Letting Them Go

Thursday, Aug 31, 2023

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Everyone has their own struggles. The more you know about what each person has to go through, the easier it is to empathize with them, to understand their actions. Even if sometimes that means that you have to let them go.

I’m not perfect. I have dark spells, and sometimes I collapse, pushing people away. I don’t like that about myself, though I’m beginning to understand why I do it. I am also sensitive and get overwhelmed easily. When I get pushed to a certain point, that brings out irrational, grumpy, self-isolating me.

All of this must be difficult for my loved ones to deal with. Seeing me crash, then pick up the pieces over and over again must be exhausting, especially when you have your own stuff to deal with. Not everyone can accept that kind of upset in their lives.

And they aren’t obliged to.

I had a recent crash. It was shorter than normal, and not as intense, but I went through the usual, unhelpful steps of pushing people away and shutting down. One of my friend groups had something planned, and my episode upset the whole thing. And one of my friends, who had been patient with me for so long, told me they didn’t want to be involved moving forward.

They have their own stuff to deal with. Multiple health concerns and the far-reaching emotional and mental impact made by those struggles. Past trauma, present trauma. A complicated story. I have to make an educated guess, because they aren’t talking to me - and don’t owe me an explanation - but it seems like they have so much on their own plate that they couldn’t handle the added stress of me shutting down.

I won’t lie. It is tempting to say that cutting me out isn’t fair of them. But that wouldn’t be accurate, would it? It wouldn’t be fair for me to expect them to shoulder MORE pain and frustration in order to, hopefully, maybe, make me feel a little better, especially when I have a history of rejecting offers of help.

I don’t know if this is a forever goodbye or an extended time-out. I hope I can reconnect with this friend. But for now, it’s important for me to let them go, respecting their decision. They have their own stuff to deal with, and I have mine. All I can hope for in the meantime is that I can apply the lessons they’ve taught me to my own situation, and that maybe they’ve learned something useful from me… and that our paths will cross again when we both have the capacity to hold space for each other.

Best of luck. To them, and to all of you, always.

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What are my qualifications? None, except for my own experience and a desire to help. Going back to Doctor Who, “I am an idiot … passing through, helping out.” I hope my own struggle with my darkness can help you with yours, or understand the struggle of someone you love.

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Life before death

Strength before weakness

Journey before destination

Writing Memories

Thursday, Aug 24, 2023

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I’m doing more than just surviving these days. Nothing’s perfect. There are lots of shadows cast over my life, but they’re just part of the landscape, not warnings of impending doom. More than just getting by, I’m also doing things that I find fulfilling, and have moments of sincere joy.

I’ve started things up again with my therapist and will be doing more than just telling him what’s happened to me each week. We’re going to start exposing the roots of my feelings and figuring out how to create better, more appropriate reactions to my triggers. I’m looking forward to this.

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Something very unfortunate happened a few weeks ago. I can’t get into specifics, but there was a complicated, dangerous situation with multiple different parties, each with their own version of what happened. In the end the danger was resolved and no one was hurt, although most of us were badly shaken.

I spent time wrestling with what happened. I reviewed the sequence of events, trying to see if I missed something important. Did I do the right thing? Was there something I could have reasonably done that would have nipped the incident in the bud? Were there signs I missed? I lost sleep, playing it over and over in my head, and at every turn I questioned things.

There were times where I felt like a monster. Self doubt and his nasty cousin, self loathing, were close at hand. But after some hard work, I was able to put them in their place. This time, I was able to see the lie my dark side was selling me and discarded it as such.

In the end I realized that while yes, there were things I could have done better, what I did was reasonable considering everything that was happening. It was a messy, complicated situation, and I was doing the best I could at the moment. 

I also had to tell the story many times, to people I care about and to people who had a right to know. It wasn’t something I wanted to do, but it was the right thing to do.

I told the story one more time the other day, and I received some unexpected feedback. To paraphrase what they said, I could have told the story with me being a victim, or beating myself up over not responding perfectly to a volatile situation. I could have been upset at the people present during the incident and what they said, did, or how they reacted.

My friend reminded me that every time we retell a story we are helping our brains reorganize the memory so we can understand and store the memory more effectively. The way we tell the story to ourselves writes and rewrites the memory. It changes the way we see the events that happened, and how we relate to them. It’s one of the slippery ways that our memories aren’t reliable, and why the way we think about our past is incredibly important.

Not wanting to put words in my friend’s mouth, it sounds like I did a good job of owning my part in the unfortunate incident. I accepted responsibility for what I did without overreaching and blaming myself for everything going wrong. I didn’t blame anyone else, either, but expressed understanding and compassion.

Hearing this was a breath of fresh air. It showed me that the work I’ve been doing on myself is paying off, and the results are noticeable to those who know me well. It also underscored to me the importance of being as honest and clear as possible with myself and others when dealing with the hardships of life. Because the way we tell ourselves these stories changes the memories we write.

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What are my qualifications? None, except for my own experience and a desire to help. Going back to Doctor Who, “I am an idiot … passing through, helping out.” I hope my own struggle with my darkness can help you with yours, or understand the struggle of someone you love.

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Life before death

Strength before weakness

Journey before destination

Shifting Gears

 Thursday, Aug 03, 2023

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I am limping along. Emotionally I am well, but physically and mentally I am exhausted. I have trouble telling if this is some kind of burnout, or lingering effects of long COVID, or even a side effect of my fluctuating blood glucose. There always seems to be another round of illness, from strep to dangerously low glucose levels to horrible aches and pains all over my body.

And yet I feel pretty good inside. Not healthy, but more centered. Not tidy, but like I can see a pattern in the mess and understand what I need to do to start cleaning up - with permission from myself to take my time in doing so.

So, I take that as a plus. Direction over velocity. Journey before destination.

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After a long time away, I had my first therapy session in months. I hit a wall, mentally and emotionally, back in January and needed to take a break from it. It took a lot of consideration, but I realized that I had become frustrated with a lack of progress. I was spending my sessions updating my therapist on what had been happening, and I didn’t feel like I was actually improving.

I sought out the same therapist, and thankfully he was still available. I explained why I stopped the sessions, and he understood. In fact, he likened it to a shift in my growth. The way I expressed it to him months ago was not ideal, but it was an understandable reaction to my changing needs.

He described my previous sessions as relational therapy, which focused on my relationships with other people. My spouse, my kids, my parents, my inlaws, my boss, my friends, you name it. Looking back, that is 100% correct. I was drowning in stories I had to get off my chest about interactions that left me frustrated.

Occasionally I was able to dig below the surface of that, identifying a question, a cause, or a trigger. Something that intellectually I understood, from all my consumption of therapy material, but had trouble noticing in myself. But because I was still drowning in stories and their consequences, I didn’t have the space to investigate these seeds and see what they grew into.

Shifting gears, we will focus on goal-oriented therapy, emotion-focused therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy - which brings me full circle. When I first started researching depression I read a wonderful book on CBT that I can’t remember the name of. I read it in an attempt to better understand the suffering of someone close to me, and stumbled into an understanding of my own depression. However, never having done the actual work of CBT, I never learned the tools I needed to apply it to myself.

I am excited, and a little worried. This isn’t just going to be me talking to someone about my problems. This is going to be me trying to figure out exactly what those problems are, why they affect me the way they do, and how I can reprogram my own responses.

I told my therapist today that my long term goal is to be able to be angry and to respond to everyone involved - including myself - with calmness and kindness. Not to ignore the anger, which will make me sick, but to integrate it and reclaim it, teaching myself how to take the gift of my anger and take away the potential harm, turning it into a useful response.

He also said that, from our conversation, it was clear that I had done a lot of work on myself in the past few months. It was good to hear that, because sometimes it’s hard to recognize our own progress. Especially when things have been dark.

So. It’s time to shift gears and focus on fixing the problem, not just talking about it. Time to do the work. Time to be better.

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What are my qualifications? None, except for my own experience and a desire to help. Going back to Doctor Who, “I am an idiot … passing through, helping out.” I hope my own struggle with my darkness can help you with yours, or understand the struggle of someone you love.

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Life before death

Strength before weakness

Journey before destination