Hi there. We talked a little bit about others, but what about recognizing that “self-protective separation” in ourselves? How do we determine whether our separation is temporary or a more permanent situation? How do we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps when we need to? How do we get our shit together before it’s too late?
Well, I hate to say it but when it comes to identifying this internal split, the struggle is real. Sometimes it takes what I described yesterday. We need to have another situation, also known as context, to compare it to. We need someone to bring it to our attention. Something needs to happen to shake us up. You can be incredibly self-reflective and still miss the signs. That is very real.
I can give you a few tricks but I can’t assure you that they are going to work. There are no guarantees. They are tips. Little guides. Thoughts that might be helpful in the scheme of things.
One major sign is that something doesn’t feel as badly as you thought it might. Don’t get me wrong, there is always a possibility that something is easier to process than we imagined. However, when our world is rocked by some thing and we think it’s going to feel like complete shit and then it doesn’t really at all, there is a good chance we aren’t fully feeling it just yet. If you can’t recall ever having this experience yourself, you might have witnessed it in others. This is when someone might say something like “I thought I was going to cry but I didn’t. I don’t feel nearly as sad as I thought I might.” Again, there is the distinct possibility that something is better than we imagined it might be. There is also a good chance that something within us is blocking the full feeling as a way of protecting our soul from the onslaught of emotions.
Another sign is that you feel less compassionate towards others or perhaps you are just disinterested in what they have to share. Sure, some of us can compartmentalize like it’s going out of style, but more often than not, if we felt before and suddenly cease feeling, it is a sign that we have shut off some emotional faucet deep within us. I find it helpful to picture a drain when trying to understand this particular method of self-protection. I don’t want shit to bubble to the top so I jam everything down the drain as far as I can manage it. I’ve turned off my faucet, but I also have to ensure that no one else spills their liquids down my drain, as their sharing might be the thing that cuts everything loose or more appropriately, clogs everything up.
Again, this sign can be challenging to interpret or diagnose. Sometimes people are tired or distracted. Sometimes they don’t care about a particular topic or they’ve gotten such a lukewarm response when engaging on that topic previously, that they decide not to jump in fully. Sometimes we understand that talking to that particular person takes a more active and participatory role and so we take a full backseat.
How else can we recognize the disconnect that occurs as a measure of self-protection? Well, typically when the topic of the discussion at hand is downplayed, that can be a sign of attempted minimizing. All of the ‘its not really a big deal” or “I don’t’ really care” statements that are made can be an attempt to make a subject so undesirable or unimportant that it doesn’t require further investigation or discussion. Again, tricky, tricky, because sometimes there are things or issues that just aren’t important. The most challenging part of that bit is that there are occasions where we’ve blown something up and are attempting to scale it back because we recognize it isn’t worth all that energy we allotted. Or sometimes we see straight away that the thing, whatever it may be, doesn’t really deserve too much hullabaloo and so we are actually doing the work to keep our responses grounded.
This is where it’s helpful to hold the situation or individuals against like situations and people to create our own sliding scale. That doesn’t mean that we can accurately determine exactly how someone feels or more importantly, how they value every single situation. It just means that we have provided ourselves with enough data to make a relatively well-informed decision.
Let me give a real deal example so this doesn’t sound like a bunch of empty talk. Let’s actually go back to the goodbye I opened with yesterday. I might decide that my reaction to saying goodbye is kind of weak. Given the relationship I have with this human in the “labels” sense (i.e. this person is related to me and is my ______), it isn’t entirely logical to fathom that I wouldn’t have an emotional response to saying goodbye. But if I dig deep into our relationship and acknowledge it as challenging or deeply troubling, then it might not seem off-base for have a milder reaction to the termination of the relationship.
Does that make sense? It is all about context. It is all about who you are or who the person is and what life has looked like, as of late and historically.
This person I had to say goodbye to meant the world to me. Our relationship, though riddled with some challenges, as most relationships are, was meaningful and substantive enough to warrant some pretty hefty heartbreak. The absence of pain or sorrow would not be an acceptable realization but rather, an admission that I can’t process what is in front of me yet. Couldn’t. It was or is too painful, too real, too in my face, too much, too soon.
Fine, that sounds great. I am going to wait until it feels better for me to process things and then once I get to that place, voila, I can work it through in a way that suits me. Sadly, that’s not how it works and sometimes when we deny ourselves the ability to really feel something in the way we need to, during the time we need to feel it, it makes shit so much worse.
We easily get accustomed to things the way we’ve constructed them, rather than the way they actually exist. If it’s just a heartbeat or so, that’s fine. However, that’s not usually the way it works. Once we decide to bury something and revisit at a later time, we often (not always) lose the ability to control when that later time might be. The issue is that we’ve already managed to demonstrate to the psyche that we are capable of bottling shit up, the sky is truly the limit. We can shove shit down and delay difficult gratification like what.
Sometimes an acknowledgement that we are indeed resorting to this behavior doesn’t lead to immediate change. You know what it does do? It makes us more aware. We plug in differently. We shorten our learning curve. We value our process more whereas we give ourselves some space to sort shit out. Not a galaxy. Just like a small patch of sky. What does that mean? Well, begin to ask the questions. Don’t be afraid. You never know. And no one else needs to know. You know?
Tomorrow, Friday. Yay.
L.
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