Friday, February 26, 2010
Codependency
I have been thinking about writing some thoughts on codependency but I've been too busy to do it. What does that tell you??? Pretty funny when you think about it.
So I'll talk about facing my fear of public speaking instead.
Tonight I gave a talk to about 250 servicemen and women who have just returned from deployment. I was scheduled to do a powerpoint on Anger Management. I threw out the powerpoint. I think one more powerpoint in the day might just have put them over the edge. They applauded that one.
I'm pretty good just talking off the cuff but giving a "presentation" makes me nervous and my mind shuts down. So in the past I would write it all out in case I got the brain freeze thing going on. And what happens then? Monotony. Whenever I prepare a 30-60 minute talk I put enough together for a 10 week college course. I want it to be perfect...to tell people everything they could possibly want or need to know.
I have always wanted to be one of those people who can tell funny stories and say clever things that people want to write down and take home and put on their refrigerators.
As I was sitting with my group of colleagues, waiting to do my talk, I was hysterical! I had everyone laughing and interacting and we were having a great time. I told them how nervous I get doing these talks and they all gave me great ideas and encouraged me and said they'd be there to help and we got all excited about the show we could put on Some of the ideas were gutwrenchingly funny.
But by the time I had to go talk I was worn out. The soldiers were worn out too. I tried some of the ideas we had all talked about, lost track of time...I mean, I didn't know if I had been talking 5 minutes or 45! They couldn't hook my computer up to the projector so the idea of using a funny video as a way to start off the talk went straight into the trash.
When I got stuck I turned to my colleagues who gave me ideas of what o do next.
I had them roleplaying, shouting out ideas of what might help them deal with anger, I had them standing and doing stretches to loosen up the body parts they store their stress in...and they were laughing!
I left thinking I have just done the most disjointed presentation of the century (thankfully that's only 10 years now) and was met with compliments and comments from the staff that they hadn't heard them laughing and interacting so much....not just al day, but hardly ever.
So I took the leap of faith that my ability to "wing it" and be funny might actually fill up half an hour and I did it....not perfectly....but for some reason other people did not notice all the mistakes I made. And maybe some did but still thought it was a good time.
Maybe, with a little more practice, I can actually be so good at this that I don't lose consciousness out of fear, and people will have my quotes at home on their refrigerators after all.
So I'll talk about facing my fear of public speaking instead.
Tonight I gave a talk to about 250 servicemen and women who have just returned from deployment. I was scheduled to do a powerpoint on Anger Management. I threw out the powerpoint. I think one more powerpoint in the day might just have put them over the edge. They applauded that one.
I'm pretty good just talking off the cuff but giving a "presentation" makes me nervous and my mind shuts down. So in the past I would write it all out in case I got the brain freeze thing going on. And what happens then? Monotony. Whenever I prepare a 30-60 minute talk I put enough together for a 10 week college course. I want it to be perfect...to tell people everything they could possibly want or need to know.
I have always wanted to be one of those people who can tell funny stories and say clever things that people want to write down and take home and put on their refrigerators.
As I was sitting with my group of colleagues, waiting to do my talk, I was hysterical! I had everyone laughing and interacting and we were having a great time. I told them how nervous I get doing these talks and they all gave me great ideas and encouraged me and said they'd be there to help and we got all excited about the show we could put on Some of the ideas were gutwrenchingly funny.
But by the time I had to go talk I was worn out. The soldiers were worn out too. I tried some of the ideas we had all talked about, lost track of time...I mean, I didn't know if I had been talking 5 minutes or 45! They couldn't hook my computer up to the projector so the idea of using a funny video as a way to start off the talk went straight into the trash.
When I got stuck I turned to my colleagues who gave me ideas of what o do next.
I had them roleplaying, shouting out ideas of what might help them deal with anger, I had them standing and doing stretches to loosen up the body parts they store their stress in...and they were laughing!
I left thinking I have just done the most disjointed presentation of the century (thankfully that's only 10 years now) and was met with compliments and comments from the staff that they hadn't heard them laughing and interacting so much....not just al day, but hardly ever.
So I took the leap of faith that my ability to "wing it" and be funny might actually fill up half an hour and I did it....not perfectly....but for some reason other people did not notice all the mistakes I made. And maybe some did but still thought it was a good time.
Maybe, with a little more practice, I can actually be so good at this that I don't lose consciousness out of fear, and people will have my quotes at home on their refrigerators after all.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Comments to Readers
Hey Peoples!
Leave me some comments! Sign up as a follower! Give me ideas for something else to write about!
Leave me some comments! Sign up as a follower! Give me ideas for something else to write about!
Saturday, February 6, 2010
This Is Dedicated To The Father I Love
This weekend marks the eighth anniversary of my Dad's death. It was just about the stupidest thing that has ever happened in my life, I have to tell you. This incredibly healthy man, who cut one food after another out of his diet each time he read some article about its unhealthy attributes, until he was down to eating bagels with bananas sliced on them, went in for an angiogram and was told he had a lot of blockage in his arteries. The doctor said, "I hear you were shoveling snow off the roof last week. Don't do that anymore". And that was the beginning of the end.
He went in for surgery which they couldn't do because he had some scarring from a previous surgery they had to repair and scheduled the heart surgery for the next week. I felt like that was a bad omen. When he had the surgery they found the walls of his heart were very thin and they tore so when he came out of surgery they had to keep him under a few days. When he was conscious, they had trouble getting his lungs inflated. He was in the hospital 13 days. My mother and I stayed at the hospital for a few nights and were called in the middle of the night a few times for emergencies with him and we were so worried for him. I remember wanting to get him home where he belonged so we could take care of him and love him up and feed him good food. He looked so sad and unhappy in that hospital that it hurt my heart. We got him home and he died two days later. He was only 79 years old.
When I got the call in the middle of the night that he had been taken to the hospital I didn't understand, probably didn't even remember who I was since I don't do well being woken up in the middle of the night. When I got to the hospital my mother and sister greeted me at the door and told me he was dead and I couldn't believe it. We all gathered around him in the hospital, in shock, not knowing what to do. I went over to kiss him and remember thinking "you're not in this body anymore but I need to kiss it anyway". It was so surreal and odd. This body looked just like my dad but it was dead. Couldn't make sense of it.
I felt guilty that I had wanted him home...maybe we should have left him in the hospital longer so they could have saved him. I was angry at him that he hadn't fought harder, that he had allowed death to take him in such a passive way.
I had lost other people I loved in my life but no one this close, nothing quite as earth-shattering as this loss has been. It affected me and my family in ways that we have still not recovered from.
What I want to talk about really is the years that preceded his death and the work that he and I did on our relationship which I think helped me cope better with the loss in the end.
My dad was not a perfect man, nor was he the perfect father. During my childhood, in many ways we were very close and loving and in many ways there was a lot of pain caused by misunderstandings and powers we were not really aware of. He had gone through things in his life that had affected him and he strove to be a better person than his parents had been which in some ways made him less available to me emotionally than I needed as a child. We had good times and we had bad times like most fathers and daughters.
In my twenties, when I started to try to work on my own issues as a separate and independent adult, I found myself angry at him for things he had done that I perceived as weak or unloving or judgemental. Lucky for me, my father was a man I could talk to about these things. He'd share pieces of information with me that helped me understand him a little bit better and understand more about the choices he had made in life. But I was still too scared to talk about the big stuff.
It wasn't until after I got divorced in my thirties that we really got to work. Once again I was working on my issues at a deeper level and found myself feeling angry and resentful. I found it difficult to spend time with both my parents together for many reasons. I thought about it and decided that if I wanted to have good relationships with them I would have to see them, at least occasionally, one on one and try to build our relationships into something mutually loving and satisfying. It felt like I was breaking some big rules and I worried they would be hurt or angry and I did it anyway. Part of my desire to do this was that I thought about them dying some day and I wanted to make sure I was the best daughter I could be every day so that I would not feel guilty, or that I had missed opportunities when it was too late.
So I started seeing each of them once a month, out for lunch or a movie...anything that gave us time to get to know each other and work out our unfinished business. If I didn't call him I knew I'd get a call from my Dad just checking in to see how I was doing, once every week or two.
During my talks with my father he shared more and more about himself, he showed love and caring for me and in many ways he validated a lot of my experiences in childhood that helped me stop feeling so crazy. I was able to get to know him as a person and share my life with him. The anger melted away as I came to see him, accept who he was and feel accepted in return. He shared my desire to remove obstacles to the loving intimacy we desired and we worked hard and had great success.
When he was lying in the hospital bed, waiting for his angiogram, I went in alone to talk to him for a while. I needed so badly to say some things about how I was feeling but I didn't want to make him scared. I gulped and tried to breathe deeply and I said, "You know, I feel like I have you deeply inside of me but I am not ready to be without you." He thanked me for talking to him about this and said he was scared too and wasn't ready to go either.
No one can tell another person how to be the best person, the best person, the best friend, the best parent or the best child. Each person gets to decide for themselves what that would look like.
No one can tell you the right way to live your life and be in your relationships or what to do to make your life joyful and satisfying.
From my 55 years of life, 30 of which I have been offically a therapist, what I can do is share stories and information with you that I have learned from my own life and from the lives of all of the wonderfully trusting people who have been generous enough to share their lives and stories with me. I can tell you a bit about what others have done and what might work for you.
Everyone comes out of their childhood with unresolved issues from family experiences or other life experiences which have caused them pain or confusion. This unfinished business can get in the way of us feeling good about ourselves as well as keeping us from having satisfying healthy relationships with others.
Some people choose to not rock the boat and continue to follow the rules of their family system because they fear being alone or unloved and don't want to take the risk. Some people choose to totally separate from their families because they don't like them or feel they are toxic and unsafe to be around. Others choose to start their own family and focus there and be involved very little with their family of origin. And others, like me, choose to try to work things out and make their relationships as honest and healthy and free of leftover hurts as possible ( and sometimes we try too hard for too long and put others before our selves when we shouldn't).
When people choose to separate from their families they often get a lot of pressure from others as many people get uncomfortable with this notion. It's scary to consider cutting themselves adrift from family even though many people want to often enough. I had never heard this before moving to Minnesota but they will often hear, "....you better go back and try to work things out, what if they die before you get the chance...won't you feel bad then?" This leaves people feeling confused and guilty about their choice. And yet many families or family members are not easy to work things out with. You can't work on a relationship with someone who is abusive or emotionally unavailable, who doesn't take responsibility for their own piece of the problem, who is active in an addiction or who has untreated mental illness. You can't work things out with someone who doesn't want to. It takes two to tango. Sometimes more.
The first step in all of this is to take a good hard look at yourself. What is unfinished for you? What part did you have, if any, in the problems? Who do you need to work things out with? Are they a person that you could talk things over with, alone, with a professional? And finally, where would you like to be in your relationships and in your life?
You may be able to figure this out on your own or you might want to go talk to a counselor to help you sort things out.
Secondly you look at options for how to reach your goals. Do you change your behavior, set healthier boundaries and see if that can change the unhappy family interactions? Do you go directly to the person and try to address the problems in a respectful, non-accusing and non-shaming way? Do you invite the person or people into therapy with you to get the help of someone who is trained to help you communicate better?
When you think about what you want and need to do before someone dies, you have to think first about what you need from it. Are there things you have always wanted to say that you've been too scared or proud to say? Are there questions you've always wanted to ask but were scared to find out the answers? Are there activities or things you've always wanted to do with them but thought they'd think you were stupid or that they wouldn't want to do them with you?
Even though I thought a lot about it all and worked hard at it with my Dad, the end was a shock and knocked me on my ass. I cried every day for over a year. I missed him. I missed his phone calls and his dumb jokes. I missed talking to him about my life and my struggles even though I can tell you exactly what he would say about any of it.
As the years have gone on I have felt sad that he hasn't seen my kids grow up. He didn't get to meet the man of my dreams who came to me three years after my Dad died. He never got to see my beautiful grand-daughter.
It took another two years, three years after he died, before I stopped thinking of him every day. I would find myself in tears at the oddest times for no apparent reason (which my cousin told me are called "grief spurts").
I started talking to him right away. That has been a great comfort. Often times it was when I would be driving in my car and I would talk to him about what was going on and what I needed his help with. And I found I got the comfort and solace I needed. I highly recommend this to everyone.
Other people may be uncomfortable with your grief and say things about how you seem to be sad for an awful long time, but I have to say that everyone grieves in their own way and in their own time. No one has the right to tell you how to do it or how long to take. In fact, I think that when we fight it and try to "get over it", it takes longer and is harder to get over than if we let our selves grieve naturally.
We will have disbelief. I found myself saying over and over, "this is SO stupid!"
We will have guilt. No matter what we all feel it after a loss. It's a guaranteed reaction.
We will have anger. Rational or not, it just ain't right. Anger at ourselves, at them, at others, at God or anyone or anything that makes sense to us at the time.
And eventually we will weave this loss into the rest of our life and find a way to live again, without them.
I chose to work things out with my father and I was lucky that he was ready and willing to join in the process with me. I suffered at the loss of him and continue to miss him to this day. And I have chosen to weave his soulful being, his essence into me and my life so that I will never be parted from him.
For me, this is peace.
He went in for surgery which they couldn't do because he had some scarring from a previous surgery they had to repair and scheduled the heart surgery for the next week. I felt like that was a bad omen. When he had the surgery they found the walls of his heart were very thin and they tore so when he came out of surgery they had to keep him under a few days. When he was conscious, they had trouble getting his lungs inflated. He was in the hospital 13 days. My mother and I stayed at the hospital for a few nights and were called in the middle of the night a few times for emergencies with him and we were so worried for him. I remember wanting to get him home where he belonged so we could take care of him and love him up and feed him good food. He looked so sad and unhappy in that hospital that it hurt my heart. We got him home and he died two days later. He was only 79 years old.
When I got the call in the middle of the night that he had been taken to the hospital I didn't understand, probably didn't even remember who I was since I don't do well being woken up in the middle of the night. When I got to the hospital my mother and sister greeted me at the door and told me he was dead and I couldn't believe it. We all gathered around him in the hospital, in shock, not knowing what to do. I went over to kiss him and remember thinking "you're not in this body anymore but I need to kiss it anyway". It was so surreal and odd. This body looked just like my dad but it was dead. Couldn't make sense of it.
I felt guilty that I had wanted him home...maybe we should have left him in the hospital longer so they could have saved him. I was angry at him that he hadn't fought harder, that he had allowed death to take him in such a passive way.
I had lost other people I loved in my life but no one this close, nothing quite as earth-shattering as this loss has been. It affected me and my family in ways that we have still not recovered from.
What I want to talk about really is the years that preceded his death and the work that he and I did on our relationship which I think helped me cope better with the loss in the end.
My dad was not a perfect man, nor was he the perfect father. During my childhood, in many ways we were very close and loving and in many ways there was a lot of pain caused by misunderstandings and powers we were not really aware of. He had gone through things in his life that had affected him and he strove to be a better person than his parents had been which in some ways made him less available to me emotionally than I needed as a child. We had good times and we had bad times like most fathers and daughters.
In my twenties, when I started to try to work on my own issues as a separate and independent adult, I found myself angry at him for things he had done that I perceived as weak or unloving or judgemental. Lucky for me, my father was a man I could talk to about these things. He'd share pieces of information with me that helped me understand him a little bit better and understand more about the choices he had made in life. But I was still too scared to talk about the big stuff.
It wasn't until after I got divorced in my thirties that we really got to work. Once again I was working on my issues at a deeper level and found myself feeling angry and resentful. I found it difficult to spend time with both my parents together for many reasons. I thought about it and decided that if I wanted to have good relationships with them I would have to see them, at least occasionally, one on one and try to build our relationships into something mutually loving and satisfying. It felt like I was breaking some big rules and I worried they would be hurt or angry and I did it anyway. Part of my desire to do this was that I thought about them dying some day and I wanted to make sure I was the best daughter I could be every day so that I would not feel guilty, or that I had missed opportunities when it was too late.
So I started seeing each of them once a month, out for lunch or a movie...anything that gave us time to get to know each other and work out our unfinished business. If I didn't call him I knew I'd get a call from my Dad just checking in to see how I was doing, once every week or two.
During my talks with my father he shared more and more about himself, he showed love and caring for me and in many ways he validated a lot of my experiences in childhood that helped me stop feeling so crazy. I was able to get to know him as a person and share my life with him. The anger melted away as I came to see him, accept who he was and feel accepted in return. He shared my desire to remove obstacles to the loving intimacy we desired and we worked hard and had great success.
When he was lying in the hospital bed, waiting for his angiogram, I went in alone to talk to him for a while. I needed so badly to say some things about how I was feeling but I didn't want to make him scared. I gulped and tried to breathe deeply and I said, "You know, I feel like I have you deeply inside of me but I am not ready to be without you." He thanked me for talking to him about this and said he was scared too and wasn't ready to go either.
No one can tell another person how to be the best person, the best person, the best friend, the best parent or the best child. Each person gets to decide for themselves what that would look like.
No one can tell you the right way to live your life and be in your relationships or what to do to make your life joyful and satisfying.
From my 55 years of life, 30 of which I have been offically a therapist, what I can do is share stories and information with you that I have learned from my own life and from the lives of all of the wonderfully trusting people who have been generous enough to share their lives and stories with me. I can tell you a bit about what others have done and what might work for you.
Everyone comes out of their childhood with unresolved issues from family experiences or other life experiences which have caused them pain or confusion. This unfinished business can get in the way of us feeling good about ourselves as well as keeping us from having satisfying healthy relationships with others.
Some people choose to not rock the boat and continue to follow the rules of their family system because they fear being alone or unloved and don't want to take the risk. Some people choose to totally separate from their families because they don't like them or feel they are toxic and unsafe to be around. Others choose to start their own family and focus there and be involved very little with their family of origin. And others, like me, choose to try to work things out and make their relationships as honest and healthy and free of leftover hurts as possible ( and sometimes we try too hard for too long and put others before our selves when we shouldn't).
When people choose to separate from their families they often get a lot of pressure from others as many people get uncomfortable with this notion. It's scary to consider cutting themselves adrift from family even though many people want to often enough. I had never heard this before moving to Minnesota but they will often hear, "....you better go back and try to work things out, what if they die before you get the chance...won't you feel bad then?" This leaves people feeling confused and guilty about their choice. And yet many families or family members are not easy to work things out with. You can't work on a relationship with someone who is abusive or emotionally unavailable, who doesn't take responsibility for their own piece of the problem, who is active in an addiction or who has untreated mental illness. You can't work things out with someone who doesn't want to. It takes two to tango. Sometimes more.
The first step in all of this is to take a good hard look at yourself. What is unfinished for you? What part did you have, if any, in the problems? Who do you need to work things out with? Are they a person that you could talk things over with, alone, with a professional? And finally, where would you like to be in your relationships and in your life?
You may be able to figure this out on your own or you might want to go talk to a counselor to help you sort things out.
Secondly you look at options for how to reach your goals. Do you change your behavior, set healthier boundaries and see if that can change the unhappy family interactions? Do you go directly to the person and try to address the problems in a respectful, non-accusing and non-shaming way? Do you invite the person or people into therapy with you to get the help of someone who is trained to help you communicate better?
When you think about what you want and need to do before someone dies, you have to think first about what you need from it. Are there things you have always wanted to say that you've been too scared or proud to say? Are there questions you've always wanted to ask but were scared to find out the answers? Are there activities or things you've always wanted to do with them but thought they'd think you were stupid or that they wouldn't want to do them with you?
Even though I thought a lot about it all and worked hard at it with my Dad, the end was a shock and knocked me on my ass. I cried every day for over a year. I missed him. I missed his phone calls and his dumb jokes. I missed talking to him about my life and my struggles even though I can tell you exactly what he would say about any of it.
As the years have gone on I have felt sad that he hasn't seen my kids grow up. He didn't get to meet the man of my dreams who came to me three years after my Dad died. He never got to see my beautiful grand-daughter.
It took another two years, three years after he died, before I stopped thinking of him every day. I would find myself in tears at the oddest times for no apparent reason (which my cousin told me are called "grief spurts").
I started talking to him right away. That has been a great comfort. Often times it was when I would be driving in my car and I would talk to him about what was going on and what I needed his help with. And I found I got the comfort and solace I needed. I highly recommend this to everyone.
Other people may be uncomfortable with your grief and say things about how you seem to be sad for an awful long time, but I have to say that everyone grieves in their own way and in their own time. No one has the right to tell you how to do it or how long to take. In fact, I think that when we fight it and try to "get over it", it takes longer and is harder to get over than if we let our selves grieve naturally.
We will have disbelief. I found myself saying over and over, "this is SO stupid!"
We will have guilt. No matter what we all feel it after a loss. It's a guaranteed reaction.
We will have anger. Rational or not, it just ain't right. Anger at ourselves, at them, at others, at God or anyone or anything that makes sense to us at the time.
And eventually we will weave this loss into the rest of our life and find a way to live again, without them.
I chose to work things out with my father and I was lucky that he was ready and willing to join in the process with me. I suffered at the loss of him and continue to miss him to this day. And I have chosen to weave his soulful being, his essence into me and my life so that I will never be parted from him.
For me, this is peace.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
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