25 Sep “just because i feel the tidal wave doesn’t mean i have to become the tidal wave”
While listening to clients I am often awed at the wisdom that so naturally arises from them. Sometimes I find my jaw delightedly dropped by what they say. It reminds me that psychological truth ends up documented in the literature because it’s grounded in experience of living human beings not some static concept that someone had and thought it might apply to people.
I love this uprising of wisdom and wish to keep fostering. It’s important to me that people hear themselves!
This past week while talking to someone I had that kind of experience. This time I didn’t stop myself and asked this person if they would be willing to write up their experience and post it on the blog.
Here’s what this person wrote:
today, during my appointment with deirdre, i said something, and deirdre had quite a reaction to it…what i said was this: “just because i feel the tidal wave doesn’t mean i have to become the tidal wave”….
so, what does that mean? give me a few minutes and i’ll explain…
i grew up with anger. there was always anger in my house. some of it was actually justified…my mom, raised by russian immigrants had to learn to navigate the world by herself… my dad grew up with a physically and emotionally abusive father… they worked hard to overcome their childhoods… they did the best that they could as parents given that neither my brother nor i grew up with instruction manuals… they had so much anger that they exploded at times…. it was scary for a kid like me to see… i didn’t know if i could trust anyone because i never knew what would set them off….
so, i grew up a product of my environment and became angry… my anger was my friend… it was my defense, it was my security blanket, my respite from scary emotional things that i didn’t know how to cope/deal with…
after many years of “regular” talk therapy, i was able to understand my anger better, but, it was still there, embedded deep inside me; i thought i actually WAS my anger… there seemed to be no dividing lines…
fast forward and enter deirdre…
it took a while for me to understand and “get” the whole “parts thing”… all i really wanted to do was vent and vent and vent and blahblahblah about my anger… someone HAD to get me! someone HAD to understand me! someone had to HEAR me!!!!!
then, with gentle (and sometimes not so subtle) guiding, deirdre laid it on the line for me…”you are NOT your anger…you are an AMAZING person” (yeah, right, i thought)….
so, i signed on for the BSE course (and actually still have all the materials from the program which lie unread by my bedside), but was convinced i still wasn’t being heard and that it was a great thing for others, but, no one understood MY anger…
okay, let’s fast forward again…
the things that some of my parts LOVE about deirdre are the same things that other parts DISLIKE about her…she draws a line in the sand and says “you’ve GOT to do the work! you are NOT your anger! YES this is hard!”
and each session i come in and kvetch (such a great yiddish word for complain) about my anger taking over, my lack of control over my thoughts, my inability to separate from it, etc…
so, today, instead of having my usual emotional (what i feel to be cathartic) vent, i actually listened…and HEARD…
and i said “just because i feel the tidal wave doesn’t mean i have to become the tidal wave”….
and deirdre actually thought that was brilliant!
so, i’m working on NOT becoming the tidal wave…stepping back, breathing and trying to find the joy as opposed to hanging on to the anger…the anger is just a poison that i don’t want coursing through me anymore…
and so, i begin the journey of riding the tidal wave, hanging onto the wave, and having the glorious feeling of still standing on the surfboard and seeing the sun when i come through it, smiling because of the beauty that the world brings….