Thursday, May 16, 2024

 Thursday, May 16, 2024

   I had a wonderful night’s sleep. I didn’t even get up to pee till after 4 am.  Then, I was up by 4:30, petting and brushing Elsa as part of our new morning routine when B called. I thought he had said he needed to leave at 5:30.  He was anxious and wanted to get to the airport early.  He did. We got there before the Mokulele Airlines office opened.  He would make his flight with time to spare.

  I continued watching the Laughter Yoga videos. The cajoling voice that bothered me in the first video seemed less. Was I getting used to it, or were they less, whatever it takes to be less cajoling? 

  I accidentally came across a video about empaths, people who can feel other people’s feelings.  I watch a bunch on the topic. Most of the videos were sympathetic to the social plight of the empath. The first one gave me helpful information.  It theorized that empaths develop because of a desperate need to connect with people due to a mother who never attuned to them.  The speaker also said that if there is an empath in the dysfunctional family, another child will go in the exact opposite pattern; they will become encapsulated.  

    The empath chooses the path of searching to find attunement with others. Their energy is projected into the world as they search for that connection. That sounded right. They are also hypervigilant.  They want connection but don’t trust people.   

   The speaker said unattuned parents develop kids with extremes of introversion and extroversion.  Those words are literal descriptions of what people do with their energy.  Extroverts send their energy out constantly, searching for connections; introverts contain their energy and avoid energetic attunement. Then there’s that fantastic state when both are going on, the anxious-avoidant attachment pattern where one constantly reaches out, searches for a connection and rejects it when it happens.  I think my mom was that way, very conflicted, downright crazy-making. I remember being that way myself, putting out come-hither/go-away vibes. I know what I did to modify that behavior- at least for myself.  Berthold Brecht’s play The Measures Taken gave me a way out of that dilemma.

    I understood my behavior as searching for connection and not trusting anyone enough to allow for the connection I sought. Resolving the trust issue was how I started to free myself from the pattern.

    The theme of The Measures Taken was to keep your eye on the goal and not become distracted by side issues.  I have no idea how that theme led to my solution.  Was it to ignore the more minor conflicts, not getting myself into trouble with every relationship?  I think that was it.  I didn’t have to resolve every difference between myself and another person before I could share time with them. I learned to accept what a person had to offer me, even if it wasn’t the whole enchilada. To accept that intimate attunement would only be a 30% connection. 100% wasn’t possible.  That made my life and probably the lives of people who knew me much easier.

    The second thing I learned was to set my own boundaries.  Ah. What a relief!  My mother recognized no boundaries.  I don’t think my dad did either, but he showed an interest in what I thought and felt that my mother didn’t.  

   The healing message I got from the video on making an empath was about the extruded energy, like a pod out into the world searching for something to fix the wound.  

    I have been told by three or four psychics that I have an enormous aura. They were not praising me. One asked how I managed to walk down a crowded street, as I was constantly bumping into others. Huh?  No one offered me any help or a definition of normal or why what I was wasn’t good. I knew nothing of my aura. It was my normal, whatever it was.      Putting all I knew about myself with this new information, I allowed the extruded energy to reenter my body. With that, the wound immediately closed. It was the one in my solar plexus that felt like loneliness and yearning, which I’ve lived with since before my sister was born. I had hoped her birth would solve the problem.  It didn’t. Neither did it make matters worse except in bringing home the hopelessness of the situation. 

   I started meditating on drawing the energy back into my body.  It brought a sense of peace.

   Mike provided some peace for me, as I did for him.  We were both denied maternal attunement. Energetic attunement brought us together and was the most vital part of the relationship, the ground zero on which we built our marriage.  We may both have been infantile in our needs, but getting them allowed us to function as adults in our marriage. Mike liked to say our marriage worked because there was always one adult present, and it wasn’t always the same person.  We were good complements. 

  I had an appointment with twenty-six-year-old S. She was late as usual. Her mom told me it was because she slept in late. S always denied that, saying she had been up for a while. I told her about the possible way to get driving lessons.  She just said no to all my suggestions. She can’t conceive of possibilities and can’t tolerate disappointment.  I appreciate her point of view; her life has been filled with disappointments.  Nothing has gone well for her.

   I can’t get her to strategize when reading. She got stuck on the word arm today.  I wrote the word car and asked her to figure out what sound the ar made in the word. The point is to look for familiar words with the same pattern of letters when having trouble figuring out a sound. She said nothing.  When I asked her what was happening, she couldn’t tell me. It came out that she was telling herself that she didn’t know the word. That’s all she was doing, listening to those words in her head over and over. I told her to say ar and then m repeatedly until they blended, to ask her mind to give her the word.  She locks out the possibility of figuring it out; she either gets it or doesn’t. She has never learned problem-solving skills.   It’s all a nightmare for her, and it’s a nightmare for anyone who has to deal with her.

   When I told her good news, she received it negatively. I told her she wasn’t required to take an authorized driver’s ed course because she was over twenty-one. Someone in the family could teach her to drive. She said no one was available. They all had their own lives and problems and couldn’t spend an hour a week teaching her to drive. If her estimation of her family is accurate, what a tragedy!  

   I was tired on our evening walk. Darby helped me tackle a hill by laying a hand on the small of my back—a hiker’s trick my mom taught me. She belonged to a hiking club in Berlin, where she learned it. My weakness was the impact of the change I felt the other day. I don’t know where it will go.