and down on the other side of the telephone line.  I could just tell. She pointed out that what’s so great about the process I went through is that I did what mattered to me and not what the vague thousands of potential critiquers could say.  I could never possibly anticipate all the things those accusing voices could see as wrong so it was pointless to care.  All that matters is knowing what I care about and what will make me happy.

The way she put this is really, really useful to me and I began to see that I’ve been thinking of acting on what I think rather than the hordes in lots of other ways.  (Besides being really bold and taking this sabbatical in the first place.)  For instance, soon it will be time to get a part time job and begin to get back into the world.  I’ve realized that I get to decide what that job is.  It doesn’t have to look good on my resume or anything like that.  And even with that – I still get to decide how much I care about what my next job might say about me to the to other people.  I get to decide how much importance I give to my perceptions of what people think.  That’s power and so much more fun than blindly seeking others’ impossible approval.

The things that I struggle with are humbling.  I’ve had a good bit of responsibility in my life but you’d never know it based on where it is that I am learning my lessons!

Aaaah!

Today it was around buying beer.  Two hundred bottles of beer.

Every year I help out the owner of my husband’s company with the logistics of the party he hosts at his house for their annual user conference.  Well, this is the third year that I’ve done it.  For the first time I needed to buy the beer.   Now I am not a drinker.  Much.  The most I have is a sip of my husband’s beer.  I kind of know what I like but I have no idea what other people like.  So I asked a friend and had my list when I went to the store today.

My list said three or four cases or 200 beers.  That’s what the host suggested.  Well, four cases is 100 beers.  What do I do?  4 cases or 200 bottles?

I am standing in the aisle with my shopping cart agonizing over this question.  I decide I’ll go for 200.  I’m feeling totally nervous about this.  I have to remind myself of all the reasons why I would struggle with this question, to try to help myself out with some compassion.

So I check out eventually with my 200 bottles of bear in the car.

I was feeling pretty good but then I started to feel anxious that the host is going to think badly of me if I bought too much!  I smile at myself because what can I do.  I’m anxious and at least I’m not denying that.

I drop the beer and groceries off at his place and sure enough – 200 bottles, do we really need that much?

So I’m telling Andrea about this today, and it felt so good to have her with me on this.  Gosh, my heart feels so warm inside that I can’t help but cry right now.  I wasn’t alone.  She could help me with the feelings.  She immediately knew that of course I would struggle with just this kind of question.  I think I have to just know things, know everything like I did as a child working in the family business.  So it’s hard for me when I am at such a loss like this.  I forget that I get to be human.

We laughed together when I realized that I could have called the host to clarify 4 cases or 200 bottles!  Again, of course I wouldn’t think of reaching out to him or to the two beer reps who were standing in the aisle with me!  I would not think of this, especially in a moment when I think I’m supposed to know.

All the anxiety went away when I talked with Andrea.  It’s stunning to me that I get to come back to myself after moments like these.  I feel warm and soft.  I used to feel hardened and defensive at times like these.  I can feel this way because Andrea welcomes me back, welcomes the young me back and reminds me with her warmth that I am safe.

It’s a party over here today because I am having so many small, great experiences that consolidate a lot of what I’ve learned and I want to keep documenting them.

So Sunday I came in from painting the patio set when Thrane reminded me that we had a birthday party to go.  I had completely forgotten.  I was so tired and hot and sweaty for a second day in a row.  I had stopped my project because I’d had enough and the last thing I wanted to do was go to a party.

Ten years ago I probably would not have forgotten a party because I would have felt anxious enough about attending that there would have been no way that it could have slipped my mind.  A few years ago I would have found a way to beg off a party if I felt really tired.  I was beginning to realize that I could say no to things and change my mind.  A year ago I would have kind of dissociated but known I would be happy once I got to the party.  So I’d have asked my husband to help me “stuff myself in the car”.  You know give me a push here and there.

This weekend I just let myself be tired and cranky.  I knew I’d be glad I’d gone.  I knew we could go home early if I wanted to.  And I had this feeling inside of me that I liked.  Oh.  I guess what I am trying to say is that I would feel inside myself at the party like I am coming to feel inside myself most of the time.  I like myself and so I would like myself at the party, too.  I would like myself at the party EVEN TIRED.  Yes, that’s the new distinction.  I don’t have the compulsion to perform like I used to have and so it didn’t matter that I was tired.  I didn’t have to be awake and alert to make sure I was entertaining and worthy.  Furthermore, I could just be me, which includes tired and possibly cranky, and that would be enough.

As a bonus people at the party love me and I love them and I could be a part of that, too.

There would also be people there that I didn’t know and some that I knew I don’t like!  I was telling Andrea about this and she said, “And it can even be fun to not like people.”  Huh?  She explained that it can be fun to not like people because then you don’t have to worry about fixing them or fixing yourself just so that you can handle the feeling of not liking a person which for me used to be a vague very uncomfortable feeling that I didn’t used to let myself have.

Needless to say I had a great time at the party.  It just felt good to be out there being me.  I can take me anywhere!

Well, this morning I went back for my third round of work on painting our patio set.  Most of the surfaces were covered with the final coat of paint, but there was lots of detail work to be done around the arms and legs of the chairs.  I started tackling those areas and it was like I would think I had gotten everything and then another unpainted area would appear.  This was happening over and over again.  It was really frustrating.

I had to stop for a minute and come to terms with the fact that this was not a project that I would be able to hurry through to the finish line.  I wouldn’t be able to suffer through the agony of all this fine detail work, comforting myself with the idea that I would be done soon.  I wouldn’t be able to rely on that old manic thrill.  So I also stopped and recognized that I really hated this project.  I kind of got a kick out of saying that.  But I knew completing this was important to me.  I wanted to do it.  I just didn’t want to ever do it again!

It was nice to spend this time with myself, to settle myself down.  I found myself thinking about how I enjoy puttering around the house and decided I would approach this detail work that way, relaxed and like the point was not to finish something per se.  Before I knew it I was actually done with what I set out to do, and I actually had a great time.  But I still won’t do this kind of project again any time soon!

As I was painting, I was thinking about how painful this would have been not so long go.  Having to do something I hated like this, would have had me feel trapped and that feeling would have kicked off another layer of much more vague feelings.  I would have had a PTSD response which would have then kicked me into a manic state of mind.  My heart would have been racing, I would have tried to just stay focused on completing the project, I would have felt tense, and my mind would have wandered to rehashing various people interactions and what went wrong and what I feared I had done wrong.  Oh what a hell.

My young parts felt really happy today.  So, so, so different from that time because I understand what those vague feelings would have been, I have outwitted the mania, and I know I am not living back in the past anymore.  I can actually make a distinction now between past and present.  What a relief.

I’m asking all kinds of questions about myself and what I want going forward.  Like in my conversation with Andrea about perfection, I am really getting it in my bones that the only person I have to please is myself.  There is nothing I have to do nor any measure of success I must accomplish to be thrilled to be myself.  I already have that and I have just spent three and a half years sitting on my living room sofa.

At the same time I do want to be sharing my gifts with the world.  It’s fun being me out in the world.  It’s been kind of fascinating for me to consider what makes me unique and different and I’d like to express that.

Even still I think it’s possible to have gifts that you might not want to share.  If I suddenly got a really strong grasp on what makes me unique, I could kind of mess myself up by thinking that because I’ve been given that gift that I MUST use it.  I like this paragraph from Lucid Living:

In the New World, you experience your value within. It is a gift of your Spirituality. It can not be increased or decreased. You become much more interested in discovering your unique strengths and talents, and exploring what impact you can have by harnessing and directing your gifts. It is a world abundant with love and an access to unlimited resources. Your only real job is to receive the gift of Life and to learn more about yourself. You are free to contribute your gifts or not, for the joy and fun of it.

My emphasis.

A recent Wired article about Craigslist had me expand my thinking about how I truly do get to decide how I want to use my strengths.  Consider this:

Newmark abandoned the idea of running craigslist as a nonprofit, which would have required him to learn and follow too many rules. He realized that nobody could stop him from giving away his money if he made too much of it, and in the meantime he handed out a significant portion of his ownership to others as a way to avoid acquiring too much authority. “I was worried about going middle-aged crazy,” he says. He also put great distance between himself and any executive responsibility.

and this:

Last year Newmark got about 195,000 email messages. He estimates that roughly 60 percent were spam. He read all the rest and replied to many. He has a boss now, a customer service manager named Clint Powell, who was hired about six years ago. But he maintains his habits for reasons that have little to do with the normal logic of work. They are part of his identity, an unconventional mode of self-realization through which he took hold of a barrier that always separated him from the world and made it into a kind of performance. Athletes compete. Artists create. Newmark answers email.

You hear artists talk about the value of having constraints and how those constraints help to shape their art.  I think it’s true about our lives, too.  The constraints limit our possibilities but make the possibilities clearer, too.

I wonder what what I will create with my natural gifts in the context of my life.

So it’s Saturday and it’s felt good to be up and about working on my project list.  First on the list is finishing painting a patio set we were given several years ago.  I’ve tried two previous times to do this, but each time I didn’t have the right painting equipment.  I think I’ve finally gotten it down.

I was outside a few minutes ago in the heat and humidity when I felt myself going down a dangerous path for me.  I started to get upset with my husband because he’s not up and about.  He’s tired from his week, has been working hard in anticipation of a big event next week at work, and is plain and simply a different human being from me with different cycles and levels of energy.  But I started to feel demanding inside of myself, upset he wasn’t outside with me or energetically helping to carry me through this project.  Just because.

That just because is the tricky part.  As I am writing this, it is dawning on me that I could go find him and ask him if he would either help me or kick back and relax near me to encourage me.  That’s different from what was going on in my head while I was out there.  Then I felt the old pull toward the idea that people who love each other just know and help one another out.  That feels yucky.  I was feeling gross and sweaty and also beginning to catastrophize thinking that I was doing all this growing and he might just never get over feeling tired at the end of the week and then I might not like him anymore.  Blah, blah, blah.

Andrea and I talked about just that very fear this week.  In fact I paged her to talk about it.  She reminded me that there is the chance that as I keep healing that I might indeed not like Thrane anymore.  It was possible but not something I could know right now.  If that did happen, it would be a problem.  But she also said that she didn’t think that I would not like him at all.  There might be more that I don’t like about him, but that’s normal and people who are married happily until the end have things that they just don’t and won’t ever like about their partners.  They can accept that their partner is different.

And so in my crappy, hot, sweaty mood, I came inside to write and give myself the chance to process my emotions.  I don’t like that my husband is playing video games right now, recovering from the week.  I am also embarrassed by my selfishness but that’s real, too.  I do wish he were outside with me encouraging me on in this arduous task.

I had thought before I sat down to write that what was important was that I not be upset that he and I are doing different things, that it’s really important that I don’t give him a hard time for not being as motivated as I am now.  I still think that’s really important, but I am reminded while I sit here writing that I still get to feel selfish and wish for things to be different.  Out of that wish I can ask him to join me.  Because we are separate, he can’t read my mind.  I will ask him and I bet he will still want to hang out in his cool, basement “man cave”.  That’s okay, too.  At least I will have respected both him and myself.

UPDATE:  I went downstairs and asked Thrane if he would be willing to keep me company, expressly saying “no” was an option.  He jumped up and came upstairs to hang out with me outside for a bit.  He first stayed in the cool of the house since I was just off the patio.  Then he brought his computer out and played the latest tennis update so I could hear it after bringing us a beer.

I’ve felt a new light heartedness within me and thus between us and that was there this afternoon.  I think before I could get really heavy and demanding.

While painting I was remembering how I used to do a big project like this, I just set my mind to it and went for it.  I shut out all of my emotions just for the sake of getting through it – especially when there had already been a couple of false starts.  So it’s really meaningful to me today that I could let myself feel the pain and agony of such a project in less than wonderful weather conditions.  I am also glad I clued into the fact that I was feeling alone which can be pretty deadly for me.  I’m so grateful I could find a way that felt good to me to ask Thrane for some help without demonizing him in the process.

UPDATE II:  Andrea and I talked about what happened here and she celebrated with me about how this all unfolded because what we have been working so hard on is developing my ability to know what I feel the unarticulated stuff inside of me and then be able to know what I want and need as a result.  My being able to get to the bottom of my desire to have encouragement and have some company was huge.  I sure felt some of the old red herrings along the way to what was true for me but I got there.  Woohoo!

About six years ago I was saying to Andrea that I was worried because my boyfriend at the time who is now my husband was so BORING.  She practically jumped up and down and said, good.

Ever since then I’ve been very curious about boring.  Andrea’s point to me was that given my history I had found someone who wasn’t exciting, someone who didn’t present all kinds of interesting challenges.  He was boring.

It is interesting to me that although I have been home alone for the last three and a half years with few commitments that I have hardly ever felt bored or at least not as bored as would be expected.  There’s always been some new discovery to be made or emotional work to be done.  This is fine.  This is the whole reason I have taken this sabbatical.  So I’ve kind of known that feeling bored might be a sign that I am nearing the end of this grand adventure.

I might just be getting closer.  I feel some boredom.

Well, now I feel lots of boredom.  I had paused in my writing for a while.  I am sleepy.  I’m not that interested in doing much.

This boredom is different from what I used to experience.  In the past I would feel sad and awful about myself.  So it’s weird to not feel that way but to still feel the agony of boredom.

I could do something about this.  I could work on my next project.  I could go for a walk.  I could crawl back into bed.  But I think I’m just going to sit with it.  For now.

I’m not going to die.  I’m not going to get swallowed up by some monster.  I am just bored.

There’s a great blog post by Jonah Leher that I have listed in the resources section.  I could quote great things from that article about how boredom actually serves to help the brain make connections between new ideas during times of boredom, but I’m too bored for that.

…Wow, and suddenly the boredom has passed.  For now.

Ha!  Sometimes it just works this way.  Last night I wrote that I had not had any PTSD reactions for a very long time.  Interesting that I said that because I think I’m actually in the middle of a huge one!  For about the last month I have been waking up at night once around 2 am, again at 5:30, and sometime at either 6 or 7am.

At first I was really successful in getting back to sleep by checking in with my young parts – infant, toddler, child, pre-teen, adolescent and 20 something selves.  This still helps me greatly and I do go usually quickly back to sleep.  Then I started to have some wild dreams which I don’t remember.  Also, the continued pattern is beginning to drive me nuts.

So this morning at the 6am wake up, I checked in further with myself, wondering if there was something larger than something that was important to just a part of me.  I wondered if it was all the changes, though positive, that I am experiencing, if it is the prospect of speaking truthfully to my parents about my feelings, if  my negative feelings toward Andrea were causing distress, or if maybe I am reacting to my upcoming anniversary to my current husband.  (This anniversary will mark three years of marriage.  I was married to my first husband for three years and two weeks.)

As I was exploring how these possibilities felt, I immediately felt anxiety around the anniversary.  I kept checking out my feelings toward all the possibilities and found that I couldn’t remember the anniversary effect possibility.  The anxiety and my forgetfulness were enough for me to decide that this is the thing that’s having me wake up.  Oh, and I started dreaming of getting up, going to the store and buying some donuts!

I feel really uncomfortable now as I type and very upset that when I am feeling so good that I have to deal with these feelings.  These are huge feelings.  I don’t want to have to go into a period of checking out just to be able to begin dealing with them, especially on the weekend.  No, that would suck.  I may end up feeling consumed by them anyway.  It would be completely understandable if things worked out that way.

Still it’s useful to just sit and be with how huge these feelings feel.  They feel big enough to fill up my entire house.  I know that Andrea would want to be here with me to help me with them.  Of course, I would want her to help me, too.  My feelings toward her at this juncture of my therapy are unresolved.  That makes this harder.  At the same time I know that in the present I would want her with me.

The front of my chest and my arms feel tingly with anxiety.  I am scared.  Not in a present kind of way.  It’s more like I remember who I was nine years ago.  I lived in an existential fear all of the time.  This is so different than what I’ve come to feel in the last year.  Back then I didn’t have a safe place to rest within me.  I needed positive and accepting feedback and understanding so much in order to survive.  It pained me so much that my first husband couldn’t see who I was, how much I cared, and know that I was on his side wanting to work together.  It tore me up inside.

I really got something new about enmeshment during yesterday’s session with Andrea.  She said something like when you are enmeshed the other person has to understand you or else you are sunk because your identity is so tied into how other people see you and reflect yourself back to you.  I can remember how painful it was that my first husband did not understand me.  It was terrifying to me.  I didn’t have anything to hold onto.  If he didn’t get me or understand me, then who was I.  Worse, if he hated me, how could I go on?  I would then embroil myself in these internal discussions about who was right.  Was it true that I was so worthy of hate?  I genuinely wanted to understand his perspective because if I understood then I would be able to change or do something about why I was so bad.  I wanted to return the “gift” of understanding to my husband.  I never understood why he didn’t appreciate that gift!

Now it is so clear to me that he was over in his own world, probably in his own hell, and was projecting how he felt onto me.  I have a long history of my mother projecting her self-hatred onto me.  That must have felt somewhat comfortable to me.  What wasn’t comfortable was that he didn’t play by the unhealthy rules my mom and I played by, and that was confusing to me.  Why, when I want to understand you back, are you not pleased?, I wondered.  There were probably other unconscious things I would do that worked with my mom to calm us both down and assure us of the safety of our enmeshed world together.  I really, really wanted that with my first husband.  I wanted him to know that I was trying to be good and play by the rules so that we could feel good together.

Today this sounds repulsive.  And totally unnecessary.  Thank God.

Hmm.  I much less worried now that I will be distracted all weekend by these feelings.  It’s amazing what lots of practice of being with feelings and a little writing can do.  I am so relieved to know what I feel.  Still, it’s not easy to come back to the present and live here.  I may end up feeling lots more feelings including uncertainty.  But I know Andrea’s with me whenever I want her to be.  So let’s see what happens!

I just wrote about how weird it is to feel so good and how this takes some getting used to and feels overwhelming.

It dawned on me that it’s not just that I am feeling so good.  I am also living in the present, not being constantly drawn unconsciously back to the past fearfully trying to avoid things that hurt.  I’ve delved into the things that hurt enough that they don’t have power over me.  It’s totally remarkable.

Andrea said to me the other day that I can now go about my life not worried about what’s around the corner or even what’s right in front of me because I can access my emotions and know just what I think and feel about whatever is happening.  I don’t have to protect my parents from feeling bad, so I don’t have to not feel anymore.  I can feel and use my feelings as information to guide me.

I’m just blown away by all of this.  It wasn’t long ago – a year and three months ago – that I was deep in the middle of PTSD episodes.  I just don’t experience that anymore.  I think.  But even if I do, even when I do because I don’t expect all of this to be totally gone, I know what to do.  I am able to stop and be with myself.

I will say that though I am happy I wish I’d been able to have some totally let loose fun this evening.  I’m still feeling kind of serious.  And tired!  This seems totally understandable given all the change and growth that’s happening right now.