Archive for September, 2012

He’s driving!

Wednesday, September 12th, 2012

My son started school (eleventh grade) on August twenty-third, a Thursday. On Friday, he brought home paperwork for the DMV (“Department of Motor Vehicles”) related to his drivers-education course. So I took him to the DMV to get the paperwork completed.

Next thing I knew, he was sitting for his written test. Obviously, he hadn’t studied for it. But the little snot got a perfect score! Worse still, he remembered that, five and a half years earlier, I’d reversed two of the road signs on the mix-n-match section of the test, so I’d gotten two questions wrong when I’d tested. He can’t remember to clean his room, but that he remembered. The whole way from the testing area to the cashier, he was dancing next to me, poking fingers at me, and singing, “I did better’n you did! I did better’n you did!” He’d gotten his beginner’s driving permit!

But he didn’t want to drive my car, because it has no brake on the passenger side that would enable me to stop him before he hurt himself. Last Thursday, though, I insisted. He was quite certain that we’d die, but I explained to him that the only “hard” part of the drive was getting out of our apartment complex, where he’d have to turn left across traffic. But there’s a left-turn lane in the middle, and he’d seen me many times pull into that, so he knew he’d only “have” to cross half of the road at once.

I was concerned that he might misjudge his position and not pull completely out of the way of traffic, but the informal driving he’d done with me over the last few years, plus the two drivers-ed classes he’d had, combined to allow him to pull neatly into the center left-turn lane. Granted, he took forever waiting until the gap in traffic was big enough for him to brave the turn, but he finally did it.

After that, all he had to do was wait for another gap, pull into traffic going his way, and stay in that lane until he reached his turn for his martial-arts class, where the intersection had a turn arrow. And he did great!

This week, he drove from his school to his therapist, which involved two lane changes and two left-turn arrows, and he did just fine for that, too. I’m so proud of him!

Control Patterns (1)

Friday, September 7th, 2012

Control pattern: I believe most other people are incapable of taking care of themselves.

I would never have stated this explicitly, and I don’t think I ever thought this, at least not that I was aware of. But when so much of one’s life is spent in cleaning up after other people, is there any more-likely conclusion for one to draw? No matter how clearly a problem was not my fault during my childhood and much of my marriage, it was always still somehow “my fault”. Of course I came to act as though I believed others were incapable of caring for themselves: that assumption — that they required me to take care of all of their problems — was the foundation of so much of my intimate relationships. How could I have thought otherwise of my parents or my husband?

In the context of Borderline Peronality Disorder, this may be characterised as being “clingy” or of having unstable relationships.

I can remember one time, when I was a teenage, my parents rented me out to one of their church friends. I can’t remember what the friends needed me for, and I have no idea why my parents consented to letting me out of their sight (and thus their immediate control), but the weekend involved travel out of state and visiting one of the friends’ families.

The trip was over and they were taking me back home. When we were almost there, we had to stop; a tree had fallen across the road. They weren’t sure what to do; this was the boondocks and was well before the era of cellphones. But then we noticed that the car stuck in the road in front of us was my father’s. So we all hopped out and, while they chatted happily with my father, I climbed into the back seat of his car.

Where I found my sister looking anxious. Before our father got into the car, she had just enough time to whisper that we were in big trouble.

It was months, maybe a couple of years, before I found out what had happened. That’s another story for another time. The point is that I was “in big trouble” for something that had not involved me. I hadn’t even been in the same state! But somehow it was my fault, what other people had done and said, and I had to bear the responsibility.

So, yeah, I developed the habit of viewing people as incapable. I’m hoping that, with time, intelligence, and determination, I can learn to view people as just people. We each have our strengths and our weaknesses, and other peoples’ lives are neither my fault, my responsibility, nor my shame.

Low Self-Esteem Patterns (1)

Wednesday, September 5th, 2012

Low Self-Esteem Pattern: I  have difficulty making decisions.

For most of my life, my opinion didn’t matter. Heck, the facts, if I were the one presenting them, didn’t matter. I didn’t matter. My attempts to say anything, on my own behalf or otherwise, met with disapproval at best, reprisals at worst. Is it any wonder that I learned to doubt myself?

But it is worse than that. I learned how not to make decisions at all, how not even to have opinions at all. When one is not allowed an independent existence, when attempts at such are punished as representing “betrayal”, then one tends not to have much “sense of self”. When everything “wrong” is somehow “your fault”, will you dare take the risk of being seen to make a decision, to have an opinion? Of course not! For one’s own safety’s sake, one learns not to think, not to care, not to decide. One only watches. One is ever-watchful for any sign, any hint of what one is “supposed” to think, feel, believe, want.

In terms of Borderline Personality Disorder, this might be characterised as “intense attachment” or a lack of a “sense of self”.

A friend of mine has, for many years, been in quite a few different Twelve-Step programs. He recommended that I try something similar. I’d tried Co-Dependents Anonymous (CoDA) some years earlier, but hadn’t been ready for it. And I’d been trying therapy, and still couldn’t get past the “give yourself a break” and “give yourself permission” stage. I didn’t “get” to give myself permission. I’d lived nearly five decades being required to get permission from outside sources. What outside source had the authority to overrule that, and give me the permission to give myself that authority?

Yes, it’s very messy inside my head.

In the context of CoDA, I couldn’t get past the “turning my life over to” any sort of “Higher Power”, because that just meant more of the same: obeying people who, in the name of God, told me to do things that hurt myself and others.

This friend asked me if I really thought God wanted me to hurt myself and others. Did I really think that God wanted me to do things, for instance, that profited (literally, in monetary terms) my ex-husband but (emotionally and monetarily) harmed my child? No, I didn’t. So maybe it was time to let go of that idea of “God”, and instead accept the idea of a god that wanted me to do good things, both for myself and others.

And that God did “give me permission” to “give myself a break”. That was what I needed to get over that hump, and learn to start exploring making decisions for myself.

Thank you, Jade!

Denial patterns (1)

Wednesday, September 5th, 2012

Denial pattern: I have difficulty identifying what I am feeling.

My therapist could attest to this one. He has often asked me things like, “How do you feel about that?”, and I’ve honestly had no clue. Other times, I’d been feeling intensely about something, but had no idea how to describe it. Nearly all the time, I “minimize” or hedge. For instance, I’d never be “angry”; instead, I might be “perturbed” or “unsettled” or “displeased”.

Within the context of Borderline Personality Disorder, this characteristic might be referred to as a mood disorder or as an inadequate sense of self.

Throughout my childhood and much of my marriage, I was required not to feel how I really felt. I was told that my (normal) reactions and feelings were wrong somehow, and was often told how I “really” felt or how I “should” feel. After decades of covering, hiding, squelching, and numbing myself, being allowed at best only to hint at what I meant, I finally reached the point of being very much “out of touch” with myself, sincerely having no idea what I might have been feeling in that instant before I’d managed to supress.

While I still believe that we shouldn’t be run by our emotions, I also now believe that we have emotions for a reason. They serve a purpose. If nothing else, they provide additional data. If I’m feeling happy about something, this doesn’t necessarily “make” the thing “okay”, but it could indicate that I’m feeling invested in the thing and am thus deriving pleasure, on more than just an intellectual level, in the success of the thing. If I’m feeling angry about something, this doesn’t necessarily “make” the thing (or me) “bad”, but it could point out that I’m trying (by force of habit) to ignore something that I shouldn’t, or that something is attacking me and I need to start defending myself. (Whether or not it’s acceptable to protect myself is another issue for another day.)

A very kind lady told me many times that I needed to learn how to “feel your feelings”, which made no sense at the time, but she worked hard at explaining. Her first rule was to use basal terms for my feelings. I’m not “perturbed”; I’m not “unsettled”; I’m not “distressed”. No, I’m “angry”, “scared”, or “sad”

As silly as that may sound, just the fact of naming my emotions with such bald terms was enlightening (though scary) and eventually freeing. After decades of being required to minimize and hedge and hide and cover, I was saying, explicitly and with no “shading”, how I felt. And I wasn’t struck by lightning; the world didn’t come to an end; people didn’t hate me; I didn’t become evil. It was okay.

Learning — from experience — that it was acceptable and safe to feel these things, and also to acknowledge feeling them, was one big step in my early recovery. Peggy, wherever you are: Thank you!