On Emotions Practicum

Chapter Two of Revival finds me living single in Redding, California. I experience adventures in dating for a few years. I also have some adventures in room mating. As I finish up with school, I find full time work. I flirt with a party lifestyle a few times, but nothing comes of it but one solid and very important friendship, though that happens later.

I continue my work in counseling throughout my trials.

I learn that the mother of one of my molesters maintains that her son was “sexually precocious.” My mother seems to agree with this assessment and I feel betrayed. I continue to work through my issues with this and other aspects of my life. To that end, I attend group counseling for survivors of sexual abuse for the first time as an adult at the ripe old age of twenty. I meet and make a really good friend out of this group.

I learn in counseling to find calmness within when faced with the storm of emotions that can emerge from a past of horrific abuse. I learn that I can move through my emotions and come out the other side a better person than ever, each and every time scary emotions come up.

Trying to make it through childhood alive was a huge exercise in stuffing my emotions down and putting a lid on them. Stuffing this way was an instrument of my survival and nothing else, and it didn’t serve me anymore as an adult. If my first three years in counseling were an exercise in Emotions 101, the next three years were all about Emotions Practicum. Sure, your emotions are recognizable, but now what do you do with them when they become uncomfortable (which is all the time)?

You stay in your body. You breathe. You move through. You come out the other side and breathe some more, because inevitably there are more emotions to come. That’s what it’s like to be a whole human being in the throes of human experience. Who new?

Aside from the fact that we are emotional people, we are also practical people. I had to learn from the age of sixteen how to manage other areas of my life, and I did this learning under fire. How to manage people, time, work, school, money. Time and school were about the only two things where I gained any proficiency. Work I managed, but I always did too much. Money, I managed, but there has never been enough. Cash slips through my fingers like water or sand. And people? I have never understood people and I probably never will. I’m resigned to that now. I have settled into a comfortable companionship in my later years, but it took me years and several relationships to figure out how best to do that. Ultimately, we’ve both changed to better fit the other. That, to me, is what works the best for us. Other people may be entirely different, but of course I wouldn’t know. It’s people, after all, and I’ve never gained much proficiency in that subject at all.

I’m not able to ascertain the character of people when I first meet them. I know only whether I’m drawn to them, and that’s about it. I’m not able to recognize substance abuse in people without some wrangling. Once I do wrangle that truth out, I’m not able to disentangle myself from the person at all, or, if I am able to it’s not before considerable involvement. Often, I find that I’m not able to get out of my own way.

It’s fairly clear to me now that I’m working out my own issues with my parents and substance abuse. As a child I was unaware of that fact or circumstance in other people. It seems to me that growing up in such an environment would make one either hyperaware of that issue or totally clueless. I fall into the category of totally clueless.

I believe that when we have issues to work out, we repeat the same kind of relationship patterns over and over again until those issues are finally dealt with. This includes coming right down to the people we pick to have in our lives. I’m not saying we do this consciously. I’m saying that we do this in spite of our best efforts to avoid it. The very thing that you might feel you want to avoid becomes the very thing that your subconscious chooses because it knows that’s the one thing (or many things) that you need to work out.

What a bitch! Or you could make the case that it’s one more opportunity to finally purge yourself of that thing that you most deign within yourself.

I do make the case that it is such. One more opportunity to work yourself out. Once you do work yourself out you may be able to say “Finally! I’ve worked that out and I need not do so again.”

In my own case the issues have been substance abuse, abusive behavior in general, and arguing that seem to manifest themselves in my close relationships. How do I get past them? By dealing with them within myself. The conflicts I find myself in over and over again have one common denominator. Me. Me equals emcee squared. The only behavior one can change is one’s own behavior. The only one in charge of me is me.

Thank God that it’s that way for me. The easiest person in my life to effect change in is me. Changing myself is the clearest pathway to a better relationship.

Peace.