Busy and Competent as a Defense

Accepting the present: body, mind and mothering.

I think I found my new therapist.  Got to sit and work more relationally than frankly I ever have.  I love sensorimotor work but once you have the somatic resources you still need to learn to relate and practice it over and over again in the presence of a safe other.

That said, what I was reminded of today was how "doing" and "being good at stuff" is a ruse for me, anyway.  It is an attempt to win other's affections but the people who matter most it impacts negatively: my family.  See staying busy, not settling in to the truth of my being, means I am not fully IN relationship to myself and therefore those around me.  Also, being good at therapy, being good at mothering, being good at being a party host can, itself, being a striving for perfection that leaves my authentic self in the dust.  I am so busy trying to achieve that the motion is forward only as opposed to inward and embodied. 

What is busy and competent in defense of?  In my case, being deeply in relationship to myself and others.  Why?  Feeling frightened about being in connection stems from something different for everyone.  The word defense according to dictionary.com has the following synonyms: security, preservation, safeguard, support, advocacy, justification.   Somewhere along the way many of us had to learn to brace for impact and we do that bracing in our bodies.  The defense was in service of security and self preservation but as time goes by the defense becomes the injury because we lose connection with our truth and voila - anxiety and depression accompanied by despair, obsessive thinking, isolating, inner criticism, judgement of others, bad boundaries, rigid boundaries, lack of empathy for self and other, fear of conflict, fear of intimacy and the list goes on. 

Moreover, our culture supports this busy and competent vortex of personal burnout.  Usually, as we are burning out, we are also buying a bunch of shit to make us feel better.  So, selling us on the idea to continue to strive for greater and better...and in the hamster wheel we go.   I have been accused of navel gazing - of too much identification with suffering.  As an accusation, that didn't go over well because what I heard was "quit complaining and get over it already" which is a massive trigger.  But as an invitation I can be curious and explore open hearted.  I seem to feel identified with my painful story rather than my lived experience in the moment.

We tend to do two things with our pain: push it away or hold on to it - perseverating, repeating and stuck.  A bunch of my non therapist friends of are the push it away camp and sometimes therapy can support this hold on to it idea by the way it solidifies over and over and over the "wounded" narrative or the very competent "let's push through this and change it" to be "better humans".  Both methods create a rigidity in the body where we get stiff and stuck in other parts of our lives too.   What we know about stiffness in the body is it leads to injury. There is no body bend, relational bend and softness in our internal organs so we become relationally sick and physically sick.

Gabrielle Roth said "The way out is in" but I would add that "the way out is through acceptance of what is in".  If we can learn to accept our human experience; fear, grief, intimacy, patterns, joy, receiving etc with an observing curiosity and mindful acceptance our thoughts soften and our actual bodies soften and ironically we become more flexible, bendable and literally healthy.  As my supervisor said, when we are in this mindful accepting state it frees up a lot of energy to think about other possibilities and create our lives as opposed to spend our energy focused on navel gazing.  But it also doesn't mean avoiding our pain.  It is a learned skill of meeting ourself over and over and over again.  Man have we lost this fine art in this culture.

I am aware, that as a mother, I can buy into the hundreds of models of "perfect parenting" striving for uber clean, uber attached, uber non tv or whatever "doing it right" kind of thing I would but if I just accepted my experience and move from that acceptance, I would just have more fun.  Here is to acceptance.