I started walking differently- again. With each step, I try to engage my psoas muscles. The ones on the left are weak. I think I have had a problem with them all my life. When I was nineteen, after joining the Dance Club at college, I remember having pain there. The doctor thought it might be a digestive problem, but nothing showed up.
I had an appointment with my life coach today. Most pressing on my mind was the pain of a woman I had never met. She is the sister of a friend. Every time I see the friend, I hear horror stories about her sister's behavior. The other day I heard that the mother of the two girls believed that she couldn't love the sister. She told the father that she had to be his favorite.
These girls had a very loving mother. My best guess is that she did indeed love both her girls. In terms of treating them fairly, my guess is the sister who the mother thought she couldn't love completely got more in compensation.
But here comes the dark side of demanding that we be loving to all in the same way. When we're not, we feel guilty, even ashamed. I suspect the sister didn't really get less of anything; she just got a distorted lens to see it through. The mother's guilt/shame colored the sister's perception of the situation.
The sister's claim that she always got less has validity. It's her story. It isn't even the story she wrote. It is the story her mother wrote. Whether it is objectively true or not, that poor woman was in terrible pain. I had asked permission to pray for her. I felt interpsychically connected; I felt her pain. The first thing I did was communicate to her that she had a reason for her pain. I didn't make the distinction between the objective truth and the subjective truth. For her purpose, it didn't make much difference. I had the image of her being on a flat plane like a prairie. Then a single head popped up, like a gopher coming out of its hole. This was the first time this woman had received acknowledgment of her truth. She had reason to be in pain.
I told Shelly, the therapist, this story primarily because I was struck by the dark side of the excessive demands we place on ourselves. My mom was a holy terror, constantly criticizing me, constantly telling me I could do nothing right – but I never questioned her love for me – or her hate. My mom felt zero guilt about her behavior. She thought she was doing something good for us by being that critical. Go figure.
I didn't have anything in mind that I wanted to work on in the therapy session. I've been scheduling them once a week because I feel so stressed and get so much out of them. I was preoccupied with this woman's pain. Shelly and I spent the whole session focused on that sending her reassurances and healing. I had no idea if it made a difference. I do know that it made Shelly and me feel better. We both had gurgling stomachs, which I consider a sure sign that something good had gone on. When I hear that in my healing sessions, I call it applause for my work. It is relaxation that I look for, signaled by that gurgling, to assure me that I am doing beneficial work.
I had two tutoring clients today, D. and M. They are both frustrating. They have problems way beyond the quick fixes I've developed. I can look at it as an opportunity to develop something new. I suppose I do, but I don't seem to have the patience. I can only hope that I can control myself enough not to do outright damage to these kids. I don't know who can do a better job than me.
D. was tired today, and getting through a paragraph was a struggle. I always have to remind him of the strategies I taught him to decode words. He has made improvements in his inferencing skills when he decodes the words' correctly.' Correctly is in quotes because correct decoding never guarantees the word's standard pronunciation. Reading English requires strong inferencing skills. Those out there who had to learn it, take heart; Hebrew is much, much worse. Theirs is an alphabetic language without letters to represent the vowels. Yikes!
M's problem is that she does not use background knowledge appropriately. Ah, as I type this, I think I have to do more modeling with M. I have to tell her my thinking, how I arrive at the understanding of the material using the words in the story, and my background knowledge.
What I did work on with M. was releasing some fear. First, the fear of getting it wrong, and then the fear she felt when she was younger and had a slight speech problem. I don't think her problem was particularly severe, but I suspect that her parents' reaction to it was intense. At least, that's the impression I got when I had my interview with them. After working with the fear of making a mistake, M. said she felt better. She felt much better after working on the fear she felt as a young child with a speech problem. Those two releases took all of 5 minutes. The rest of the session was a conference between the mom and me while M. was there and some work on the story we had worked on last week.
Darby called around 5:45 pm and said she was up for joining me for a walk. As she approached me, she commented on my stride. She said I didn't look like an old woman. That was from using my psoas muscles more as I walked. Yay!
I watched more of Hinterland. It is gloomy, but the acting is spectacular. I also love the Welsh names Gwilliam, Gweneth, Alun and the way they pronounce them. Yum.
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