inside me

I don’t know what happened yesterday. It wasn’t about the argument… it was but it wasn’t. It was my reaction and where it came from and how I felt.

The fire of a thousand suns was in me and I despised myself. I felt like my mother. I felt mad. Like a stick of rock with madness written through me… like it’s how I’ll always be and I can’t change it.

I could have really hurt myself and not felt it. I contemplated it… but it wouldn’t have changed anything. I’d have just felt more crazy.

I wish I could get a handle on my thoughts when I’m angry.. I wish I could articulate how I feel.. but all there is a rage that I can’t express.. that I can’t understand and I’m lost again.

conditions of worth

School was tough last night… and I was still awake at 4am thinking about it.

We were discussing conditions of worth that we had adopted and I really struggled to explain the condition I felt Mum placed upon me. It all seemd so huge and tangled and all I knew was that there was one.

But when my tutor pushed me it seemed simpl; I must be OK.

I must understand where other people are coming from, how they are motivated and therefore forgive… let things wash over me. Mum treated me poorly.. but she was unwell..

..for me, acceptance/love/positive regard was achieved by being someone who understood, accepted and forgave others. Someone who did not get angry. Calm in a crisis…

there just wasn’t room for me to feel.

…and somehow seeing it written down on my counselling notes last night…it all crashed down. But this morning I feel OK again. Calm… like I’m conditioned to.

the organismic valuing process

A poor self concept and countless internalised conditions of worth are typical attributes of clients accessing therapy. Such people are cut off from their essential resources as human beings and divorced from their intrinsic ability to make judgments about their existence – their organismic valuing process in Rogers’ terminology. The human organism, it is argued, can essentially be relied upon to provide the individual with trustworthy messages, and this is discernible in the physiological process of the entire body and throughout the process of growth by which an individual’s potentialities and capacities are brought to realisation. This fundamental intrinsic or ‘organismic’ valuing and process helps the person to have a sense of what they need from other people. Unfortunately, however, the need for the positive regard and approval of others is overwhelming and not infrequently this need takes precedence over the promptings of the intrinsic valuing process which, if followed, could perhaps earn the anger or displeasure of a parent r other significant person whose approval is crucial to the individual’s physical and psychological well-being. When the organismic valuing process comes into conflict with the need for approval the outcome must be confusion, and where this happens repeatedly a person will be forced to develop a self-concept which serves to estrange him almost completely from his organismic experiencing or to make him profoundly distrustful of it. The loss of trust in the promptings of the organismic valuing process can result in the creation of a self-concept which attempts to blot out such promptings altogether, or to view them with the most critical scepticism. A person who has been told repeatedly, for example, that it is wrong and destructive to be angry may arrive at the point where he says of himself, ‘I an a person who never feels angry’, or just as disastrously ‘I am a person who deserves punishment because I am always feeling angry’. In the first case, the promptings of anger have been totally repressed from consciousness, whereas in the second they are a cause for self-condemnation and guilt. In both cases the resulting self-concept is far removed from any sense of trust in the reliability of the organismic valuing of direct and untrammeled experience. In therapy there sometimes comes a crucial moment when trust in the dependability of the organismic valuing process is restored. however temporary or partial this may be. Such moments do much to strengthen the therapists faith in the clients’ ability to find his own way forward and point to the actualising tendency or innate capacity in all human beings to move towards the fulfilment of their potential. At the deepest level there is in all of us a yearning and the wherewithal to become more than we are.

Dave Mearns 1999

the deadline approaches

It shouldn’t be this hard, it really should’t. It’s a job application. I’ve written them before… good ones too. But I’ve sat here for two hours. I researched assistive technology…which got me nowhere fast. I know I should also research the disibility legislation but … it feels so big an unmanageable. I can’t see each section as a piece that needs completing… it all just feels like a huge thing that I’ll never get done and that I don’t know how to take apart.

Besides which, I’m pissed off with C. Possibly unjustly so. But we woke up at 8am and she grumbled something about how she’d been awake half the night and needed more sleep and I should go work on this application. So.. the dog and I made breakfast, went for our mornng walk and started work. Just went in to wake her and she asked how it was going… I said that it wasn’t at that I needed help to which I got the supportive reply..

“.ughh… you know I need a day off today. I can’t sit up until midnight doing your application. Just go and get it done.”

….which just made me crumple a bit. I know I’m fragile at the moment. And she wont have meant it like it sounded… or maybe she did.. but sometimes she’s just a cunt, I know that about her… it’s just that.. I feel desperate. I need to work again or I’ll go entirely insane. But I feel so far from competent and employable and I don’t know where to start or what to do and .. I feel totally alone again..

… fucking hate this. Need to snap out of this pathetic state of mind soon. I’m irritating myself so God knows what those around me are thinking.

a basic lack of empathy

It’s all so fragile, this house of cards. Like the slightest wind could knock it over.. there’s no foundation.

I’m so confused about the truth. Everyone has one. I don’t know what mine is. I feel like the ability to see other people’s points of view, to empathise with everyone makes it all so much harder. If I could just see things more narrowly… maybe I’d know what I think. Instead what I think changes by the day, the hour… each time I talk to someone else about it, I take on a little of their perspective until. So now, the only person I can’t empathise with is myself.

don’t fool yourself
into thinking things are simple
nobody’s lying and still the stories don’t line up
why do you try to hold on to
what you’ll never get a hold on
you wouldn’t try to put the ocean in a paper cup

rootless

…no calls… mother, father, step father…

…and I feel too hurt to call. Even just to say..

merry christmas.

I swear to god, if I ever have a child, I will never make them feel this alone.

it’s how you read me

I’m listening to this as I write.. and somehow it fits…

I can’t win with her. She responded in her usual passive aggressive and emotive way after being shown an email I wrote to D (confidentiality breach well and truly noted) in which I said..

“I just don’t know that I can continute to care for her at the expense of myself”

The response this got from Mum was a list of all the things she had ever done for me. A catalogue of supportive acts over the last few years and the sentiment that she was devastated that I could say such a thing.

The thing is…what I really meant, and couldn’t say in that last email, is that I’ve been keeping her secrets at my own expense. I know about the affair and because she doesn’t know that I do, she’s allowed me to think that certain things are my fault, when really, they’re not. (This will probably make little sense to someone who doesn’t know about all this..).. and keeping that secret in order to protect the feelings of those around me (incliding her) has come at a cost to me. To my family. To my heart. I kept it out love.. not oligation. Not because I keep score of who supports who the most and who owes what… but beccause there are things, I thought, that are mistakes and best left in the past. And I could do that, I could…. but she won’t.

I’m supposed to be calling her tonight..two choices…

• Try to make her see where I’m coming from…persuade her that the quote in the email wasn’t about what she thought it was… but in the end, it turns ut to be true whichever way you choose to read it. She’ll feel hurt.. our relationship might not ever be the same..
• Decide that there are some words that are not better in the air than in your head.

dislocation

I started writing in the other blog. The one I started so that I could just write.. stuff.. but today is not the day.

Horrible day yesterday. Was feeling a little better today but had an email from Mum half an hour ago and feel crap again.

I think the problem for me is and has been since I can remember, that I can always see more than one truth. And I constantly search for one. The truth of truths. The way things really are. When really, there isn’t one.

1. I love her

2. I dispise her

3. She’s mentally ill

4. She’s not ill, she’s just not nice

5. She’s a good mum

6. She’s failed me

7. I’ve failed her

8. This could go on forever

the reply to your email that you’ll never get

No, the issue for me isn’t that I haven’t called (because that’s what’s we mean when we say ‘disappeared’). I may not have called her, however I have made no attempt to block or discourage communication with Mum. The same cannot be said for her.

I am standing up for myself because no one else does. I’m not saying that I know how to, but I’m trying. Everyone was horrified that Dad didn’t call me. Why is it different now that Mum and I are arguing? Unless of course you consider that I am in the wrong, in which case this issue will stay unresolved for some time.

…if you were in Mum’s position and I was Arwyn, I can’t imagine that you would allow this to continue. We have always joked that I am nothing to do with you and at the moment, that’s how I feel. I don’t feel as though I have a family that love me unconditionally, I feel completely alone.

I can’t describe how this feels and I have no idea how to recover from this. And yet, I feel like the message is that I have done something wrong and even if I had, she’s my mother. Why is no one helping me?

I’m not saying this because I expect you to fix anything. That’s not your job. I just want someone to fight for me.

I always knew that Dad’s priorities lay with his new family.. I always feared that when mum told me that she hated me, she really meant it.

There was a time when it was all so clear.. the line between Us and Them.

We were high functioners who held down jobs and got up and washed and dressed each day and earned enough money to survive and sure, we had our problems… but we’d be OK.

Then there were the others. Those who watched day time TV all day because they couldn’t quite manage to hold down a job. They had mental health problems they couldn’t manage without medication and their lives were lived from one day to the next. Hand to mouth…

And it seems to me the line between gets more blurry by the day. It’s ballancing act..

..it would be so easy to fall and there’s no net uder this trapeze.