Shame and the Dependence Coil
In response to this post, a friend emailed to ask me about time lines, in response to my reference to "a baker's dozen years after the [self-discovering] process began". His confusion over the math is explained by the fact that this process started *before* Matthew, and to some extent even before J and I met and began working with Gloria.
It began sometime in 1998, possibly in 1997 but certainly reaching critical mass the following year, when I was with Brock. We broke up, for all intents and purposes amiably, on the snowy drive to Monadh's New Year's Day event. In truth, however, the break had been coming for a while, encompassing but not limited to a complete emotional and mental breakdown I had late that fall in which Brock looked at me in disgust where I lay curled in a fetal ball in a corner of my sewing room and told me to get over it, it was all in my head. He'd had enough of my emotional state, but more importantly, so had I. Some period of time prior to that incident, as the movement toward the break was gaining momentum, he'd told me that he really missed the girl I had been when he'd met me, the girl who needed him. And in truth, I was still dependent in a lot of ways but since leaving my first husband and realizing the grass wasn't so much greener on Brock's side of the fence as I had hoped, the problem wasn't entirely with the boys but had a tremendous amount to do with the fact that I wasn't happy *being* dependent.
I look back now on those years and I cringe more than a little. Seeking the kinds of love I thought I wanted, then panicking when I got too close - being needy meant being dependent, but dependence on emotionally-unavailable men meant they could abandon me at any time (just like my parents would, over and over, when they escaped into work or drinking), and I hated being dependent and taking the risks of being hurt by their unavailability. With J, the pattern had a more overt form in the closed door to his office, a door I struggled and failed time and again to overcome (my father's at-home office had a similar policy: "Don't disturb Daddy when he's working". Brock rarely closed his door but his love was controlled in a different manner which I accepted but eventually couldn't adapt to, and finally chose not to accept. I struggled against the control because trying to find my own self-definition and independence seemed preferable to being vulnerable - it always does - which manifested in trying to push myself up by pushing him away. I didn't know how to be vulnerable effectively, and my ineffective attempts to reach out to him from the depths of the inevitable breakdown were shut out in the most excruciating way possible: I was completely dismissed and the state utterly denigrated. You don't recover from that. I'm pretty sure Brock never recovered from what he may have thought was my abandonment of him; I'm still struggling to "sit in the other chair" as Gloria would say, and see the abandonment issues inherent in my actions as perceived by my partners over time.
So in 1998, I understood already that I wasn't happy being dependent on others, was probably ashamed of feeling so "needy" when those needs were going unmet by aloof, detached, emotionally inexperienced or unavailable men; Brock wanted me to depend on him, but to keep my emotional quandaries to myself. He didn't want to be vulnerable with me either, and that led to my feeling shut out of his emotional life, which led to distance and detachment... and the mistaken sense that emotional disengagement and independence were the same thing (they're not, in case anyone's not clear on that). I was struggling to be independent. When I put a time frame on the self-discovery voyage, that's the point I define as the embarkation, the point of origin; it was the moment in which I first put language around both who I was (not), and what I was feeling about that who-ness, recognizing (or at least admitting to myself) for the first time that things needed to change.
That *I* needed to change.
Here I am, now 14 years on, and still engaged in that change process. The state of evolution has been pretty constant; some days it feels like the distance from Then to Now is measured in picometers, while other days I can't even see that galaxy from here. Some days I still feel like shit for making the same mistakes, and other days it's the greatest thrill int he world to make the same mistakes but at least understand *WHY* I'm making them and where they come from... maybe in another 14 years I'll have figured out how to *STOP* making the same fucking mistakes (though Gloria assures me that we never stop making them, we just get better, generally speaking, at mopping up our messes or communicating them as they're about to happen anyway). The idea of having "come so far" and know that I'll still be making the same mistakes, along with plenty of new ones as new information shakes down through the filters frankly fills me with terror; try telling the man you love that "things will be different" when everyone is fairly certain that the same mistakes are GOING TO HAPPEN plus all kinds of unpredictable new ones, and it's almost enough to make one give up, sell the farm, and just pull the whole dirt pile down over our own heads. Why fucking bother at all??
Because in the end, information (self-knowledge) is invaluable, and change in increments at the outset means vastly different destinations light years down the line. Because knowing something different about yourself *is* a change, even if you can only implement the attendant desired change in related behaviour a small percentage of the time. Because sometimes the slightest shift in behaviour can have the biggest impact on *someone else*, whether it's about you or them in the moment; and if you don't believe me, try sometime to, instead of reacting from a place of fear in asshatted ways, simply say, "I am afraid." Tiniest of changes, largest of impacts. Now instead of creating a pattern of (short- or long-term) destruction because of fear, you're in a position to have a conversation.
Trusting that the conversations can happen is hard. So often growing up, I heard, mostly from my mother, that I couldn't have certain freedoms or privileges because I wasn't mature enough to handle them, and when she left before I started my grade 12 year a lot of the sense that I could earn the recognition for maturity from her also vanished. My largely-absent father didn't know what to do with me and didn't exert a lot of authority (that I recall) so long as I held up my end of the bargain looking after him and the house. So when it came time to start my own adult relationships, I hadn't felt I'd earned the maturity to make a lot of my own decisions and looked for someone else to make them for me... selecting-for-type the familiar model of emotionally-unavailable men who were in turn looking for someone who would meet *their* needs without provoking or inviting their own vulnerabilities. Conversation about fears and vulnerabilities and ghods-forbid shame didn't happen, COULDN'T have happened if I'd wanted them to. I trusted ill-advisedly by putting something unformed in the hands of mostly-well-intentioned men and expected them to mold me as they wanted, only to discover that what *I* wanted was a thing unto itself - buried alive and howling and pushing reactivity all over the place, but never fully present or identified and always opaque to everyone else in the room.
Hindsight and nostalgia being what they are, I still wish I had known how to have those conversations fourteen years ago. I don't know what my life would look like today if I had; Brock and I might even still be together if I had. I suspect he might have been willing to hear me out, or grow into being able to hear me out without triggering his own stuff too badly. He might have succumbed to the same choices Matthew made, in choosing to capitulate until he could twist no further around the fears, but he might not have chosen to punish both of us when he decided finally he didn't like the person into which the choices to bend had turned him. Then again, Brock had a fairly unyielding spine, so the twisting was generally done more by me than him, and I guess in my own way *I* did exactly what Matthew would later choose to do, in abandoning what seemed an unfixable situation when I realized I couldn't stay the person *I* had become. (I don't think Matthew realizes just how much personal understanding I have for his decisions, but I really have "been there, done that" for some of the same reasons). I'm pretty sure I couldn't have seen how the shame of depending on people I believed to be inherently unstable in their availability to me motivated me that long in the past, but it was there. I thought, by the time I'd moved on to J, that getting involved with someone I perceived as aloof from the outset might save me from the expectation of closeness that always triggered the fears of being abandoned, but when J and I abandoned each other anyway for our respective reasons, it still stung. I hadn't learned that I was still depending on him for validations even beyond emotional availability and constancy; I still craved the intimacy and closeness, and pretending otherwise didn't work any better than risking them did.
Ergo, now I'm sitting in a small room of my own creation (metaphorically and sometimes literally) being mindful of the delicate balance between the shame of dependencies and failures and disappointments in my partners, and the understanding of my own desires to feel safe and heard in those vulnerable places, and how subtly and overtly I have sabotaged my own attempts to be heard time and again, sliding into emotional dependencies without balancing out the attendant fears with trust. I begin to understand, in looking at how I become complicit in my own subjugation, how I also subvert and subjugate my partners. The illumination is freeing, but in staring into the face of Shiva, it is also terrifying. It's hard to look at that revelation and NOT fall apart in the furnace of my own self-contempt and certitude that all of the negative scripting I've internalized in my life has been right all along: that I am worthless, heartless, unloved and unlovable, that I will never be strong enough to be independent, that I will always be too emotionally needy... and too afraid to change.
If I cannot find the self-compassion and strength to hold those opposing forces in simultaneous embrace, then all the change in the world will mean nothing, and I will be torn apart in the maelstrom. I'd like to think this is simple melodrama talking, but sitting here in the fury of What Must Change, the revelations buffet at my peace of mind like hurricane-force winds and my job is to stand fast and bend but not break, be soft but not weak, flex but not twist. I tried to explain to a friend of mine recently how Buddhism was in many ways a warrior's path, but I think it has only been in the past month or so that I have really come to appreciate how true that statement is. I have always been passionate, I have often been fueled by subterranean rages I could neither see nor control; I have always fought *against* things, but rarely known how to be strong through yielding. Yielding means submission, means weakness, means vulnerability... means all the things that a dependent feels, and I have not previously been willing to separate vulnerability and my needs from seeing myself as dependent and at risk and unable to trust in spite of desperately wanting to be trusted - to earn the trust and respect I never finished earning as a child.
And therein lies the path.
I said, earlier this summer as the debris was still collapsing around my head, that I wanted to be the person who earned the privilege of second (or further) chances, and now I know far more concisely what I meant by that. I want to find the strength in yielding, the trust in vulnerability and the vulnerability in trusting, the passion that burns but does not destroy. I want to build safety in which I can *be* afraid without fear of reprisal or abandonment, and I want to trust that I am safe enough to allow another to be fearful with me without devastating nuclear reactivity. I have bits and pieces of the puzzle, and I am being slammed almost daily with more of them as I struggle to hold this door open as long as I can.
Mindfulness and Choice.
Things are different because I have chosen/am choosing/will choose differently in future, including treating myself and others with more compassion when I/you/we make the same mistakes we've always made. That's going to be some of the hardest work I've ever done, especially working with anyone who has already lived through some or many of those mistakes; others may not WANT to believe things are different, may not choose to view them differently, may not be aware of or accepting of the things that are different *internally* when the mistakes still manifest outwardly. I cannot control any of that Other Awareness except by communicating what I know as I know it... like I have always done, even when it has clearly not been *ENOUGH* in the past. And that's going to be hard.
But the message I wrote myself before this process started, before I understood what the words meant, was "CHANGE THE WORK". Sometimes my own prognostication abilities freak out even me, but today, at least, I have a very clear picture of the kind of person I am choosing to be... and that makes all the difference in the world.
It began sometime in 1998, possibly in 1997 but certainly reaching critical mass the following year, when I was with Brock. We broke up, for all intents and purposes amiably, on the snowy drive to Monadh's New Year's Day event. In truth, however, the break had been coming for a while, encompassing but not limited to a complete emotional and mental breakdown I had late that fall in which Brock looked at me in disgust where I lay curled in a fetal ball in a corner of my sewing room and told me to get over it, it was all in my head. He'd had enough of my emotional state, but more importantly, so had I. Some period of time prior to that incident, as the movement toward the break was gaining momentum, he'd told me that he really missed the girl I had been when he'd met me, the girl who needed him. And in truth, I was still dependent in a lot of ways but since leaving my first husband and realizing the grass wasn't so much greener on Brock's side of the fence as I had hoped, the problem wasn't entirely with the boys but had a tremendous amount to do with the fact that I wasn't happy *being* dependent.
I look back now on those years and I cringe more than a little. Seeking the kinds of love I thought I wanted, then panicking when I got too close - being needy meant being dependent, but dependence on emotionally-unavailable men meant they could abandon me at any time (just like my parents would, over and over, when they escaped into work or drinking), and I hated being dependent and taking the risks of being hurt by their unavailability. With J, the pattern had a more overt form in the closed door to his office, a door I struggled and failed time and again to overcome (my father's at-home office had a similar policy: "Don't disturb Daddy when he's working". Brock rarely closed his door but his love was controlled in a different manner which I accepted but eventually couldn't adapt to, and finally chose not to accept. I struggled against the control because trying to find my own self-definition and independence seemed preferable to being vulnerable - it always does - which manifested in trying to push myself up by pushing him away. I didn't know how to be vulnerable effectively, and my ineffective attempts to reach out to him from the depths of the inevitable breakdown were shut out in the most excruciating way possible: I was completely dismissed and the state utterly denigrated. You don't recover from that. I'm pretty sure Brock never recovered from what he may have thought was my abandonment of him; I'm still struggling to "sit in the other chair" as Gloria would say, and see the abandonment issues inherent in my actions as perceived by my partners over time.
So in 1998, I understood already that I wasn't happy being dependent on others, was probably ashamed of feeling so "needy" when those needs were going unmet by aloof, detached, emotionally inexperienced or unavailable men; Brock wanted me to depend on him, but to keep my emotional quandaries to myself. He didn't want to be vulnerable with me either, and that led to my feeling shut out of his emotional life, which led to distance and detachment... and the mistaken sense that emotional disengagement and independence were the same thing (they're not, in case anyone's not clear on that). I was struggling to be independent. When I put a time frame on the self-discovery voyage, that's the point I define as the embarkation, the point of origin; it was the moment in which I first put language around both who I was (not), and what I was feeling about that who-ness, recognizing (or at least admitting to myself) for the first time that things needed to change.
That *I* needed to change.
Here I am, now 14 years on, and still engaged in that change process. The state of evolution has been pretty constant; some days it feels like the distance from Then to Now is measured in picometers, while other days I can't even see that galaxy from here. Some days I still feel like shit for making the same mistakes, and other days it's the greatest thrill int he world to make the same mistakes but at least understand *WHY* I'm making them and where they come from... maybe in another 14 years I'll have figured out how to *STOP* making the same fucking mistakes (though Gloria assures me that we never stop making them, we just get better, generally speaking, at mopping up our messes or communicating them as they're about to happen anyway). The idea of having "come so far" and know that I'll still be making the same mistakes, along with plenty of new ones as new information shakes down through the filters frankly fills me with terror; try telling the man you love that "things will be different" when everyone is fairly certain that the same mistakes are GOING TO HAPPEN plus all kinds of unpredictable new ones, and it's almost enough to make one give up, sell the farm, and just pull the whole dirt pile down over our own heads. Why fucking bother at all??
Because in the end, information (self-knowledge) is invaluable, and change in increments at the outset means vastly different destinations light years down the line. Because knowing something different about yourself *is* a change, even if you can only implement the attendant desired change in related behaviour a small percentage of the time. Because sometimes the slightest shift in behaviour can have the biggest impact on *someone else*, whether it's about you or them in the moment; and if you don't believe me, try sometime to, instead of reacting from a place of fear in asshatted ways, simply say, "I am afraid." Tiniest of changes, largest of impacts. Now instead of creating a pattern of (short- or long-term) destruction because of fear, you're in a position to have a conversation.
Trusting that the conversations can happen is hard. So often growing up, I heard, mostly from my mother, that I couldn't have certain freedoms or privileges because I wasn't mature enough to handle them, and when she left before I started my grade 12 year a lot of the sense that I could earn the recognition for maturity from her also vanished. My largely-absent father didn't know what to do with me and didn't exert a lot of authority (that I recall) so long as I held up my end of the bargain looking after him and the house. So when it came time to start my own adult relationships, I hadn't felt I'd earned the maturity to make a lot of my own decisions and looked for someone else to make them for me... selecting-for-type the familiar model of emotionally-unavailable men who were in turn looking for someone who would meet *their* needs without provoking or inviting their own vulnerabilities. Conversation about fears and vulnerabilities and ghods-forbid shame didn't happen, COULDN'T have happened if I'd wanted them to. I trusted ill-advisedly by putting something unformed in the hands of mostly-well-intentioned men and expected them to mold me as they wanted, only to discover that what *I* wanted was a thing unto itself - buried alive and howling and pushing reactivity all over the place, but never fully present or identified and always opaque to everyone else in the room.
Hindsight and nostalgia being what they are, I still wish I had known how to have those conversations fourteen years ago. I don't know what my life would look like today if I had; Brock and I might even still be together if I had. I suspect he might have been willing to hear me out, or grow into being able to hear me out without triggering his own stuff too badly. He might have succumbed to the same choices Matthew made, in choosing to capitulate until he could twist no further around the fears, but he might not have chosen to punish both of us when he decided finally he didn't like the person into which the choices to bend had turned him. Then again, Brock had a fairly unyielding spine, so the twisting was generally done more by me than him, and I guess in my own way *I* did exactly what Matthew would later choose to do, in abandoning what seemed an unfixable situation when I realized I couldn't stay the person *I* had become. (I don't think Matthew realizes just how much personal understanding I have for his decisions, but I really have "been there, done that" for some of the same reasons). I'm pretty sure I couldn't have seen how the shame of depending on people I believed to be inherently unstable in their availability to me motivated me that long in the past, but it was there. I thought, by the time I'd moved on to J, that getting involved with someone I perceived as aloof from the outset might save me from the expectation of closeness that always triggered the fears of being abandoned, but when J and I abandoned each other anyway for our respective reasons, it still stung. I hadn't learned that I was still depending on him for validations even beyond emotional availability and constancy; I still craved the intimacy and closeness, and pretending otherwise didn't work any better than risking them did.
Ergo, now I'm sitting in a small room of my own creation (metaphorically and sometimes literally) being mindful of the delicate balance between the shame of dependencies and failures and disappointments in my partners, and the understanding of my own desires to feel safe and heard in those vulnerable places, and how subtly and overtly I have sabotaged my own attempts to be heard time and again, sliding into emotional dependencies without balancing out the attendant fears with trust. I begin to understand, in looking at how I become complicit in my own subjugation, how I also subvert and subjugate my partners. The illumination is freeing, but in staring into the face of Shiva, it is also terrifying. It's hard to look at that revelation and NOT fall apart in the furnace of my own self-contempt and certitude that all of the negative scripting I've internalized in my life has been right all along: that I am worthless, heartless, unloved and unlovable, that I will never be strong enough to be independent, that I will always be too emotionally needy... and too afraid to change.
If I cannot find the self-compassion and strength to hold those opposing forces in simultaneous embrace, then all the change in the world will mean nothing, and I will be torn apart in the maelstrom. I'd like to think this is simple melodrama talking, but sitting here in the fury of What Must Change, the revelations buffet at my peace of mind like hurricane-force winds and my job is to stand fast and bend but not break, be soft but not weak, flex but not twist. I tried to explain to a friend of mine recently how Buddhism was in many ways a warrior's path, but I think it has only been in the past month or so that I have really come to appreciate how true that statement is. I have always been passionate, I have often been fueled by subterranean rages I could neither see nor control; I have always fought *against* things, but rarely known how to be strong through yielding. Yielding means submission, means weakness, means vulnerability... means all the things that a dependent feels, and I have not previously been willing to separate vulnerability and my needs from seeing myself as dependent and at risk and unable to trust in spite of desperately wanting to be trusted - to earn the trust and respect I never finished earning as a child.
And therein lies the path.
I said, earlier this summer as the debris was still collapsing around my head, that I wanted to be the person who earned the privilege of second (or further) chances, and now I know far more concisely what I meant by that. I want to find the strength in yielding, the trust in vulnerability and the vulnerability in trusting, the passion that burns but does not destroy. I want to build safety in which I can *be* afraid without fear of reprisal or abandonment, and I want to trust that I am safe enough to allow another to be fearful with me without devastating nuclear reactivity. I have bits and pieces of the puzzle, and I am being slammed almost daily with more of them as I struggle to hold this door open as long as I can.
Mindfulness and Choice.
Things are different because I have chosen/am choosing/will choose differently in future, including treating myself and others with more compassion when I/you/we make the same mistakes we've always made. That's going to be some of the hardest work I've ever done, especially working with anyone who has already lived through some or many of those mistakes; others may not WANT to believe things are different, may not choose to view them differently, may not be aware of or accepting of the things that are different *internally* when the mistakes still manifest outwardly. I cannot control any of that Other Awareness except by communicating what I know as I know it... like I have always done, even when it has clearly not been *ENOUGH* in the past. And that's going to be hard.
But the message I wrote myself before this process started, before I understood what the words meant, was "CHANGE THE WORK". Sometimes my own prognostication abilities freak out even me, but today, at least, I have a very clear picture of the kind of person I am choosing to be... and that makes all the difference in the world.