When to trust your man (or woman)

I’m up early, working. For some reason all the clients are active right now. And it’s good for money, but there’s not a lot of time for sleep.

I read all the pain and regrets here, the self-blaming and the feelings of being blamed by the outside world. I understand how hard this is.

What Donna is talking about, the burning away of the debris that keeps us from understanding who we are and trusting our own center is a real thing. All this pain, even pain we’ve been living with for a long time, is part of that process.

One of the reasons I write here is to help people understand how healing works. If we don’t know that, we may not believe that we are really made to work through our traumas, to really get well, and to evolve through these traumas into something better. A combination of our true selves — independent, compassionate and creative — made wise and skilled through experience.

If we understand that truth, we don’t get brainwashed by ideas that we will be permanently scarred, permanently victimized, permanently stuck in the symptoms of healing. Which may be shock, denial, self-blame, self-hatred, feelings of being ostrasized or blamed by other, fear of making mistakes, endless regrets, depression, fear of more bad coming, etc. These are normal feelings in the healing process. They are also feelings that lead to other things, if we stop being afraid of these feelings and really explore them.

That’s why we go to therapy, because therapists are trained to help us express these feelings — get them out of our heads and into our conversations — so we can begin to understand why we feel them. Not just the immediate issues, which are actually often caused by unacknowledged older feeling, but what’s really underneath them. The traumas that we really need to work on.

It also helps to talk about things here, as we all know. It helps to journal. I found another technique when I was working on myself, which was to “sit inside” my worst pain and wait for it to talk to me. It was like peeling an onion, one pain would would lead me to what was below it, and then I would sit with that. But eventually, I came to the real causes of what Donna calls the debris inside me. The voices that criticized me, the traumas that really affected the way I looked at myself and the world, and then I could do the deep and permanent work on recovering myself and my life.

For some reason, I believed that this was possible, when everyone else was telling me to “just forget about it and move on.” And I discovered that its is possible to change my understanding of these traumas. To remove their power over my life, and understand that they were not my fault, that there was bad luck involved in the sense of being subjected to people or natural forces that I couldn’t anticipate or control, and that — and this is the important things — they hurt me but they didn’t really change who I was. The coping strategies I developed, particularly as a child, changed my beliefs and behaviors. But I could develop better coping strategies now, ones that didn’t diminish me or make me adjust my whole life to the constant presence of fear or the need to survive in a dangerous world.

I’ve written a lot about this in other posts and in the series of articles that is here on LoveFraud, so I’m not going to into detail now. But I just wanted to say again that that healing is a natural process. And to a great degree it’s programmed into us. We just have to let ourselves go through it, and believe that there is a good ending to it. Because there is. These challenges are a kind of schoolroom, where we’re faced with the need to learn something new about the world, but more importantly about ourselves.

Surprisingly, one of the things we often learn is that we’ve always been doing a pretty good job with difficult circumstances. And this may sound strange to some of us that live with shame and a lot of regrets about what seems like crazy past behavior. Believe me, if I ever write an honest autobiography, you guys would be shocked out of your shoes. But you know, I had reason every inch of the way. And even the apparently craziest things I did were ways of managing or of having some creativity in the midst of depression or of finding some kind of identity in the midst of blown boundarie and lost dreams.

Do I have regrets? Sure I do, but regrets are a kind of game we play in retrospect. It’s easy to say that we wish we had done something differently. But the truth is that what we’re saying is that we wish we had been different, that we weren’t carrying all the confusion and pain and limited perspectives that were really the source of these behaviors. And that’s not so easy to “fix” in retrospect, because this was all about untreated trauma and limited resources. And it’s really pointless to beat ourselves up about that. So regrets are really just an expression of the fact that we’re better now, that in the same circumstances, we would have more sanity and more resources. And that’s something we can celebrate. Every regret should come with a kind of long exhale, and a feeling of gratitude that we’ve moved to another level in our lives.

Regrets about damage to other people are more challenging. The more we heal, the more we understand the real dynamics of interpersonal damage. How what people did to us caused us pain and, in the worst cases, how we developed coping mechanisms that shaped our lives in non-productive ways. And knowing that, we can also imagine more of how our behaviors may have affected other people.

Especially when it’s our children, this is really hard to make peace with. I live with a emotionally ill son, and one of the challenges is managing my own feelings of self-blame, because he grew up with an untreated incest survivor. No matter how determined I was not to pass on the damage to him, I realize now how unbalanced I was and what my lifestyle put him through.

But here is the reality that I have to deal with. Devoting a lot of time to self-blame or anything else that destabilizes me is an indulgence I can’t afford, as long as he’s living with me. I need to find the strength in myself to be compassionate to both of us, to hold onto my belief that we both are entitled to have our needs met so that we stay as healthy and happy a we can be, and that the key to all of this is trusting and having a good relationship with myself. Blaming myself for something that happened years ago is a waste of time and can only make things worse now.

That doesn’t mean we don’t talk about happened and how he feels about it. I freely acknowledge that he grew up with a mother who was certifiably crazy at times and made some really awful decisions. But when he gets into angry, grieving, blaming states, as he does occasionally, I also recognize that this is not about me, but his own struggles with his feelings and his healing process. And when I’ve reached my limit in listening to those feelings, I tell him. Because I am not his therapist, and I cannot be that. His healing is not about me, but himself. And he needs to find support from someone who is not emotionally involved, because I have feelings too.

All of this eventually comes down to staying in touch with ourselves, with understanding and believing that it is important to take care of ourselves. To comfort ourselves when we need it. To include recreation and fun in our lives. To make sure we have private time and down time, as well as all the time we spend on taking care of the various types of work and life maintenance we have to do.

As everyone here knows, diving into trauma-created feelings eats a lot of energy and time. It removes us from the forward motion of our lives. I believe it’s really important to invest in the “inside time” for healing. But it’s also ultimately within our control to make choices about when and how much time we give to it. And when there is a threat from the outside to experience something that will only make it worse — and that includes the repercussions of bringing our emotional problem to work or expressing our bottled-up anger on people who don’t deserve it or leaning on people who are themselves too damaged or needy to handle it — we can put it away for a while, until we have the privacy or support to work on it again.

I only say this, because it makes us feel better to know that we are working on ourselves in ways that are safe and don’t do further damage. And it’s important at these times to recognize that we are not stupid or terminally damaged or completely without internal resources. That is never true, unless we’re in full-out psychotic break. Rather we are just tired or overwhelmed or taxed by the processing effort. And we have to consider that in planning our lives, that we need to give ourselves recovery time, just the same as if we were recovering from a car accident or major surgery.

I hope this makes sense. And I hope it eases at least a little of the fear that goes with recovery. We’re not going to be in it forever. Things do get better. Time helps, even if we don’t work on our healing. But if do we do work on it, with a belief that we are eventually getting something really good out of it, it goes faster and is a lot more exciting and enjoyable. Even the pain, even the rediscovery of old traumas. It’s sounds wierd but it’s true. Learning about ourselves, giving ourself the gift of time and attention, is one of the greatest and most profitable things we can ever do. Don’t begrudge it or hate your feelings. They just part of healing.

Love —

Kathy