my heart knows me better than i know myself
Thursday, November 1st, 2012 05:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
erikaconvo with a friend that I'm using as a lead-in to this entry because it fits——sorry about all the IM logs, I TALK ON IM A LOT and I'm really lazy:
(9:16:12 PM) marissa: Hey, disappearing you. <3
(9:16:20 PM) Erika: heh, I was fixing my font!
(9:16:21 PM) marissa: Just checked LJ recently. :-/
(9:16:23 PM) Erika: i'm on josh's laptop
(9:16:27 PM) marissa: I meant GENERALLY DISAPPEARING
(9:16:31 PM) marissa: WHICH YOU ARE/WERE
(9:16:36 PM) Erika: OH RIGHT WELL IF YOU WANT TO BE ACCURATE AND SHIT
(9:17:02 PM) Erika: josh was like "yeah, you're not "depressed" as in you're having an episode, you're FEELING depressed because people have been criticizing you, including me, i really don't think you're having an episode right now"
[editor's note: this is my summary of a conversation that was over 20 minutes long on the phone, no worries, he was neither dismissive nor judgmental!]
(9:17:20 PM) Erika: and i was like "wah wah" and he was like "seriously if you want to stay home, i understand, but i don't think isolating yourself is going to make you feel any better"
It was ... weird. And true. And I recognized it as true, which was the most bizarre thing ever.
I first noticed it shortly after this particular mood bust-up triggered, after the big fight with my mom, after I'd turned off my phone and IM, when I was coccooning myself in my bed and crying, as is my wont——yet I had this sense almost all that time, like ... there was a detachment, but a compassionate, loving sense of "this will not be forever, it's okay to be sad."
It didn't start out quite that way; I was crying and thinking my usual/typical depressive-woe-is-me (described earlier as "wah wah" because seriously, at that point, you could pretty much just copy&paste any description I've done of this thought cycle over the last decade and it would be accurate, like, oh, my last entry)——and I thought, suddenly, "am I being flooded right now? Is this Persephone/Kore action going on?"
Yeah, that last sentence doesn't make any sense without a great deal more of explanation. So... I guess I'm going to talk about my current method of therapy!
I'm doing this thing that's called Internal Family Systems, and first off, I just want to say it all LOGICALLY feels very strange to me because even though I really like yoga and meditation and consider myself an "aspiring Buddhist"——and yet even just writing all of that makes me cringe a bit, because it all seems very... woo——as in, outlandish, not scientifically based, incapable of being accurate/precise. How far from this to crystals and UFO conspiracy theories, I sort of wonder.
And that's totally all my own baggage, because ... here's the thing. I have the worst double standards of anyone I know, and it's all directed towards me——I have NO PROBLEM with a close friend telling me that her therapist talks about opening up her chakras, hey, that sounds awesome, I'm glad it's working for you! Talk to me about opening up my chakras? Um, no. Never. Not gonna happen.
When stuff like that goes down, I generally am just gonna give hypothetical-chakra-person the same response I gave the therapist who asked me at 16, in all sincerity, if I'd given my troubles to Jesus.
That response, by the way, is "engage Polite Mode/Let the Other Person Do All The Talking/Mentally Check-Out of the interpersonal interaction as it is undoubtedly not going anywhere useful." This approach has been honed over many years during Thanksgiving where the familial habit was to hang out with my mom's extended family, all of whom seem to be fundamentalist Christian Republican/now-Tea-Party-ish types. (This mode also comes in handy during church services in places where I'm not a member of the faith and they seem to be quite literally preaching to the choir.)
(By the by, that therapist is pretty much the reason I avoided therapy for another three years until I was 19ish. Good job, random mental health professional who thought intrusive religious questions [without even asking me if I was a Christian or ANYTHING about god] were appropriate at a youth-oriented agency which had NO RELIGIOUS BACKING.)
So, yes, ANYWAY, I'm doing this therapy heavily based on IFS (Internal Family Systems), and it's weird for me because it's all about honoring the different parts of oneself.
People say "oh, part of me really wants to do X but the rest of me says no no" or "I halfway just want to go back to bed right now but I know I gotta go to work" and nobody thinks it's weird, but ... if I start talking about how I'm literally interacting with the part of me that wants to do X, or the half of me that wants to go back to bed, I kinda sound like a fruitcake. At least, again, that's my own internal judgment, my own internal censor and those double standards rearing up again to tell me NO NO NO, THIS IS CRAZYCAKES.
If you google it, you can get more info, but Wikipedia especially seems to be saying "this method of therapy hasn't been studied THEREFORE HAS NO VALUE"——and that's just not my experience.
The thing is, IFS therapy is really fucking working for me. For one thing, my new therapist, Chris, is amazing. He's truly compassionate, non-judgmental, and open to my experiences.
He not only hears what I'm saying, understands what I mean even when my explanations aren't the best——yesterday after a rambling description I gave which totally failed to describe anything, I ended up saying "you know what I mean!?" and he actually did, which amazed me, no lie——but he really ... I don't know, fosters this environment where I deep down feel like it's okay to approach the parts of me that are reacting in a way that's not appropriate for Me As I Want to Be or Me as I Am Right Now (as opposed to me as I used to be, or me during the abusive years)——approach those parts with true compassion and curiosity and love.
And ... yeah. How do I talk about that without sounding like "oh, my therapist is a unicorn, my current mode of therapy is made of rainbows and we explore my inner child all the time"? Because ... we don't. For one thing, my inner child is apparently a neurotic, depressed, angry, isolated, UPSET child prone to throwing tantrums which means that "she" floods me with overwhelming emotional tides of rejection, shame, guilt, and sadness when bad things happen to me. It's not her "fault", per se, but it's really, really fucking rough for me to deal with.
Chris is understandably wary of trying to force talking to this part of me directly——that part of me just isn't ready to be around people. People are fucking scary, yo. People can't be trusted——or at least that's what this part of me really believes.
This tantrum-throwing cranky little girl (who I've nicknamed Persephone/Kore) won't even interact with me on a mental level. The best way I can describe it is that sometimes she hangs around when we're dealing with other parts, but always in a very isolated area where she can easily hide and disappear if attention were to be brought to her. Kind of like a kid hiding in the closet or underneath the bed so the monsters won't get her. Yeah. My inner child has massive trust issues, yo.
(Kore is another name for Persephone in Greek mythology, and it just means "girl or maiden." I like this simply because it's so non-connotative—when I think Persephone, I think "abduction/rape/abuse/forced cohabitation with abuser," but I don't think any of that when I think the name "Kore.")
And I just re-read all of that and want to face-palm, because jesus, it really sounds so far out there. Here's the thing, though—I did not gel with cognitive behavioral therapy.
Combating my thought patterns made me feel like I was fighting myself, that my rational side was more important or somehow much better than my emotional side. When I failed, which often happened, I used that failure to beat myself up more. Worst of all, I disconnected from myself emotionally, which led me to ... not feeling good or bad about anything except the really shocking, horrible things, which of course always manage to penetrate. (This wasn't a side effect from my meds, btw, this was purely based on my idea that my rational side was the only part of me I should listen to.)
I could go on a giant rant about CBT but the above paragraph really says most of my problems. That's not what's supposed to happen in therapy.
Despite the fact that my CBT therapists were amazing, caring, supportive people, and that yes, I did get better in the sense of "doing more stuff", and I did learn some tools for recognizing when my thoughts were becoming disordered, but ... I didn't really feel much better. I often left therapy feeling like I was on board a sinking ship and someone had taken away my hammer, nails, and boards——my attempts to try and GET RID of the holes—— and given me a bucket instead, because it would "work so much better, the water is really your problem here."
I need the bucket and the tools, man! I need it alllllllll.
IFS, as my therapist explained it to me, works on the principle that all the different parts of oneself—my rational side, my emotional side, the part of me that wants to let other people walk all over me so they don't leave, the part of me that gets angry about any problem and then generally turns that anger inward, even this inner child throwing tantrums——all of my parts want what's best for me.
In the case of people who are struggling with disorders, it's not that their parts are flat out wrong, it's more that they've been previously aligned to a system of working (often due to abuse or mood dysfunction) that isn't working anymore.
Therapy should never be about criticizing yourself for being "wrong" or "broken"; it's about recognizing that you did the best you could with the tools you had, and working with yourself to realign again to a different way of living.
I actually leave therapy feeling physically lighter. I find myself noticing more about what's going on with me, and acting with more compassion towards myself and, I hope, other people.
When I had the thought I described in one of the first paragraphs of this entry, the idea that maybe I was being flooded with emotions because so much of me was fucking terrified of rejection——and feeling that, knowing that it was a possibility, made the emotions... not less intense, but further away. The fires were still burning, but I was no longer standing in the middle of them. I could look at the despair and shame and think about what to do, how I wanted to react, how I wanted to engage with it, as opposed to just screaming.
This gives me so much hope.
(9:16:12 PM) marissa: Hey, disappearing you. <3
(9:16:20 PM) Erika: heh, I was fixing my font!
(9:16:21 PM) marissa: Just checked LJ recently. :-/
(9:16:23 PM) Erika: i'm on josh's laptop
(9:16:27 PM) marissa: I meant GENERALLY DISAPPEARING
(9:16:31 PM) marissa: WHICH YOU ARE/WERE
(9:16:36 PM) Erika: OH RIGHT WELL IF YOU WANT TO BE ACCURATE AND SHIT
(9:17:02 PM) Erika: josh was like "yeah, you're not "depressed" as in you're having an episode, you're FEELING depressed because people have been criticizing you, including me, i really don't think you're having an episode right now"
[editor's note: this is my summary of a conversation that was over 20 minutes long on the phone, no worries, he was neither dismissive nor judgmental!]
(9:17:20 PM) Erika: and i was like "wah wah" and he was like "seriously if you want to stay home, i understand, but i don't think isolating yourself is going to make you feel any better"
It was ... weird. And true. And I recognized it as true, which was the most bizarre thing ever.
I first noticed it shortly after this particular mood bust-up triggered, after the big fight with my mom, after I'd turned off my phone and IM, when I was coccooning myself in my bed and crying, as is my wont——yet I had this sense almost all that time, like ... there was a detachment, but a compassionate, loving sense of "this will not be forever, it's okay to be sad."
It didn't start out quite that way; I was crying and thinking my usual/typical depressive-woe-is-me (described earlier as "wah wah" because seriously, at that point, you could pretty much just copy&paste any description I've done of this thought cycle over the last decade and it would be accurate, like, oh, my last entry)——and I thought, suddenly, "am I being flooded right now? Is this Persephone/Kore action going on?"
Yeah, that last sentence doesn't make any sense without a great deal more of explanation. So... I guess I'm going to talk about my current method of therapy!
I'm doing this thing that's called Internal Family Systems, and first off, I just want to say it all LOGICALLY feels very strange to me because even though I really like yoga and meditation and consider myself an "aspiring Buddhist"——and yet even just writing all of that makes me cringe a bit, because it all seems very... woo——as in, outlandish, not scientifically based, incapable of being accurate/precise. How far from this to crystals and UFO conspiracy theories, I sort of wonder.
And that's totally all my own baggage, because ... here's the thing. I have the worst double standards of anyone I know, and it's all directed towards me——I have NO PROBLEM with a close friend telling me that her therapist talks about opening up her chakras, hey, that sounds awesome, I'm glad it's working for you! Talk to me about opening up my chakras? Um, no. Never. Not gonna happen.
When stuff like that goes down, I generally am just gonna give hypothetical-chakra-person the same response I gave the therapist who asked me at 16, in all sincerity, if I'd given my troubles to Jesus.
That response, by the way, is "engage Polite Mode/Let the Other Person Do All The Talking/Mentally Check-Out of the interpersonal interaction as it is undoubtedly not going anywhere useful." This approach has been honed over many years during Thanksgiving where the familial habit was to hang out with my mom's extended family, all of whom seem to be fundamentalist Christian Republican/now-Tea-Party-ish types. (This mode also comes in handy during church services in places where I'm not a member of the faith and they seem to be quite literally preaching to the choir.)
(By the by, that therapist is pretty much the reason I avoided therapy for another three years until I was 19ish. Good job, random mental health professional who thought intrusive religious questions [without even asking me if I was a Christian or ANYTHING about god] were appropriate at a youth-oriented agency which had NO RELIGIOUS BACKING.)
So, yes, ANYWAY, I'm doing this therapy heavily based on IFS (Internal Family Systems), and it's weird for me because it's all about honoring the different parts of oneself.
People say "oh, part of me really wants to do X but the rest of me says no no" or "I halfway just want to go back to bed right now but I know I gotta go to work" and nobody thinks it's weird, but ... if I start talking about how I'm literally interacting with the part of me that wants to do X, or the half of me that wants to go back to bed, I kinda sound like a fruitcake. At least, again, that's my own internal judgment, my own internal censor and those double standards rearing up again to tell me NO NO NO, THIS IS CRAZYCAKES.
If you google it, you can get more info, but Wikipedia especially seems to be saying "this method of therapy hasn't been studied THEREFORE HAS NO VALUE"——and that's just not my experience.
The thing is, IFS therapy is really fucking working for me. For one thing, my new therapist, Chris, is amazing. He's truly compassionate, non-judgmental, and open to my experiences.
He not only hears what I'm saying, understands what I mean even when my explanations aren't the best——yesterday after a rambling description I gave which totally failed to describe anything, I ended up saying "you know what I mean!?" and he actually did, which amazed me, no lie——but he really ... I don't know, fosters this environment where I deep down feel like it's okay to approach the parts of me that are reacting in a way that's not appropriate for Me As I Want to Be or Me as I Am Right Now (as opposed to me as I used to be, or me during the abusive years)——approach those parts with true compassion and curiosity and love.
And ... yeah. How do I talk about that without sounding like "oh, my therapist is a unicorn, my current mode of therapy is made of rainbows and we explore my inner child all the time"? Because ... we don't. For one thing, my inner child is apparently a neurotic, depressed, angry, isolated, UPSET child prone to throwing tantrums which means that "she" floods me with overwhelming emotional tides of rejection, shame, guilt, and sadness when bad things happen to me. It's not her "fault", per se, but it's really, really fucking rough for me to deal with.
Chris is understandably wary of trying to force talking to this part of me directly——that part of me just isn't ready to be around people. People are fucking scary, yo. People can't be trusted——or at least that's what this part of me really believes.
This tantrum-throwing cranky little girl (who I've nicknamed Persephone/Kore) won't even interact with me on a mental level. The best way I can describe it is that sometimes she hangs around when we're dealing with other parts, but always in a very isolated area where she can easily hide and disappear if attention were to be brought to her. Kind of like a kid hiding in the closet or underneath the bed so the monsters won't get her. Yeah. My inner child has massive trust issues, yo.
(Kore is another name for Persephone in Greek mythology, and it just means "girl or maiden." I like this simply because it's so non-connotative—when I think Persephone, I think "abduction/rape/abuse/forced cohabitation with abuser," but I don't think any of that when I think the name "Kore.")
And I just re-read all of that and want to face-palm, because jesus, it really sounds so far out there. Here's the thing, though—I did not gel with cognitive behavioral therapy.
Combating my thought patterns made me feel like I was fighting myself, that my rational side was more important or somehow much better than my emotional side. When I failed, which often happened, I used that failure to beat myself up more. Worst of all, I disconnected from myself emotionally, which led me to ... not feeling good or bad about anything except the really shocking, horrible things, which of course always manage to penetrate. (This wasn't a side effect from my meds, btw, this was purely based on my idea that my rational side was the only part of me I should listen to.)
I could go on a giant rant about CBT but the above paragraph really says most of my problems. That's not what's supposed to happen in therapy.
Despite the fact that my CBT therapists were amazing, caring, supportive people, and that yes, I did get better in the sense of "doing more stuff", and I did learn some tools for recognizing when my thoughts were becoming disordered, but ... I didn't really feel much better. I often left therapy feeling like I was on board a sinking ship and someone had taken away my hammer, nails, and boards——my attempts to try and GET RID of the holes—— and given me a bucket instead, because it would "work so much better, the water is really your problem here."
I need the bucket and the tools, man! I need it alllllllll.
IFS, as my therapist explained it to me, works on the principle that all the different parts of oneself—my rational side, my emotional side, the part of me that wants to let other people walk all over me so they don't leave, the part of me that gets angry about any problem and then generally turns that anger inward, even this inner child throwing tantrums——all of my parts want what's best for me.
In the case of people who are struggling with disorders, it's not that their parts are flat out wrong, it's more that they've been previously aligned to a system of working (often due to abuse or mood dysfunction) that isn't working anymore.
Therapy should never be about criticizing yourself for being "wrong" or "broken"; it's about recognizing that you did the best you could with the tools you had, and working with yourself to realign again to a different way of living.
I actually leave therapy feeling physically lighter. I find myself noticing more about what's going on with me, and acting with more compassion towards myself and, I hope, other people.
When I had the thought I described in one of the first paragraphs of this entry, the idea that maybe I was being flooded with emotions because so much of me was fucking terrified of rejection——and feeling that, knowing that it was a possibility, made the emotions... not less intense, but further away. The fires were still burning, but I was no longer standing in the middle of them. I could look at the despair and shame and think about what to do, how I wanted to react, how I wanted to engage with it, as opposed to just screaming.
This gives me so much hope.
