Friday thoughts

This morning’s readings brought a great Melody Beattie nugget:

Our commitment to staying open has little to do with what life does to us. It has to do with how we decide we want to live.

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That speaks truth to me. After I read the passage, which came from one of my daily books, I started to think about what makes a person brave enough to decide to live openly despite hardship, despite previous traumatizing experience that wants to inform every thought and action. What can help a person interact with the world as if they are open, loving, and safe when they have been conditioned not to be that?

Then I realized what the answer is for me: boundaries.

If I am certain in myself, if I have loved myself enough to be able to stand up and securely and kindly say, here is what I need, here is why I need it, and here is the line you may not cross when it comes to dealing with me, I find my power.

I kept digging. More came to me.

The most important boundaries I have are the ones I have with myself. And they have to run deep. Imagine trying to erect a fence without digging post holes. If my personal boundaries are not strong, I have no hope of having any with anyone else. I have no power.

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I stopped drinking alcohol because it lowers my ability to be accountable for my thinking, my speech, my actions. Anything that has that effect on me is no longer okay. I’ve always been too afraid to get too deeply into the bottle, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t struggled with the desire to escape myself through intoxication, and struggled with the effects of that escape. Sometimes it has been more than a little. Truth is, I am genetically predisposed to not be able to handle alcohol and never should’ve fooled with it in the first place. But man, did it feel good to be able to get warm and loose without really working for it. Mostly too warm, too loose. It took a while for me to quit bargaining about it, but once I did, I was relieved. I can no longer have anything in my life that brings with it a pretty good guarantee of some sort of volatile energy.

I began to work on identifying my batshit crazy patterns. I did some intensive trauma work with a therapist last fall, and in a nutshell, here’s what she told me: I skip over my feelings because my ability to acknowledge them is underdeveloped, then I am unkind about it to protect myself from those who I think are responsible for the feelings I can’t express correctly (which is a survival strategy, because no one wants to be around a person who is angry, so of course this ostracizes me and sends me into further hurt), then I shame myself for it all. From having the feelings, to being mad about not having them acknowledged. These are layers of strategies that I developed when I was a young child. So I have had to go back and treat my emotional self as if it is an infant because it is. IT IS.

Anger is a form of protest. So what she told me to do is

S L O W D O W N

T H I N K I T T H R O U G H

Now if I feel myself sinking into survival strategy: walking around arbitrarily angry, finding fault with everything and indulging my perfectionism, spending too much money on clothes I don’t need, doomsday thinking, minding other peoples’ business, isolating in any way which includes being on my phone — I do my best to pull out of it and get to the center of why I’m feeling unsafe and need to compensate with such a pile up of negativity. Sure, it’s great for those who love me when I am in a great mood and am showing my most loving, available, and open self, but it’s best for ME. That’s a personal boundary I’ve had to construct for myself out of an understanding that has come quite recently — that most of my behaviors, for lack of a better description of the entangled suffering I tend to do, come from first, not being able to say how I feel and second, not being to honor how I feel because it was set up long ago that I was to please others even if it made me feel like I was going to die.

Phew!

The other day I said I had recently begun to understand integrity. I can’t define what it is exactly, because I think it means something different for every person, but I know it when I see it. It looks like alignment.

And I feel it when I have it. It feels like alignment. It feels like my outsides match my insides. It feels like every part of me knows every part of me. It feels like nothing is hiding. It feels open, loving, and free.

And I like that feeling. I want more of it.

Lots of love. Stay warm.

AM

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There is a squirrel hanging upside down from the bird feeder I just filled this morning. Do you think he cares about boundaries, personal or otherwise?