Well, here it is, New Year's Eve. I'm sitting in the window of my favorite, local, downtown coffee shop writing this and watching all of the Missoula residents that are out enjoying the First Night activities. My perspective on things this evening are a little different tonight that they were last night. Last night I wrote everything from a very emotional point of view, I just ran with how I was feeling at the time. I spend a great deal of time writing each week in my journal and decided it was time to start putting some of it in my blog as well. One thing I learned about myself when I was at The Center was that writing is very therapeutic for me and I actually enjoy doing it. I usually manage to make it down here to my coffee show three to four times a week and usually spend around two to three hours writing and watching people each time. I try to be as honest as possible in my writings but generally try to keep things positive in nature, unlike yesterday's post.
There are constantly two different Jon's competing for control of my personality. On the one side you have the very emotional and reactive side of my personality that is very sensitive in nature and is greatly skewed toward focusing on the negative aspects of my life. The other side is what I like to call the clinical side of my personality. This side of my personality is very analytical in nature and does it's best to be as unemotional as possible. As you can imagine, these two sides of me are constantly at war with each other. I try my best to favor the clinical side of my personality and bury all of my emotions as much as possible. Trying to ignore your hurt and emotions is not a healthy practice, even if the emotional side of my personality is completely irrational. Being completely clinical all of the time also has unintended side effects, it makes it very difficult to form bonds with other people and it makes me appear cold in nature about things. As a result, people can mistake me as someone who doesn't care about others. This is far from the truth though, I am a very sensitive person and care a great deal about people that I interact with. I just don't want them to know it for fear of being exploited by them. My clinical side helps me exceed in my job at the hospital lab and I take a great deal of pride in being good at my job. I just work in an environment where effort and excellence aren't recognized or rewarded.
I wish so much that I could just erase the emotional side of my personality and live completely in the realm of reason and logic. That's impossible and very unhealthy though. Emotions are what they are. They are raw. They are powerful and they are rarely logical in nature. Everyone has them, it's what you do with them that often determines how healthy of an individual you are. This is where I run into trouble when it comes to therapy sessions. Getting me to switch out of clinical mode and start feeling raw emotions is very difficult because I hate feeling like I'm not in control and I'm scared to death that I will be punished for expressing them. I feel very guilt about what I wrote last night. Everything I wrote was the truth as I saw it at that moment. My emotional side was in charge at that point in time and I ran with it. As a result, I feel very vulnerable about it today. Obviously my clinical side is back in the driver's seat tonight as everything I'm writing is very analytical in nature.
Why do I feel so guilty about having feelings? I wasn't really allowed to express myself emotionally growing up and was punished for having feelings or showing any kind of vulnerability. This went well beyond just feelings though. I had severe asthma growing up and had little to no control over it. Unfortunately for me, my mother didn't believe in getting me the proper medications to help with my symptoms (keep in mind that we trying not to judge here, it is what it is). What was worse, I had severe allergies to go with the asthma which included things like dogs and cats. We would travel to visit mom's friends in other cities who had pets and I would always get really sick with asthma. Mom always became extremely angry with me whenever this would happen and I would have to do my best to hide just how sick I really was. One time it was so bad that I needed to immediately go to the hospital. It was bad, really bad. I could have died but all I could think about was how mad she would be with me if she found out. Unfortunately I couldn't hide it from her for long and she reacted just as I expected she would. She physically struck me and told me that I always ruin our trips. I still have nightmares about that experience to this day and also refuse to let anyone know when I'm not feeling well.
I learned I couldn't show any weakness growing up so I coped by becoming as unemotional as possible. This was nearly impossible since this was time time that the inner child was silently seething away in unexpressed rage. I lived in a world where I had to be in control of my emotions at all times. Unfortunately I feel I still need to live that way. No one ever cared about my feeling growing up so why should I care about them? This quite possibly saved me sharing a similar fate as my sister as far as alcoholism goes. I absolutely hate being drunk, I abhor it. Why? Because alcohol lowers your inhibitions which means I lose control of my emotions. I never know what is going to come out when I get drunk and it scares the shit out of me. Fortunately for me, I am a happy drunk and tend to be extremely honest with my feelings about people when I am drinking. My ex-wife used to tell me that she loved it when I got drunk because I would actually express real feelings while intoxicated. I shudder just thinking about it right now. I cannot stand being vulnerable in any way, shape or form. Any time I drink more than two beers (it's extremely infrequent for me to drink at all anymore) I wake the next day in a near panic over what I might have said or revealed to people about me. My heart rate has gone up noticeably just writing about it right now.
I have to learn to be vulnerable with people if I'm every going to make long lasting relationships. Like I said previously, I have a lot of anxiety over what I wrote last night. It was very negative in nature and that isn't the person that I want to be. I want so much to be a positive person who has nothing but nice things to say about life in general. Unfortunately I am far too cynical and jaded in nature. Being cynical was a coping mechanism for me growing up, it helped me survive my childhood. If the world was going to reject me, I might as well learn how to make fun of how stupid it all is. Being cynical is just an excuse to not interact or be part of the world. Why put yourself out there on a branch, exposed to the possibility of falling or worse yet, being pushed off by someone else? What's the incentive to try something new when it's far safer to just make fun of it? I have to learn to stop using my cynicism as a defense mechanism and learn to embrace the world and new experiences. I was doing a very good job of this 18 months ago but things have eroded since then.
Being mindful and allowing myself to be vulnerable is at the core of my path toward recovery. I have to be mindful of every word I speak and every thought that I think. I have to ask myself constantly, is this really the truth or is it my programming and negative skewing nature expressing itself? At the same time, I have to learn that it's okay to have feelings and be vulnerable around the right kind of people. I have to find a way out of the isolationist tendencies of my life. There are things that I can change, like attending support groups, and there are things that I can't change, like my work schedule (I work until 10:30 at night most of the time). I have to learn to not hate myself and the feelings that I have been suppressing for so long. This is not going to be a short or easy journey for me though. It is important to remember that it is a journey that never ends. The most important thing is that I have to try, not just some of the time or part of the time. I have to try all of the time. This means getting out of bed after only eight hours of sleep, no matter how tired I am or how much I don't want to. This means finding a new therapist that will keep me focused, on task and will help pick me up when I stumble along the way. This means learning how to feel and express my feelings without feeling weak or guilty afterwards. This means going to the gym as frequently as possible. This means attending as many support groups a week that my schedule will allow. This means I have to continually look for new ways to meat people, no matter how much it scares the hell out of me. It means that I have to focus and be thankful for what I have and not what I don't have. It means allowing people to care about me and allowing myself to show that I genuinely care about them. This is by now means a complete list of the things that I need to work on. Tonight is the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013, it's as good a time as any to get back on the road to proper recovery.
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