Emotional Teleportation
At the end of my last post, I wrote about having a full heart after a week of being slathered with friendship and love. This emotional state was absolutely true and honest. And there was simultaneous emotional process happening that was heart wrenching and distressing and equally true and honest. That’s the thing about emotions- sometimes it feels impossible that one meat-sack of a body could hold so much emotional energy! The past couple days leading up to my leaving Texas, I supported, from a distance, a family member entering a therapeutic process. I am used to being involved in my own therapeutic processes- oh, I have had several. I also have experience with facilitating others’ therapeutic processes as an inpatient and outpatient therapist. However, being the family member of a person entering a therapeutic process is a shit of a different smell. And a stinky one, I might add. It is the position of least control. If the devil wanted to make a deal with me for my soul, offering control would be an appealing trade. In times of out-of-my-power distress, my fallback is hyper-competence and research. Give me the fact and stats! I turn into a most motivated researcher in service of my neuroses, and, frankly, my fear. My role as “supportive family member” is made even more nightmarish (for myself and others) by the fact that I have personal and professional advice, which I am convinced could make the world right, if people would just listen! I also know that generally no one ever listens to a damn thing but, I swear, I have very good advice!
In addition to brimming with conflicting emotional states in reaction to simultaneous life-happenings, I had that experience where emotions seem to teleport one through time. (I’m not totally sure what the mechanics of teleportation are and I’m sure sci-fi Seth could tell me if I asked, but I won’t give him the satisfaction.) What I mean is, I had the experience of being this 31-year-old woman, and also felt myself inhabiting my 19-year-old self. (So it’s really not like teleportation where your physical matter is moved from one place to another- but rather it’s like time travel, but without physical movement through time?) I was 19 when my own recovery process began in drug and alcohol treatment, so my loved one entering the same process recharged that emotional experience for me again. That in and of itself is crazy. Those memories and feelings still live inside my mind and body- dormant for the most part, but emerging in empathy for my loved one. The tumult and confusion. The shame and the fear of the unknown. The relief and the doubt. The grief and the anger. I wasn’t totally reliving it, but it’s all still there- not influencing by daily life, but just a part of my development. What really got me to travel through time was the interactions within my family. After years of work in therapy, I’m able to ask for exactly what I would have needed at that time. Here’s my chance! So of course, I’m coaching family members with unsolicited feedback about how to respond to this loved one with compassion, vulnerability and gentle honesty. My 19-year-old-self yearned for those responses so badly at the time. And there’s still this part of me that desperately craves for it- I don’t think that childhood yearning goes away for anyone. After coaching my family on how to respond to my loved one for a few days, it became really clear that I had picked up an old battle that I had decided to surrender long ago. It makes me feel sad to write that, but really it depends from which perspective I’m looking. Like I feel sad for my younger self that needed something more or different, but the fact is, I moved through and have moved through my recovery process without getting those responses from whom I wanted them most. I learned to turn to others for comfort and grew to have a balance of relying on others and believing in my own personal and spiritual resources. In some ways, it was an appropriate developmental milestone to be hitting at that time. (See, I do that- get all technical and intellectual on myself- which just shows how wounded I still am- smiley face). <—-I do that too, cover up the pain with a jokingly quivering smile. Here we have it folks, layers upon layers of defenses, splashed across the page!
I will say, although it was a mistake to try to speak up for my younger self under the guise of trying to be helpful to my loved one, it felt empowering to have the language and wherewithal to do so. I recognized the part of myself which still desires a reparative emotional experience with my family around what it means to be vulnerable. Another part of me accepts that I have agreed to the unspoken family contract in which the equilibrium has been struck. That equilibrium involves fierce loyalty and devotion, expressed from a subdued distance. It has been accepted by all in the system including me. And while i’m generally ready to screw with some equilibrium, it doesn’t feel honorable to push people down a road they don't want to go. And it certainly doesn’t feel honorable to do so during the start of someone else’s recovery journey. It’s not all about me. BUT ACTUALLY it’s about all of us- the whole family- every time some crisis strikes. Each individual’s reactions are a product of the system and a link in the current chain reaction. So in that sense, the timing to stir things up while the pot is boiling makes a sense! However, one of the values I ascribe to is not to cause undue harm. After a few days of badgering others on how to be compassionate, I took a dose of my own medicine and compassionately let my family off the hook. While I’m ready to dismantle the walls that stand between us, others may need to continue to straighten the picture frames on the walls to stave off whatever pain I can’t even imagine. I initially wrote “I’m ready to bulldoze the walls that stand between us,” butin reality I’m still fairly ambivalent about allowing my loved ones to be closer to me. It’s so painful to try to open up myself up to them to end up feeling unseen and misunderstood. I have loads of curiosity about them, though, and it’s as if we’re in some kind of transactional emotional stalemate. I’ll share some, if you share some. But I’m the only one asking for more exchanges. So, I’m focusing on being supportive in my own way for my loved one with hopes that our relationship may grow and change. This may or may not impact how others in the family want to decide to connect, but I am enthusiastic about the potential to increase the sum-value of love with my loved one as we travel through recovery together. And despite that hope, I think the universe is delivering a gift for him and for me by having planned for me to pack up my personal and professional advice and getting the heck out of the country. The trip to Paris is feeling more and more real as I pack for fall in Europe which is the age at which I started my own recovery process. Which is a super strange thing, but something that happens quite a lot, I think. I think that some people actually live in this teleported state of emotional existence, which can sometimes lead to terrible suffering. I’ll describe what I’m talking about to be more clear. So my loved one is beginning this treatment process and I’ve become somewhat of the family liaison- partly due to my professional expertise, but also because this loved one and I have maintained a semblance of a relationship despite his tumult.
