Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Smooth and Supple is Bad in Landing Gear

For my 50th post, I am going to write something of the truth that I've learned about myself.  I am looking for a mother.  A great deal of my life's troubles, and alas, there are a few, stem from that drive.  I am not seeking out some great Oedipal thing, but more the basics - care and comfort in the arms of the mother I never really had.  

So much of my behavior over the last 4 years has been the subconscious drive to find peace when I've had none.  I've driven so hard and so long with nothing, that my infantile brain began to remind me that I needed something, and desperately so.  This is not a knock on my SO, as she is neither my mother nor does she ever need to be.  That said, she is not the nurturing, warm and gushy type.  She just isn't, and it isn't in her DNA nor her experience.  She has many charms, and is a good person, but doesn't smother with love.

But like so many men who've reached my age without ever having had a mothering experience, there is some primal drive to get there that seems to overtake.  The women I've spent time with outside my marriage, damaged and unhinged as they all were (that is my real mother), all, to a one, had the mothering gene.  It was the only comfort I got from the relationships, even as they inevitably turned to a borderline (pun intended) disaster.  I would get care and comfort, mothering of sorts, but at the only place I've ever known it, the crazy bar.  

That sounds like a basic thing, to call this a learned truth, but to be honest, I don't think I understood what the hell I was doing to myself, and why I was doing it during that time.  Every single relationship and pursuit was to find my mother, or at least the crazy version I know, because I need to feel that love.  

Now, to greater things upon realization, and that is to find that love.   I don't really know where to look.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Living at the Eight and a Halfs

Depression leaves me at the eight and a halfs.  You know when you are in the hospital, and they ask you to explain where your pain is on a scale of 1 to 10?  I explained to someone today that when I get to the point where my internal suffering passes 8.5 on the scale, that there is nothing I wouldn't do to make it stop.  I used the analogy that I would cut off my own arm, and that it might even seem logical to do that, to make it stop.  I mean, what's crazier, thinking that cutting off your arm might solve the problem, or starting to wonder if it is, in fact, crazy to think it is crazy...

I shared as well the real trauma at the eight and a halfs...   The constant failures.  The failure to do much more than raise your head above the pillow, to accomplish one single thing beyond breathing all day and then the lumps.  The lumps of self-flaggelation, self-loathing and self-hatred for letting yourself and others down yet again...  

If only I could just do something, anything, it would be better.  I've survived a hundred debillitating traumas, but I can't make my brain do what I need it to do.  That's a horrific sensation living at the eight and a halfs.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Short on Posting, Long on Self-Pity

The truth of the matter is that I've had a setback of sorts in my depression.  I am back to feeling exhausted and worn out.  The positive looking side of me says that it is a natural whiplash effect from all the stuff I've been touching on the inside that just asked for some time to heal and regroup.  The negative side feels a little hopeless and lost in the return of the canius negra.   But the loudest voice is the positive one, though not always...

I am still doing all the my work, still attending meetings, still talking and learning as much as I can.  I am still doing one or three little things to improve the pace every day, but I am tired, woefully so.  It does bother me that I felt like I was winning, but sometimes I think it's a sin, to feel like I'm winning when I'm losing again... 

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Gunter Glieben Glauchen Globen

It starts with nonsense and then it gets nowhere, fast.  

Today I won.  

I am not less than I was when I awoke.  And for that, I win.  

If you've been there, you know what I mean.  
 

Friday, March 11, 2011

No, I'm Not Saying I'm Sorry

No, No, No, No!!!

Saw the T today.  It was pleasant, fun and a little weird, in the good way.  It was the last of my 6 EAP sessions.  I am better, there is no doubt and there is hope on the horizon.  We talked a lot of my resentments and my frustrations with how things have been.  

There were a couple of salient moments, moments of great solace and comfort.  First, is that she validated what I've know for so long.  That I've lived a left so bereft of care and comfort, so absent of basic human contact, that I have sought it, when I needed it most, the only comfort I've ever known, even in the arms of the crazy and malicious.  

I'm truly sorry.  I am who I am, the product of where I've come from, where I've been, and not going anywhere specific, but to safety and security.  I wish there was no such thing as fighting, that the world could just be this perfect place and everybody could just get along, but obviously that can't happen... 1:42...  The look says everything I feel... 

Thursday, March 10, 2011

I've Got A Dangling Chad

Life is weird. I know I am the first person to ever say that.  For my originality, I am pretty proud.  Ok, that's not totally true.  But I am feeling the burden lift of my demons.  Maybe not perfect, maybe not ideal, but not the same as its been.  I stood in a colleague's office today, yelling and dropping F-bombs about something retarded that his retarded boss was asking for that is actually in my domain.  I was passionate, engaged and committed to my craft and trade and it eeked out in violence of action.  I was in the game and it was obvious.  I care.   Deeply.  Passionately.  At one point, someone 40 feet down the hall sent an email to my colleague asking if everything was OK, cause all they heard were F-bombs and yelling.  I had an audience of really smart people hanging on my every word and fully engaged and revelling in the mirth of the show.  I was teaching, engaging and funny.  They learned some incredibly complex concepts during my little show and were smiling and laughing at my outburst.  It was the wunderkind teaching how deep the skilllzzzz go.   There was shock and awe. 

I've not done that in 10 years.   

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Like a Dirty Sock, Dirty Sock, Dirty Sock

I am back.  Was a productive downtime.  I really had gone too far, too fast and was in danger of implosion.  Implosion for me is to begin to disassociate and to live outside myself, finding solace for my pain in everything and anything that resolves it, even if only for a second.  It does lend itself to some guilt that with an illness that takes all of the good from life for so many, that I have found a few little behavioral things that can offer a touch of relief.  That is completely said in an ironic voice, as those "things" are also incredibly self-destructive and self-mutilating.  

So what have I been doing?  Well, the depression that I woke up with on Saturday, the day after my self-imposed blogging exile, has passed.  I was doing too much and I am grateful being measure that I got a wake up call before I sunk deeper.  Chalk one up to my enthusiasm, and the good sense to surround myself with people who've got good sense, as I seem to lack it sometimes.  Since then, life has been ok.  Up and down with the SO, but that is a matter of a) my inlaws visiting, always a stressful experience and b) some of the anger she feels towards me bubbling to the surface.  I am ok with the anger, and I feel I deserve it, but it is very counter-productive to making things better.  I simply don't handle it very well, and shut down emotionally when she's on me.  And that is exactly a trigger for her to get angrier.  I feel as though her angry side just wants to hurt me, hurt me as I've hurt her, regardless of the consequences.  She's let it fly a few times and I feel like I've been in the ring for 30 seconds with a young Mike Tyson.  It leaves me dazed and confused and seriously riding my internal self-mutilation pony.  I get on that little horse and pound and beat on myself until I am thoroughly ass-kicked and bleeding for all orifices.  But while some shame and remorse in this situation is good and needed, it doesn't help that I don't have a healthy way of handling those feelings and only abuse myself with them.  

With that, I've exhausted myself again, but I'll be back for another episode of my valiant, vainglorious battle through the Noonday Demons....   

Friday, March 4, 2011

In the White Room With Black Curtains

I am under orders tonight.  Those orders come from my T, who I saw today.  Those orders are to take a break from all things emotional for a day or three.  She's concerned that circumstance and enthusiasm are going to leave the cupboard bare of cope and hope.  I am feeling good, but I am exhausted emotionally.  I don't have much left in the tank and need to take care of that.  I've not been work-functional for a couple of days, and it is obviously due to the heady number of emotion-driven events of the last week or so.  

So with that, I slumber and rest, and onto a new day.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Tell Me Lies Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

It starts here.  

Lies 

I read this posting today and I was floored by the fact that something I've been so crushingly ashamed of actually has a reasonable basis in logic and reason.  If I look at it with some honesty (ironic?) I would say that my lying falls into two parts of the definition.  First, I am over honest.  I spill everything and anything about some of my more intimate details very easily.  This blog is somewhat an evidence of that, if I consider it fully.  It is certainly evidence of a lack of practice with boundaries and understanding what "normal" is.  The other area that strikes me is the grandiosity lies.  It strikes me very much as a need to prop myself up and be seen as more than I feel I am.  Which if I take a breath for two seconds and look at what I've accomplished in life, in terms of professional and personal, there is no need for a prop.  But I can't shake that sense of drowning in the juices of my own stew.  I have nothing to be ashamed of for who I am on the inside, and that's something I need to grasp with both hands.  Maybe I wasn't born this way, but I sure earned it.

I am very tired again.  Emotionally worn out, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing.  I am working hard with muscles that I've frankly never to very rarely used.  I want to keep going, to move forward, more and more, but I am tiring quickly.  I am still doing my three things every day, and it feels good.  Somewhere on my list of next baby steps is my physical fitness level, but I am only cautiously stepping towards that one.

Realizing that I am a normal product of the chaos I grew up in is a safe feeling.  I like safe.  

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Not Yet a Woman...

Life is rolling.  It is moving in fits and sputters, but unlike much of the last 4 years, it is moving.  I am feeling quasi-human, and that's a start.  I am still fighting the depression, and still get wrapped around the axle on feeling ashamed and humiliated by what I've done.  I can't say it clearer than that.  Not sure what to do at the moment with that, though I have a clear sense that that shame and the corresponding self-sabotage are what is singularly standing between me and the next gatepost.  I am not seeking a life of denial and to launch myself headlong into the abyss of "solving" that problem.  What I am going to undertake is patience, and try some self-understanding.  I want to lift the veil of shame and live more freely of who I am.  On the surface, and even at my core, I know that most people think I am the cat's meow and not the dog's breakfast.  But the absence of anything to buttress my shame and loneliness against leaves me bereft of substance enough to feel any peace.

I attended a meeting tonight, an open AA meeting where a friend was speaking.  He is a great guy I've met through ACOA and listening to his story, as usual, I heard much of my own.  He spoke of never having felt like he belonged, of always having to have a prop to get people to like him, of being a teller of tall tales that amused people enough that they'd like him.  That's my story too.  I don't remember ever feeling secure in and of myself.  He also spoke of enjoying being alone.  I so know that feeling, and to this day will withdraw into a vacuum of human interaction if you let me.  

On a side, but related note, I have sworn of the internet porn thing for a while, because I think I've been using it as a crutch of avoidance.  It can be so compelling to get that rush of testosterone, and to overwhelm my feelings of inadequacy with feelings of manliness.  Not so different from the place I ended up with serial infidelity, where it was more about living out Oedipal compulsions and sub-conscious impulses than it ever was about sex and intimacy.  It just isn't a healthy place for me, to self-medicate.  I am running away from what I want to be when I do that.   

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

We Aren't Going to Go There

Went to the marriage T tonight.  I am ambivalent about the experience, but after a sleep, I expect to be all cool with it.  The MT went through all the systems and processes for how he runs his deal, and it all made real sense.  It is based on the IMAGO approach from some guy who wrote some book about getting the love you need.  It broke down into the same lizard brain versus the frontal cortex discussion that I've focused my depression T on and my mindfulness approach to doing 3 little things every day.  So I was all cool.  Then he said that we weren't going to get into the betrayal at this first session as it is too charged with emotion.  I thought, cool that makes sense, and lines up with my trying to approach things with the antithesis of my usual approach to charge headlong and aggressively into everything I "go after".  

So, near the end, we started doing one of the exercises, and what do we end up talking about?  My infidelity.  I felt crushingly shamed sitting here talking to some guy I just met about the singularly most shameful acts of my existence, in front of someone who is still very hurt and angry about my actions.  It kicked my ass a bit, to be totally honest and I am feeling incredibly emotionally fucked up.  I am living with a weight of shame and remorse, and I don't feel terribly much like adding to that burden while I am also trying desperately to lift my head out of a major depression.  I am not trying to make a cope out or excuses, because I am responsible for what I've done, I am just trying to find a pace of healing that lets me survive this.  Yes, these are my actions, based on compulsions I can't understand or quantify, to self-mutilate in search of something, something I know not totally what I was looking for.  I do know that I damn near destroyed myself in the process, and hurt my SO so greatly that I am still at risk of losing her.  

I know I need to make amends, but I can't do it if it will destroy me in the process.  It is clear to me that I need to take time and place with this, even at the risk of hurting her a little bit more, because I want to survive this to make it through.  It sounds dramatic, and overwrought, but anyone who's been to the darkness knows that you don't compound your exit from it with more horror.  I need a beachhead of safety and relative personal sanity, and I am getting there.  This is not a rip the bandaid off moment, that's my usual self-mutilating stupidity.