Stepping Out of Crisis Mode
I've come to realize something about myself. I tend to gravitate toward operating in what I percieve to be some sort of crisis zone. That is, I see problems as crises, sometimes, because, in part, I like going through life as if I'm dealing with a crisis. I don't think I'm special in this regard--lots of people do this, I think--but I also recognize that it's not the only way to be. I'm working on the whole taking-a-step-back-and-taking-a-deep-breath thing. I'm working toward feeling more comfortable with being calm.

Part of this comes, I think, from the fact that I 'really was' in a crisis, about a year ago. I felt the rug o' life had been pulled out from under me; not only had my romantic relationship ended, but now I was faced with feeling abandoned by my ex as a friend, too (whether I was or not is up for debate, but it felt like it); my other friendships were being negatively affected by it; I was feeling both needy and abandoned really as a combo for the first time I can remember. Also, being out of a romantic relationship meant that lots of stuff I had set aside now came back into view--things I ought not have set aside, sure, but still, having them all come flowing back in, all at once...I entered crisis mode for sure.

One Solution
One of the ways I decided to deal with my crisis (crises?) was to start going to a therapist. So far it's had pretty much exactly the effect that I thought it would--it gave me a forum to vent and cry, and has provided some insight. It has been a good way to let some steam off--and I don't mean to trivialize it with that description--I think that's been fundamental to my finding a more peaceful place to live in, really.

But there has been one unexpected result of therapy: I've come to see that I'm not always in crisis mode. That is, I've calmed down. Even the things that I know will be tough for me don't seem as daunting, and I'm thinking of them in terms of the larger picture, rather than in terms of "I've got to get through this". I haven't perfected being calm about stuff, but that's part of the point--there is no 'perfecting' it, there is no state of just being perfectly calm (I think) for very long, any more than there is a state of being in crisis all of the time (for people who aren't in, say, a war-torn or abusive environment, anyway). I can exist here in the middle.

Just Another Friday
One example is this upcoming Friday. It's going to be tough on me, make no mistake. My weekly hangout time with old friends won't happen this week, and it's not because people can't make it. It's because, once a month, I've been uninvited. I understand intellectually the reasons for this, and can even empathise with everybody--everybody--involved in the situation. While I can see some potentially better solutions, I am not in a position to make any of them happen at the moment, so I am in effect, just powerless about it.

This has all of the makings of something I'd go into crisis mode about. It ties into my abandonment fears (and realities!); it places me in a position of absolute non-power; it intersects with my overdeveloped sense of what is and what isn't fair; I feel, to a certain extent, bullied (though that's not rational), which is also a trigger for me. And I am responding in crisis mode to a certain extent--I'm making sure that I'm taken care of that night, in various ways. I'm giving myself lots of potentially happy options. And my friends were gracious enough to do things so that I *could* plan ahead and the like.

But it doesn't feel as much like a crisis as it might. And I realized that last night in therapy--I had gone there all ready to talk about my apprehensions about Friday, knowing that's a good thing for me to use therapy for, but really--I don't have so many apprehensions. It's going to have some sucky aspects; I'm going to feel bullied, a bit; I'm going to feel abandoned, a bit. But I have managed to place those emotions in a larger context, and I don't feel so crisis-y about it. I feel more introspective about it. It's the difference between watching a rat in a maze and being the rat. I can see my emotional reactions, but I am also not only those reactions. It's a nice place to be (though not where I'd choose to be, if I could choose anything, of course).

And I think therapy has afforded me a little bit more of what I need in order to find a path through the rest of my life that doesn't feel like its goign through a battlezone. My heart still races at the thought of all of my fears coming true, but then I recognize that if they all do come true, my heart will keep beating, I will keep walking done some path, so I might as well try to pay attention to the horizon, instead of only looking down at my feet.

Oh, and I probably should take an writing class so that somebody can help me drill the mixed metaphors out of my writing.

Filed under: Therapy

What I Deserve

The Laptop
So, around my birthday, my bosses gave me a bonus/b-day present: A laptop. It's my first. I had been sort of shopping around for one, but wasn't sure I even wanted one, and when I was in a mood where I thought I was pretty sure, the abundance of choices kept sort of overwhelming me. I'm that way with any large purchases (erm, if I ever make large purchases at all, which I'm not certain I do any longer); I tend to decide to not buy shit by indecision. Which is, y'know, maybe not all a bad thing.

But then again, I sort of wonder if it is a reflection of something that's not the healthiest of mental attitudes. I think, in a way, I have carried my lower-middle class background with me maybe further than I really might have wanted, had I thought it through; and even sort of amplified it—that is, I oftentimes see myself and create myself as less-well-off than I used to be, back when I was growing up.

And this isn't, of course, just about the laptop. It's about my lack of desire, once I have a bit of a buffer, to buy any 'big'-ish items, and to some degree to by anything that I think of as potentially part of a permanent environment. I haven't yet bought a couch, or chairs. I tend to think in terms of things I could move by myself if I needed to if I furniture shop. I have a hard time not thinking that way. Part of it is habit, I know—this is just the way I have lived, so this is the way I will continue to live unless I make some explicit changes. Part of it is a more pervasive fear that I won't have enough money to survive someday...and this isn't a completely irrational fear. I haven't placed financial security on a very high level of priority in my life.

Deserving
I haven't used my laptop as much I thought I might have. I had an intuition that I wasn't really sure how often I'd use it—that's one of the reasons that I had been putting off buying it, I think. But then, once I had it, I found that I was barely using it at all. I used it to do stuff with my game, because I wanted to bring the laptop to the game and organize it that way. I did a little bit of writing at a cafe. But I didn't do a lot, and I didn't get into all of the new features of the damn thing—I made sure I knew how to turn the wireless on and off, how to check the battery, and that was about it. I made a small effort to put my music on it, but when I did that wrong, I just didn't bother any longer.

And I found myself deciding to not bring it with me when I was heading out to places where it might have been useful and/or fun to have. Part of this was not having a proper backpack to carry it in (I told myself—my current one actually works pretty well). But all of that stuff was just an excuse, I realized this morning. I think the central reason behind why I wasn't getting into it was sort of deeper: I didn't feel like I deserved it.

And, of course, in all sorts of ways, I don't. I was just doing my job (the bonus) and I just made it to year 36 (the birthday). Big freakin' deal.

But then, part of the problem with thinking this way is the notion of merit anyway. To a great degree, I have just been lucky in life. I'm lucky to be alive, really (preemie with a heart condition); I'm lucky to have had a great mom as I was growning up—as well as now that I'm an adult. Luck, luck, luck. Of course, we do make some of our own luck and all that—but the concept of merit is just so not-simple to me anymore, and I think that, not only have I stopped thinking that I 'deserve' various things, I also think that I've stopped thinking in terms of merit in general; which is a problem, really, because it tends to curb the amount of time and effort I spend figuring out what I want. And I tend to think that having some wants that are as-of-yet unfulfilled is one of the things around which happiness can live.

This is definitely throwing out the baby with the bathwater stuff, and I think I have to get a hold of it.

Yet Another Blind Spot
I didn't realize any of this consciously until this morning, when I was working out what I was going to do today—and I found myself actually thinking about not going down to the cafe I like because I didn't want to bring the laptop; which is really, really backward logic. I can bring it or not. But I know that it would help—I can write, I can type notes, I can work on my game, which are all things that I want to do this morning. So, somehow, if I'm not in the mood to bring the laptop, I'm somehow not in the mood to go out? Freakin' weird logic that I think is caused in part by my deep seeded views about what I deserve in life, what I have earned.

Some of this crap is simple white middle-class guilt, which is pretty lame, I know, but yet there it is, deeply ingrained in me. But a good deal of it isn't that, I think; a good deal of it comes from making judgments about myself of other sorts. For instance, I think that I am often too hard on myself regarding 'what I get done' in my life, where I'm at and the like. It's easy to forget the conscous choices that I have made regarding being the sort of person who has time and energy to do some thinking, to do some writing; the sort of person who examines and reexamines (again and again) his values. I could go on. There are all sorts of things that I like about myself, all sorts of decisions (some of them difficult to follow through on) that I've made that I feel proud of. But sometimes, sometimes I feel like I was only able to work that hard, only able to make those decisions, because I was just completely fucking lucky.

I recognize, intellectually, the problem with thinking this way; I see the fallacies involved. The main one, of course, is that causes are tricky things, and almost always we ought to talk about a bunch of correlative causes when we want to talk about a cause, or a series of causes. Causes are more like a web, and some of them might carry more weight, conceptually, than others, depending upon the context.

I know this. And yet, it's hard to incorporate it more deeply into my emotional life.

Appreciating What I Have
Another negative side effect of the way I've been thinking about what I deserve, I think, is that I may tend to not appreciate the things I have. Even if everything came to me from luck (it didn't), that shouldn't mean that I don't enjoy and appreciate what I have. That is, just because I have food on my table when others don't, doesn't mean that I ought not enjoy my food (or even, that I ought not eat unless everybody has food).

And this lack of appreciation actually helps fuel the feeling that I don't deserve stuff, really, because in some cases, not appreciating what I have means that I don't use it to the extent that others, who deserve it more (in my eyes), might use it. (And here I see another problem with my 'logic'--if I don't deserve anything because of an accident of birth, then nobody does; and that means not just the 'haves', but also the 'have nots'. You can't have a universe where it's all luck if it's not all luck for everybody, right?) For instance, I know there are people who write more, people who have it as a central goal, that they become writers, who don't have access to any sort of word processor—or at least don't have the easy access that I do. And the guilt I feel around not using my 'stuff' so much (whether it be smarts or a laptop)? Keeps me from using it, in turn.

To Do List
So what do I do? Well, I think I need to do a combination of recognizing the good things I do in my life, the hard work that I do, and of actually doing more along the lines of happy-making work. More writing on the things that interest me (feminism, race theory, gender theory); more taking care of my mental and physical health. A one-two punch of appreciation and allowing myself to be better motivated.

Sigh. I'm not sure why this feels so weighty, but I think it is. Maybe more later.


Filed under:
Therapy

Tired of the Circles
One of the first things I learned from therapy was that somethign I needed to work on was being able to give myself space to think about certain things, but only for a limited amount of time. That is, once I find myself going around in circles, I need to be able to think about something else. I think there is a productive side to overworrying, actually...it's just about how 'over' is over. I think that some sleepless nights spent tossing and turning because my brain/heart combination won't shut off isn't such a bad thing, in moderation. It reminds me that feeling is part of living, and it also indicates that things matter to me--apathy is generally more my enemy than sadness. Which may be a suspect way to live, but I think it's what I want.

Still, there are times when enough is enough. Almost getting hit by a car on my bike because I can't stop thinking about something, for instance. Or getting so little sleep that I get into a downward spiral (lack of sleep encourages the circles-of-worry/thought/concern).

Some people have this skill sort of intuitively, I think. They can compartmentalize in general, and with emotional thinking in particular. I think I'm pretty bad at this. I tend to need to 'figure things out' before I can move on to other thoughts. Which, in a world in which lots of things aren't figure-out-able, is, y'know, not the greatest thing. But I am working on it. It's a matter of both distracting myself from the eddys of circular thought as well as reminding myself that sometimes I get into those circles because I would rather think and worry about that thing than face other, just as real or more real, worries in my life.

I think in a lot of ways I've been reacting to my now-a-year-and-a-half-ago breakup more deeply than I would have if it weren't the case that my relationship with S was a great distraction from lots of other things in my life that I ought to have been thinking about and working on. Not that this is the only reason it has affected me deeply--I think there are other, good reasons for that, too--but it is one I would do well to remind myself of, when I wake up at 3 in the morning thinking insecure unhappy thoughts about how valuable I am as a lover.
Filed under:Therapy

Ways of Dealing
Last post I asked for suggestions for things I ought to talk about in therapy. This was half joking--only half, because sometimes others can see the things that you ought to be dealing with a lot better than you can (the opening scene to Brain Candy always comes to mind, where everybody recognizes the dad is gay but him). It's all about the blind spots, sometimes. Eden's comment/suggestion was an interesting one, and it did get me to thinking about my methods of dealing with 'stuff' in life. In fact, one central purpose of therapy for me (aside from having somebody who I can regularly go to when I'm in need of venting/crying/etc.) is to learn to interact with the world in different ways. I'm not sure I'd want to characterize this as 'dealing with psychological problems'--but it's along those lines.

Last night my therapy session led me to at least one realization: I oftentimes distract myself from how I'm feeling/what I ought to be doing by invalidating my experiences through over-recognizing the validity of the experiences of others. In less new-agey-speak, I think that my problems aren't a big deal because other people are suffering such more difficult problems all the time. But this is (in part) an avoidence mechinism, keeping me from changing the way I interact with my world.

One of the tricks is to see my experiences as 'valid' without sort of reifying them. That is, I do experience sadness around loneliness and gender issues, but I need to recognize this without also thinking of loneliness and gender issues as somehow inherent in my life--or I'll be the most self-fulfilled of all prophecies.

Doing It All
One of the other things that came up last night was that I tend to cause a lot of internal strife because I forget that I can't do it all, especially when it comes to particular feelings in my life. For instance, a big one for me is that I desperately want to better understand my expression of gender, and to play with it, to engage it in whatever ways, but I'm almost constantly beating myself up for the ways I don't engage it at all. Meaning, I do a lot of thinking about gender, I look at various situations through the lenses of gender, but I don't, say, change the way I dress because of such things. For some reason, dressing like a 'typical guy' bothers me a lot--though not enough to change the way I dress. Therapy was helpful for me last night because I recognized that I don't have to dress differently than I do in order to better understand the way I do 'being a man'. It might help if I did, but there are other avenues that I can explore, and I often do.

Boundary-Making
One last thing that came out of last night (there were more, but this is all I can deal with at the moment): I need to better draw some boundries...mostly around what I expect of myself as regards dealing with the feelings of others. In an effort to not be a complete jerk, I've gone too far down the road of empathy--to where it somehow leaves the larger paths of taking care of myself. I need to sort of relearn how to ask for what I want from people without censoring myself so often by what I perceive as their needs.

This comes out in various ways, but mostly I need to talk with a few of my friends about how much I need them to interact with me in various ways intellectually and emotionally. Is that vague enough?

Anyway, thanks to Eden (and to k) for giving me some meta stuff to think about on the way to therapy (and during!). I'm my own best hobby, I think.
Filed under:Therapy

Tonight: I Cry
Therapy tonight. What do y'all think I ought to talk about?


Filed under:Therapy

Needy
One of the things that was discussed in my last therapy session had to do with some of my recent feelings about my 'being needy'. Up until relatively recently, 'being needy' was something that I would have almost never attributed to myself. In fact, I thought of myself as perhaps overly independent for a good deal of my life--and I may have been, at times, even upon reflecting now. There are still ways in which I might think of myself as overly independent--I tend to let people in to a certain degree and then keep them at a certain distance nonetheless.

On the other hand, I'm starting to recognize what a complex concept 'being needy' really is.

Interdependent
One aspect of this is that there aren't just two ways of being: Needy and independent. There is, of course, a spectrum of being along these lines. I think that, over the course of the last few years, I have learned what it means to be interdependant--and I also think that interdependant is something that all of us are, in the sort of Aristotelian way that we are 'social animals' as well as in the sort of urban reality way of existing among bunches and bunches of people.
Recognizing that one is interdependent can be a great shock, especially when one thinks one is radically independent. To my great (yet somehow hilarious) shame, I was a big political libertarian and Ayn Rand fan when I was in my early 20's. Ok, not shame, really--a lot of people go through a Rand phase, I think--in fact, the whole notion of uber-independence may be a psychological stage of growth that everybody goes through, at different times in their lives (most people get the Rand-ish stuff out of their system when they are, like, 12, however, when they're taught the value of family and sharing and such). Still, I was big on free markets and the rather confused notion that I didn't need anything from anybody--especially emotionally. All the while I was seeking out romantic love that was pretty darn needy, in retrospect.

As I grew more socially and politically aware (really I think I have feminist theory--especially its analysis and criticism of 'atomistic' theories of the self-- more than philosophy to thank for this), the uber-independence and Rand-ishness began to subside. I started to recognize that, not only did I value my friends and family as individuals, but I also valued them because they helped me live my life better, because they cared for me, and because they were there for me when I needed them, and when I didn't.

Wanting and Needing
When I was still in high school, I wrote a bunch of angsty poetry about needing and wanting. Perhaps I'll go back and try to find it at some point. But I remember it distinctly--it stayed with me in some way that made me realize that I wanted to be the sort of person who wanted romantic love, but not the sort of person who needed romantic love. Sometimes, on days when I don't have much of an eye for conceptual subtleties, I still think this. But more and more I recognize (and I think I had some good intutions about it then, too) that needs and wants are relative in important ways--both to each other and to the context of the situation in which they apply.

Back to therapy: One of the things that my therapist has helped me to understand is that sometimes, when I want something from somebody in the world--i.e. I want them to talk with me, to treat me better, to call me more often, to make plans with me, even to be in love with me, etc.--that can feel like a need to the person, depending on where they are at in their emotional life, and where they are at in how they feel about you. So, when, from my side of things, I feel like I'm wanting something from somebody, I need to keep in mind that such a want on my part can feel like (and be!) something the other person just doesn't want to give.

This sounds like such a simple thing--but for me it was quite a realization. When I've called for my friends to make more plans with me (rather than playing it by ear more often), it's in part because what I want is more structured time with friends--this has to do with some of my psychological hangups, I think. But what happens is that sometimes some of them feel that my want for such things is way too needy; or, at least, their wants conflict with mine. Again, it sounds like a simple thing to recognize, and it makes me feel like I've been incredibly self-centered about a lot of things, for, well, my whole freaking life. So I'm going to work on recognizing that when I want something from people--and I think it's ok to want--that I've got to recognize and respect that their wants may conflict with mine.

Yes, But
At the same time, my therapist helped me to realize something else. Sometimes, when I'm wanting something from somebody, and they feel like it's too needy, it's not just because their wants conflict with mine--sometimes it's because they aren't comfortable with my expressing my emotional states with them, and/or they're not comfortable expressing their own emotional states with me. Truth be told, I have a hard time keeping this in mind, because I think that the chances of getting all elitist about it (i.e. "I'm so in touch with my fucking emotions, and you're not") are pretty high; and yet, I think my therapist has a point. I live in a society where people are discouraged from expressing how they're feeling, especially when they are feeling sad. Also, the stark individualistic streak in our culture is such that people aren't ok with asking others for what they need, because such requests are often rebuffed sort of out of hand. (And I've been on the 'other side' of that many times, really--in hindsight, I have felt others were 'clingy' in ways I couldn't handle when, in fact, it was mostly me who just wasn't cognizant of how I was feeling at the time.) In romantic relationships, I think that women who might be attracted to my openness at first, come to not enjoy it when they recognize that it's not going away. A gross generalization, perhaps, but I think it holds some truth; I think this stuff is gendered (of course I do!), too, and that the sort of man that I am isn't often comfortable for some of the women I'm attracted to. Of course, some of this just is incompatiblity, too, so it's hard to tell.

Wanting and Needing
Still, I think I'm learning some stuff here. Learning that some of the sadness I've been dealing with lately has to do with being incompatible with lots of people--friends and lovers alike--along the lines of what I want and need from others. And this also helps me understand better the myriad sorts of friendships I may have: Some of them may be more of what I want and some of them less--and they still may be good friendships either way. It also helps me to recognize that some of what I wantin my life are more friends who enjoy discovering their own inner emotional lives, enjoy sharing them with me, and who also aren't (eventually!) put off by the fact that I need to do that with others, too.

Filed under:Therapy

Fighting the Tide, Riding the Tide
And, in the continuing personal tradition of being manic-depressive in at least a pop-psychology sort of way, today I am fighting a downturn.

Did I say fighting?

I gave up on the fighting thing, really, recently, because it's like fighting the tide or some such. But I am trying to react in various ways that might help me ride the negative stuff out more easily, and perhaps even help it go away more quickly. I'm letting myself feel sort of sad; I'm recognizing that sometimes feeling sad this way is part of my continual healing process (of course, the process feels like a never-ending process, which is part of the problem, but I remind myself that it likely isn't never-ending--at least the intensity isn't); I'm also trying to recognize that the way I feel today (and last night) is a product of years and years of conditioning, at least as much caused by that as it is caused by more recent events. And heck, at least I can see some causes this time--that makes me feel somehow strangely consoled.

Another consolation: I think I actually *can* think my way out of some of this stuff, at least at this point. I can think about my future and my past and I can see the larger world around me; I can feel that other people have their lives to live, their own problems, their own depressions. And that, really, it's not all about me.

Which is, y'know, progress and shit.
Filed Under: Therapy