Acceptance Can Be Hard To Accept

As I said before, my goal in dealing with my wife’s personality traits or behaviors which I wasn’t fond of was to change her, either directly or indirectly.

We all make little changes for other people in relationships. Maybe we clean up our language a little, tone down our volume a bit, or stop insisting on watching every Spongebob episode the night it premieres.

Sometimes we make big changes for these people in our lives. We might give up our career ambitions, our desire to live in a certain part of the world, our choice in having children, or even certain traditions we’ve held for many years.

In those cases above, the decisions are probably fine for a couple of reasons. The major reason is that we are changing voluntarily. The other reason is that we will still remain essentially who we were, just a little different.

But what if those changes aren’t all that voluntary? Well, that’s a problem. And what if the changes change who we are inside? That’s even worse!

And if those changes are forced upon us by these other folks, that's an impending disaster.

I faced a number of these changes, and most of them were somehow connected to relationships.

I had a girlfriend I cared about, but there was tremendous pressure on me to move the relationship along. Eventually I bought an engagement ring, and after more pressure I gave it to her and we set a date.

That was pretty much the end of the relationship. From my perspective, her goal was to get married to get out of her parents’ home. Once that ring was on her finger, and her future seemed secure, she began to break dates, go away for weekends without calling when we were supposed to be together, and in general began to have her own life. I broke the engagement and became Public Enemy #1.

After that, the next scenario began. I knew a girl at work who, it must be pointed out, I did not like. She did not like me either. So of course we started dating. I mean, who wouldn’t?

Soon I noticed a challenge looming. She was loud and gregarious (that is, she basically didn’t know a stranger, as her parents would say). She would inject herself into conversations with people in the next row at theaters before the film. She would tell folks fairly personal things before she even knew their names.

I’m a relatively quiet person, and more quiet when I’m with folks who aren’t. Soon I was getting embarrassed regularly.

It was just who she was, and it was harmless. But the more it happened, the less I was willing to accept it and the more I began to resist it. I made disapproving faces. I got emotionally distant, and sometimes physically if I could.

I was determined to let her know I didn’t like this behavior. I assumed once she understood that, then she would change. “Ha ha,” the universe said.

If I had been accepting, then she could have acted like this all the time and I would have had the distance to just let her. I mean really, what’s the worst that could happen? Someone might take offence? Well, that’s on her, isn’t it?

But in my mind, it wasn’t on her. It was a reflection on me. I felt she was acting like a child in many ways, and I felt more and more parental. When people would look at me in disbelief about things she would do or say (very few filters between her mind and her mouth at the time), in my mind it was as if they were saying, “Dude. Do something with your kid, will you?”

Not fair, I realize. But that’s honestly how I thought and felt. I was not accepting these things, and much of the reason I wasn’t had to do with my upbringing and my lack of boundaries.

What do boundaries have to do with anything? Great question! That will be the focus of the next entry.

So What's With All This Mindfulness Stuff, Anyway?

You may notice that my blog isn’t exactly going to be scientific. I don’t have a degree in psychology, although I did pretty well in it in college. I’m not an expert on Buddhist teachings, although I am familiar with many of them. I’m not a therapist, although anyone with friends or relationships with other people are often unpaid therapists in a way.

I am a guy living in Missouri, who has been through a lot of junk and am still going through a bunch of it. I have a psychologist who works with me using mindfulness. So while most books on the subject sound like textbooks, I’m going to write this my own imperfect way. Sometimes I will ramble or use incorrect sentence structure or grammar. But if I get too far off track, throw something at me and get my attention, will you?

Also, while Mindfulness touches so much of my life, my introduction to it was due to a troubled marriage. So relationship applications will often be my focus.

I have to admit, I wasn’t really sure what all this “mindfulness” stuff was at first. My doctor simply tried to teach me the foundation without really putting a label on it.

Mindfulness pretty much sits on a foundation of Eastern Religion. If you see Buddhist monks, you see some folks who are generally being Mindful.

My doctor noticed that some of his Christian patients might have some trouble with mindfulness therapy concepts, so he went through and found Bible passages that highlighted the same concepts. I found that if I just looked at them as principles, it didn’t matter to me where they came from. They just worked for me.

Here are the big fundamental Mindfulness pillars in my mind:

·         Acceptance (instead of resistance)

·         Being Present (being in the Here And Now)

·         Detachment (experiencing emotions but not becoming those emotions)

·         Faith (not really religious faith, though)

·         Boundaries (knowing how to be in a relationship but not lose who I am as an individual)

There may be more concepts that I’ll run up on later, but this blog is going to focus on these things primarily.

There is a lot of focus on meditation in Mindfulness. But really, those of us in the West don’t really grasp it too well unless we take classes or read books about it. I don’t set aside specific time for meditate at this point. Maybe I will one day, but with kids and work and occasional showers, it just isn’t part of my daily time budget.

Instead, I find that I do my little meditations as a sudden intervention on myself when anxiety strikes.

 Anxiety – I Can’t Stress It Enough!

My problems really stemmed from a lot of unresolved junk growing up and from bad coping mechanisms. I didn’t handle stuff very well at times. I would react strongly when I was faced with anxiety triggers.

Triggers for me were sometimes people, and sometimes events. But I am a Virgo and have a black belt in worry. So sometimes I would find anxiety firing up in my brain just over things I thought could happen.

For crying out loud, I could get myself all worked up over running through a bad scenario in my mind that I made up! That’s a train you really don’t want to leave the station.

In some folks anxiety causes them to erupt, and that is an obvious clue about what’s bugging them. Downtown traffic, looming deadlines at work or school, money problems, and anything else that might be no big deal to others but for that one person it’s a mountain.

But in my case, and for so many others, anxiety gets held inside. It causes more pressure to build up inside, and it if doesn’t find some decent release then it will begin to morph into depression. Ugh. Welcome to my nightmare.

My wife would tell me I needed to stop bottling it up so much. But when I vented it, she usually either responded with complaints of how I was always complaining about her (hmmm…. Is that a warning alarm I hear there?), or worse she would simply escalate the issue with her own eruption.

I learned to just keep my mouth shut. Unresolved anxiety led to depression. In time I was getting vaguely suicidal thoughts, which in time became a lot less vague!

Mindfulness would have helped me deal with the situation. In fact, it would have prevented much of what I experienced. But I was raised as a boy with Mid-American notions, and I just didn’t know there were alternatives. So I continued to be miserable.

In the next post, I will start looking into the first Pillar – Acceptance.

The Journey Begins...

This will be an aspect of my journey. A Journey Journal as it were.

My hopes are that I will have ample incentive to keep posting, partly because I love to write and can always use another prompt, and partly because it will give me a way to look at where I'm at in the journey.

I also hope that folks will begin to read this little journal and feed back on my efforts. If people like it, great. If they love it, even better. But even if folks really don't like it, or if they want to take exception to things I've written, at least it's feedback. It's an opporunity for communication, for dialog.

I have been on this journey since sometime in 2007 or so, but I've only recently found myself in a place in life where I am taking it seriously. Or maybe I'm just at a place where I can understand what it is I'm doing.

My psychologist initially tried to point me towards mindfulness as a coping strategy for my marriage. I was struggling, unhappy, and finding myself more and more introverted in my own home. Since I was unhappy with the person I was with, I avoided her as much as possible. But as the stresses built up, instead of lashing out I lashed in, to coin a phrase. I became bitter. Angry. Depressed. Yes, even suicidal at times.

It never dawned on me, in the midst of the chaos of my own emotions, that I could have left long before it got so bad. But my parents were divorced, so I promised myself and God that I would not follow that path. So I stayed, and the situation got worse.

My big problem - well, one of them - was that I figured that my unhappiness would just clear up if she would just change. And isn't that how we usually look at things? If he or she or they would just shape up, man! Things would be so much better.

Ah, the Great Lie.

This journal will track how that whole Lie got started in my life, how my unhappiness was almost ensured based on my upbringing and life up to the breaking point, and how the little light bulb finally clicked on. The light bulb was the 10,000 watt variety, and although I started out having to squint because of the intensity of the illumination, now I can see things so much better. Yeah, there are still shadows. But now I know that the shadows are not the only thing in the world.

I can't promise I'll contribute to this blog daily, or even weekly. A week might offer many nuggets I want to share, and a week might be so weird that I don't have time to do much more than eat, sleep, and work.

But I will resolve to make this a part of my life. It will be a tool and journal of a guy who's trying to heal from a lot of pretty deep wounds.

A parting thought: when a large ocean wave approaches a ship, the captain has a choice to make. If he tries to run from it, he's going to find out that there is no outrunning nature. If he tries to ignore it by staying parallel to it, he will find himself swamped. If he turns into the wave, though, he will experience all the fear and anxiety of facing this natural force.... but he stands a way better chance of surviving the experience.

Likewise, when life throws anxiety at me, I realize that trying to merely escape r ignore it won't work. But by facing the anxiety-causing trigger, as scary as it might be, it's the one way I stand a chance at overcoming it.

More to come.