Journal rdewald's Journal: Being met 4
I have been tossing and turning in bed for the last hour and a half thinking about my group therapy session this evening. Since I can't seem to get to sleep I thought maybe I'd try to tire myself about writing about it.
It's not a bad thing. I had a great session. Our group has been going through some significant turmoil. One member, Cindy, is out for the summer because of career obligations. Another, Karen, has been attending sporadically, also obstensively because of career obligations but her explanations sound more like excuses. Another group member, Angie, has been showing up pretty much in body only, but she wasn't in group tonight. That left me and two others, Mona & Irene, both of whom demonstrate to me the same high level of commitment that I bring to the process, even though one of these two, Mona, was not in group last week because of career obligations, but such an absence is the exception rather than the rule for her. Really only Irene and I have been consistently making it to every session for the last few months.
Those are not their real names in case you think I've suddenly lost my ability to protect a confidence.
Yes, I'm the only man. Yes, that's both a problem and a plus for me. Karen and Mona are movie-star gorgeous, Irene is very attractive, Cindy is damned cute and Angie has her moments, even though she also has a significant investment in a butch tough-girl persona. Of course, my therapist is also present, and yes, she is quite easy on the eyes.
You might notice there's a lot of energy around sex in my descriptions, well, if you've been paying attention, you might have noticed I have plenty of work to do in that area, so the fact that there's sexual energy, at least for me, in each of these relationships is a good thing. It's "work," as we say in group lingo.
It took me a long time to get to the point where I could freely admit (to others) that this sexual energy is/was present. I had, and I think others did too, a significant investment in the notion that all of my relationships with other group members were egalitarian and equal by some imagined yardstick of attraction/fondness/connection. Of course, that's utter bullshit, no relationships are equal, not when one has the opportunities for the kind and depth of transactions presented in a therapy group. Humans favor each other to differing degrees, particularly along intimacy axes, that's a natural thing.
What's been "alive" for me, and I found out tonight for others too (mostly Mona), is that I had been managing my own feelings (and what I perceived/guessed to be other's feelings) by holding back a bit in the group, and I had been doing this for months. Last week I was so frustrated by this defense that I began to consider quitting group, making a timetable for withdrawal if certain things didn't begin to happen.
Of course, as is wont to happen, I was projecting traits on to others that I was rejecting in myself, i.e., I felt as though others were holding back from me out of their own sort of selfish hyper-protection, not meeting me, not making the effort to be vulnerable enough to really connect. That may be happening, but the relevant issue for me is that *I* was doing this.
Well, I learned tonight that Mona had been working along a very similiar path, having the same feelings about the same defenses, and she is just as fed up with it all as I. Mona and I *met* along this axis and found comfort in our connection around this pattern. Irene was there too, but she's a little bit further back in her process, she protects herself by not seeing herself, but she knows that she's intentionally blinding herself so she's beginning to see.
Karen and I had a similiar "join," group lingo for being really, significantly and intimately met, two weeks ago around something else. We each simultaneously hold a heartfelt, deeply profound longing and an unspeakably terrifying fear of having a real, functional, and profound connection with a lover. What surprised me about all that is Karen is so gorgeous, she looks like Sandra Bullock (she's maybe even a bit *better* looking than Sandra Bullock). She works in a very high profile job, she meets lots of people, and I KNOW she's lusted after everywhere she goes. Sometimes she'll take off her sweater or something in group and I'll completely forget what I was thinking.
I always thought that I was isolated in this problem by my not-so-good looks, the fat certainly isolates me, and it literally rocked my world when I discovered in group that Karen and I each spoke with each other's voice around this issue. Literally I sat there and listened to my words come out of her mouth. I felt very close to her and that feeling of intimacy persisted for the week after the group.
Then Karen's gone for two weeks (this week was the second). Fuck.
Mona I find as attractive, she looks a lot like Lady Di, except she's also better looking than Lady Di, but she has boyfriends, of whom I am very jealous. None of them deserve her. Mona's fond of me and expresses this frequently, but I've been afraid to bring my sexual feelings to our relationship out of fear of destroying it. This is where group is really useful, because that's what is known as transference. I can't really destroy my relationship with Mona in that way. She's not threatened by my attraction and I'm sure she's aware of it, but this is the pattern in which I am stuck personally, so I *transfer* it to my relationship with her, which is exactly what is supposed to happen. Once it's there, I can work it. Mona's going to stay in the room with me. She'll show up.
So, I need to work along this axis with Mona but I've been holding back. She told me tonight that this pisses her off because she wants to work, she wants to bring her stuff to the table and she feels like she's the only one really pushing herself. To a degree, she has a point. I've been pushing myself too, but not as hard as I'd like, which is also not as hard as she'd like. I come off to Mona as a bit of an authority figure or something, we've had one big blow-up in group when I came on too strong with her making a point I wanted her to understand. She felt criticized and demeaned by my manner, which was not what I intended at all. If anything I wanted her to know that this was important, it was an issue I had worked through and I knew the way out. All that got lost by my manner.
Irene. I love Irene. She's adorable and genuine, even though she's having trouble really bringing herself forward because of long-standing patterns of stubborness and defenses of goofy-silliness. I told Irene tonight (last night, really) that her stubborness was attractive and even sexy, and that I imagined this fact caused these patterns to be rewarded and reinforced by other people. Irene can stand there and shake her head saying "I won't do it" all day to me as far as I am concerned, it's adorable the way she does it.
I find Irene attractive too, those not as intensely as Karen and Mona, but intensely enough. She has a pattern of observing rather than participating, though she's well aware of it and works against it. She appreciated my feedback and admitted that she was aware on some level that both her stubborness and her goofiness had a persuasive effect on other people and she used it without remorse. Mona copped to knowing that she could get a lot done "with a little T&A" but that she felt cheapened by resorting to it, so it never really got her what she really wanted, even though it had facilitated her escape from a number of speeding tickets.
Angie, who was not present, has not really been taking any emotional risks in the group and we each discovered tonight, in her absence, that we were all frustrated and angry about that. Angie came in late to the group (as in starting four months after everyone else) and we also shared some anger at our therapist for choosing her and asking her to join our group as she hasn't really worked out.
I'm sort of pissed at Cindy, though she has a very real and legitimate reason to be out of group all summer. She is paying for her seat anyway because she wants to return in the fall. Cindy is intelligent and well-spoken. I think she's very pretty in her Asian way. She also is honest and frank about her eating disorder (as is Karen), which I appreciate because we have a lot in common along that axis. I miss that interaction, I need it. I know she has to be where she has to be, that's clear, but that doesn't manage my anger.
This group started back in September 2005 and I'm just now getting to a point where I feel like if I risk putting myself out there that there's a pretty good chance I'll be met. That is, if I try to meet, if I try to be open and talk about the deepest issues, someone is going to identify with those issues and relate their own version of them. That's being met. That's what this is all about. I'm noticing this success and it's coincidence with the greatest urge to give up. There's an old Chinese saying about the urge to quit being greatest just before success. I think it's true.
Thanks for reading. I needed/wanted to spill all this out somewhere in the relative anonymity of the circle. You know me, or rather, rdewald, and you don't and can't know Angie, Cindy, Irene, Karen and Mona. They don't know that I have this journal.
Some of you "meet" me from time to time. Don't think that goes unnoticed. Maybe I can get a couple of hours sleep now.
Be well.
Allowing being met (Score:2)
Your thought about *allowing* to be met got me thinking. I notice that people don't approach me as openly as they used to (I've always been someone who gets in touch very easily), and after two months in our new home, I still have no aquaintances there. Zero, none, zilch. I noticed that it makes me quite sad some days ago, and I'm trying to find out why it
Regarding the self (Score:2)
More later. Awareness is good.
Re:Allowing being met (Score:2)
When it is filled with water, it is a water glass, when it is filled with wine it is a wine glass. The same glass is no more *particularly* a water glass or a wine glass, it is what it is in the moment it is examined. It is something else when filled with another thing.
In this way the glass has no particular identity apart from the context of what fills it. That's the emptiness spoken of when one realizes the emptiness of the concept of the self. The self is not som
Re: (Score:2)