I started seeing a new therapist a couple months ago. She’s helping me to go back and establish a new framework for understanding myself. It’s been pretty amazing, actually. We’re focusing a lot on how traits and characteristics that I took on, the way I learned to be, that I didn’t learn those things deliberately. The ways I interacted with the world, and with other people, weren’t so much a result of decisions I had made, but were because I was repeating what was modeled for me by my parents.
This has really been blowing my mind. Some of this, I sort of already knew. I was very sheltered growing up and had pretty much just my parents for examples on how to deal with everything (and I mean that more literally than figuratively). One example: I thought I learned to not fight back against bullies because I was trying to follow the non-violence ideal of my father. But that doesn’t work because it implies more thinking than I was capable of at that age. My brain hadn’t yet developed to the point where I was capable of that type of thinking process. And even if it had, the far more powerful message was his behavioral example of sitting and hunkering down through my mom’s nitpicking. That was the real example I had of how to deal with conflict—shrink down and wait for it to pass. That was the behavior that was modeled for me, so that’s what I learned. That’s what got written in my behavioral programming at an instinctual level.
My parents' interactions are a real insight into my own issues with relationships, too. I’ve done a lot of work on myself in the past, so I already have a lot of pieces to the puzzle: things like understanding how people are drawn to what’s familiar. But the new therapist is helping me really look at those pieces and see how they actually fit together. It’s as though I had pieces before and was sort of able to squash them together, but she’s come along and said, ‘here, let me turn those over for you so that you can see the picture on the other side’ and wouldn’t you know it, the pieces just snap right together.
As I type this, I’m thinking about the nutty women I’ve dated, or more generally all the high-strung uptight women in my life over the years. Just like mom. Dated a lot of tense, uptight, occasionally unstable women? You bet. Well guess who we know that’s just like that? Dated a lot of women with poor boundaries? What. A. Surprise. I’m also trying to use less sarcasm. What I mean to say is, of course many of the women in my life have been like my mom. Not just because she’s my mom and so has had a huge influence, but because of how she is, my sheltered childhood, my absent (but present) father, she had a HUGE influence in forming my concept of what a ‘normal’ woman is like. It’s no wonder I have such difficulty just talking to actually normal women—I’ve got no model for what that conversation is like!
We’ve talked, too, about the things that weren’t modeled for me like how to deal with—regulate—emotions. This has lead to even more ‘well of course’ moments. Of course I was super emotional as a child (and into adulthood, and maybe even still), I had zero examples of how to deal with them. Or, I suppose even more accurately, I had two: the model of total suppression (dad) and random explosiveness (mom). Which, of course, go hand in hand.
Looking at this new framework, the therapist then zeroed in on something else—how angry I am, and very specifically how angry I am because I wasn’t given the tools I needed to deal with life. And even more so how angry I am about the tools I was given being ones that didn’t work. I’d thought I’d dealt with my anger issues, but having her point out my anger to me was like having a blanket pulled off of my head and all of a sudden I could SEE, really SEE, that I was still unbelievably angry. Like, 'see' in the way the Buddhists talk about seeing.
The same thing is true of tension. The therapist and I have talked a lot about the bullying I went through growing up. She started to say I have PTSD from it and I really didn’t like the sound of that. I may have to talk to her some more about that. But I carry a tension, too. How many times have I longed for the ability to relax? How rare has it been in my life that I’ve actually been able to??
I’m hopeful that these old habits can be dealt with, that these ingrained ways of thinking and dealing with the world can be changed. I’m tired of being tense all the time. I’m tired of being pissed off all the time. I’m tired of not being okay with me and the world. Which feels a bit ridiculous to write because I used to think that I was okay with everything. In recent years, I have found some peace and some serenity and I do feel far more comfortable in my skin than I ever thought I could. It's been a bit of a shock (at least, on a surface level) to discover that I'm not nearly as okay with everything as I thought I was.
But like an onion with many, many layers, there’s still so much further to go.
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