Differentiations in progress
Some day, I hope to be able to tell which of the voices I'm learning to filter out in my head are mine, and which are those that have been living rent-free in this space for a lifetime. It took a long time to be able to discern the subtle difference between my Self and my weasels - which, while still a part of me, are short term wants inauthentically masked by rationalizations and justifications based in poor impulse control and a fear that I won’t be allowed to have what I want if I ask for it directly. (Or because asking for something directly means having to admit out loud to oneself and others that the requisitioned item *is* desired, which might be a harder thing to admit than you think if it treads the line of Programmed Moral Acceptability).
The work around fear that Gloria and I have been grappling with all summer is moving into a new area. The issue of not hearing my own voice in the midst of my own terror, other than the incoherent howling of a terrified pre-verbal toddler, is slowly resolving itself into other, more subtle voices as I give sound and space to the first of the emergent aspects. What this means is that I begin to distinguish other voices adding to the screaming chorus in my head, almost like I’m distinguishing from the mass of seething shadows in my night-time closet a sequence of individual monsters, to use dicea’s analogy. The latest voice is one I’ve heard and lost and heard and lost a couple of times in the course past self-discovery work, but it’s back now with a vengeance.
[As an aside, I know it sounds uncomfortable for some of you when I talk about these disparate voices in my head; it’s not any kind of dissociative personality disorder (DPD), I promise. I don’t switch out or lose time to these as disparate personalities, but this is the simplest analogy to describe how individually I experience the impact of these affecting factors when they get up to speed. And they all have their own individual place in my internal pantheon, with impacts particular to each one. There is a book, written from well beyond the far side of DPD, called When Rabbit Howls, written by the Troops For Trudy Chase; these are her collective personalities who chose to tell her story. It has always resonated with me, particularly the description of Rabbit, the littlest one, who cannot speak but will howl when overwhelmed with pain or fear. Were it not for the fact that I carry my experiences in full consciousness in my waking - and, apparently, my sleeping - hours, I’d be more alarmed about the similarities. As it is, I’m in possession of my faculties, and able to put those disparate voices into the context of historical values still acting on my decision-making processes today in largely-opaque, conflicting ways. The work of the moment is to sort out more of those voices and identify them so that I can manage them in the moment when I realize I’m having a Rabbit Moment, or a Mommy Moment, or whatever else we uncover throughout the ongoing spelunking.]
In recent weeks, the latest voice to emerge from the maelstrom has been the one that keeps hitting the soft underbelly of the work that I’m doing now, specifically at my motivation to earn friendship and respect, to remove the stigma of other people’s fear, to be the person worthy of chances and reconciliations and opportunities; to be the person worthy of love. The strikes against this stated intent and desire are insidious and pervasive and subtle. Each strike carries the payload of a question: “If you keep breaking your toys, what makes you think you deserve new ones?” “You’ve broken your last toy, who’s going to fix it for you now?”, and my personal favourite, “Just who do you think you are to presume you deserve *ANYTHING* now?”
These are not my voice I’m hearing.
Gloria and I dug around this one in our last two sessions, but it was largely clear to me that the nature of the questions ties them closely to my mother’s voice in my head; I heard these questions a lot, growing up. An only child of two high-functioning alcoholics, I wasn’t as spoiled as some kids, but I didn’t lack for a lot. And while one could argue that I grew up in a privileged class, I don’t recall a lot of profligate waste in the sense of “break something, replace it with something new” in our house. Neither of my parents grew up wealthy, so while they made a good life for me to the best of their ability, there was a stronger sense of preservation and conservatism than in some of my friends’ homes at the time. My mother in particular had an extremely difficult and probably emotionally-abusive childhood in which reward and punishment worked like some unanticipatable FunHouse game of terror, so I suspect the family value she inherited for children who seem to not respect the things they’ve been given (especially if there’s any sense of the thing being given without the child necessarily having earned it) was likely going to be extremely tough, possibly downright harsh.
This balances off in her behaviour with a statement she made much later in life to me about how she had sworn up and down she would never be the kind of parent to her child(ren) that her undiagnosed bi-polar mother had been to her. And yes, as systems theory has proven time and again, the nature of fusion is such that the harder we try to move away from those internalized and indoctrinated values, the more likely they are to continue to impact us long after we think we should have freed ourselves. So, in spite of her best intentions, the lessons learned at the hand of a brutal dictator still became things that affected how she raised me, especially in the not-so-subtle judgment tones around what appeared to challenge her implicit value system.
“You don’t deserve [perceived reward=X] if you [deviate from implicit value=Y],” as Gloria pointed out, is the language of ultimatums. It’s the language of fusion, designed to enforce compliance with the family mass. “Who do you think you are, anyway?” is a reactive, blaming stance that takes root in the belief that one who deviates from the family norm is somehow deserving of derogation and contempt. Taken in the light of transmitted values and learned behaviours, the nature of emotionally abusive relationships and behaviours that follow along that same pattern is easier to trace back to roots in the family of origin, even ones that overall seem relatively supportive and functional. And let me tell you, tracing *THAT* little gem back to its source was something of what 3RR terms a “couch bomb”, when the lights and bells all go off at once and the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. I could see a lot of the contempt and derogatory patterns with Matthew fall into place in that moment as well. (It’s self-discovery shit like this that makes the aftermath of sessions with Gloria so hard to manage for days afterward.)
This week in particular, we tackled the question of why this voice is coming back so hard now, and how it’s tied into the aspect of fear that seems to have dragged it back up from the depths. That one was easier to puzzle out once we started looking at associations and chronologies. My mother was within a few years of my current age when she left my father after 19 years together, and with the exception of a couple of very-short-lived flings with alcoholic, emotionally-unavailable men (my mother is nothing if not consistent) she hasn’t had another relationship of significance since. She is in her mid-70s now, alone, in poor health, and bitter about a lot of things in her life, including her belief that one daughter hates her and the other has no time for her. Gloria asked if, in the wake of being abandoned by Matthew, I see myself in her current predicament, with the added level of aloneness that comes from not even having children to connect with in my later years. I’d be lying if I said there probably wasn’t a lot to that idea. She and I are still vastly different people with enormously different life experiences, but my patterns and behaviours and values are moulded by her hand in ways I’m still uncovering 45 years into my own unique life. To find myself *also* now alone in my mid-40s and facing fiscal crises and wondering if I’m doomed to spend the rest of my life alone because I don’t deserve another chance to love and be loved by someone who will work to *get* me... I may be making new mistakes for myself, but it seems to be by living my mother’s life (in my head at least).
So with the plausible similarities echoing down from her generation to mine, it’s no wonder the associations are also rearing up in her voice in terms of the ancient judgements that lead to my being *in* this plausibly-similar situation in the first place. We/I broke something valuable (the marriage), I shouldn’t presume I’m entitled to more nice things; who am I to think I am deserving of more (any) chances, more (any) opportunities?
I am afraid of turning into that bitterness, of being alone with no partner for support, and no resources. The spectre of that particular future may actually be the second-largest monster in my mental darkness, dwarfed as it is by the ancient child’s pervading fear of abandonment. I managed to make the second fear come to pass, what’s to stop me from preventing the former from manifesting as well?
Mindfulness and choice, is what. In the end, they are the only two tools I have, the products of lessons learned and still-in-progress. They are still grossly-wielded tools, a stone hammer in the age of microchips, but they are more than I had a lifetime ago, and I know more about how to use them now against these particular voices than I understood three months ago, when I couldn‘t even identify the voices let alone counter them consciously.
It’s okay to be afraid. It’s even better to understand the nature of that fear, and best to accept that some day, there will be more effective workarounds for it when those voices threaten to drown out my own. As hard as the work is, I’m closer to that “some day” every day I choose to do the work.
Un jour à la fois, un souffle à la fois; un pied devant l'autre.
And some day, maybe the only voice I hear in my head will be my own.
The work around fear that Gloria and I have been grappling with all summer is moving into a new area. The issue of not hearing my own voice in the midst of my own terror, other than the incoherent howling of a terrified pre-verbal toddler, is slowly resolving itself into other, more subtle voices as I give sound and space to the first of the emergent aspects. What this means is that I begin to distinguish other voices adding to the screaming chorus in my head, almost like I’m distinguishing from the mass of seething shadows in my night-time closet a sequence of individual monsters, to use dicea’s analogy. The latest voice is one I’ve heard and lost and heard and lost a couple of times in the course past self-discovery work, but it’s back now with a vengeance.
[As an aside, I know it sounds uncomfortable for some of you when I talk about these disparate voices in my head; it’s not any kind of dissociative personality disorder (DPD), I promise. I don’t switch out or lose time to these as disparate personalities, but this is the simplest analogy to describe how individually I experience the impact of these affecting factors when they get up to speed. And they all have their own individual place in my internal pantheon, with impacts particular to each one. There is a book, written from well beyond the far side of DPD, called When Rabbit Howls, written by the Troops For Trudy Chase; these are her collective personalities who chose to tell her story. It has always resonated with me, particularly the description of Rabbit, the littlest one, who cannot speak but will howl when overwhelmed with pain or fear. Were it not for the fact that I carry my experiences in full consciousness in my waking - and, apparently, my sleeping - hours, I’d be more alarmed about the similarities. As it is, I’m in possession of my faculties, and able to put those disparate voices into the context of historical values still acting on my decision-making processes today in largely-opaque, conflicting ways. The work of the moment is to sort out more of those voices and identify them so that I can manage them in the moment when I realize I’m having a Rabbit Moment, or a Mommy Moment, or whatever else we uncover throughout the ongoing spelunking.]
In recent weeks, the latest voice to emerge from the maelstrom has been the one that keeps hitting the soft underbelly of the work that I’m doing now, specifically at my motivation to earn friendship and respect, to remove the stigma of other people’s fear, to be the person worthy of chances and reconciliations and opportunities; to be the person worthy of love. The strikes against this stated intent and desire are insidious and pervasive and subtle. Each strike carries the payload of a question: “If you keep breaking your toys, what makes you think you deserve new ones?” “You’ve broken your last toy, who’s going to fix it for you now?”, and my personal favourite, “Just who do you think you are to presume you deserve *ANYTHING* now?”
These are not my voice I’m hearing.
Gloria and I dug around this one in our last two sessions, but it was largely clear to me that the nature of the questions ties them closely to my mother’s voice in my head; I heard these questions a lot, growing up. An only child of two high-functioning alcoholics, I wasn’t as spoiled as some kids, but I didn’t lack for a lot. And while one could argue that I grew up in a privileged class, I don’t recall a lot of profligate waste in the sense of “break something, replace it with something new” in our house. Neither of my parents grew up wealthy, so while they made a good life for me to the best of their ability, there was a stronger sense of preservation and conservatism than in some of my friends’ homes at the time. My mother in particular had an extremely difficult and probably emotionally-abusive childhood in which reward and punishment worked like some unanticipatable FunHouse game of terror, so I suspect the family value she inherited for children who seem to not respect the things they’ve been given (especially if there’s any sense of the thing being given without the child necessarily having earned it) was likely going to be extremely tough, possibly downright harsh.
This balances off in her behaviour with a statement she made much later in life to me about how she had sworn up and down she would never be the kind of parent to her child(ren) that her undiagnosed bi-polar mother had been to her. And yes, as systems theory has proven time and again, the nature of fusion is such that the harder we try to move away from those internalized and indoctrinated values, the more likely they are to continue to impact us long after we think we should have freed ourselves. So, in spite of her best intentions, the lessons learned at the hand of a brutal dictator still became things that affected how she raised me, especially in the not-so-subtle judgment tones around what appeared to challenge her implicit value system.
“You don’t deserve [perceived reward=X] if you [deviate from implicit value=Y],” as Gloria pointed out, is the language of ultimatums. It’s the language of fusion, designed to enforce compliance with the family mass. “Who do you think you are, anyway?” is a reactive, blaming stance that takes root in the belief that one who deviates from the family norm is somehow deserving of derogation and contempt. Taken in the light of transmitted values and learned behaviours, the nature of emotionally abusive relationships and behaviours that follow along that same pattern is easier to trace back to roots in the family of origin, even ones that overall seem relatively supportive and functional. And let me tell you, tracing *THAT* little gem back to its source was something of what 3RR terms a “couch bomb”, when the lights and bells all go off at once and the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. I could see a lot of the contempt and derogatory patterns with Matthew fall into place in that moment as well. (It’s self-discovery shit like this that makes the aftermath of sessions with Gloria so hard to manage for days afterward.)
This week in particular, we tackled the question of why this voice is coming back so hard now, and how it’s tied into the aspect of fear that seems to have dragged it back up from the depths. That one was easier to puzzle out once we started looking at associations and chronologies. My mother was within a few years of my current age when she left my father after 19 years together, and with the exception of a couple of very-short-lived flings with alcoholic, emotionally-unavailable men (my mother is nothing if not consistent) she hasn’t had another relationship of significance since. She is in her mid-70s now, alone, in poor health, and bitter about a lot of things in her life, including her belief that one daughter hates her and the other has no time for her. Gloria asked if, in the wake of being abandoned by Matthew, I see myself in her current predicament, with the added level of aloneness that comes from not even having children to connect with in my later years. I’d be lying if I said there probably wasn’t a lot to that idea. She and I are still vastly different people with enormously different life experiences, but my patterns and behaviours and values are moulded by her hand in ways I’m still uncovering 45 years into my own unique life. To find myself *also* now alone in my mid-40s and facing fiscal crises and wondering if I’m doomed to spend the rest of my life alone because I don’t deserve another chance to love and be loved by someone who will work to *get* me... I may be making new mistakes for myself, but it seems to be by living my mother’s life (in my head at least).
So with the plausible similarities echoing down from her generation to mine, it’s no wonder the associations are also rearing up in her voice in terms of the ancient judgements that lead to my being *in* this plausibly-similar situation in the first place. We/I broke something valuable (the marriage), I shouldn’t presume I’m entitled to more nice things; who am I to think I am deserving of more (any) chances, more (any) opportunities?
I am afraid of turning into that bitterness, of being alone with no partner for support, and no resources. The spectre of that particular future may actually be the second-largest monster in my mental darkness, dwarfed as it is by the ancient child’s pervading fear of abandonment. I managed to make the second fear come to pass, what’s to stop me from preventing the former from manifesting as well?
Mindfulness and choice, is what. In the end, they are the only two tools I have, the products of lessons learned and still-in-progress. They are still grossly-wielded tools, a stone hammer in the age of microchips, but they are more than I had a lifetime ago, and I know more about how to use them now against these particular voices than I understood three months ago, when I couldn‘t even identify the voices let alone counter them consciously.
It’s okay to be afraid. It’s even better to understand the nature of that fear, and best to accept that some day, there will be more effective workarounds for it when those voices threaten to drown out my own. As hard as the work is, I’m closer to that “some day” every day I choose to do the work.
Un jour à la fois, un souffle à la fois; un pied devant l'autre.
And some day, maybe the only voice I hear in my head will be my own.