Cling-Free Mother to Mother Interaction

So yesterday I got together with another mom and her kid I used to spend a lot of time with.  We had a good but messy dynamic.  Mixed up in our relationship was my anxious and clingy need for approval and her heady, intellectual way of relating designed to keep people at arms length. But I like her.  I think, erroneously, in the past the part of me who has a lot of wounding around attachment would get triggered by her cool-hand-luke intellectualism and distancing - I would both idealize it and cling to her - needing her approval.  I don't think I was totally unaware of this dynamic but I would get sucked in even in attempting to stop.  I often made myself  "the fuck up" which meant she didn't have to look at her own avoidant kind of detachment that is her intellectualism.  Neither of us really had to be in authentic connection.

We had to take a break.  There was an unconscious enactment that we co created to shift the dynamic and I became quite literally dizzyingly aware of it one day as I stepped out of it being all about me.   I realized "oh hey - we co created this funky thing."   Said differently, " I am not nuts.".  Thanks be to the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy work my therapist and I have been doing the last three years, after 15+ years of therapy I have more profoundly understood the healthy workings of my nervous system and that the fear and clinginess is not pathological but was necessary component of survival from my young life that is hard wired into my body/mind. 

What was the end result?  I pushed back on this friend and instead of naming for her all the ways I "fucked things up" I actually named the things she was doing that didn't feel ok to me.  I rarely speak up this way.  I was kind but firm.  I didn't like we seemed to bond around our shared misery, I am not always miserable but why is it that that is all we talk about?  I named my desire to connect in a more heartfelt way rather than just an intellectual way.  And finally I named what I experienced as ambivalence from her around wanting to step out of the one down dynamic. After I said this I felt like an energetic exorcism had taken place.  I felt fantastic.

The end result is a great deal of space opened up and I was able to more fully see her when I stopped holding the crazy bag.   I could also feel and honor my own needs more clearly and I was able to act on them.  In seeing her I was able to notice her wounding  - she has her fair share - and deeply empathize and from that place of empathy I could not only change my expectations of her but also seeing her more fully I no longer idealized her.   This one-upmanship is a bullshit way we were doing relationship and we both created it - not me alone and I was done putting my chips on that bet.

Celebration dance!

I am moved to write bc after a three month break I was able to hang with her yesterday and I felt ZERO anxiety and only very controllable moments of "cling".  I was shocked.  I felt very inside my skin.  I didn't idealize.  There were some desperate moments when I could feel some clinginess around parenting and a touch of the idealizing come back (I imagine she is a better parent but she isn't - we are both bumbling along) and I just took a deep breath and said to myself inside "Hey no one gets this parenting thing just right.  Ask her for some ideas but then remember that those ideas don't mean she knows any better than you."  And then I was calm again, I re oriented to what I felt in my stomach, my feet on the ground, I could feel my breath going in and out even while I was standing talking to her.   And you know what I was able to feel when I did that - I looked over and I saw her face at one moment and I felt how much I love her.  I felt my love for her from a place of adult connection and a calm nervous system.  My love does not mean I need to do anything differently with her right now.  I can just feel it inside of me and stay inside of me looking at her. 

I feel really really proud of myself.  I have been working my ass off retraining my sensorimotor system to orient in relationship so I can feel safe inside my body so my nervous system doesn't go on clingy high alert and it is happening.  This was such a feat.  I just had to mark it with celebration!!!!!!!!!