Therapy: Going down the wrong road
This post is going to start by offering some details about an annoying work situation, but it actually taps into something I'm dealing with in therapy...
I work with a supervisor and fellow employee who have turned out to be big time nitpickers. All emails sent out to others must first go past them, and each one is always returned with a number of edits. Any meeting agenda I come up with has to be run past them, and most recently, two of them went back and forth so many time with edits that it made my head spin. You'd think it was the second Declaration of Independence. This is a freakin' meeting agenda people-- perhaps the least memorable thing about a meeting.
I try to learn from their edits, but it became clear after a number of these that in the end it's really about what they want rather than what's 'right'. Based on my experience with my last boss in Atlanta ( the ultimate micromanager), I can understand your potential hesitation to believe me, but I have 3 other supervisors who love my work--this is the only one who is anal.
The problem is, after a while, this level of micromanagement eats at your self-esteem and confidence, and this sends my anxiety off the roof. I try to reassure myself that I'm doing my best, but this does little to calm me down, their criticizing and correcting me all the time makes me feel rejected and the anxiety is so bad that it makes it hard for me to think straight. In a case of heightened irony, the anxiety makes it hard for me write a professional email, it's as if I can no longer find the words, I grapple for the right thing to write, it's as if their doubting my skills have made it come true. This struggle to write an email only reinforces that fact that I'm not feeling to great about my intellect.
As I shared this with Dr. M I did the most perplexing thing-- I started crying. The confusion I felt when I started crying was similar to the confusion I'd feel at crying at no longer seeing my last therapist Josh-- Why does this bother me this much?
I allowed the tears continue though; I feel incredibly safe with Dr. M and a part of me wanted her to see my tears because I sure as heck didn't get them. As she talked me through it, she told me that NO ONE likes to me micromanaged, how in her opinion, as a part-time editor, given all the emails I've written to her, she's hard-pressed to believe that my emails would need a once-over, and to her it seems like the problem isn't with me, but with them. Sher taught me that I needed to look at the situation from my perspective-- could it be that they're the ones who are wrong? Could it be that they're suffering in their heads because they're anxiety, and need to control makes it hard for them to allow anyone to do things on their own? She said from her professional view, based on all the details I gave her, this is the case here.
She added to this however by saying, "Micromanagers are hard for people in general to handle, but for you I imagine it's so much harder....can you talk about this a little?".
I knew what she was getting at-- my mother. It was what my therapist Josh always pointed to, and now Dr. M does as well. Dr. M said, "So much of what scares you about this is what you went through with your mother isn't it?"
And to my surprise again, after she said that, I BURST into tears.
When she told me this I'll be honest, it didn't actually resonate with me or my gut. I've actually worked through most of my anger re: my mother with my last therapist, I honestly don't hold a lot of resentment for her anymore, but when I shared this with my therapist, she suggested that I might be trying to 'avoid' the truth. Or as psychologists like to say, "resisting" moving forward towards insight.
I was intrigued.
I went home from session determined to break through this resistance, and for the past 2 days, I've journaled, reflected, and even meditated on what I'm in denial about, and the most i came up with was a headache. A part of me at times felt like I was looking into something that had no basis, and trying to look for pain where there wasn't any was making me all angsty and negative-- I was overanalyzing the negative things I've gone through and making them worse than they really are.
That's when I decided to let go of the "mom connection" and see if the work incident with the annoying micromanager tapped into any other issues, and as soon as I did that -- BINGO-- my gut knew the truth. Getting criticized by my supervisor and coworker tapped straight into the rejection I felt at the hands of my peers, NOT my mother. Without going into too much of a pity-list let's just say that I grew up being ostracized by my peers for one reason or the other and it built in me a real sensitivity to being rejected by people. My family moved to Houston, TV when I was in 2nd grade and the kids made fun of me and shunned me because of my brown skin color. When we moved to Lexington, KY, I made friends with a group of 6 Indian kids from our community, who, for reasons I never understood, shunned and teased for years just 6 months after befriending me. And finally, in junior high I was picked apart for being 'ugly' by male peers at my school.
Being teased and shunned happened to me a lot growing up-- so much so that when someone does something that may suggest they don't like me (like micromanaging me), I bristle, get anxious, and yes even cry.
The good news? My therapist taught me how to look at the situation from my point of view. I'm conditioned to assume I'm the wrong one, but what if I look at the situation and ask, "is this really fair to me? Is the agenda I sent to them really that screwed up? Did their changes alter it THAT much?"
To all those answers, I gave a resounding 'no'...and being able to do that made me feel so GREAT. That anxiety I felt about going to work disappeared that day and I went to work in the best mood!