Posts tagged with "parents"

Psychoanalytic Reflections 03

My ther­a­pist is on vaca­tion now. When he gets back, I’ll start to see him on a bi-month­ly instead of week­ly basis. At first he sug­gest­ed that we slow down only once I get a han­dle on my anx­i­ety, but when I explained that the ses­sions were putting me in a neg­a­tive cash-flow sce­nario, he under­stood and agreed1.

  • My depres­sion is gone. Most like­ly, it was a side effect of my anx­i­ety, or gen­er­al­ized anx­i­ety dis­or­der, which is most­ly gone now.
    • The root of this is from my habit of pre­dict­ing neg­a­tive out­comes and ask­ing too many “what ifs”, which I’m still learn­ing to con­trol.
  • There’s this idea of learned help­less­ness that I strug­gle with. The big­ger issue is that when I feel help­less, I get depressed as a result, about things out of my con­trol such as the weath­er.
    • I love how the prac­ti­cal side of psy­chol­o­gy falls in line with Taoism. In this case, I think of verse 29 of the Tao Te Ching:

      Allow your life to unfold nat­u­ral­ly
      Know that it too is a ves­sel of per­fec­tion
      Just as you breathe in and out
      Sometimes you’re ahead and oth­er times behind
      Sometimes you’re strong and oth­er times weak
      Sometimes you’re with peo­ple and oth­er times alone
      To the Sage all of life is a move­ment toward per­fec­tion

  • One issue I had a hard time under­stand­ing was my belief that attempt­ing some­thing is a waste of time if I don’t suc­ceed. I sup­pose that it seems rather sil­ly now that I think about it (such as avoid­ing get­ting in a rela­tion­ship just for the fact that one may get hurt), but I spent an entire ses­sion on this sub­ject alone. It’s a prob­lem because I give up on cer­tain things before I try, and lose impor­tant oppor­tu­ni­ties as a result.
  • I’m start­ing to become more aware of my auto­mat­ic thought pat­terns. I’d auto­mat­i­cal­ly avoid cer­tain sit­u­a­tions because they would give me anx­i­ety, or pre­dict how oth­er peo­ple would react based on past expe­ri­ences, with­out even real­iz­ing it. This is wrong.
  • I was a lit­tle skep­ti­cal about the use­ful­ness of thought records at first, but now that I’ve fin­ished about a half-dozen, I notice a change in my thought process. Every time I get flus­tered, I think in my head of what I’ll write down lat­er (sim­ply because I don’t have time to write it in the moment) and just doing this helps a great deal.
  • My ther­a­pist is a fan of Chappelle’s Show (which is gen­er­al­ly con­sid­ered to be a low-class and crude form of humour), because it breaks social bar­ri­ers by mak­ing fun of stereo­types, there­by rob­bing them of their sig­nif­i­cance. This makes him the coolest mid­dle-aged white guy ever, and makes me want to smoke a spliff with him.
    • He also calls weed, “grass”, which is cute.
  1. We’re both baf­fled by the fact that the ses­sions aren’t cov­ered by OHIP, where­as phys­i­cal health prob­lems are. [↩]

Psychoanalytic Reflections 02

My ther­a­pist is still get­ting to know me. Now I have books to read and work­sheets to fill out. It’s some­what strange; I’ve been putting myself through self-help for years, but I’ve nev­er traced it so far back to my child­hood. I don’t like to blame my par­ents because I see how Darren and Pat have sur­vived far “worse” but it’s get­ting more and more obvi­ous that there’s trau­ma in my child­hood that still affects me to this day.

  • Apparently, I’m mod­er­ate­ly depressed, and “mod­er­ate” is not nor­mal.
  • We’ve fig­ured out that my unassertive­ness is the result of con­flict avoid­ance. Even if I prac­tice a sit­u­a­tion in my head where I say some­thing that may bring up con­flict, I often can’t fol­low through. I feel help­less to fix this, and this leads to a self-defeat­ing atti­tude.
    • This stems from my child­hood. I’ve almost nev­er argued with my par­ents (there were two times in my life I felt strong­ly enough to stand up against them, both end­ing in me sub­mit­ting because there was no rea­son­ing with them). I’ve always felt like I would­n’t be loved unless I got good grades and did every­thing I was told. In oth­er words, it was an extreme­ly con­di­tion­al love.
    • This means I care about what peo­ple think of me, and I define or eval­u­ate my self-worth through them. Knowing this piss­es me off because philo­soph­i­cal­ly and prag­mat­i­cal­ly I don’t agree, but can’t do any­thing about it.
  • Every time I’ve been in ther­a­py, I’ve cried at least once. This hap­pens when­ev­er I bring up spe­cif­ic aspects of my rela­tion­ship with my par­ents.
  • Hearing my ther­a­pist say, “Wow, that’s bad” brings me a com­fort­ing val­i­da­tion to what I feel.
  • Aside from being slight­ly ver­bose, my ther­a­pist is great. He’s a non-judg­men­tal, eth­i­cal, open-mind­ed intel­lec­tu­al. He’s also a good lis­ten­er.

My Mom Keeps Calling

And I keep hang­ing up.

The first thing she asks, non­cha­lant­ly like noth­ing has hap­pened, is whether I’ve eat­en yet. This is some­thing thing she used to say at the begin­ning of every phone call. One of her old habits, to make sure I’m eat­ing enough.

I did­n’t answer her ques­tion, but asked what she want­ed. She told me she just want­ed to see how I was doing.

She does­n’t get it. I don’t want to talk to her. I nev­er want to talk to her again. Every call is a reminder of the wounds that haven’t healed.

It’s like hav­ing your rapist show up at the door with flow­ers.

Signs Of Senility

I’m exhaust­ed today. I try not to acknowl­edge it, but my body keeps remind­ing me.

How is it doing this?

I just peeled a banana, and with the peel in my hand I threw the banana in the garbage.

My dad did the same thing once with an orange. “The old man’s going senile”, I thought to myself.

Hopefully, it’s not due to some degen­er­a­tive brain dis­ease, but the 12-hours I put in at work until mid­night yes­ter­day.

My new sched­ule involves going to ther­a­py after work on Mondays. Today, I also have to go to my framer to sign my pho­tos and mats after­wards. I was going to pick up a drop cloth and back­ground stand at the pho­tog­ra­phy store in between, but I think I’ll skip that.

We’re in the mid­dle of a serv­er swap at work, so I expect client com­put­ers to be burst­ing into flames today. I’m also orga­niz­ing a pot luck for the com­pa­ny at the end of the week.

My mind feels like it’s going in eight dif­fer­ent direc­tions at once.

But as long as I feel, I know I’m alright.

Defining Myself Through Others

I’ve come to real­ize that as much as I’ve grown and gained, I still seek approval from oth­ers, albeit to a much small­er extent than before. This approval is how I define my self worth.

It’s an old, bad habit.

I can trace this habit back to my par­ents. I would always do things to try to win their approval, only to be met with a com­ment about not being good enough, or unsup­port­ive silence. Their con­stant crit­i­cism led to low self-esteem and feel­ings of inad­e­qua­cy. Yet anoth­er exam­ple of how they mind­fucked me.

At this point, it’s just a knee-jerk reac­tion. Remnants of my old, inse­cure self creep­ing up. I know that one day, I’ll be able to break the habit com­plete­ly.

Until then, I have to remind myself that it does­n’t mat­ter what any­one thinks of you.