Luna Tail

My therapist was telling me something the last few sessions that really made me look at myself. It’s my initial reactions to things. And I’ve been thinking, because of this club thing I’ve been dealing with lately, how I automatically react to conflict and confrontation.

I don’t like how I react. I react like a child. My initial reaction is to feel like my life, my soul, my very self, is threatened, and I might die. I cower like a beaten puppy. I cry. I want to run and hide.

Other people will lash out with anger, or a snappy hurtful reply. So it’s interesting to see how people react.

My therapist tells me that I am probably hard-wired to be the way I am. And I will have to learn how to accept it, and perhaps how to reduce the time frame it takes me to switch from death, to acceptance, to I’m okay my life is not over and I can deal with this just fine.

I have many things in my life that I think will cause my life to fall apart. And good crap, I’ve been down before, and I don’t ever want to get there again. And she said that the down I experienced, because of codependency and anxiety, is different than the difficult emotions of, say, grief of losing a loved one. But I’m terrified of reaching that place again. It was horrible. I think that scares me more than anything in life.

But I am an adult now, not a child. And the thing I like about being 40 years old is that I have been an adult for as long as I was a child. In another 20 years, I’ll be able to say I’ve been healthy for half my life. LOL but I’ve only been working on getting emotionally healthy since 2000, so only 7 years. And that is actually something else to talk about. For most of my life… 33 years of my life, I suffered with anxiety and codependency and awful, destructive, negative behaviors. And I can’t expect them to just go away over night.

So anyway, I have to write myself some reminder notes and post them around. To let myself know that my initial negative and fearful reactions are not proportionate to the situation. They are, usually, very disproportionate to the reality of the situation. Not that reality can truly ever be known, but I try to get as close as possible.

So this is where disputing irrational thoughts comes in, too. To retrain my brain to think differently. And if I am hard-wired to be like this, then I have to learn to deal with it. She recommended the books by Daniel Amen, as he talks a great deal about how the brain is hard-wired to be certain ways. I might just order one of his CDs. I haven’t been reading books much lately, and I enjoy listening when I’m driving.

Anyway, that is my thought for the day.
Day 11

On this day..

• 11 Hour Days - 2006

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