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Feb. 1st, 2014 10:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elizabethOh, for fuck's sake.
I was planning, on the subway ride home from a friend's, to write an entry here about how I Have Topics for Tuesday's therapy session (we started talking, last time, about what we are doing, at this point, given I have been working with Dr. L for eight years now, with a couple of hiatuses, and I want to continue that conversation and also I want to talk about anger, because my current work project/a couple of work relationships have recently been pushing my buttons in particular ways, hopefully more on that in a few paragraphs). And then I got home and petted the cat and chatted with my roommate (including confessing to having broken-and-replaced a thing of hers, and she wasn't mad!), and checked my email, and my abusive biological father had emailed me.
It's not hard to find my email. I'm not distressed by that.
I promptly asked Twitter for hugs, and emailed my best friend. I am totally fine with sitting with the various feelings I am having. I'm okay.
There's a metaphor I've been using for years:
In case you couldn't tell, my biological father is the rock. I just got reminded that the fucking rock is still there.
I don't really have words yet. I am going to mark some of the identifiable feelings bubbling up, and put on a mindfulness track, and hope that I can get to sleep and sleep without nightmares.
The things about anger that I ACTUALLY WANTED to talk about are (a) what is sending me into jaw-clenching, precisely-clipped-diction fury at work, what buttons are being pushed (some of them I know about, like the helplessness and the sense of being watched and hunted and found inadequate, but I don't think I have all of them) and (b) why anger is one of the emotions that goes straight to my body. I don't like my body being the locus for that. I want to like living in my body, to feel good in it. And anger is something that is too present in my body.
I've talked about this before, a little, sort of, how anger is an emotion I have no tools for. And I want to work on that. I can't go through life with no escalation process between "mildly irritated" and "blinding rage". I don't want to be afraid of my own anger.
The part where I have no model for how to feel and express anger appropriately is tied into the work thing, because my mother's way of dealing with tasks she doesn't like — for example, housecleaning — is to get angry at it, and use that as fuel to push through. Which is ....not great as a model, full stop, and is especially not great for this project, because I already have a profound personality clash with my client and my immediate supervisor (and also this is a long-term project, and housecleaning is over in a day or so). Different personality clashes. (The former is a matter of "totally incapable of making a decision or sticking to decisions once made, does not respect my expertise, is a TERRIBLE WRITER whose clarifications make already-confusing requests completely incomprehensible." The latter is a matter of "I do not want to be your friend, I want you to be my boss. And stop interrupting me verbally, I have told you that breaks my concentration in a way that written communication does not, and I want a paper trail for requests.")
Being angry at my immediate supervisor? NOT A GOOD PLAN. Especially when I can't control it.
(I mean, I don't get violent or anything. I just grit my teeth and sound condescending and like an asshole. It's not subtle.)
And I have no idea of where to go with this.
I guess the plan from here is: mindfulness track, email this entry & the email to Dr. L before Tuesday's before-work session, go into therapy on Tuesday prepared to work hard.
I was planning, on the subway ride home from a friend's, to write an entry here about how I Have Topics for Tuesday's therapy session (we started talking, last time, about what we are doing, at this point, given I have been working with Dr. L for eight years now, with a couple of hiatuses, and I want to continue that conversation and also I want to talk about anger, because my current work project/a couple of work relationships have recently been pushing my buttons in particular ways, hopefully more on that in a few paragraphs). And then I got home and petted the cat and chatted with my roommate (including confessing to having broken-and-replaced a thing of hers, and she wasn't mad!), and checked my email, and my abusive biological father had emailed me.
It's not hard to find my email. I'm not distressed by that.
I promptly asked Twitter for hugs, and emailed my best friend. I am totally fine with sitting with the various feelings I am having. I'm okay.
There's a metaphor I've been using for years:
Most of my life is pretty great. My life is a garden full of nice-smelling flowers and shrubs cut into interesting shapes and nicely-designed paths weaving through it, and I like spending time in it and taking care of it and deadheading and pruning and watering. But there's a rock in this garden, and it is embedded really deeply in the ground, so I can't dig it out. And most of the time, that is fine. The paths are built around it, and I have cunningly constructed shrubs to hide it, and so on and so forth, sometimes I can even be grateful that it has acted as a spur to direct my thinking because I have made some nice things to work around it, and I know it's there, but I don't waste much time thinking about it, because I can't do anything about it. But every now and then, I trip over it, or stub my toe, and fuck fuck fuck that fucking hurts fuck that fucking rock why is it still there.
In case you couldn't tell, my biological father is the rock. I just got reminded that the fucking rock is still there.
I don't really have words yet. I am going to mark some of the identifiable feelings bubbling up, and put on a mindfulness track, and hope that I can get to sleep and sleep without nightmares.
The things about anger that I ACTUALLY WANTED to talk about are (a) what is sending me into jaw-clenching, precisely-clipped-diction fury at work, what buttons are being pushed (some of them I know about, like the helplessness and the sense of being watched and hunted and found inadequate, but I don't think I have all of them) and (b) why anger is one of the emotions that goes straight to my body. I don't like my body being the locus for that. I want to like living in my body, to feel good in it. And anger is something that is too present in my body.
I've talked about this before, a little, sort of, how anger is an emotion I have no tools for. And I want to work on that. I can't go through life with no escalation process between "mildly irritated" and "blinding rage". I don't want to be afraid of my own anger.
The part where I have no model for how to feel and express anger appropriately is tied into the work thing, because my mother's way of dealing with tasks she doesn't like — for example, housecleaning — is to get angry at it, and use that as fuel to push through. Which is ....not great as a model, full stop, and is especially not great for this project, because I already have a profound personality clash with my client and my immediate supervisor (and also this is a long-term project, and housecleaning is over in a day or so). Different personality clashes. (The former is a matter of "totally incapable of making a decision or sticking to decisions once made, does not respect my expertise, is a TERRIBLE WRITER whose clarifications make already-confusing requests completely incomprehensible." The latter is a matter of "I do not want to be your friend, I want you to be my boss. And stop interrupting me verbally, I have told you that breaks my concentration in a way that written communication does not, and I want a paper trail for requests.")
Being angry at my immediate supervisor? NOT A GOOD PLAN. Especially when I can't control it.
(I mean, I don't get violent or anything. I just grit my teeth and sound condescending and like an asshole. It's not subtle.)
And I have no idea of where to go with this.
I guess the plan from here is: mindfulness track, email this entry & the email to Dr. L before Tuesday's before-work session, go into therapy on Tuesday prepared to work hard.
