Figuring Stuff Out, Maybe

A big thing I had been putting a lot of emotional energy into happened last week. To get to that point I had to do a lot of work in the emotional trenches. It was horribly hard, and one of the reasons I started therapy again. I found a lot of it was absolutely impossible to be rational about. When I say it pressed my buttons you can imagine me dealing with one of those great church organs with all the stops and pedals. I may have been able to bang out a passable Chopsticks but spent most of my time attempting to play Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do what was required of me. It was that I was getting in my own way. My therapist and I spent time talking this week about the patterns of self-sabotage that I run and how I am so often my own worst enemy.

Therapy is a funny beast. I never look forward to it, but it invariably lightens some of the huge, emotional load I carry with me. If I can accept the difficult, shameful things about myself, I can negotiate with and ultimately change them. It is genuinely empowering to realise that so much changes if I do the work for myself. I still fucking hate doing it though. I do not therapise with any graciousness. I often feel like I am a guest, turning up to someone’s house with a massive bag of shit instead of a bunch of flowers. It seems wrong to sully such a clean space with all this dirt.

What helps is the realisation that I am not a guest. I have entered into a relationship with someone else on the understanding that it is exactly the right space to unpack this stuff. Between us we are responsible for creating a safe, empty space, hived off from the rest of my life and the world. The absolutely best way to use it, is to unpack all that muck and figure out what to do with it. This space does not exist before our hour begins and it disappears once the hour finishes. It is as good an illustration of quantum reality I’m likely to get outside of a physics lab.

I’ve had hundreds of hours of therapy in my life. I’ve tried all the accepted methods and quite a few of the completely off the charts bonkers things. I keep trying because living with myself is incredibly hard and I am the only person I am incapable of running away from. When something works, the peace in my head is the best gift I can give myself.

I used to think I could ‘fix’ myself by finding one, single thing to do that would work and that when I found it, I would never have to do anything else again. I would be bright and brilliant and know how to do life, just like that.

What I have had to learn is that nobody learns to do life, just like that. Life so far has proved to be longer and stranger than I ever thought it would be. Navigating it works best when I am willing to be flexible, when I embrace change, no matter how difficult it is. When I accept that there is no ‘one way’ to do anything or be anything. The therapy that would have worked for me as an eighteen-year-old, would never work for me as a fifty-one year old, because I am not the same person anymore. I wonder if I would recognise myself if I bumped into eighteen-year-old me now? I might, but I expect I might pretend I didn’t.

The thing about all these life changes is that they are not consistent or even. It reminds me of the biology lesson where we learned that every seven years, every cell in a person’s body is different, but not every part of us renews and changes at the same time. The cells in our eyes change really quickly, so you might get ten changes of eyes in the seven years it takes everything else to change. I am beginning to see that emotions, beliefs and thoughts change in the same way.

Some of me is very wise. Some of me is an absolute fucking idiot. Some of me holds damaging beliefs that I haven’t done anything about because I didn’t even know I held them until something happened and I hurt myself or others. As I journey through life and therapy, I uncover things about myself that I simply had no idea about. Sometimes I uncover things I did know about but was too ashamed or frightened to deal with, so I just covered them right back up again. Some of it is old and foolish and some of it is old and dangerous.

Most of the really difficult stuff is old. Things I learned as a child that in the cold light of day were only helpful when I was five but which have been keeping parts of me stuck aged five ever since. For the last few weeks, primary school aged me has been driving the emotional bus and that’s been a ride in every sense of the word. It has been neither my favourite nor my best. Grown up me decided that the best way to tackle this was to shout at myself. It turns out that was a terrible idea when I was five and remains a terrible idea now I’m ten times older.

And that’s where the therapy comes in. The space my therapist and I carve out together is neutral and safe. It has no temporal boundaries that allow reality to leak in. This means five-year-old me can come out and play in complete safety. I can talk to her there, not as a parent or as a child. I can just be with her and I can allow myself to be curious about what is going on for her and compassionate about whatever she tells me. There is no judgment and there are no terrible consequences for whatever it is that she wants to say, the beliefs she holds or the things she has done. It is a space of acceptance.

Sometimes in that space there is nothing to be done in the way we usually think of when we attempt to fix things. I never really understood the power of bearing witness until recently, but it is something I am learning to do for myself. I listen to what I have to say. I accept whatever it is, no matter how daft it might seem back in the real world. I do not try to fix it. Sometimes I find that all I ever wanted was to be seen and heard and for someone to try to understand me without putting words in my mouth or telling me what I really think.

In the real world, that time has gone. Nobody is going to go back and cuddle that broken five-year-old who doesn’t understand the world but is making a valiant attempt anyway. In the quantum space of the therapy room, I can do that for myself. It might seem like quasi-mystical bullshit, but it works for me. It is working for me.

The hard thing that I did last week? It didn’t work out. I thought I’d be crushed. I am not, which is surprising, but good. I’m putting it down to an early win for the therapy. I’m not saying I’ll be skipping to the next session but it will make it easier to go.