Tag Archive: psychology

Asking.

Written on November 7th, 2009 and labelled Authentic, NaBloPoMo, Reflections
2 Comments - Thoughts?

I don’t like asking for help.

It’s because of vulnerability.

About a year and a half ago I was sat in a room in my school on some comfy chairs whilst a slender, female psychotherapist gently gazed at me.  Her name was Becky. She was very kind and her eyes would refuse to focus on anything but me.  It was white-hot concentration.  It was weird.

I remember that, with Becky, I had my first ever ‘Johari’ moment.  A moment when everything suddenly falls into perfect place and your awareness of your mind becomes forever shifted. My first ever moment, with her, was about control.

Control.

So often, people that enter the warm embrace of psychotherapy are told that we can’t ‘control’ everything.  That we have to learn to let go and let what’s going to happen, happen.  That there are certain things that, regardless of our efforts, will happen without our input.  We’re told to sit back and worry about what we can control.

With me, it goes deeper. Much, much deeper. I remember sitting on one of those grey, soft chairs with Becky, facing her but at a slight angle, and suddenly everything having a common link.  My muddy-brown mind suddenly becoming transparent.

Control is something I have a problem with every single day.  I long to be in control.  Of myself.  Of situations.  Of the minutia of every footstep I take into the future.

Being in control.  Being able to run away if I have to.  Being able to grasp tightly to my freedom.  That is my control.

Sometimes it’s hard to talk to people who haven’t had therapy.  Not because they haven’t had to deal with the intense, riveting emotions that ‘we’ have, but because often they look down into their minds and see nothing but murky waters.  Murky waters filled with suppressed grief and past pains which were never dealt with.  It’s hard to be aware when you’ve never looked below the quiet surface of the water.

And so when I tell people that I don’t like asking for help, my defences form answers to distract them from my reality.  “I enjoy the challenge”, I churp back at them in a rehearsed fashion, “asking for help is like giving up.”

A lie.

I wear a mask a lot of the time.  A mask so big that it covers who I am, and more.  It allows others to see me as the person they want, not as the person I am.  They see what they want to see, and that’s okay.

Because I do not choose to lie to them.  I choose to let them understand a side of who I am.  Because without the mask, they see nothing but chaos.  They see a cavern of darkness dimly lit by the shining jewels of my realisations.

And so I do not ask for help from people very often.  Instead, I hold my tongue and battern down the hatches, waiting for the storm to pass. And when it does, I open everything back up again to see what is left of my existence.

It’s all about vulnerability.

I don’t like asking for help.

Tags: , , , , ,

Please stop speaking.

Written on August 27th, 2009 and labelled Emotions, Why the sun should be out
0 Comments - Thoughts?

I have a headache and the only song out of the meagre 408 on this computer that I want to listen to is Get Gone by Fiona Apple.

I’m grumpy and tired. I feel suffocated. This is the last time I’ll be going ‘back to school’. And yet, it’s also just one of many to come.

But it won’t be if I don’t find out what god-damn degree I’m going to do. I look on ucas.ac.uk whenever I can muster up the courage. Each time I come back feeling more frustrated and confused. With myself. With universities. With the world. With whatever.

I’m irrated and irritable. I have a cup of nettle tea next to me because it’s the only thing that stops my head from exploding.

The sky is grey. I click on a song in windows media player which I haven’t rated. It sucks. I fall back on In The Waiting Line by Zero 7 and hope that it’ll somehow soothe my sore ego. I know it won’t.

I want 925.788497 British Pounds so I can buy Ali Brown’s online success blueprint. A part of me laughs at how stupid I’m being by thinking that buying one of her products is ever going to make me any returns.

And a part of me clings to the hope that I might one day become something.

I’m tired and I want to go to bed. I don’t nap. It’s 5pm. I wonder why I bother anymore. I wonder if it would’ve been better if I had never been born. If neither myself or my two brothers had. That way my parents could have gotten a divorce instead of staying together and having children.

I think about speaking to the teacher at school that got me elected as a college president. I want to resign. I don’t know why I even signed up. My stomach burns with hatred towards my school yet I applied for the position as a lapdog.

A part of me wants to run away. A part of me wants to leave school so I can get away from the mind-destroying falsification that it is.

There’s no moral. No story. No joke and no philosophical by-line.

I’m tired of having to live this life but I can’t see any other option. Well, there is one.

But I swear to whatever possible god is out there, if you allow me freedom from this 2.3 children-esque existence, I’ll try not to do anything stupid.

Tags: , , , , ,

Angry? Not me. No way. Well, maybe.

Written on August 22nd, 2009 and labelled Emotions, Reflections
1 Comment - Thoughts?

A lot of people don’t think I’m the type of guy to get angry.  Jealous?  Sure.  Indecisive?  Sure.  Angry?  Nevah!

And, you know, I can see where this comes from.  I’m definitely not the type to frequently show my anger.  I hate it sometimes.  Truly hate it.  But, well, I’m don’t like hurting other people’s feelings.  I know it’s silly and, you know, I think there’s more than just a small grain of truth in the saying, “The only person that can hurt you is yourself”.

But that still doesn’t stop me from restraining my emotions.  Putting a leash on them and calling it emotional-sensibility — or something.  But I shouldn’t.  I know I shouldn’t.  As the late Carl Rogers said, fully functioning people don’t self-censor their experiences.  And while ‘fully functioning’ does make people sound like computers, it does seem to hold itself quite well.  At least in my eyes it does.

But, you know, I think a lot of the reason why I don’t show my anger is not because I’m angry at someone else but really I’m angry at myself.

And these are the exact words, every time, that come through when I’m so self-hating: “Why aren’t YOU that good.”

It’s like there’s another personality living in my head — at least most times in the day — saying this.  Some other entity blaring that statement.  Not a question, a statement.  Branding me with the red-hot iron each time with the word ‘failure’.   I honestly can’t tell you when it started or why it exists.  It just does.  It corrodes me down, statement by statement, drop by drop.

And, you know, I see it in everything.  In so many, many people.  I find it physically uncomfortable to watch any program that contains male models without some sort of saving-grace-of-a-quality which I can criticise them for.

What’s worse is that instead of dealing with my obvious low self-worth, I take it out on other people.  People who I could know or learn from.  Instead, I get out the gasoline and mark a line so that if a bridge should ever be built between me and any other person that sparks this self-hate response, I can quickly burn the bridge back into nothingness.  I hate it.  I need it.  Without this now almost-unconscious act of defending myself from people who would normally make me feel massively inferior, I’d actually have to face my self-hate.

And we can’t have that now, can we?

—-

I’m only slightly sorry that my first true post on this self-hosted shindig should be a slightly depressing one.  However, I’d rather it be this post than something superficial.  A blog filled with emotion, depth and windows into my life, to me, is a blog to be proud of.

Tags: , , ,

The Wheel of Change & Unfinished Business

Written on May 22nd, 2009 and labelled Questions To You, Reflections, Unfinished Business
0 Comments - Thoughts?

I remember reading (a long time ago) about an idea within the Pagan religions about this thing called ‘The Wheel of the Year‘. Simply speaking, Pagans divide their year up with 8 festivals (the 2 solstices / 2 equinoxes + 4 others). Though I don’t consider myself to be a Pagan, the idea of the year going around cyclically resonated — and resonates — with me still.


You see, I’ve decided to have a nice big clean-up of this here blog. I just had to re-vamp it all. Why, you ask?

Well. Foremost, the biggest reason is documented in this post. However, another, perhaps more human reason, was that it really didn’t feel right. I’m one of those touchy-feely types and so I have to have things feel right to me. It’s just how I’m programmed. If things don’t feel right, I bail. Hey! I just explained why I don’t ever finish projects! *snarf*

But, no. It was feeling wrong. So, naturally, I decided to re-vamp it a little (and I’m definitely not saying I’m done!). So, with all the changes I decided to follow suit of my good writer-friend Lezstar and make myself a nice little blog twitter.

And so there I was, ferreting away through follower lists to pick out people who I thought looked nice and would be interested in reading this here blog. Then, BAM, brainwave. Years ago I knew this guy that lived — and I assume still lives — in Florida. I’d been thinking about him for the past couple of days. I search for him on Twitter and, lo and behold, he’s there!

And I think it’s funny. MUY funny. “Why?”, you say? Let me give you a bit more background.

As of about a month ago, yours truly had recieved psychotherapy for a good 2 and a 1/2 years. One of my very first therapists (or, as we call them, counsellors — not like the US ‘Camp Counsellor‘) explained to me this thing from a theory called ‘Transactional Analysis‘.

Stay with me!

What she explained was this thing called ‘Taking Stamps‘. Very kindly, she used post-its (I <3 post-its). For example, every time this tweeter ignores my @replies, I take a stamp of offense. If these stamps continue, we ‘cash in‘, the stamps and ‘act out‘ (normal speak: do something as a result of that emotional energy) towards that person. In my situation, it could either be an abusive tweet at them or, perhaps more healthily, an unfollow.


So, how does this relate? Well, I think that this is what a lot of people do with ‘unfinished business’ (though, for you psychology geeks, unfinished business really relates more to Gestalt). The person has all of these stamps from the things that certain person said. Yet, at the same time, they’ve not been able to ‘cash them in’. Or, I guess, find closure with that relationship.

And so how interested was I when, after stumbling upon this long-lost Floridian-friend (is that the word for a Florida person? I don’t know!) that all these emotions came bubbling up!

My Wheel of Change in motion, it seems. With all of this re-branding and re-vamping and re-whatevering it seems life has plopped this guy back into my life. Well, if I’ve got some unfinished business, then that’s quite alright with me!

I wonder, then.

Where is your unfinished business hiding?
Tags: , , , ,