Figuring shit out

Warning: Another long post about my internal set of affairs.

Lately I’ve been reading , by Nic Sheff — I have a real soft spot for utterly self-destructive stories of recovery. One of the places Nic rehabs has a psychological focus, working on processing past traumas and whatnot, because whether or not an addict experienced some kind of trauma in their past that led to using, experiencing the life of an addict is probably one of the most trauma-inducing things you can do.

One of the therapists works with Nic using Somatic Experience. I had never heard of that, but reading his description, I realized it was something my therapist had been doing with me. I had kind of assumed it was some weirdo New Age stuff, but went along with it because I trusted her and was willing to give whatever she suggested a shot.

SE is all about focusing on a feeling — physical or emotional or the way the two entangle — and describing it to the best of your ability in very non-analytical terms. Talking about where it is in the body, what it sounds like, what it looks like — somatic terms. I could tell my therapist’s intent in doing this with me was to get me to STFU. I am very very very good at talking over myself and everybody else when I feel cornered, confused, whatever (witness this post). So if I was discussing something painful or especially difficult, I might babble awkwardly for an hour, never actually coming to any resolutions or realizations. So she would shut me up and ask me these weird-ass questions about my feelings, and while trying to answer what color my feeling is, the verbal part of my brain would shut down. Random thoughts and memories would shoot through my head, and I quickly realized that all of them were connected to the feeling. All those thoughts and memories had the same qualities, the same color, the same shape, occupied the same space in my body. Sometimes it helped me identify the source of something, which always helps a body feel less crazy — oh, look, there’s a reason! Physics! Cause and effect! I didn’t just make up my neuroses out of thin air! Other times, it helped me just identify a pattern, which I find just as comforting and not-crazy — okay, so I did this thing five thousand times until it’s a habit. All I have to do is try it the healthy way five thousand times and then THAT will be a habit. Score.

While reading about SE last night, and remembering my therapy, I took an extra second to sit back and think, okay, how am I doing these days? What do I feel in my body, and where do I feel it? I realized I have lately been in this teetering state of perpetual anxiety. My life is a little messy right now, with some untied loose ends, unresolved issues. Just after my divorce, I really struggled not to make any new connections or start any new projects, because I just could not tolerate anything open-ended in my life at that point. I wanted everything self-contained and within my limits. Now, my life has expanded bit by bit, as I’ve gotten healthy enough to deal with more and more complicated relationships and problems. I don’t think I even realized I was allowing my life to expand, and include more people and problems — it just started to happen almost naturally, once I was healthy enough.

But just as naturally, the anxiety started creeping in. Earlier in the night, my bear had made some friendly criticism about something I’d done. It wasn’t mean or hurtful in the least, and it wasn’t an important or emotionally-laden thing he criticized either. But I realized, sitting there trying to be all SE, that I was carrying around some crippling anxiety about his comment. Focusing on the feeling, shutting off my verbal brain, I suddenly thought of work. Every now and again, I will mess something up at work. I forget to do something, or file something in the wrong place, or I get off the phone with a person calling for help and realize there was more I could have told them, or a better way to answer their questions. And I feel that anxiety.

My therapist, when doing this, would tell me to show in my body what the feeling looked like. So I tried that, and found myself pulling up my shoulders and putting my head down. I remembered something Mr. Flint had told me once, when we were teenagers. I had come over to his house to hang out, and had to call my dad. He said he got all freaked out watching me, because I pitched my voice into this ultimately agreeable, hyper, oh-so-happy squeak, while I raised my shoulders up “like a barricade around your happy face,” he said.

Another thing my therapist would sometimes do when I talked to much: she would make a one-breath rule. Everything we said in therapy had to be said in only one breath. It really forced me to slow down, think out what I wanted to say, what was most important to get out in that one breath. I tried to describe the anxiety I felt in one breath, and out popped, “Somebody is going to get hurt.” And it just felt like this explosion of fear — bullseye! I am hyper anxious that somebody is going to get hurt.

I started to think about my dad. I don’t know how much I’ve talked about my dad in my blog, but to sum up, he was abusive; I ran away when I was a teenager, and so did my sister. I know he’s abusive. I have no question about that. But something sort of obvious clicked in my head last night — he was extremely emotionally manipulative. Whenever I thought of my dad’s abuse, I would come up with images like: his face purple from screaming; him throwing a couch against the wall; the sound of his booming knock on my door in the middle of the night, as he woke me up to deliver whatever mean-ass zinger he had just thought up while pacing outside my bedroom door. But like my ears popped, I suddenly tuned into those images. I remembered him saying things like, “You didn’t sweep the floor because you don’t love me! You wish I was dead! I can never trust you again because you hurt me so badly!” I remember him faking alligator tears, punching himself in the chest to illustrate how much his heart hurt from my betrayal of doing his laundry poorly. I remember how often he told us how much we didn’t love him, how much that hurt, how worthless we’d made him feel by not taking out the trash.

Okay, bingo. I grew up learning that any mistake — no matter how big or small — has an enormous emotional consequence. That when I mess up, people feel bad. That when I do something wrong, I hurt the feelings of innocent people that I care about. And I grew up learning to react in the way my dad needed to see me react: I needed to look down at the floor, appear embarrassed, and work twice as hard. I wasn’t allowed to apologize — that only made him angrier — “You think that fixes anything? You can’t just tear my heart out and then expect ‘sorry’ will make it better!” Of course, if I didn’t apologize, he would yell at me about that, too — “You know how I know you don’t love me? You haven’t even said ‘I’m sorry’ once. You haven’t even tried.” Basically, I learned to keep my head down, take my punishment, never mention it again, and never expect to be forgiven.

I have been doing that at work a lot — or maybe I’m just noticing it a lot. Since I have decided I want to work elsewhere, I’ve stopped caring as much about how I’m doing here. I don’t slack, but I don’t care if I say something my boss finds askance, or state my feelings more clearly and plainly. I don’t care if everybody knows I want to quit. My body language for this feeling, this freedom-because-I-don’t-care feeling, is head up, confident, and cool. That comes into some stark massive conflict when I forget to call a person I was supposed to call an hour ago and I feel myself morphing into keep-yer-head-down-Harriet.

This also made me see some extra work I need to do with my boundaries. I have learned, since my divorce, how to set boundaries with others when my relationship with them is causing me pain. But there is this towering gap in my boundaries when somebody else is hurt, but isn’t causing me pain. Oh, sure, that gets complicated sometimes; part of the reason I ended and kept ended my friendship with Sunny was because she allowed herself to be so abused by other people in her life that it was causing me enormous pain and distress to watch, and people who are that abused will often make very poor and desperate decisions about how to treat others, which meant she sometimes hurt me directly (though I don’t take it personally). But when it’s not that level of pain, when somebody’s feelings are hurt just a little, or even an awful lot — but they’re not that close to me — I let that pain flow past my boundaries and become THE ONLY THING IN THE WORLD I AM CONCERNED ABOUT. Which quickly becomes OH SHIT I CAN’T FIX THIS I AM MESSING UP AND CAUSING MORE PAIN AND I WILL NEVER BE FORGIVEN. Which quickly returns to SOME TOTAL FREUDIAN SHIT.

This all dovetails rather nicely with a conversation I’ve been having with CR about how to handle a certain something going on right now. I’ve been noticing, more and more, how much my life seems to line up that way lately. How often a pattern will continually pop up until I notice it, and listen. Or how I feel like I come up with some new realization, only to look back and realize the universe has been setting me up to figure that out for a few months now. This is the kind of stuff they talk about to addicts and other 12 steppers, when they talk about a Higher Power. Once you open yourself up to it, the universe makes its own kind of special sense, has its own logic, and it is bigger and better than your finite knowledge and tiny two eyes. To me, I don’t call that God, or consider it embodied in any spiritual form. To me, it’s just what happens when you make the daily decision to participate in the flow of life around and within you — you nudge the world and it nudges you right back.