And how I’m changing my life with them
So I’ve landed myself back in therapy and it’s far from a bad thing, in fact, I’m happy to have someone back in my life that is there to support me, and only me. Don’t get me wrong, I have a loving husband and two beautiful daughters, and family and friends that surround me, but I suddenly realized the importance of having someone to support me as staunchly as I do for others in my life.
And for me, that’s my new therapist.
The reader’s digest version of the back story
My husband and I moved 975km (a 10 hour drive away — if you’re lucky) from home in Muskoka to northwestern Ontario after he accepted a job as the town’s new Fire Chief back in April. He moved here in April and I stayed back to finish up with the sale of our house, and then moved to our new hometown with a population of 3,300 on May 1.
My two daughters, 19 and 20, stayed back home as they were already set up with their college lives, work, boyfriends and friends. It was a hard move for me to make and I struggled with “leaving them” behind, although they were the ones that said, “I don’t know why you wouldn’t go.” and “Go live your dreams like you’re always telling everyone else to do.”
The only problem being, this was my husband’s dream, not mine. However, he’d supported me through the last 2 1/2 years of trying to start my own business without so much as a whisper about the lack of money I was bringing in, so I felt indebted.
And I really did want him to live his dream.
But I also really struggled with finding my bearings here in this new life of ours. I was incredibly lonely and spent my days trying to entertain myself, which was way more exhausting than it sounds. And then there was the little voice in my head constantly telling me I wasn’t doing enough…
I had my ups and downs but for the most part, it appeared as though I was settling in.
Fast forward 3 months
Last Friday, my family (my two daughters, their boyfriends, and my 86 yr old Mom) show up for a surprise visit and I’m elated. For 5 days, I’m happy, our house is full of love and laughter, I’m present, I feel peaceful and I can’t get enough of them.
We have campfires and eat smores and play and endless badminton tournament with a makeshift net made from two bar height lawn chairs and a 12' ladder. We visit the beautiful beaches and parks in town and just enjoy being together again.
And then, on the day before they leave, I’d already started to miss them. They were still here, and yet I was slowly being overcome by feelings of loss and loneliness.
I remembering saying to my oldest daughter, “I miss you already” Monday afternoon. The words somehow strike me as a red flag but I can’t fully comprehend what’s about to come.
I cried myself to sleep that night.
Tuesday tidal wave
Tuesday morning, my youngest daughter Emily, her boyfriend and my Mom were packed and ready to leave by 8am. I stood in the driveway and sobbed as they gave me hugs and got into the truck. I could barely speak.
I went back into the house, curled up on the couch and cried for 2 hours.
My oldest daughter woke up around 11am and I had about 30 minutes with her before her boyfriend woke up and I watched helplessly as they too packed up their belongings and their cat, Bean, and loaded their car.
Again, I stood in the driveway and sobbed. I remember Sydney saying, “Love you” as she closed the car door, and I couldn’t even speak I was so overcome with emotion.
Back to the house, back to the couch, back to the tears. I sobbed and sobbed. The kind of crying where you feel like your eyes are about to burst.
I felt like a tidal wave came crashing down upon me.
When I finally stopped crying and tried to do something productive with myself, I’d go into the kids rooms and start to bawl, or I’d look out into the back yard where we’d been hanging out and having fun, and I’d feel gutted.
I fell to my knees, wracked with sobs to the point of near hyperventilating.
I knew I needed help
I know enough to know when it’s time to reach out. I’ve battled my demons much of my life and even though I like to think I’ve battled them all, sometimes one comes back.
I reached out to a couple of carefully chosen people (which in itself is a difficult thing to do, even when you know who your people are) because in that moment, not just anyone will do. Trust is a huge factor and the person you reached out to last time might not be the person you reach out to this time.
In my experience, it totally depends on the demon you’re up against at the time.
I felt a bit better having shared with someone that I was struggling, but something in me knew that I needed more help. Professional help.
The devastation I felt after my family leaving wasn’t something a friend couldn’t help me navigate because it was a symptom of a deeper underlying issue. I didn’t have much figured out but I did realize a couple of key things.
- I’d spent my life living for others, and when others left (similar to what I went through when both girls went off to college and I faced the dreaded empty nest for the first time) I felt a devastating emptiness that perhaps only a Mom can understand. I felt like a shell of a person. Like there was no reason for me to be there.
- I lacked the internal support system to navigate this next chapter of my life. I’m a mental health advocate (call it baptism by fire), and I will champion it for the rest of my life. I know all the things to do — meditate, read, journal, exercise, yoga, mindfulness, community — and I was doing them but they weren’t enough. I needed to learn to stand on my own two feet. I needed the internal sense of self and strength for times when those other things weren’t enough.
I was a people pleaser who lacked a sold sense of self and that’s how I fell into the trap of living for others. It’s totally ok to love and support and encourage others but it’s a very different thing to live through others. You cannot live your life through others. You can only live your life through you.
The second issue arose in relation to the first because as a victim of childhood abuse, I never felt safe and therefore never lived on my own for any significant amount of time. I went from relationship to relationship, looking for someone to take care of me.
I’d never learned to really take care of myself.
Thus began my internet search to find a therapist to help me and the missing piece of the puzzle that I discovered while talking to her.
How ironic that she happened to be driving by
My search turned up no one in the immediate vicinity but with the way things have evolved due to Covid, that didn’t really matter.
I found someone whose photo looked nice (I’m a body language coach and I’m very keen when it comes to people’s vibe so looking at their photos or seeing a video is very helpful to me when it comes to working with someone) and her bio seemed to match up with my needs. I sent her an email but after a couple of hours, I hadn’t received a reply.
I searched again and found someone from close to back home, again, based on photo and bio seemed like a good match so I reached out. She replied within an hour and said in her email that she’d ironically just driven past Marathon on her way back from visiting her son in Thunder Bay, and she understood the feeling of parting with your family.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I am totally woo-woo and a believer in things happening for a reason and that you’ll cross paths with the right people at the right time, but this had me in a state of disbelief.
I also knew without a doubt that she was the one.
The three things she told me that are changing my life
The three things that seemed to be at the heart of my issues weren’t even a surprise to me, but somehow, hearing them from her made them carry a new meaning, a new perspective, a way to change things.
When I talked about the visit from my family and how I’d felt so at peace and present, I told her that I’d realized it was because that crappy voice in my head had stopped. I recognized it while my family was visiting, which only made me more aware of how present it had been in the last couple of months following the move.
I’d somehow gotten used to it.
That voice in my head that was always on me to do more, accomplish more, make better use of my time, clean the house, walk the dog, don’t sit and relax (relax? I didn’t even really know how to relax) because there’s other things you should be doing especially since you’re not “working”…you know, that kind of voice?
I was also deathly afraid of it coming back once my family had all left and I was alone with it again. It had been kicking the sh*t out of me and I was so tired of the abuse.
The first thing she told me was that I was too self judgemental.
When I talked about feeling lost after the kids went home, I went on to explain how I blamed (or judged as she called it) myself for “not being the Mom I wanted to be” because I had postpartum depression when the girls were born and I felt like I was still trying to make up for not being there for them the way I should’ve been (hence the intense fear that moving away from them triggered in me). I was also judging myself for having postpartum depression in the first place, which was something I hadn’t really thought about before. It was healing to hear her say that I was in no way at fault for that because postpartum is not something I had any control over, even though I didn’t consciously judge myself for it, I had been on some level.
I also judge myself for every one of my career choices and changes over the years. I still struggle with the number of the times I got to a high point and then gave up and walked away, usually because my personal life seem to crash whenever I started to succeed in my career, but to me, they were a string of failures.
The second thing was that I’m too critical of myself.
This wasn’t a complete surprise but I was somewhat taken aback by the the fact that it was more of a problem than I realized because of the fact that I had gotten used to the voice being there.
Day in and day out, I was fighting against it from the moment I woke up. I wasn’t waking up happy and looking forward to the day. It was more of a “great, now what am I going to do to keep myself busy today?” But then I’d immediately try to reframe/rewrite/rethink the thought and come up with a positive one.
This was all happening in the first 30 seconds of waking up in the morning. Every. Damn. Day.
I told my therapist it was like I had this drill sergeant in my head nonstop. Interesting to note — she asked me whose voice it was and I don’t think I answered her. I’ve come to realize it’s a cross between my father (God Bless him, he was a small town police sergeant and had three boys that struggled with drugs and alcohol and everyone in town knew it. His part of the drill sergeant voice filtered into my brain from hearing him yell at my nearest-in-age brother for sneaking out of the house one night and blaming me for letting him. He was maybe 13 or 14 which would have made me 10 or 11 at the time. Like I could’ve stopped him anyway. But at that age, you internalize other people’s sh*t as your own without realizing it’s not yours to carry.)
The other part of my drill sergeant’s voice is sadly my own. It’s the same voice that I remember hearing for the first time when I was around that same age and looked in a mirror and heard, “ you’re so ugly. I hate you.” That’s actually a memory I don’t think I’ve ever shared with anyone and as far as I can recall, it happened after the sexual abuse happened, so it kind of makes sense that it formulated then.
The other thing about this critical voice was that when she identified it as a problem, my reaction was, “I know it’s there, I’ve been fighting it forever and can’t seem to get it to completely stop.”
And in that moment, I somehow received a divine download, or intuitive knowing or a-ha moment or heck, maybe it was a touch of the Big Guy Himself that said, “you can’t fight it, you have to surrender to it.”
And I knew that the way to do that was through kindness, compassion and love. I somehow suddenly realized/saw/understood/knew that instead of beating myself up, I needed to do exactly the opposite and treat myself with kindness and compassion and love. The same way I do with my daughters and my husband and those that I love.
The same way the Little Jenny in me needed to be loved and to feel safe and supported, because on some level, that’s where all this was coming from.
The third thing was that I have to stop living in the past
This one actually caught me off guard because I thought I’d already figured this one out. A month after we moved here, I gotten myself into a bad place by focusing too much on what we’d left behind and not enough on the life in front of me.
I was still doing it in so many ways, and once I’d heard her say it, I see examples of it daily. The good news is, I don’t stay there now. I notice that I’m in the past and I smile to myself, acknowledge and appreciate the memory and let it go.
Like the other day, I came across a photo from my firefighter days and thought to myself, “I don’t even remember who that person is anymore. It seems like a lifetime ago.” And then I noticed that I was feeling sorry for myself, and then I heard Carole’s voice in my head telling me to stop living in the past.
I actually laughed and put the photo down and carried on.
The truth is, you can’t live through or for another person, and you cannot live in the past. It just makes you feel bad and the kicker is that you’re the reason that you keep reliving it. If the memories are good, then great! Hang on to them. But if it’s something that makes you feel bad or feel sad, let it go.
You can’t live in the future either because that just creates anxiety. I know all about that one too, but that’s for another blog.
Basically, this all comes back to my “not enoughness” as I affectionately call it. And I’m honestly tired of this being a thing I’ve carried my entire life so I’m ready to get it gone. Anyone with me on this?
Here’s a recap
- Don’t be so judgemental — you’re did the best you could with the awareness you had at the time.
- Silence your inner drill sergeant — instead of fighting against him/her, do the opposite. When you hear the voice, be as kind as you possibly can to yourself. Kindness, compassion and empathy for yourself will do far more for you than beating yourself up EVER WILL! Trust me, I know this is 100% true. It’s only been two days since I tried this new approach and I’ve only heard the drill sergeant once, and I easily and completely silenced it by being kind to myself.
- Stop living in the past. You can’t anyway. If your head is in the past, you’re not living, your pining for a life once lived AND you’re totally missing the one you’re in.You can’t live in the past and you can’t live through your children or for your children (or parents or partner or whoever it is that you’re living for). You will only continue to make yourself miserable. LIVE FOR YOU! Be excited FOR YOU! Create things in your life ONLY FOR YOU! Celebrate YOU!
- Love YOU. Seriously dude. Nothing else will EVER work right until you get this one thing right.
It won’t matter what job you get or person you marry or house you live in or how much money you have if you do not get this one thing figured out.
5. The internal support system I mentioned at the start of this blog that I was lacking comes from treating yourself with love. You literally have to learn to love the sh*t out of yourself. Here’s some ways to do that;
Be your own best friend.
Be nice to you.
Ask for what you need.
Stop breaking promises to yourself.
Honour your boundaries.
Or set boundaries if you don’t already have them.
Know what you like and what you don’t.
Stop saying, “I don’t know” and “whatever”.
Find your voice.
Stop apologizing.
Be intentional.
Go after that dream you’ve been ignoring.
If you struggle with “not enoughness”, or self judgement or self criticism or living in the past, I hope something in here resonated or helped in some way. That’s the beauty of talking to someone about the sh*t you’re going through (either someone who has been through something similar, or a therapist), either way it helps you process your crap/deal with your sh*t/face your demons, which ultimately takes it’s power away.
