What’s Different

The heavy, heavy lifting of this journey is beginning to wrap up (written in September 2009).  This is a place for me to record what’s different.

1. My sense of timing has changed.  I used to feel like I had to act on inspirations I had right away.  I couldn’t think and reflect because it felt like the world wouldn’t wait for me.
2. I went from feeling nothing, to being aware I was dissociating, to feeling everything, to being aware I was having PTSD flashbacks, to reaching out to Andrea for help, to being able to recognize when something is amiss and I need to check in with myself.
3. No longer do I identify myself so completely with my work.  I have a lot of peace inside about who I am.  It was hard to take a sabbatical and then such a long sabbatical.  I worried at first so much about what people would think.  I guess I thought I would be nothing in people’s eyes.  In 2007 I came to the end of the year and I was comparing myself with others in my life who had made great strides in their careers and did things I would have loved to have done myself.  The funny thing was that I realized I had done in that year what I most needed to do for myself in getting closer to the bottom of my crap.  I was really on purpose and that felt good to me.  As time went on I began to really accept the course of my life because I knew it was the right thing for me.
4. I can roll my eyes at my parents.
5. I can recognize my parents’ bids for me to reduce their anxiety and I can ignore them.
6. I don’t defend my parents in my head anymore.  I remember asking Andrea to be the keeper of their goodness for me because I guess I needed to know that someone was protecting them.  Hmm.  As time went on I became much more comfortable being critical of them and later even feeling angry at them, confronting my belief that if I was true to my feelings of anger that they would somehow die.  Now I can see their outward goodness and generosity to the world along with their charm and also know that they suffer greatly from an anxiety that they unconsciously expect me to assuage.  I can piece together how this had a tremendously awful impact on my life.
7. I have learned how to notice my defensiveness and other small feelings in my relationship with Andrea and be able to talk to her about them in the middle of what we are talking about.
8. I learned to pity myself.  Who’d have thought that would be such an amazing elixir.
9. I’ve learned to look at people and the things they do and call them “stupid”.  Again, really, that’s what I got out of therapy!  Yes, and it allows me to see things more clearly and not take things so seriously.  Stupid is just stupid.  I get to do stupid things, too, and be stupid.  It’s just not that big of a deal.
10. I don’t second guess every frigging thing that I do and say.  I revisit things, yes, but I don’t fundamentally question my right to make an assertion about my view of the world.