Here I Am, Again...

Wow.  Three years since I last wrote?  Well, hello.

Life brings many changes in 3 years - and the need to write therapeutically "they" tell me.

The father of my two beautiful children, the man who I spent many times of joy with, the man who caused me great fear and pain...yes, that one.

He took his own life on my 40th Birthday, August 29, 2011.

A last statement from him, no doubt.

I've spent the past year ignoring my own feelings of grief - the sadness, the disbelief, the anger, the confusion as I helped my sweet daughter work through her own pain.

No surprise that this ostrich-like approach to my feelings has resulted in occasional bubbles rupturing to the surface.

I went to my therapist - the one who I had left the last three sessions thinking, "This woman does not LIKE me." (only to tell myself, "How pathetic is THAT??  Oh, boo-hoo, even my therapist doesn't like me").  And this time I left in tears feeling like a total failure.

Soooo...time for everyone's favorite chore - finding a new therapist.  Ugh!

So maybe you, my readers, whoever you are will be my therapist for now.  If you are reading, please let me know.

In peace,

J~

No Time for This

Just working out the anger before I go to bed so I have happy dreams instead of angry dreams. This is modified from a free-flowing e-mail to my best friend who has been through so much with me in the past 2 years!
I had another one of those conversations tonight with someone saying how amazed and proud she was of how quickly I landed a good job after being laid off.

This is all very interesting and puzzling to me. Maybe it's because I have the support of good friends and because I feel more mentally healthy than the average "Jane" but to me it just seems like what you DO.

Now that I think about it, though, it would only seem like an accomplishment to your average person. To your average "Driver" (stereotypical Type A) you just figure out what you need to do and then you do it. Even though I suffer from the same self-doubts as anyone else, I also believe that I am a good and capable person and would do a good job at any place that I decided I wanted to work.

It also helps that I seem to have the ability to somehow detach from things that are traumatic. I'm not saying I didn't have to work through the feelings of low self-worth that are common with a lay-off but they, generally, didn't cause me too much despair (other than when I let my former husband momentarily cause me to doubt myself).

It reminded me of 9/11. I think I told you about how I was able to watch it all unfold on TV and not feel, at all, the same impact that it had on everyone else. I had work to do. I was having a baby any day (8 days later as it turned out and I think this was a big part of my ability to detach). There was a huge bike event that weekend and I had to finish the arrangements for our booth. I remember being frustrated that no one seemed to be working that afternoon. My attitude was, "The world goes on. Bad things happen. We can't shut down because something bad happen." Heck I should have been Bush's spokesperson - "Everyone go on with your business and keep spending (money you don't have)"! To me it didn't seem that much different than the terrible things that happen all over the world every minute of every day - I just knew from all my reading of sad memoirs that American had been sheltered until that point. I remember feeling, "Look - we all still have to get up tomorrow morning. We have to eat. We have to go to work." And I'm about to bring a child into this world and I am NOT going to process this on any level.

It's like I figure there is no TIME for wallowing in grief.

Maybe, too, this is why when there are times when I feel I do need to grieve that I have historically wanted to flee and be by myself? It feels shameful for me to allow myself to "go there" and grieve? And maybe I worry that if I grieve I will get angry which I already have recently discovered I like to avoid as an experience?

But as I type I think, I am not an "angry" person - I don't get mad about little things. The things I get angry about might actually be useful anger - like when you get angry at someone for passing out with your kids in their care? Or angry at being treated unfairly? Or angry at injustices in the world?

Well, aren't I just a wealth of words tonight?? I'm not even sure if they are coherent at this point! Hopefully you will be able to pick up what I'm setting down because it is actually making a lot of connections in my brain.

I've stayed up WAY too late tonight!

J~

Examining Emotions

I have been working on a technique where I allow myself to fully experience all the emotions that flow through me without judging them but without allowing them to affect my overall experience. It has been suggested to me, that a person can examine their emotions as if they were a rock - turning them over and over and observing them in a detached manner.

It has been interesting to me how many different emotions a person may experience in a given day (or at least I do). Some of them are very similar - to the point that they could easily be confused for another if one were not examining them like a rock. Also, some of them are so subtle that a person might not realize they are happening until things start to get filtered through that lens. A few I have examined this week...

Anger (over a letter from an attorney) - Physical Experience: Feeling of vision disturbance, Tight in chest/shoulders, increased heart rate; Mental Experience: Very judgmental and tendency to be argumentative about topics that I actually know I am wrong about.

Jealousy (over custom kitchen cabinets of all things!! I was working on a document for a company I am doing some marketing for and a builder had written about the custom cabinets in their homes and I had a, "When will I ever get to have something nice like this?" thought). This was one of those FLASH emotions that I might have either classified as "sad" or not even known went through my mind but could have led to filtering things negatively - Physical Experience: Felt it in the chest/heart area; Mental Experience - Whiny voice in head and then, interestingly, a judgmental voice telling myself, "These things don't matter. Why do you buy into the American materialism? Are you like all those people?"


Grief (I think this was brought on by a dream that I don't remember - I was in the shower and I had this flash of grief for my kids having to be the "kids whose parents got a divorce". The kids who have to shuffle back and forth between their parents house. Grief for the loss of the life I had envisioned in my head) - Physical Experience: An instant urge to drop to my knees and sob; Mental Experience: Mind wildly running a reel with all my perceived failures and questioning whether I did everything I could (intellectually, of course, I know that I did everything I could and more) and then moving directly into...

Fear - (this is where the mind went from Grief which I'll bet happens to people ALL the time because they can't deal with the emotion of grief. This is when I started worrying about my son taking his first ride on a school bus that day on freshly icy roads) Physical Experience: Eyebrows raised, but other than that little facial expression. Sinking feeling in stomach; Mental Experience: Like a snowball rolling. Thinking about all the other things that could happen and mentally searching for a way to stop these "bad" things from happening.

Indignation: (Over a summons to talk to my Supervisor about some of my "extended appointments") This was actually one of the hardest ones for me to examine objectively. Physical Experience: Similar to anger - tightness high in chest, tension in shoulders/neck; Mental Experience: I guess indignant sums it up best. Again, very similar to anger but the mind is racing thinking of justifications and evidence that the other person is "out of line" in their belief. Very, very defensive mentally. Also a very strong element of flight/wanting to flee with a sense of urgency. Inner dialogue of, "Well, the person does have a point. But they should consider this and this and this and what about this and this and this??"

Just a Ring

Someone I trusted stood in this room and looked me blankly in the eyes.

I told him how crushed I was when he asked me to put my ring back on when nothing had changed.

And there was no connection. Just blankness.

I trusted him.

I thought he loved me.

And he loved me as much as an alcoholic can when they are approaching the end stage of their disease.

I can feel him here right now. Looking at me. The way he did that day.

And the way he looks at me now.

I do get scared.

I was very scared with him.

How did I let myself get in that spot?

How did I not see it coming?

He told me he loved me.

He told me he hated me.

He told me we had nothing in common.

And that we should have realized it years ago.

And that he regrets having children with me.

That is hate.

Despising.

How do you live with someone who despises you?

Who can find nothing redeeming in you?

Release the grief.

The pain and sadness of being hated.

And now what?