Stepping into terror
A propos of everything, it’s ironic when I can invest several *hours* in purging the topmost level of thoughts about fear and how it has impacted my behaviours historically in costly manner, then spend an entire evening retreating into exactly those same damned patterns of fearful inhibition. Okay, so everything is tenuous right now and the rules are all different and nobody know what the hell is going on and I should cut myself some slack, but… oy. You’d think by now even *I* might recognize that if I’m being frustrated because I’m silent, that maybe I shouldn’t be silent?
You’d think. *sigh*
In the end, I ate the fear and asked what I needed to ask. It went okay. I’m simultaneously running two distinctly different conversations in my head, one of which I’m reining in brutally on a tight choke-chain so I can simply be present and hear what’s being said, not what I’m dancing to interpret (professional therapist training, FTW!, or something). Keeping the two soundtracks distinct is exhausting; I slept much better after the conversation than in the attempts prior to it. When I told Matthew at the start of the year that I wasn’t going to hold anything in anymore, I don’t think I foresaw things getting to quite this same layer of needing to step into and talk about the deeper fears like they were pets in the room, but I suppose if one needs to commit to a path, one needs to commit to the path even when it wends through to the dark and boggy spots. It’s a lot like being trapped in a horror movie trope: a woman sets out on the journey of a lifetime to “discover her authentic Self” only to have things go horribly, terrifyingly awry when she gets lost in South America and finds herself about to be eaten by primal pygmy cannibals, and *no-one* is coming to rescue her. Our heroine has to eat her fears, or be consumed by them.
“Eat, Pray, Love” meets every B-grade horror flick ever shot = my life; you’re welcome to it.
But that’s not what today’s homework is about. The first question about mistakes is a question with many moving parts. Yesterday I poked at fundamentals of my experience with fear. Today I look at how the fear became the thing that got in the way of my being lovingly engaged in the relationship I still so highly value and desperately want to restore.
her: What are the parts of a relationship that are not baggage handling, for which you anticipate specific anxiety when stepping away from your familiar relationship model?
me: The parts where we get to just be in love: the engagement, the encouraging, the support, the partnership on goals, the space we jointly create to share things that are NOT always just our interpersonal issues. I didn't grow up in a household where loving this way was The Way Of It. I have no model for this.
her: And someone who grew up with it would have no concept of any other way.
me: Likely not, no. Matthew got the loving family who didn't have the tools to effectively process conflict; I got all the conflict tools, but not the loving processes. And we failed to meet in the middle, somehow, working towards sharing what we had and building it into something flourishing and sustainable.
Its not that my parents have a lot to answer for, since the decisions I’ve made as an independent adult have all been my own shit to manage, but one of the reasons why the ACOA material hit so hard yesterday was the reaffirmation of something I’ve known since my teens, before my parents separated: theirs was not a reasonable model for healthy relationships. And yet in the way of family systems everywhere, the fusion that occurs between their values and mine is impossible to detect until someone lays out the patterns as a Big Picture observation and ALL of the pieces fit altogether too perfectly. (There will be other thoughts on the ACOA stuff later when I’m willing to make space in my head for reading the SourceBook and NOT have it feel like self-flagellation).
But the truth is, looking back over all of my adult relationships I see many of the same patterns emerge time and time again. They arise once insecurities are triggered without sufficient coping mechanisms to sustain the intimate emotional connections necessary to soothe those anxieties. The more intensely attached to the relationship I am, the bigger the fears of losing it (ahhh, attachment… ). The bigger the fears, the more I withdraw from the fears in avoidance - and, subsequently, from the relationship. Once those intimate communications channels start to fail as a result of the systemic shut-downs (I become afraid to initiate sexual contact, conversations, requests for time, shared activities; I especially become fearful of looking inward and accepting what I see happening and sharing it outwardly for fear of rejection), the train is in motion.
Those fears become obstacles around which I am unwilling to navigate because the cost of rejection is (in my head) too high, so I pre-emptively shut myself off. Self-fulfilling prophecies: I haz dem in *buckets*. This stage is all about owning someone else’s shit, as I presume that the rejection state is the default state, and bring a whole lot of confirmational bias to back that up. It really doesn’t take much for me to see signs of rejection in the smallest things, and I’ve only recently come to understand it’s my biggest issue with partners I perceive as passive participants in intimate relationships (more on that another time too; that’s a puzzle piece that’s only just starting to fall into place).
This is why relationships, especially this one in which trying to be aware of what’s going on internally has been such a huge component, have devolved to become about damage control. It’s a huge step forward for me, at least, that I can perform and articulate a lot of the internal processing, even if I’ve only gotten to the basic skills of talking about the outer layers of the onion. I don’t have a lot of experience in adult relationships with being supportive and encouraging, but doing damage control where things don’t work, that I *can* do (in a way, sometimes, as long as I don’t poke down to the fears level). The cost of that approach, however, is that I’ve frequently lost sight of the fact that there are a lot of relational needs for positive engagement that get lost when one is constantly fire-fighting. I couldn’t meet a lot of Matthew's needs once my fears were in the room, or believe (trust) that he was trying to meet mine; I was too busy battling those fears to a Mexican stand-off, and trying to manage (control) the situations that triggered them, to just *be* the partner he wants. Too wrapped up in my fears to relax, too exhausted by all the work to rejoice, too quick to assume the worst before checking in to confirm the love first1.
This is exactly why another step in the homework is:
5. I will practice sitting with my fears and letting them go before they become a tempest. Fear is the mind-killer, and from there, all else is threatened. Managing the fears [more effectively] is the key to being open to the experiences of others, and to acknowledging those experiences in more effectively mutually-beneficial ways. This includes being open to the needs and wants of another.
This is also why part of the process of reconnection, should there be one, has to include getting back to the basics of understanding needs and wants, not as things to be fenced in and fought for or defended like contended terrain in an European land-war, but as the places where love is rooted and encouraged. Less about, “What can you do for me, and how can I cement and enforce the supply chain?” and more about, “What can I do for you to meet your needs and encourage your willing engagement on my own?”, with a whole lot of acknowledgement of effort thrown in to fertilize the entire development.
It’s not putting too fine a point on the issues to say there is no trust in the barrel for that particular process at the moment, on either side. But as I wrote somewhere else a week ago, “Sometimes, standing in a place where one has nothing left to lose, is the best place in the world to take every risk in the book.” Being a lover is glaringly pre-emptive, but being a friend is not; it’s a toe-hold in the cliff-face from which the climb starts. Every interaction from ground zero now carries the seeds of that revised intent: what does it mean to engage authentically with the fears in motion but not in control, and to *still be able to encourage* even those things that may not be aligned with my own desires?
It hurts, and it’s terrifying and it freezes me like a rabbit in the headlights every damned time, is what it means. And I’m doing it anyway (eventually; as last night proved, sometimes I still need to kludge and bully myself into engaging in this dangerous and foreign manner; I’m trying to negotiate a delicate and nuanced peace treaty and future trade opportunities with a vastly powerful alien race that can crush me like a bug and I don’t speak the fucking language. Yeah, like that.)
The intrepid reader might ask why, in the name of all that’s holy, do I want to keep stepping into the terror-filled places, because that isn’t what love is supposed to be about, is it?
Well, yes and no. There are the parts of this that are about him, and the parts of this that are about me, and the parts of this that are about the relationship as an entity and exercise unto itself. The parts that are about me are always going to be worth stepping into the terror, even as I hate and fear doing it. I don’t change by staying safely on those narrow paths around the elephant in the room, and not changing pretty much guarantees that all subsequent relationship attempts - here or elsewhere - will fall prey to the same fear-stunted patterns. The parts that are about him can probably be summed up best as, “He deserved, and deserves, far better from me than he got.” The parts that are about the relationship are about acknowledging a truly special platform unlike any I have ever built or been given on which to work, which makes it really fucking difficult to let go of it (ahhh, attachment…).
The terror is, in short, apparently still worth the effort and cost of stepping into for any one of those reasons, never mind all of them in concert, and never mind the fact that I really have no leg to stand on here any more. *Someone* will by ghods get to reap the benefits of me learning how to be the Lover & Partner I choose to be (probably at the cost of suffering through the growing pains with me), and while I can hope someday it will be Matthew, in the end it will be someone chosen carefully for an ability to work authentically and patiently with me while I Change the Work. Beyond that, I can make no promises; this time, there is no room for “try”, there is only room for “do”.
Sometimes you just have to close your eyes and let go of the cliff-face to see what happens. And if that’s not an apt description of being in love and loving authentically, I don’t know what is.
1- Perhaps unironically, Matthew the other day sent me a link to an article about how smart people make dumb processing mistakes that seems to have some relevance to these reflections, but as I'm trying to process this backlog and backwash in bite-size chunks, I'll just toss the link here and those inclined to do the reading for themselves can make if it what they will: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06/daniel-kahneman-bias-studies.html
You’d think. *sigh*
In the end, I ate the fear and asked what I needed to ask. It went okay. I’m simultaneously running two distinctly different conversations in my head, one of which I’m reining in brutally on a tight choke-chain so I can simply be present and hear what’s being said, not what I’m dancing to interpret (professional therapist training, FTW!, or something). Keeping the two soundtracks distinct is exhausting; I slept much better after the conversation than in the attempts prior to it. When I told Matthew at the start of the year that I wasn’t going to hold anything in anymore, I don’t think I foresaw things getting to quite this same layer of needing to step into and talk about the deeper fears like they were pets in the room, but I suppose if one needs to commit to a path, one needs to commit to the path even when it wends through to the dark and boggy spots. It’s a lot like being trapped in a horror movie trope: a woman sets out on the journey of a lifetime to “discover her authentic Self” only to have things go horribly, terrifyingly awry when she gets lost in South America and finds herself about to be eaten by primal pygmy cannibals, and *no-one* is coming to rescue her. Our heroine has to eat her fears, or be consumed by them.
“Eat, Pray, Love” meets every B-grade horror flick ever shot = my life; you’re welcome to it.
But that’s not what today’s homework is about. The first question about mistakes is a question with many moving parts. Yesterday I poked at fundamentals of my experience with fear. Today I look at how the fear became the thing that got in the way of my being lovingly engaged in the relationship I still so highly value and desperately want to restore.
her: What are the parts of a relationship that are not baggage handling, for which you anticipate specific anxiety when stepping away from your familiar relationship model?
me: The parts where we get to just be in love: the engagement, the encouraging, the support, the partnership on goals, the space we jointly create to share things that are NOT always just our interpersonal issues. I didn't grow up in a household where loving this way was The Way Of It. I have no model for this.
her: And someone who grew up with it would have no concept of any other way.
me: Likely not, no. Matthew got the loving family who didn't have the tools to effectively process conflict; I got all the conflict tools, but not the loving processes. And we failed to meet in the middle, somehow, working towards sharing what we had and building it into something flourishing and sustainable.
Its not that my parents have a lot to answer for, since the decisions I’ve made as an independent adult have all been my own shit to manage, but one of the reasons why the ACOA material hit so hard yesterday was the reaffirmation of something I’ve known since my teens, before my parents separated: theirs was not a reasonable model for healthy relationships. And yet in the way of family systems everywhere, the fusion that occurs between their values and mine is impossible to detect until someone lays out the patterns as a Big Picture observation and ALL of the pieces fit altogether too perfectly. (There will be other thoughts on the ACOA stuff later when I’m willing to make space in my head for reading the SourceBook and NOT have it feel like self-flagellation).
But the truth is, looking back over all of my adult relationships I see many of the same patterns emerge time and time again. They arise once insecurities are triggered without sufficient coping mechanisms to sustain the intimate emotional connections necessary to soothe those anxieties. The more intensely attached to the relationship I am, the bigger the fears of losing it (ahhh, attachment… ). The bigger the fears, the more I withdraw from the fears in avoidance - and, subsequently, from the relationship. Once those intimate communications channels start to fail as a result of the systemic shut-downs (I become afraid to initiate sexual contact, conversations, requests for time, shared activities; I especially become fearful of looking inward and accepting what I see happening and sharing it outwardly for fear of rejection), the train is in motion.
Those fears become obstacles around which I am unwilling to navigate because the cost of rejection is (in my head) too high, so I pre-emptively shut myself off. Self-fulfilling prophecies: I haz dem in *buckets*. This stage is all about owning someone else’s shit, as I presume that the rejection state is the default state, and bring a whole lot of confirmational bias to back that up. It really doesn’t take much for me to see signs of rejection in the smallest things, and I’ve only recently come to understand it’s my biggest issue with partners I perceive as passive participants in intimate relationships (more on that another time too; that’s a puzzle piece that’s only just starting to fall into place).
This is why relationships, especially this one in which trying to be aware of what’s going on internally has been such a huge component, have devolved to become about damage control. It’s a huge step forward for me, at least, that I can perform and articulate a lot of the internal processing, even if I’ve only gotten to the basic skills of talking about the outer layers of the onion. I don’t have a lot of experience in adult relationships with being supportive and encouraging, but doing damage control where things don’t work, that I *can* do (in a way, sometimes, as long as I don’t poke down to the fears level). The cost of that approach, however, is that I’ve frequently lost sight of the fact that there are a lot of relational needs for positive engagement that get lost when one is constantly fire-fighting. I couldn’t meet a lot of Matthew's needs once my fears were in the room, or believe (trust) that he was trying to meet mine; I was too busy battling those fears to a Mexican stand-off, and trying to manage (control) the situations that triggered them, to just *be* the partner he wants. Too wrapped up in my fears to relax, too exhausted by all the work to rejoice, too quick to assume the worst before checking in to confirm the love first1.
This is exactly why another step in the homework is:
5. I will practice sitting with my fears and letting them go before they become a tempest. Fear is the mind-killer, and from there, all else is threatened. Managing the fears [more effectively] is the key to being open to the experiences of others, and to acknowledging those experiences in more effectively mutually-beneficial ways. This includes being open to the needs and wants of another.
This is also why part of the process of reconnection, should there be one, has to include getting back to the basics of understanding needs and wants, not as things to be fenced in and fought for or defended like contended terrain in an European land-war, but as the places where love is rooted and encouraged. Less about, “What can you do for me, and how can I cement and enforce the supply chain?” and more about, “What can I do for you to meet your needs and encourage your willing engagement on my own?”, with a whole lot of acknowledgement of effort thrown in to fertilize the entire development.
It’s not putting too fine a point on the issues to say there is no trust in the barrel for that particular process at the moment, on either side. But as I wrote somewhere else a week ago, “Sometimes, standing in a place where one has nothing left to lose, is the best place in the world to take every risk in the book.” Being a lover is glaringly pre-emptive, but being a friend is not; it’s a toe-hold in the cliff-face from which the climb starts. Every interaction from ground zero now carries the seeds of that revised intent: what does it mean to engage authentically with the fears in motion but not in control, and to *still be able to encourage* even those things that may not be aligned with my own desires?
It hurts, and it’s terrifying and it freezes me like a rabbit in the headlights every damned time, is what it means. And I’m doing it anyway (eventually; as last night proved, sometimes I still need to kludge and bully myself into engaging in this dangerous and foreign manner; I’m trying to negotiate a delicate and nuanced peace treaty and future trade opportunities with a vastly powerful alien race that can crush me like a bug and I don’t speak the fucking language. Yeah, like that.)
The intrepid reader might ask why, in the name of all that’s holy, do I want to keep stepping into the terror-filled places, because that isn’t what love is supposed to be about, is it?
Well, yes and no. There are the parts of this that are about him, and the parts of this that are about me, and the parts of this that are about the relationship as an entity and exercise unto itself. The parts that are about me are always going to be worth stepping into the terror, even as I hate and fear doing it. I don’t change by staying safely on those narrow paths around the elephant in the room, and not changing pretty much guarantees that all subsequent relationship attempts - here or elsewhere - will fall prey to the same fear-stunted patterns. The parts that are about him can probably be summed up best as, “He deserved, and deserves, far better from me than he got.” The parts that are about the relationship are about acknowledging a truly special platform unlike any I have ever built or been given on which to work, which makes it really fucking difficult to let go of it (ahhh, attachment…).
The terror is, in short, apparently still worth the effort and cost of stepping into for any one of those reasons, never mind all of them in concert, and never mind the fact that I really have no leg to stand on here any more. *Someone* will by ghods get to reap the benefits of me learning how to be the Lover & Partner I choose to be (probably at the cost of suffering through the growing pains with me), and while I can hope someday it will be Matthew, in the end it will be someone chosen carefully for an ability to work authentically and patiently with me while I Change the Work. Beyond that, I can make no promises; this time, there is no room for “try”, there is only room for “do”.
Sometimes you just have to close your eyes and let go of the cliff-face to see what happens. And if that’s not an apt description of being in love and loving authentically, I don’t know what is.
1- Perhaps unironically, Matthew the other day sent me a link to an article about how smart people make dumb processing mistakes that seems to have some relevance to these reflections, but as I'm trying to process this backlog and backwash in bite-size chunks, I'll just toss the link here and those inclined to do the reading for themselves can make if it what they will: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06/daniel-kahneman-bias-studies.html