A Tangled Mess

I'm a mess. Much of my life is a mess. I'm spending so much energy distracting myself from my messes that I barely have enough energy left to breathe. I feel like I'm caught  in a mass of tangled yarn.

I'm reading obsessively, including books that I'm not normally interested in, as long as the books are light entertainment. And when I read, I skip over more and more of the text to just get to the main plot points. I'm not taking much enjoyment from the books. Books with greater emotional or mental content get set aside. I just purchased a new Tawna Fenske book and haven't been able to enjoy it. I love Tawna's work, but I'm anticipating the emotional and romantic complications and getting anxious about them. Anxious about fictional characters, people!

I'm not watching any TV series with my housemates anymore. Everything they watch has character arcs: I become invested in the characters and get stressed out when their lives are difficult. In general I've always had difficulty detaching from movies and TV, but it's a lot worse now.

There are people in my life I haven't contacted in months, some of them in over a year, and not because I don't like them. I don't read blogs much at all. I don't know why I've dropped contact with most people: I have no idea how doing so connects with how I'm feeling.

Right now, I'm in the middle of a two-week experiment proposed by my psych. For two weeks, I'm not going to try to go to bed earlier. I've been staying up until 3 am, but wanting to go to bed around 10 pm. I spend mental and emotional energy chastising myself for staying up so late. So for these two weeks, I'm just going to let myself stay up as late as I want to and sleep as late as I want to. No judgements.

As a corollary of this experiment, I'm setting aside all shoulds and should-nots. No judgement. No restrictions. Want to eat ice cream? Sure. As much as I want. Be a slug on the couch? Sure, as usual, but this time no judgements. Do it because I want to.

When I manage to quiet the shoulds and should-nots, I feel less stressed, more peaceful. It does take effort to quiet them. In addition, my housemates do NOT like this experiment. They think it's a bad idea. They disapprove. They disagree with my psych. Even though it's only for two weeks and I wasn't making any progress doing things the other way!

Thinking On My Center

The last part in my getting centered discussion with my therapist is the part that cognitive therapy has played, which is significant. As we discussed, I have tended to make other people or situations my center, my anchor, and my home, rather than making me be those things for myself.

On the cognitive side, I developed an external locus of control. I didn't learn young how to depend upon myself in a good way; I only learned the ways I couldn't depend upon others. Yet they still remained the loci from which all things came to me. But my therapist reminded me that we had in discussions come across things I have done in the past and present that showed me growing more independent from my family and standing on my own two feet. So her question to me was: what have I accomplished that proves to me that I am self-reliant and independent?

Being self-reliant and independent gives a person a center, an internal locus of control, and a firm place to ground themselves. Proving to myself that I have those qualities would go a long way toward helping me see that I have a center inside myself, just that it's been hidden and it may be undeveloped. It would prove that I am grounded at least a bit, no matter how high above the ground my feet feel.

So what have I done that proves self-reliance and independence? Well, for one thing, I left my family and moved halfway across the country. Part of my moving was to find work and a warm place to live. The other part was to cut the ties that had come to bind me to my family more closely than I was comfortable with. (I still feel guilty about that, as if I rejected my mom and grandma. I hope that goes away.) I relied upon myself to make the trip and find a new home successfully. I visited some other friends and family but didn't rely upon them for anything more than some company and a place to stay while I visited them. And I eventually found a warm place to live. The work part, not so much yet, but I continue to hope and to work on it. I kept driving until I found a reasonable place to look for work, even though I was ready to stop moving along at three weeks (it was five weeks before I stopped in Houston and another week before I decided to stay). I made these decisions alone.

The Center of All Things

Today's therapy became very philosophical. A post of mine appeared on the What EveryBetty Said blog today and it was about the concept of all things being transitory. This led to my thinking about how I lost my anchor and my center when my mom died because she was those things to me. Then I wondered if maybe I'm making my BFF into those things in her place, and if I should pull back a little bit.

My therapist saw things differently. She's listened to me talk about the Zen Buddhist and Stoic philosophies that I read on and her take was about risk and needing to risk pain and the negative emotions (think in terms of the negative space on a graph) in order to have the possibility of joy and love and the full range of positive emotions (the upper, positive part of a graph). That what I really need is to create my center, my anchor, within myself, not pull back from people so I don't risk pain.

There are a lot of reasons why my center is not within myself. My parents did not raise me to be self-sufficient. In fact, my father — a cop — taught my mother to handle a gun and my little brother to handle a gun, but did not teach me. I was warned away from tools and ladders and other "dangerous" things because I "might get hurt." I was sheltered and protected, at least as they saw it (they didn't protect me from being molested) and pretty much expected to marry someone who would continue to take care of me. Even though my mother worked outside of the home and she made equal decisions with my father and was in no way submissive or second to him. It was all very weird — I saw that even as a kid. So I didn't develop an interior locus of control or a sense of self-confidence in the face of difficulty.

Next, well, are the traumas in my life. Molestation. Bullying. Then losing my father, then my brother before I was 22. I held onto my mother with both metaphorical hands and all my might: she was the reason I chose not to take my own life after my brother took his and I could barely cope: I felt a responsibility to my mom to not put her through that again. So she was my reason for living for a very long time. She anchored me to this life.

One of the biggest problems I've had since Mom died was this lack of a center or an anchor, a lack of being grounded. My therapist proposed that this is what I work on. Be my own center so that I can embrace those I love without leaning on them so that if they go away I won't fall over. Be grounded on my own feet so that passing traumas cannot knock me over. Be able to still love and care with a whole heart, without crumbling should I lose who I love.

The concept is a simple one, sure, but not easy for me to achieve. It's spiritual: what in my non-deitific life gives me a spiritual center? It's cognitive: what have I accomplished that proves to me that I am self-reliant and independent? It even touches that part of me that is kinesthetic in nature: not leaning, standing on my own feet, etc., like a Weeble ("Weebles Wobble But They Don't Fall DOWN!")

I'll address these aspects of centeredness and my life in later posts (or this one is going to be far too long; besides, then I'll have ready-made ideas for later posts). Right now, I'd like to know, do you feel centered and grounded within yourself? What does or does not give you that sense?

The Story of My Life - Part 2

As I explained in Part 1, my therapist told me that there is another way to look at my life, rather than the powerless, victimized, trauma-ridden way. She talked about it as telling stories about our lives and how we can choose to emphasize different things. I've learned to emphasize the sad and fearful things, but my life has had so much more than that to it.

So here's another way to look at the story of my life. Beware: this is even longer than Part 1. If you want, you can scroll to the end and just read the conclusions.

It's true that I was molested, became afraid of the dark, and was bullied for many years. But I didn't live with my cousin (or my grandfather) and wasn't around either too often for the most part. And I didn't live near my school peers who bullied me. So I had the room to build a stronger self than it first seemed.

Although victimized early, and having parents who were kind of clueless about how to raise me and what was going on in my life, I did some powerful things. There was the time I taught myself to ride a two-wheel bicycle in a day so that my parents would buy me one. Because we didn't live near my school friends and there was seldom anyone for me to play with, I learned to keep myself entertained  --- I was bad at most sports so the boys in the neighborhood didn't usually want to play with me if they were playing football or baseball, and none of the girls were my age. I enjoyed skating around the cul de sac for long periods, I loved to read and write and draw, and I liked pretending to be a detective or something else that required me to sneak around the neighborhood. I didn't retaliate against my bullies, nor did I become cynical and bitter. When things got better for me in 10th grade, I simply enjoyed my good fortune and made more friends.

Then I survived a move away from everything and everyone I'd ever known. I survived the death of my father from a heart attack. And I survived going away to college and even thrived there. I was wary enough and strong enough to take myself out of an uncomfortable situation and move out of my aunt and uncle's house and into on-campus housing. And I did begin the steps toward adulthood, something I didn't realize until I casually brought up the following story to my therapist. 

The Story of My Life - Part 1

There is a type of therapy called Narrative Therapy where you rewrite portions or all of your life highlighting different aspects than the ones you currently highlight. For example, these days I describe my life mainly by highlighting all the things that have happened to me where I was powerless and bad things happened. Wonder why I'm depressed and anxious?

But talking with my therapist this week, we discovered that I have other aspects that I could use to describe my life. For example, remember when I talked about not being self-differentiated from my mother, aka still having the uncut umbilical cord between us? Well, in another conversation, we discovered other stories where I had differentiated and done things that carry you on into independent adulthood.

By talking about how differently I can describe aspects of my life by what I choose to highlight, we got on the subject of how I could write a different version of my life and remind myself of all the good and powerful aspects I've shown in my past. It hasn't all been bad choices and powerless tragedies. So I'm going to do that. But first, here is the way I currently tell the story of my life, to myself and to others (well, some of it I only tell to others I am close enough to trust).

Home

What and where is home? Much has been written about it: Home is where you hang your hat, home is that place where they have to take you in, home is where the heart is.

For me, I guess it was the last one. The problem being that my heart was with my mother. She was also my center and my anchor (this goes back to my lack of self-differentiation from her). So when she died, there went home, center, and anchor. 

I could pretend that I had a home when I went to visit the house and check it out. I called it "my house." But although I still felt very comfortable there, it was empty besides me.

What about Houston? you might ask. Well, I like it well enough (although the early high temperatures this year are not making me any happier than the flooding this winter). But I don't have friends to do things with much. I have some commitment issues, so my heart isn't really here.