(no subject)
Nov. 28th, 2011 07:51 pmSo this morning, my boss said something vaguely about wanting to talk to me for a minute when I had a moment, and added "nothing big."
And I promptly panicked. Clearly I was fired. Clearly something was wrong wrong wrong.
This happens to me ...a lot. I catastrophize. I borrow trouble. A few years ago, my New Year's Resolution was to learn that nothing is as bad as I think it's going to be. It sort-of took, in that I learned to remind myself that it -- whatever "it" was -- was survivable, and not that big a deal in the long run; it did not take, in the sense of freeing myself from the first horrible lurch of oh god what's wrong what did I do the world is sliding off its axis omg omg.
But a couple of weeks ago, I had a revelatory conversation with my therapist, where she pointed out that the guilt I was feeling about an ongoing thing in my life was incredibly disproportionate to ...well, reality. (That wasn't the revelatory part. I knew that.) And then she added that she thought that it was probably the feelings of guilt from my parents' divorce that I was actually feeling.
The next five minutes were me spluttering and swearing. Because holy what the actual fuck !!!!
She's totally right. Not just about that. I had honestly thought I had escaped feeling guilty over the divorce, because I read the books, all of which explained that children of divorce often blame themselves for causing it, or not preventing it, and I, being me, and a serious reader even at age six, decided that reading the books and the warnings therein, would protect me from falling into this trap.
Oh, brain. Oh, tiny![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
elizabeth. The hind brain? Did not get that memo.
That worked out great, let me tell you. For the past twenty years, I have been constantly guilty, constantly afraid not of fucking up, but of having fucked up. Constantly hearing j'accuse! in every criticism, every request for a moment of my time. Let me tell you, this is exhausting.
(It absolutely baffled my mother, who has been asking why I have such a guilty conscience for years. I don't know if I'll tell her why.)
So this is where so much of my fear comes from. This is why I have such a hard time with people who have power over me asking me to account for myself -- not because I can't do it, because the six-year-old inside me doen't understand what is going on, doesn't understand that her world falling apart is not her fault, that she is not to blame. And so the twenty-five-year-old panics.
Ever since my therapist dropped that particular bombshell -- seriously, I never in a thousand years would have come up with that -- I have been able to defuse more than one moment of oh god oh god my fault my fault everything is wrong and I have to fix it but I don't know what's wrong and everyone is angry and it's my fault what did I do wrong oh god. I'm not saying they've gone away, those moments, I'm not sure they ever will -- twenty years have engraved that pattern deep -- but I know them for what they are now, at least a little. And that means that they aren't in control. As much.
It is amazing.
And I promptly panicked. Clearly I was fired. Clearly something was wrong wrong wrong.
This happens to me ...a lot. I catastrophize. I borrow trouble. A few years ago, my New Year's Resolution was to learn that nothing is as bad as I think it's going to be. It sort-of took, in that I learned to remind myself that it -- whatever "it" was -- was survivable, and not that big a deal in the long run; it did not take, in the sense of freeing myself from the first horrible lurch of oh god what's wrong what did I do the world is sliding off its axis omg omg.
But a couple of weeks ago, I had a revelatory conversation with my therapist, where she pointed out that the guilt I was feeling about an ongoing thing in my life was incredibly disproportionate to ...well, reality. (That wasn't the revelatory part. I knew that.) And then she added that she thought that it was probably the feelings of guilt from my parents' divorce that I was actually feeling.
The next five minutes were me spluttering and swearing. Because holy what the actual fuck !!!!
She's totally right. Not just about that. I had honestly thought I had escaped feeling guilty over the divorce, because I read the books, all of which explained that children of divorce often blame themselves for causing it, or not preventing it, and I, being me, and a serious reader even at age six, decided that reading the books and the warnings therein, would protect me from falling into this trap.
Oh, brain. Oh, tiny
elizabeth. The hind brain? Did not get that memo.That worked out great, let me tell you. For the past twenty years, I have been constantly guilty, constantly afraid not of fucking up, but of having fucked up. Constantly hearing j'accuse! in every criticism, every request for a moment of my time. Let me tell you, this is exhausting.
(It absolutely baffled my mother, who has been asking why I have such a guilty conscience for years. I don't know if I'll tell her why.)
So this is where so much of my fear comes from. This is why I have such a hard time with people who have power over me asking me to account for myself -- not because I can't do it, because the six-year-old inside me doen't understand what is going on, doesn't understand that her world falling apart is not her fault, that she is not to blame. And so the twenty-five-year-old panics.
Ever since my therapist dropped that particular bombshell -- seriously, I never in a thousand years would have come up with that -- I have been able to defuse more than one moment of oh god oh god my fault my fault everything is wrong and I have to fix it but I don't know what's wrong and everyone is angry and it's my fault what did I do wrong oh god. I'm not saying they've gone away, those moments, I'm not sure they ever will -- twenty years have engraved that pattern deep -- but I know them for what they are now, at least a little. And that means that they aren't in control. As much.
It is amazing.
