From a Place of Fear

While lying in bed, trying to make myself get out of bed, I spent some time musing about why I am at such a low place in my life. I have less than $3000 in the bank. I still need to find work. I generally stay in bed until noon or 1. I take a shower about every 5 days or so (I often lose track). I haven't finished my initial read-through on my novel; I read over half of it about a week ago and haven't touched it since. I don't exercise. I don't go for walks. My diet is crap.

Why? I, who have done so many different things in my life and who have made major changes and gone on to success, am stuck and passive. I am afraid. It all comes down to fear.

Detailing each individual fear connected to each individual lack is no longer useful: I believe it's all fused into one solid, darkly shining ball of fear and either it has overwhelmed me past my ability to cope or I have surrendered to it or both. Even that doesn't matter anymore. What matters is that virtually everything I do comes from or passes through a place of fear; fear controls me.

Inside, I want someone to save me. I want someone to take my hand and lead me out of bed early in the morning, lead me through exercise, make sure I eat fruit and vegetables, sit with me while I go through my novel, help me look for work (actually, I want someone to either hand me a job or tell me exactly the right work I should be doing right now), and make sure I go to bed early enough at night.

I don't think I've ever been this passive before in my life, no matter what trials and traumas I've faced. I feel ashamed.

I want to be active. I want to be in control of my own life. I want to make my choices from a positive place. I want to be strong and happy and healthy. I want abundance in all good things. I want to have enough money for all that I need and want, including enough so I can live on my own again, independently and comfortably. This doesn't seem like too much to want.

When I'm Stronger

NOTE: This is an extraordinarily long post and delves into more detail in ugly places than normal. Don't feel you have to read it.

My therapist and i talked about journaling at my last appointment, referring to my last blog post and the epiphanies that came to me while journaling early one morning. Michele suggested I continue to journal when I first wake up because your mind is still open then; it hasn't put up the usual barriers it does once you get up and start your day. That was Monday. (We had to meet out of order due to Xmas, and we'll meet on Tuesday next week due to New Year's.)

So I started on Tuesday, two days ago. In less than 2 pages, memories of Mom bubbled up in my mind. These memories promptly turned into ones that hurt and disturbed me, memories I have shunned and shunted away, memories I don't feel able to deal with. i want to be able to deal with all my memories of Mom during the few, short months leading to her death with acceptance and equanimity. The set of memories that came to me Tuesday morning hurt. They scared me the way the events I remembered scared me. My stomach is tight just remembering my reactions on Tuesday. I cried a little, but held myself back from full immersion into the emotions those memories contained. I was strong enough to hold myself back from that. I tell myself I'll deal with those memories when I'm stronger.

Today, after I'd been home for about an hour and a half (I spent Xmas with other friends), I took a nap. it was a wonderful nap: a gentle sinking into unconsciousness under a warm, fluffy cloud of a comforter with the sun shining through the window onto my face. Then lovely vague dreams, and waking up feeling soft, pliable, and happy.

Somehow, ideas relating to my past rose up inside my mind. I remembered a memory from when I had to be nine months old: I was lying in a cool, twilight-dim room and knew I shouldn't cry or make a fuss, just wait for someone to come get me out of bed. I know I was 9 months old because I knew who was my regular babysitter at the time (I checked with Mom). It was my Aunt Nita. She and her sons always seemed kind of tense and unhappy, for very good reason: Uncle Jack was a drunk. He wasn't just an alcoholic — he drank himself into a stupor, drank himself into the gutter, and, when brought home by my father and/or his other brothers and put to bed, would promptly climb out a window and go back to yet another bar. As an infant, I was completely aware that I shouldn't cry, shouldn't upset that household, should wait to be picked up from my nap.

That memory came to me as a corroboration of how I could remember that my cousin's molesting me started when I was two. How can a two-year-old remember anything? How can a nine-month-old? But traumatic events can set memories into stone.

Who Am I?

Just got back from therapy a little while ago, a session that was basically a rambling, tangled talk about how I no longer feel as if I know who and what my authentic self even is, much less how to find her.

I articulated my ideas about self (well, at least I tried), and Michele provided some other ways to view self. I rambled over how much I hate that I am still in therapy, almost 30 years later; how I am afraid to "follow my dreams", not even being sure what they are anymore and being afraid of following them and being poor and insecure; about choices I've made in the way of relationships with men that where less than beneficial for me and why I might have made those choices; about feeling so many emotions and how they affect me physically and how I wonder if all my meds are messing me up and I wish I could go off them …. It was a turgid, tangled mess.

Sometimes I wonder if therapy is even helping me anymore, if I'm beyond the point where it could help. I wonder if I can every be functional again, or if I am now stuck in this mental and emotional tangle forever.

In therapy, I posited that we all have a basic (right now I'd say "essential') self — the person we are when we are born. The core of our personality, perhaps. And that we gain layers as we grow, and maybe we get twisted around our core self, or get too many layers between our authentic self and the self we have become, obscuring our authentic self. In this schema, I no longer know who I am when I'm authentic, what my core self is like. Is it the child I remember? The woman in her early 30s who went to Britain alone for a month, who published a story, who applied to and was accepted into a competitive six-week writing workshop?

Or am I the pleaser, the one who has a puppy-like need to make others like me, who makes herself as "normal" and non-threatening as possible, who doesn't make waves?

Michele's concept is that we have a central personality who is the kind of overseer of the sub-personalities. Our sub-personalities — the rebel, the responsible adult, whoever else one may have tucked in there — are kind of like board members of a corporation or organization. And that I, as the central personality, can have dialogues with the various sub-personalities of me. This concept has intriguing possibilities. However, it doesn't answer the questions of who am I? What is my authentic self like? And how do I know what my "dreams" are that I should follow?

I pointed out to her that she didn't give me what I wanted, which was a clear, pure answer. She was understandably amused.

Therapy Hangover

Sometimes, when going through therapy, a person can experience what some call a "therapy hangover." This feeling can occur from extreme emotions experienced during therapy, from reaching a deep place during therapy, and from intense realizations or epiphanies reached during therapy. Usually this feeling doesn't come during or right after the therapy session, but a little while later.

I think that today I experienced a therapy hangover.

Today's therapy was good. I was feeling disappointed with myself for not achieving the goals I set at last week's session. I've been feeling disappointed in myself for not putting more time toward my freelance job and being behind in reaching my deadline. Those were the feelings we started off the session discussing. Fairly simple and normal stuff.

I tend to approach my sessions in a freestyle, stream-of-conscious style. I lose track of original points as some new thought or memory comes to mind and I chase after that. I've told my previous therapist and my current therapist about this tendency and given them permission to control the session more, but both of them have basically let me follow my paths and tangents.

Today, in particular, I think this tactic was useful. I went from being disappointed in my not reaching my goal for the week to disappointment in myself regarding work to having developed the feeling over years that I'm going to disappoint my employer eventually, so I might as well get it over with right away. (I tend to feel this with friends, too, but forgot to bring this up during therapy.) So I tend to do something that will disappoint: I take a sick day early in my employment, I change plans suddenly (such as not coming in on a day I was scheduled to be in the office, saying I'll work at home instead), and I don't always work as hard as I feel I should and can. I'm not just in the process of disappointing others — I'm disappointing myself.

Ideas and memories and feelings kept coming to mind as I spoke, such as my parents' insistence on straight A's, even though they couldn't do the work I was doing in school and they had no understanding for how hard math was for me, for example. I told my therapist that I'd tried not to internalize that mindset, but that I had anyway. Perfection is hard to live up to.

Has It Been Six Weeks Already?

My e-course on shame, love, and worthiness is almost over and I haven't reported in to to you folks at all! The time just flew by and I'm behind in my reading of the teacher's book, but I'm finally caught up with everything else.

There is a lot to learn about how to become shame resilient, and the most important lesson is the last, of course: your healing can depend on your telling someone what you feel and what you need, but not on whether or not they give it to you or what their response is. And that is so true!

My life has been full of shame from various sources and for various reasons, from the mild shame my mom used to try to get me to stop biting my nails ("boys won't want to hold hands with you") to the major shame of having been sexually molested for most of my early and young childhood. (Not by anyone in my nuclear family.) The baseball story I told several posts back is a story of my teammates shaming me and my coach and my parents allowing it. I have lots of such stories.

And now I have some tools for dealing with any shame in the present and future. I have tools for looking at past shames and letting them go (I think).

One of the big points for me was that shame is normal and it happens to everyone every day. There is always someone around who tries to control you using shame. While I have taken on the badge that being normal isn't attractive, that I liked being "different", "weird", "unique", etc., I think it has been shame that has left me feeling isolated and like I wasn't lovable or likable and that I didn't belong. It's one thing to belong to a group (nerds, geeks, jocks, etc.), but to feel that I don't belong to any group is too isolating. It's not healthy. 

On Shame

I'm taking an e-course at the suggestion of my therapist. It's titled Ordinary Courage: Lessons in Love, Shame, and Worthiness by a woman called Brené Brown. There are writings, audio conversations between her and a woman named Jen Lemen, activities, and readings from one of Brené's books: I Thought It Was Just Me.

Brené has been studying shame and its effects on people (mostly women, until recently) and their lives for well over a decade, and for the next six weeks I'm going to learn about what shame does and how to develop what she calls "shame resilience" — the ability to bounce back after an experience causes you to feel shame. 

Shame is not the same as humiliation, guilt, or embarrassment. The closest thing to it would probably be humiliation, but while they both make you feel like crap, humiliation also contains anger because you know you didn't deserve whatever happened, whatever someone said to you, and shame makes you feel like you deserve it and you simply are bad or something is wrong with you.

My therapist has thought about some of the last few stories I've told her, including the baseball one, which she read and we discussed, and has concluded that they have shame as a common denominator, the feeling that I am bad and unworthy and unloveable. So she suggested this woman's books and this class. I have to say, what Brené writes and says is very powerful and makes a lot of sense to me. I can see the ways in which shame has ruled my life from the time I was quite young.

Shame is disconnecting, which feeds into my solitude. Shame makes you feel you aren't worth anything, so you'll take any kind of treatment from others, explaining why I stayed on the softball team and with some of my boyfriends. Shame makes you feel unloveable, so you are always afraid that those who supposedly love you will stop, which explains why I was such an obedient child and tried to live up to my parents occasionally impossible or at least unreasonable standards and demands.

What I learn in this class has a lot of possibility to make a major change in my therapy and me and I have to say I hope it will. I'm getting tired of fighting with the anxiety and the frustration and the depression. I'm tired of not having a support network here in town. I'm just tired of struggling. It would be great to catch a break, one that will create a breakthrough in my therapy.

The cognitive-behavioral therapy is still something we are doing but it's going slowly. I guess I just don't know what I'm supposed to do. With this class, I do know what I'm supposed to do, so I can at least feel as if I am accomplishing something.

I'll report back from time to time on this and let you know how it's going. At the very least, it will be interesting. I'm taking a risk, talking about this here on my blog because most people are very uncomfortable talking about shame and shaming experiences. But of the readers who comment, I don't think it's much of a risk. And if anyone comments destructively, well I have the power to delete their comment. So Be Warned!

What do you think?