sex education

[malign]

"well, i guess i suck at being vulnerable."

Okay. Join the crowd. :-P Those who are good at it just have a different set of problems, don't worry.

"Completely honest" is asking an awful lot, for anyone. I think "trying" qualifies as good enough ...

I can see how the speech you described would feel pretty humiliating. But I have a counter-suggestion:

"Hey! What gives? It felt like you were giving me the blow-off last time, so I thought I'd remind you who's paying who here <you're allowed to mess up the grammar when you're being tough.> This isn't just some game for me, you know. This is important."

As you can see, groveling is a state of mind. :-)

Another thing that strikes me is that you've been fairly open with us here, but that's different for you in some way. Perhaps it would help to venture into why?

As for books, I think all the best ones fuck with your mind. The ones that only want to cuddle are probably just telling you what you wanted to hear, anyway. :-)

[Lana73]

Thinking of you Jai. I hope you had a better day today.

[finding my way]

Did he ever get around to teaching you about parts therapy?

It doesn't have to be that camp, but learning about therapy approaches can help give you some tools for organizing a perspective. Sometimes it helped me in therapy to press my therapist to teach me about something. I often took notes. I brought in notes of what I wanted to ask, too.

I had an attachment disorder, I know how it felt for me. SUPER self conscious. Pain all around. The trouble eased as I learned to get a perspective on myself. I think judging ourselves and calling ourselves names is a primitive attempt at that; it doesn't work because it just causes more pain. It is possible to observe oneself without layering on the judgement.

For me books did not trigger my attachment disorder, people did. I got some great help from books, still do. Are you reading anything you'd recommend?

[JaiJai]

gotta crash, ttyl!

[malign]

Yah well, I probably couldn't say it exactly as I wrote it, either. But the point was that there's a very wide spectrum of possible things to say, and the aspect of humiliation isn't inherent in the situation. That feeling comes from you and your past history; I'm just suggesting that it's something you could question. The outcome doesn't have to be what your protective parts imagine.

It sounds like you do have a pretty good idea why you can be open here and it's more difficult in person: different parts are in charge of you in different situations. In person, you perceive a greater threat, so a more protective part takes over. And it's in that perception, the decision point about which part to use, that you have some control over changing things. The odds of something bad happening aren't higher in person, but the perceived penalty of that something bad happening seems greater in person. So, negotiating ways to reduce how bad the outcome would be might be a way to give yourself more freedom in therapy. Unfortunately, some of our automatic defenses try to reduce the perceived penalty in less productive ways, such as when a protector minimizes the importance of the therapist or therapy itself.

Only, that's not particularly helpful if other parts of you want to make progress in your therapy. So the trick is for those two sets of parts (protectors and call them "willing ones", for now) to negotiate with each other ways to get both comparative safety and progress. Writing beforehand might be one way. Establishing some sort of ground rules, either internal or agreed with the therapist, might be another, such as limits on how much you say or some cue for yourself and him that you need to stop (similar to the idea of a 'safe word'.)

In the end, it's your Self that needs to be in control of the therapy. She knows what you need, who's hurting and who's trying to protect those vulnerabilities. The hard part, for anyone just starting to change, is that they spend very little time being their true Self, and a lot of time reacting to perceived threats using parts. So, for instance, maybe some part of you feels sad for somebody, so some protector part steps in and says "use your intellect to minimize them, because being sad makes you vulnerable to them," and then maybe you feel even worse about that reaction, and another part steps in and says "distract, distract!" and starts looking at stuff online ... If we're continually running around fighting emotional fires, we never have a chance to let it all go and be our Selves. The point of parts therapy is to give yourself that space.

Hang in there, Jai.

[JaiJai]

Hope you guys are doing ok.

Later,

Jai

[finding my way]

Vent away, JaiJai.

If you get a chance to go back, maybe ask him for some help with parts theory and the Self? could be a useful focus....

There are some super hardy plants to choose from... hope you find one you like!

[malign]

When I moved out of the house I grew up in, I inherited Mom's rubber tree plant. And if you can believe it, a ficus.

Mom had a tendency to kill houseplants too, and my thumb is even browner (no comments, please.)

The ficus didn't live very long ... but I had other plants of various sizes.

And, when I got two kittens, I put all the plants in the basement, because I wasn't sure which ones might be harmful to them.

You get some idea of how much effort I was willing to put into researching my decisions, back in those days.

When she-who-must-not-be-named (my future ex-future wife) first saw them, they were a little forest of potted sticks still sitting in the dark ...

Now I limit myself to a single African violet named after my Mom (she was fond of them), and a random bulb I picked up a couple of years ago in Home Depot, which this year put out only three enormous leaves and no flowers.

At least they're still both green. :-)

--------------------------------------------------------

Ah, willpower. The delusion of our society.

In the end, it amounts to denial on a grand scale, specifically denial that I have any problems I didn't cause. Supposedly, the moment I came of age, I was a perfect specimen; any problems from then on were entirely due to a failure of will, my failure of will. We're deathly afraid of things that might happen to us that we can't prevent, so we invented the idea that we control everything, that we will everything.

Now, that's not to say that most of the problems I've had haven't been the result of my own choices. I think they have, most if not all.

But in part, that's because I chose things based on my upbringing, which because I was raised by actual humans was inevitably imperfect.

It's not that I'm not responsible, but that I also have compassion towards myself for what's past.

The secret of the willpower delusion is its flip-side, which our society wholeheartedly endorses: the blame. "Don't blame me," everyone else says. And we all have parts that use blame, scorn, shame, and similar feelings to try to force ourselves into the mold we have as a self-image. But what comes out of that mold, if anything ever actually does, is a molded thing, dead, inhuman. Our real human forms have little unfinished dangly bits like earlobes and navels. Face it: if you had the option, would you have designed humans to have a navel? Did someone really feel like I needed a place to trap lint?

But we can't will away our navels, or our past. I can't will myself to be a plant person, or only just a little. And what's the difference between choosing well and will-ing? Loving the chooser. Love is what's missing when blame is the currency, the reason for doing things. Self-love, mostly, but I believe that love of others follows directly from that.

It's out of fashion to talk about loving yourself. We hear about narcissism instead (and it does exist), but that's not self-love. It's just a cover for fear, in particular the fear the person feels, that they might be unlovable. They learned to pretend to love themselves instead of actually doing it, and the result is a knee-jerk self-affirmation with no awareness of who their self really is.

And we're afraid that we're the same as they are, because we don't know our selves very well either. So we strive, achieve, blame, to make sure we don't become what we fear. When in fact what we have to do is look inside with love and compassion, and get to know who we actually are, as opposed to all the splinters we've shed as shields against fear and pain.

Dang, this thing needs a word limit.

[malign]

I want to apologize. Not for having that opinion, or even for expressing it, but for expressing it as if it were absolute truth.

In fact, it's something I'm working on for myself, at the moment, the conflict between wanting to be secure by believing in a world I can control, and, well, reality.

What came out was the opinion of just one part of me; a valid opinion, to be sure, but just one. Not some kind of definition of the way things must be, the way it sounded.

[IrmaJean]

How are things, Jai?