So, I had another therapy session today.
Introduction
For context, the lesson I’ve learned repeated from Gabor Mate, Pema Chodron, the Buddha’s writings, and validated time and time again by my experience is that compassion is the essence of any deep self transformation, whether through meditation or therapy. Today, I shined a light on yet another part of my thinking where I am not using it, as well as its consequences. I’m yet again reminded of the importance of compassion on my journey.
Therapy session summary
I say to my therapist, “Yesterday, I found myself in a very frantic mind state. I’m going to see this girl I’m interested in in two weeks, but I was hopelessly worrying about how to make our meeting perfect. What presents to bring, how to plan the day, what to say to her in various situations, etc. I don’t think the issue is planning a date, but more the internal experience of not being able to control my thoughts. The sense of franticness.”
She asks, “Can you tell me what the emotions underlying the franticness is?”I’m confused, “I feel like frantic is an emotion, or at least a feeling? I guess I was worried and anxious. what underlies the feeling is probably this sense that I need to be perfect every time I talk to her – even thought our interactions have never shown that this is indeed how I need to be.”
And at this point, we go into a discussion about this is just another manifestation of “I’m not good enough” or “I need to be perfect/superhuman”. I tell this part of therapy session just to illustrate one of the ways this deep belief influences my emotional states, thoughts, and actions.
Through a long line of questioning, I realized that I even apply the “I’m not good enough” mindset circularly to judge myself, when I find that my behavior is revealing that I’m being motivated by a fear of abandonment and need to prove that I’m good or perfect. In my mind, all I could think of was the cons of this belief; I had labeled my numerous hobbies as “coping mechanisms for my shame” and my academic accomplishments as “escape from reality”, all terrible offshoots of this “flaw” in my character, this belief that “I’m not good enough”. (If you’re reading this, yea I think that’s pretty silly and jumbled up too. But that’s just how I came into the session and I’m bringing that authentically to you)
I found out in many earlier sessions, that even the very act of talking about this self belief with someone that matters to me (my therapist) seems to threaten my self worth. For context, the self beliefs I’ve identified are “I’ll always be abandoned”, ”I’m unlovable and unworthy”, “I’m not good enough”, the last of which seems to drive my entire professional, extracurricular, and interpersonal life. (aka my whole life).
My therapist asked me, “I just had a thought: do you think there’s any relationship between these three self beliefs?”
I got super excited, as I had just made the connection earlier in the week myself, “YEA! I realized earlier this week that these beliefs were probably integrated in a sequential fashion: When I was abandoned, I integrated the belief that everyone will leave me and that I’m unworthy of love. My solution to this when I was a child, was likely to act out of a belief that ‘I’m not good enough’ and accomplish things inside and outside of school.”
Just like in the last blog post, when my therapist said these beliefs to me, I felt my conscious awareness pulling away. My therapist’s voice because harder to hear, I was struggling to hold the conversational thread in my head, everything became further and hazier. I was slowly dissociating. I told her this, “I think I’m fading a bit like last week again. Part of me is still here, because I’ve been looking at this ashamed part of me that believes “I’m unlovable’ throughout the week, but I’m slipping.”
And the session ended there with some closing comforting words.
The reason for the dissociation
In retrospect, I believe I’ve come to understand the dissociation as a protective response. Since a part of me in my childhood has learned that “I’m unworthy of love”, this part of me is deeply ashamed of who I truly am, so the protective/compensatory “I need to be perfect” emerges, in order to guide my childhood behavior to become a “lovable” person. Of course, if I admit to someone that means a lot to me that I have an attachment relationship with, the part of me that deeply believes I’m unworthy of love will shrink away from reality out of shame and fear. Since my body learned to dissociate easily while living with my schizophrenia mother for several years in my teenage years, that is the mechanism by which I “shrink”.
At a deeper level, I believe that the reason that honesty about my deepest beliefs is so subconsciously terrifying to me, is that my mind has been, for all 20+ years of my life, an incredibly judgmental place. While my intent soon after I started therapy has been to cultivate as much compassion as possible for all parts of me, since it’s such a huge shift in mindset, all the way down to my subconscious beliefs, it has been wreaking chaos in my mind. In particular, like today, when I tried to be open and honest about my suffering, and my body rejected the attempt by dissociating.
The solution, I think, is to make my mind a loving and compassionate place, starting with how I relate with all the long rejected and judged parts of myself. Even the “I need to be perfect” part that the judgements emerge from. With just this goal, many external behaviors will fall into place:
- I will bring more happiness to the table: I don’t have to pretend, or disconnect myself to think “what would a loving person say”. I will genuinely radiate love and equanimity, based on what I’ve internally cultivated for these parts of myself
- I won’t be afraid to be honest about myself, as my home base which provides security will be myself. Other people have God, one caring adult from their infancy, or a loving husband. While I may not have these useful external sources of unconditional love, I can learn to cultivate it in myself. With security, fear disappears.
- many more benefits…
Lesson conclusion
So, the takeaway for me is the same as it has been for the past months – put the judging aside, and self inquire with compassion and curiosity. In this way, I can begin to form harmonious relationships between my parts based on curiosity and compassion, and the understanding that comes as a result of this compassionate inquiry. Concretely:
- I must reflect on both the PROS and cons of the part of me that believes I’m not good enough
- very high academic accomplishments
- great skill in a wide array of hobbies: climbing/judo/snowboarding, cooking/coffee, interpersonal skills1 like speaking, humor, “charisma”, etc.
- establish a compassionate relationship with this part, to see when it’s harming me vs when it is helping me.
and as 1 leads to 2, My experience of life will become simple and fuller of love and compassion, both because of how I lead these inner parts of me, and because of how I interact with the people around me.
Footnotes:
- these skills are useful in society as a way to unconsciously fill my emotional hole of “I’m not good enough”, but as a way to get what I want, wholesome or not (relationships, leadership roles, friendships, etc.) Once I’m in the relationships, and who I really are is more important, the skills lose their power since communication is not so useful as I’m largely an unconscious machine that acts out my desire to continuously be better and more worthy of love. I become addicted to sex and physical intimacy to feel for a brief moment that I’m good enough, then the doubt snakes back into my mind. I will never feel lasting true peace, love, or security so long as I don’t address these beliefs at their root, and integrate them into my conscious awareness. ↩︎
Holding my heart 