I was here

I’m not supposed to think about this anymore.
And mostly I don’t.

But when I do

I remember

hot wax between my fingers
the sour tang of Johnny Walker Red and Coke
the feeling that I had no choice
blood on my hands and piss in the bucket.

And the weight
the weight
the weight of it.

Left to carry for the rest of my life.

———

I’ve been toying with the idea of working with old photos in some sort of way (here, in a separate online space, or perhaps in a physical way), another outlet for processing what can’t be completely processed and connecting to parts of me that are sometimes shut off. Watch this space—maybe—for more.

The ever-present aftermath

Let me build a framework of remembrances and self, a series of connecting, interlocking stories that explain who I am and have become, stories that protect me from the darker parts of myself, scaffolding for what is good within.

I woke up from a dream about high school. I had to go back, but there was no place for me. The girls had become football players, heavily muscled tackling machines with wide shoulders and tapered waists, steroid-injected caricatures of meathead manhood. I no longer had anything in common with my friends—or with anyone. Why did I have to go through this again? I didn’t. What a relief. But I did not wake up relieved.

Let me identify the tributaries to this dream and its aftermath of heavy grief, self-blame, and worry, the flows in and out: a surface reconnection with my first boyfriend, leading to a sadness about the lost-world quality of my early life; a boy about to head off to ninth grade; a realization that something of my childhood and adolescent trauma, which gelled in high school, will always be with me; the stirrings of a depressive episode that may or may not be fordable, which makes connection difficult and my mood thorny and jagged. 

A framework for sanity and self-acceptance rebuilt upon the saturated alluvial plain of trauma and self-blame. . . I build a trap to catch the thoughts that eat away at me, self-directed harpoons, remnants of what can’t be explained. I don’t know whether to hide these sharp things away or polish them for display, wall hangings that directly remind me that survival comes with scars.

Survival at any cost. But I am here, am I not? What to accept, what to change? For I was permanently altered and am capable of so much.

What was, what is, and what (may) never be

What do you remember about being a teenager?

 My memories of adolescence are a push-pull of opposing forces. The teen years were a confusion of insider jokes and outsider status, of sweat and insecurity, of styling mousse and endless possibility. Sheer joy intermingled with instability, sadness, and trauma and the path I traveled was perilous—but often exciting. Music and fashion were paramount. Crushes were huge. Pulled by forces that felt beyond me, my moods had the strength and inevitability of the tides. The possibility of managing my emotions would have been as alien as the concept of turning 50. 

It can be easy from the vantage of age and the calming of circumstance to wonder if I ever really was fifteen, filled with the surety of pop culture truths and the power of love to save me. Now I’m the parent to a teen (albeit one with a very different temperament and life experience) and a therapist to teens. And I’ve been working on this post for a long stretch, trying to think about how to meld lived and learned knowledge into something palatable for my professional blog.

Former adolescent, parent to an adolescent, therapist to adolescents . . . my training intermingles with what was and what is. My life history and process of working through deepen my therapeutic approach. Similarly, my best writing is rooted in the personal. However, writing in this way in a more professional space feels vulnerable and, perhaps, questionable. In addition, the concepts I am most curious about don’t lend themselves to click-friendly, prescriptive writing. 

For example, I’ve been curious lately about the effects on parents of having an adolescent. Based on parents I’ve encountered and my own internal mapping, I believe your attachment and trauma history can affect how you experience a teen’s natural process of individuation. A person’s childhood relational trauma, particularly if unexamined and unprocessed, can make parenting an individuating, authority-challenging teen painful (think Ghosts in the Nursery a decade later). Old wounds tied to attachment and abandonment reopen. Parents may respond to this in various, often unconscious, ways as they try to manage their emotions, ranging from totally checking out to intruding on their child’s life.

Crossing Paths by psychologist Laurence Steinberg is one of the few broad studies on the topic of the effects of adolescents on their parents, albeit a dated and not necessarily culturally diverse one. Steinberg focuses on the rise of youth contrasted with the lessening possibilities of midlife. He also looks at the parent’s general life satisfaction. If things are bad in your job and/or marriage, if you have little outside of your children to provide verve and purpose to your life, well, chances are that their adolescence is going to hit you hard.

Steinberg sorts the potentially more challenging emotional effects of parenting a teen into five categories: jealousy, abandonment, loss, powerlessness, and regret. At the same time, he doesn’t examine the potential early life causes of those feelings. True, this focus is perhaps not absolutely necessary to spur change. Recognizing that you may be feeling less “acceptable” emotions about your child’s blossoming and sudden disrespect can help you cope. In addition, having other interests and connections apart from your kids is generally a good thing. But there are other layers beyond the immediate, beyond the here and now, that are useful to excavate and grasp. Without awareness of the effects of the past we may find ourselves replicating or avoiding it, closing ourselves off to what is vulnerable and unfed within.

The questions I am asking, the hunches I am carrying, are not easily researched or explained. My own early life, heavily examined, written and rewritten, is close to the surface. My tendency to reflect upon my fears of and reactions to parenting the boy, who will someday (soonish) leave us, keeps me—I hope—from holding him back. It keeps me—I hope—from disappearing to avoid the pulls of his long leave-taking upon my vulnerable heart. But would writing about my personal experiences potentially help parents of clients without freaking them out?

Yeah. Well. I don’t know. It’s complicated. There are no neat how-to lists, no rules for smarter parenting and better businessing for these circumstances. So I post it here, for a very limited distribution, as I work it through. I was young, lonely, and angry once. I grew up and felt much of the same. Still do sometimes, though I’ve learned how to cope with those feelings, how to ride them out. And when parenting makes me feel like an abandoned child, I remind myself that I am a grownup and will be connected to this boy one way or another as long as life flows between us.

(Semi)permeable

I’ve had to make the choice lately between professional and personal writing, between the boundaried and the lightly bordered, between my own emotions and the semipermeable guise of being a therapist. These two emotional worlds can sometimes meet, even in writing, but there are times when I am compelled to toss aside the measured and meted, when it needs to be about my needs and untidy emotions.

What do you do when your head is full of other peoples’ stories, when life is built around work and family, and all your reading is of a psychological nature? When do the filters become a part of you, and you become a balanced, careful self, incapable of indulgence? So often I glide and elide along the thin surface of my own subconscious, focused on what lies beneath the surface of others.

I sometimes crack open at night. Two nights ago, back on one of those short binges of 3am sleep interruptions, I woke up crying, missing my father and reminded again of the permanence of death, the absolute quality of the absence. But more often than not, I wake up anxious, worried about the boy, about a client, about the crumbling state of the world. These are the things I cannot touch in my waking life, not while keeping the brokenness together, while showing others that to be broken is to be human. There is no other way. Once we accept this, we can take those broken parts and reshape ourselves again and again.

I’m an optimist. I’m a weakling. I am strong beneath the weakness, vulnerable under my self-obscuring cloak. I play a role and I am a role. The mask can become real, but at night it melts into me and I am fifteen again, letting the ache roll out of my chest, as sure of myself as a toddler, a bundle of this way and that way, a rummage of self and other coexisting in contradiction.

There is no selfishness in this sense of self, just me in all my messiness.

The end of the vanishing act: Sober 13 months and counting

I stopped drinking a little over a year ago. The last time I raised full glass to chapped lips, April 14, 2018, I drank furtively in a darkened kitchen, finally acknowledging that the only one who could stop this slightly swaying train was me. I was not a full-blown, stereotypical alcoholic, not physically and dangerously dependent on booze, but most nights I was a bit wobbly, a bit absent. Most days I was looking forward to that first anxiety- and boredom-softening glass of wine. And I belonged to a wine club, which ensured that my supply never ran out.

That night I was disgusted with myself. The drinking wasn’t enjoyable, the process of absenting myself abhorrent. To fade away without notice, to be a part of a group where not noticing is a habit, is painful on multiple levels. Not for the first time, I made the decision to stop, to end the double ache of negated invisibility, to stop a pattern in which there can be no good conclusion. I fell in love with someone who learned early that acknowledging reality could be dangerous, while I grew up with a tendency towards melodrama deepened by an often-unrealized need to be seen. This romantic match is not an unusual combination, but is one that can lead to repetition of patterns. The drinking, more low drama than high, wasn’t doing any of us any good. And who was I fooling, anyway? It was time to grow up and accept responsibility for being present in life.

So far, the sobriety experiment has stuck. I’ve gotten through holidays, birthdays, celebrations, family visits here and there, and one inadvertently stressful anniversary dinner in which complementary glasses of champagne were placed before us. I have had hard days at work and sudden, anxiety-provoking surprises. I’ve been sad and mad. I’ve rewatched the entire run of Mad Men with its cocktail obsessions. And, slowly, parts of me are returning. I am reading more. My temper is generally even, my sleep, for the most part, better. The dinner conversation flows and, when it doesn’t, I mostly take it in stride. Those wide ribbons of feeling that first brought me to this blog—the depression, the desire, the angst rooted in trauma—are certainly still here, but less desperate, less monumental and all-encompassing. 

On occasion, I still miss the feeling drinking brings, the slow melt, the blurred lines. Perhaps a return to the occasional drink, the celebratory glass of bubbly, the slowly sipped mojito would not result in another slip down the slope of boozy desperation. But the benefit of being present far outweighs the risk of returning to perpetually hiding and waiting to be found. Here I am, where I’ve been all along.