Parenting in Ghostland
The past few months I've been in a boot camp of the mind. Once a week a sensitive and highly educated therapist comes to my house for two hours. We usually begin by chatting about my daughter's growth milestones, or good books, or the weather. These are subjects I'm "good" at, that I can skate through comfortably and with a dose of humor.
Then my therapist's smile will become more sympathetic and I will know that it is time. Time to talk about what psychoanalyst Selma Fraiberg calls "The Ghosts in the Nursery." The phrase--as I've come to understand it--symbolizes the beliefs, patterns and fears that parents transfer from their past into their present. Basically it describes the imprinted psychic baggage that you carry, often without your knowledge--until you begin to parent. And then the haunting begins. Annoying, chattering phantoms--and a few terrifying ones, dogging even your most mundane parenting tasks. That's what got me--I had broken away from toxic individuals years before TTC and thought that my "work" was all done. Ha! (Okay, taking a more generous and loving approach to myself here--yes, a lot of the self-as-healthy-adult-work was all done.) Then I entered into a whole new territory. Parenting. Or Ghostland, if you will.
"Ghosts in the Nursery" intimates that you'll probably parent in large part how you were parented yourself...especially when under stress. Looking at the situation, I realized that I'd been living with several big stressors that I could control--and that once controlled would improve my ability to parent. The first step was to go through Ferber-style "sleep training" in order to cure the crushing physical fatigue that plagued both me and DH (I'm happy to post more about that or PM if there are any requests). The second step was to (finally) take the plunge, combine our finances and make a joint monthly budget. Both changes helped monumentally.
Once those things were out of the way, I was able to take note of the sheer mental drain I was living under--and touch upon the notion that maybe, just maybe it kinda sorta wasn't normal to agonize three ways from Sunday about Every. Single. Decision. It wasn't OCD or any quickly categorized or coded pathology (yes, I've been evaluated). It was just those dratted ghosts whom I felt like I was fighting at every turn. And not just over food stuff. (For instance, if you want to peek into the freaky, cobwebbed-recesses of my cortex: "OMG I just made an angry face in front of my daughter because I'm thinking of something that pissed me off years ago and I just happen to have a very expressive face--do I need to do damage control? Or: I have a migraine today...is it okay if I don't respond to her every single cue to play and just kind of lie on the bed--or will it damage her cognitive and emotional development if she doesn't have a consistently receptive primary caregiver??") Okay, okay a bit of reductio ad absurdum there--but you get the point.
All I can say is that living with that kind of high daily anxiety lead me to realize that I can't count on intuition alone to parent, because that "intuition" was working me so hard I was falling asleep in my clothes at 8p. I had to admit that somewhere along the way some very crucial wiring got very crucially crossed, which was leading to my current analysis paralysis exhaustion. I'm not going to go through facts or figures from my formative years here and now, nor will I name names from my past. What matters most is that I realized that I needed another way--and I sought it out. Boy oh boy has it been a lot of work. The first few weeks of therapy were a mind-muck of exhausting emotions, disappointing revelations and sheer, brutal honesty. In retrospect, I realize that it was the kind of dynamic initiation that allowed me to look at myself and say "Whoa--there's some stuff I don't like here. Some stuff that needs to change."
I am grateful to have a guide for the process and I can see that I'm making progress. I intend to blog here about the process and be forthright about any setbacks. The most important thing I've learned so far? Working on myself is, ironically, the very best way I can advance my goal of raising a healthy kid with a strong mind. Though wonderful in its simplicity, the idea has only been easily accessible to me as of late. One unexpected gift of the work I've been doing is a new-found empathy for people who struggle with harmful yet unidentified patterns. I also have a better-developed understanding of why people repeat damaging behaviors. Understanding is not the same thing as condoning, but it has gone a long way toward helping me make sense of the world I live in and of the past that haunts me (the song "Human Behavior" by Bjork comes to mind here). Go figure!
Oh, and in other news--if you aren't on fb, we welcomed a new sous-chef to the team. :-)
Then my therapist's smile will become more sympathetic and I will know that it is time. Time to talk about what psychoanalyst Selma Fraiberg calls "The Ghosts in the Nursery." The phrase--as I've come to understand it--symbolizes the beliefs, patterns and fears that parents transfer from their past into their present. Basically it describes the imprinted psychic baggage that you carry, often without your knowledge--until you begin to parent. And then the haunting begins. Annoying, chattering phantoms--and a few terrifying ones, dogging even your most mundane parenting tasks. That's what got me--I had broken away from toxic individuals years before TTC and thought that my "work" was all done. Ha! (Okay, taking a more generous and loving approach to myself here--yes, a lot of the self-as-healthy-adult-work was all done.) Then I entered into a whole new territory. Parenting. Or Ghostland, if you will.
"Ghosts in the Nursery" intimates that you'll probably parent in large part how you were parented yourself...especially when under stress. Looking at the situation, I realized that I'd been living with several big stressors that I could control--and that once controlled would improve my ability to parent. The first step was to go through Ferber-style "sleep training" in order to cure the crushing physical fatigue that plagued both me and DH (I'm happy to post more about that or PM if there are any requests). The second step was to (finally) take the plunge, combine our finances and make a joint monthly budget. Both changes helped monumentally.
Once those things were out of the way, I was able to take note of the sheer mental drain I was living under--and touch upon the notion that maybe, just maybe it kinda sorta wasn't normal to agonize three ways from Sunday about Every. Single. Decision. It wasn't OCD or any quickly categorized or coded pathology (yes, I've been evaluated). It was just those dratted ghosts whom I felt like I was fighting at every turn. And not just over food stuff. (For instance, if you want to peek into the freaky, cobwebbed-recesses of my cortex: "OMG I just made an angry face in front of my daughter because I'm thinking of something that pissed me off years ago and I just happen to have a very expressive face--do I need to do damage control? Or: I have a migraine today...is it okay if I don't respond to her every single cue to play and just kind of lie on the bed--or will it damage her cognitive and emotional development if she doesn't have a consistently receptive primary caregiver??") Okay, okay a bit of reductio ad absurdum there--but you get the point.
All I can say is that living with that kind of high daily anxiety lead me to realize that I can't count on intuition alone to parent, because that "intuition" was working me so hard I was falling asleep in my clothes at 8p. I had to admit that somewhere along the way some very crucial wiring got very crucially crossed, which was leading to my current analysis paralysis exhaustion. I'm not going to go through facts or figures from my formative years here and now, nor will I name names from my past. What matters most is that I realized that I needed another way--and I sought it out. Boy oh boy has it been a lot of work. The first few weeks of therapy were a mind-muck of exhausting emotions, disappointing revelations and sheer, brutal honesty. In retrospect, I realize that it was the kind of dynamic initiation that allowed me to look at myself and say "Whoa--there's some stuff I don't like here. Some stuff that needs to change."
I am grateful to have a guide for the process and I can see that I'm making progress. I intend to blog here about the process and be forthright about any setbacks. The most important thing I've learned so far? Working on myself is, ironically, the very best way I can advance my goal of raising a healthy kid with a strong mind. Though wonderful in its simplicity, the idea has only been easily accessible to me as of late. One unexpected gift of the work I've been doing is a new-found empathy for people who struggle with harmful yet unidentified patterns. I also have a better-developed understanding of why people repeat damaging behaviors. Understanding is not the same thing as condoning, but it has gone a long way toward helping me make sense of the world I live in and of the past that haunts me (the song "Human Behavior" by Bjork comes to mind here). Go figure!
Oh, and in other news--if you aren't on fb, we welcomed a new sous-chef to the team. :-)