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12 January, 2009

Getting Into My Head

I hate the way she does it. The way she's able to do it.

I can get a note and have it roll off me and think how great I'm doing, how easy it is to look at that and say, "Oh look, she's pulling this trick, that trick, the other; the subtext here and here is all about how great she is, the subtext there and there is all about how horrible I am. It reads surface-level as supportive, and is completely full of undermining. Ha ha ha, how remarkable. Good thing I'm able to draw that boundary, huh?"

And then ...

... then there's the way a decision I had more or less made winds up getting ripped out from under me and turned on its head because of a totally reasonable conversation, just letting you know, and of course she would do this responsible thing rather than the thing that I was intending, and it wasn't like I told her what I was doing anyway for her to undermine, I think she just guessed, or maybe it doesn't matter and she'll do what she does without knowing anything and ....

Yeah, around and around in a giant damn loop of self-doubt and uncertainty and needing to balance what is real and what isn't, and I don't know anymore.

I'm full of hormones and full of fear and my mother is in my head again and I don't know how to get her out.

In my head in my head in my head ....

2 comments:

Graydon said...

Best trick I ever found for that involved, well, they're isomorphs; either invite a god into the voice or chuck the mommy voice into the Outer Dark.

(My self-image is quite a lot of landscape, but the kind of landscape that has an edge-of-the-world. This is handy when you're trying to get to the Outer Dark.)

Generally speaking, trying to out-think a self-image deepset isn't going to work; it's not a reaction on the scale of thought, though knowing how it works can let you figure out what the essential thing is -- why do you care?

Whatever that thing is, replace it with something that is on your side, not her.

Anonymous said...

I'm big for chucking. But here is something I recently came across in one of my fire meditations: I suddenly got an image of myself scrubbing pots outside to get the burned bottoms shiny new again. This did occur in my childhood...my mother was THAT concerned with the appearance of perfection. What a fire of self-criticism SHE must have had going inside, to be that controlling of me? See, recognize that the head in your head has worse ones in her own---and BAM she is knocked out. Finally, a good use for pity.