Recovering Girl

Hey World.  It’s been a while.  I’ve missed you.

One of the central themes that I need to conquer in order to recover is “black and white thinking.”  I need to let go of the belief that there are only two ways to do something.  Perfectly, or not at all.  This is also the reason I haven’t posted anything in a while.  I’ve had a lot of big feelings/situations/issues and I have a lot of half written posts about them, but because I feel so strongly that things have to be finished and perfect and it’s not possible for them to be finished and perfect until the feelings are resolved, I have not been able to post them.

I had “treatment team” last week.  This is a check in every six weeks with all the counselors and clinicians and people who work with your insurance company to procure additional approvals for more time.  And when I explained that I didn’t always have time to write through all the things I’m thinking and feeling, she said it might be a good exercise for me to just write down how I am feeling and what I am thinking about without working all the way through it.  So that’s what I’m doing.  I have much more to say about “all or nothing/black and white thinking,” but if I don’t post this until I have reached the ALL end of the spectrum, you might not hear from me in a much longer time.

And so, I leave you with this:

I recently had a birthday and both of my parents contacted me on the actual anniversary of my birth.  Sounds pretty normal, right?  Except that this is the first time that has happened in about a dozen years.  Normally I get an email or text message between a few days and a few weeks later letting me know that one or both of them lost track of time.  They know the date I was born.  They just didn’t realize that date had come so soon.

You would think I’d be pleased about this unexpected accuracy, but as it turns out, I’m pissed.  Why?  Because it is much easier for me to be angry at them for my current predicament/feelings if they continue to be the inconsiderate dirtbags I grew up with.  They don’t suddenly get to be “good parents” and pretend the last 30 years didn’t happen.  I feel like accepting gifts and appreciating phone calls would mean exactly that.

It would mean “it’s OK, we can have a good relationship, because you are trying now and that’s all that matters.”  It would mean “it doesn’t still hurt me that you said you wanted to give me away when I was twelve, because you didn’t like me (and as a parent you are only required to love me, not to like me).”  It would mean “my self worth is not still tied to my grades and career successes, because I was so desperate for your approval and nothing was ever good enough.”

It would mean “I don’t still replay your words from almost a decade ago, while I was rocking a 4.0 GPA in college, that my old teachers would be so surprised to see how well I am doing, because I was always such a mediocre student.”

Dear parents: I don’t want to have to feel like an ungrateful brat, because you are sending money, gifts or ‘love, Mom/Dad’ like it’s the most natural thing in the world.  The only gift I have ever wanted from either one of you was some indication that I matter.  That you cared when I left home and moved halfway around the world at 16.  That you loved me, regardless of the size of my body.  That you didn’t have me counting calories in first grade because I wasn’t good enough just the way I was.

I want to tell you how your signals made me feel.  Give you the opportunity to acknowledge the pain you caused, or at least tell me that the harsh judgments were not intended the way I perceived them, but I’m afraid you will respond with the same indifference you have always shown and we will never be able to come back from that.  Surely, knowing that you were aware of your cruelty would be a thousand times worse than believing you were merely ignorant of your effect.

I don’t know how to resolve these feelings.  I desperately wish I could let go of the anger, but I’m afraid of the loss.  I’m afraid of confirming that my greatest fears are true.  At least I can take solace in the fact that I am finally feeling and processing the feelings and not pretending everything is OK; pretending I don’t have a long road of healing ahead.

I’m rational.  I might even say I’m TOO rational, if I rationally believed there was such a thing as too much reason.  However, I’ve been noticing in my recovery process that I comfortably wrap myself up in rational, reasonable, logical thoughts, to keep myself from feeling the feelings.  Kind of like using food to distract myself from being uncomfortable.  Then I apply reason to food and this happens:

But I learned something this week.  You can’t really reason or rationalize with a child.  It can be difficult to imagine or consider that there is another person, more specifically a child, inside yourself, but when I think about it, I am a rational adult on the outside, in life, but my feelings and old wounds, or thoughts that are based in old situations are less controlled/measured, like those of a child.

So, for the sake of argument, let’s say the inner child is the source of feelings and those feelings are totally separated from the adult rational thoughts.  What would happen if you took away a child’s blankie, stuffed animal or other security/comfort item they’ve been sleeping with since they were born?  The child would have a very emotional, visceral response (sad, scared, nervous, lonely, lost, etc) and no amount of telling them, rationally, that this blankie/animal/thing has no physical powers of protection will change how they feel about that loss.  In fact, the more you try to downplay the value of the item, the more upset they might become, because now you add dismissed, misunderstood, unloved, uncared-for (that might not be a word) to the list of initial emotions.  (Disclaimer: I don’t have kids.  I don’t know the proper way to handle a child when their security items is lost or in the wash.  The purpose of this comparison is purely to get to the source of my own cognitive dissonance.)

There’s a story behind this revelation, but the more I work through stuff, the more I am leaning that it’s not about the individual instances, it’s about where the feelings are coming from in those situations.  The bottom line is, I was/have been dismissing my feelings, because they could not always or immediately be rationally explained and the chaos/inner turmoil is very hard for me to live with.  This goes back to my need to fill the emptiness.  Fill the silence.  I have a hard time feeling the feelings and then patiently inquiring what they are about and where they are coming from.  I am much more comfortable putting together a firm story that explains everything away, or just go for the food and avoidance of feeling them in the first place–probably not even in that order.  The rationalizing away the feelings is new (at least consciously) since shining a spotlight on the old crutch, food.

Interestingly enough, when I started questioning the urge to rationalize all the feelings, I discovered that this has been part of my mechanism against my mother.  When I repeat some of the things she has said to me over the years in therapy or group, the reaction I usually get is that her statements aren’t reasonable/realistic/based in reality/rational, etc., which has always bothered me.  A lot!  I consider it a huge weakness, so I go completely in the opposite direction.  In order to not get sucked into her illogical beliefs and become irrational right along with her, I used reasonable, sensible, logical arguments (well, logical to ME) to avoid the emotional response I didn’t want to feel, or didn’t want her to see.

But here’s the funny part.  I always tell one of my friends that “you can’t reason with crazy.”  That’s not a mental health comment.  I mean you can’t reason with someone who refuses to be reasonable.  Just like the numbers in the math joke below can’t make each other real or rational.

So at the end of the day, I need to accept that feelings don’t HAVE TO be rational/reasonable/well thought out.  It’s OK for me to feel them and be frustrated, without having to soothe myself with food or reason.  Acknowledging my thoughts and feelings and accepting that they are OK and somewhere deep down have a source that will make sense some day might even might keep my inner child from digging in her stubborn heels to get a reaction out of adult me.  I’m going to keep an eye on that and let you know how it turns out.

I have more to say about intellect versus senses, but let’s save that for another day.