Thursday, July 24, 2014
When performed rigorously physical activity can leave your muscles enveloped with something like a burning sensation. When your own psyche gets a good work-over in a psychotherapy session it seems a similar phenomenon can unfold.
One of the lessons I have learned from a full year of psychotherapy is that insights can and often do come at most any time...and sometimes those insights come at the most inopportune of times. The present moment is a good example. I am taking a break from work in order to put my thoughts down now while they are fresh and in the forefront of my consciousness.
This morning I had a different moment in my life history drift through my mind. It was the Spring of 1994. I found myself recalling the particular night in which I divulged the circumstances of my recently ended relationship with my first boyfriend to my father. This morning I recalled the anger, disappointment and disgust I felt when my father, rather than really offer me any consolation or compassion, instead advised me to not divulge what I had just shared with him with my stepmother. I can so vividly recall standing there in an extremely vulnerable condition and feeling so extraordinarily let down by his inability to really be emotionally available to me. I was additionally traumatized by the fact that my first boyfriend later tried to commit suicide. Still later he attempted to blame me for his own actions. Despite being in deep pain due to the circumstances of my relationship ending my father couldn't extend himself out of his narrow little world. All that seemed to matter to him was keeping the whole matter quiet...apparently to suit his purposes.
The incident I am briefly sketching now happened twenty years ago. After what unfolded last year, in which my father again could not be present to my own pain, I finally realized I had to let go of the dream I had once had that my father would ever be much more than an emotionally immature man. Letting go is often difficult. Letting go of deeply held desires about the way we wish our parents had parented us or would be available to us now in the present can be even more challenging. It can be agonizing. To be completely honest that is what these last twelve months have often felt like...agony. It's been something akin to the way I have heard Purgatory described (a realm, by the way, I do not personally believe exists).
That moment when a person finally lets go and emerges from a protracted period of resisting what (unfortunately) is to accept what can never be (but also as a consequence opens to other beautiful possibilities) is the moment I find myself in now. I am in that moment of letting go. And yet this 'moment' often resembles not a moment but a protracted period of time. But this is the truth of the matter because what I am undergoing is a process. Processes, by definition, unfold in the stream of time.
I have felt quite raw lately. I attribute this to the fact that more anniversary moments have come and gone this week. Monday was my mother's birthday. And tomorrow will be the anniversary of my paternal grandmother's death.
There are still many days when the best I can do is awaken, go to work, put myself out there, breathe, eat, enjoy the sunlight and then lay my head down to sleep once more.
When performed rigorously physical activity can leave your muscles enveloped with something like a burning sensation. When your own psyche gets a good work-over in a psychotherapy session it seems a similar phenomenon can unfold.
One of the lessons I have learned from a full year of psychotherapy is that insights can and often do come at most any time...and sometimes those insights come at the most inopportune of times. The present moment is a good example. I am taking a break from work in order to put my thoughts down now while they are fresh and in the forefront of my consciousness.
This morning I had a different moment in my life history drift through my mind. It was the Spring of 1994. I found myself recalling the particular night in which I divulged the circumstances of my recently ended relationship with my first boyfriend to my father. This morning I recalled the anger, disappointment and disgust I felt when my father, rather than really offer me any consolation or compassion, instead advised me to not divulge what I had just shared with him with my stepmother. I can so vividly recall standing there in an extremely vulnerable condition and feeling so extraordinarily let down by his inability to really be emotionally available to me. I was additionally traumatized by the fact that my first boyfriend later tried to commit suicide. Still later he attempted to blame me for his own actions. Despite being in deep pain due to the circumstances of my relationship ending my father couldn't extend himself out of his narrow little world. All that seemed to matter to him was keeping the whole matter quiet...apparently to suit his purposes.
The incident I am briefly sketching now happened twenty years ago. After what unfolded last year, in which my father again could not be present to my own pain, I finally realized I had to let go of the dream I had once had that my father would ever be much more than an emotionally immature man. Letting go is often difficult. Letting go of deeply held desires about the way we wish our parents had parented us or would be available to us now in the present can be even more challenging. It can be agonizing. To be completely honest that is what these last twelve months have often felt like...agony. It's been something akin to the way I have heard Purgatory described (a realm, by the way, I do not personally believe exists).
That moment when a person finally lets go and emerges from a protracted period of resisting what (unfortunately) is to accept what can never be (but also as a consequence opens to other beautiful possibilities) is the moment I find myself in now. I am in that moment of letting go. And yet this 'moment' often resembles not a moment but a protracted period of time. But this is the truth of the matter because what I am undergoing is a process. Processes, by definition, unfold in the stream of time.
I have felt quite raw lately. I attribute this to the fact that more anniversary moments have come and gone this week. Monday was my mother's birthday. And tomorrow will be the anniversary of my paternal grandmother's death.
There are still many days when the best I can do is awaken, go to work, put myself out there, breathe, eat, enjoy the sunlight and then lay my head down to sleep once more.
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