In my 47th year of life, I can say that I have been working on myself for the past 25. I have read on average 45 books a year, listened to a podcast every other day and written many journals and blog posts (mainly because writing has a therapeutic effect on me). I have worked with six different psychotherapists (because I believe that in our different stages of life and development we need different types of guides on the side), three psychiatrists and two life coaches (one at a time, obviously). And through this mountain of work with myself to untangle the many wires that were crossed within me I feel I’ve made almost no progress, untangling one of them.
The part of myself I like the least and that frustrates and puzzles me the most is how affected (to read emotionally hijacked) I get by reactions that people have to my words and actions. Regardless of how thoughtful I had been in saying something, regardless of the history I have or don’t have with that person and whether that can be judged as negative or positive, regardless of how little interaction I have with this other human being, and regardless of my conscious knowledge that people’s reactions are a statement about themselves most often, I still have the hardest time taking in and digesting retorts that I deem abrupt or actions that I consider thoughtless or even offensive.
Yesterday, on such an occasion, I chose to stay with the discomfort I was feeling at the way someone chose to write to me. I noticed the reactions I was having were very strong: tunnel, vision, anxiety, being transported into an almost different being. I asked myself what this was about and I tried to go deep inside myself and understand why this affected me so. I must say that I got little to no response. The physical reactions of a contracted gut and the electricity going down my arms were too strong for me to relax enough to move from the more ancient part of my brain into the newer one that may have harbored a semblance of an answer. My usual signs of anxiety were alerting me that there was a threat nearby. But what it was a threat to, I could not calm down enough to decipher.
This morning, as I am still processing this, I think I can safely assume that the part of me that felt under attack was my ego. I have an image about myself that I have worked hard to create and even harder to maintain, and whenever someone is acting or talking to me in a way that threatens that image, my body and mind react to protect me. It makes much more sense on the inside of me than I on the outside, believe me.
When I was little, I would frequently be asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I happen to believe we never “grow up” as in we never settle on a way to be or on a development stage. If we do things right, we never stop learning and changing (or at least we shouldn’t). But if I were to go along with a question and indulge an exercise of imagination, I would say that when I grow up, I dream to be a person who is able to stand up firm, look people in the eye and breathe easily into the knowing of who they are, even when they are bombarded by the results of other peoples’s frustrations and suffering. When I grow up, I want to have a strong back, a soft front and a wild heart.
Connect 