Perseverance/or/Holding feelings, good and bad

My therapist this past week (the new one, who I'm liking very much by the way) told me that I have a lot of perseverance; he said that even though he's just getting to know me, he can see that I'm trying as hard as I can.

Words like that mean a lot to me since I have a LOT of guilt around work-related issues; essentially, I have a very strong tendency to feel like I'm never working hard enough, and thus, since my brain long long ago adopted the belief that the work I do=my worth as a human being, I then feel like I am a bad person. My guilt about "not working hard enough" is, at this stage of my life at least, seemingly omnipresent. Hell, guilt about anything and everything is always hovering somewhere in my mind.

I didn't apply for enough jobs this week. I should have called so-and-so back sooner. I'm not studying hard enough (GRE coming up). I should have done my chores sooner and better. I should clean my room more often. I should go to bed earlier. I should eat healthier. I should exercise more. I should be more considerate and caring to the people in my life. I should spend less of my energy giving to people in my life and more on facing my own problems. I feel bad that that car had to stop so I could cross the street. I should spend less time on the computer. I should play my violin more. I should read more. I should live more frugally.

and on

and on

and on

Despite the momentary relief I felt at my therapist's words, I spent much of the rest of the week feeling very very guilty for various items on that list, and probably others too haha.

Often my response to feelings of intense guilt has been to assuage it--say, it's ok Kate that you didn't do this or that, it doesn't actually matter that much, it doesn't make sense to feel that guilty. I'm good at talking myself down, of coping with the guilt, distracting myself, removing the edge to it, dulling the pain, pushing it away..... I think this has contributed to my emotional emptiness; and clearly, all the reassurances in the world have not taken away my root tendency to assume that I am doing something wrong at any given moment, to believe that I am never good enough.

So this week I tried to hold the guilt instead of going through my usual reassurances/coping mechanisms. I tried to just sit there and acknowledge, I am feeling very very very guilty, very ashamed. Tried to just feel it, not fight it, not push it away..... So, honestly, between the guilt and the corresponding shame and sadness, it was a pretty shitty feeling week. But I am proud of myself for trying to feel what comes up, trying to not run from it.....this is all in the long-term hope that if I learn to feel these things fully, perhaps they will not continue to hold so much power over me; perhaps by feeling them I can actually move through them, move forward. (A lot of the philosophy fueling this supposition is coming from Re-Evaluation Counseling theory and Buddhism/meditation stuff I'm reading).

I started to think tonight that perhaps it's not just bad feelings I have a hard time facing. I think I sometimes run from good feelings as well. I was feeling very sad this evening and turned on some music and began to feel sooooo much better; and very soon after that I felt the impulse to turn the music off and go on with my evening the way I had been. I think this impulse came partly from a sort of fundamental distrust I have of feeling good. I think that sometimes I am so afraid of losing good feelings that I'd rather not have them or cut them off myself; that way I maintain a sense of "control" over disappointment/loss. I think that because I recognize that good feelings are so ephemeral (as are all feelings in truth), I just don't want to bother with them; I want what I know is solid; so I settle for not too bad, because I think some part of me believes that I can at least control things so that I won't feel too bad. I'm afraid to feel good because I'm terrified of losing feeling good. I'm terrified of coming to trust that feeling good can be a regular part of life, only to have it swept away. Only to be "disillusioned". Only to have to be faced with the "hard realities" of life once more.

Perhaps this is why I can't hold onto my therapist's words of praise, or any words of praise, or any feeling of accomplishment, for very long. I'm deeply afraid of *actually* believing something good about myself, and then being proven wrong and crushed. I felt crushed often at other points in my life; I learned to cope, it seems, by never letting my hopes get too far ahead of me, never letting myself feel too confident, too happy, always keeping the highs low enough that the seemingly inevitable corresponding crash wouldn't be too painful. I think some part of me believes that emotions look like a sine wave--up always followed by down--and writing the equation to make the wave as narrow as possible will mean that my downs don't go too far into the negatives.

So here's to rewriting the equation to open up my sign wave wider and wider; here's to learning to hold the really painful stuff, and perhaps even harder, learning to hold the really good-feeling stuff. Here's to learning to value not only lack of pain, but to actually value feeling good. (In the words of a good friend, "Kate, just because you're used to being miserable doesn't mean you actually have to be miserable all the time." oy! haha) Finding the courage to actually believe something good about myself, or to actually hope for my future.

When my therapist said that I am trying as hard as I can, that I have perseverance, it rang true to me. I know, on some level, that I am reallllly trying hard; I know that I have not given up; I know that I am determined to continue putting one foot in front of the other. So what is the next step? I am not going to try to force myself to feel good of course; I am going to continue to try to really let myself feel whatever comes up for me, and I'm going to be conscious of trying to let myself hold/feel both the sharp pains that I normally turn from and the good feelings that I normally truncate. Phew, good luck to me! hahahah