My somatic shrink and I label my difficult thoughts “Mom Mind.” Why? Not every difficult thought I have sounds exactly like my mother. In fact, I don’t think I sound much like her in my head. It’s less about content and more about process. My mom and my mind are equally uncompromising. They easily and definitively settle on a version of reality where I am seen in a negative light for not being “perfect” and happy all the time. For doing something wrong that isn’t really a problem. For just being human. My mind acts the way my mom did when I was a kid. It refuses to entertain any other notion of reality. It yells at me for hours and makes me cry. It tells me why I’m bad and that I need to atone. It justifies itself by saying that it’s trying to be helpful or it’s not really so bad. I’m sure my mother would find nothing of herself in the description that I’m giving. But I’m working on trusting myself. I know what I experienced.
So when I get self-critical thoughts I’m trying not to entertain them or let them overwhelm me but to label them for what they are: Mom Mind. This technique comes from mindfulness or insight meditation. I’ve been on meditation retreats where you identify the “top tunes” or lies your mind is telling you. Sometimes you’re trained to just notice “the mind” impersonally. But I have my issues with American meditation practice. It’s a painful subject, but there are ways it doesn’t work for me. Just noticing the mind keeps me stuck in it. So I opt for my somatic shrink’s version. I label “Mom Mind” and I say some variation of “No.” “I’m not doing this” seems to work well lately. “I don’t feel like it.” “I don’t believe you.” “I don’t have to listen to you.” Even “fuck you.” I did a nice sarcastic one today that was something like “thank you for contributing — no.”
This is challenging because Mom Mind tells me that she is bringing up valid concerns that I need to address. She insists on being answered. But trying to answer her yields more of her wrath. That’s just being caught.
Not listening to her can be disorienting. I don’t always know what to do with the free space in my head. Or it feels like leaving a project unfinished, which I hate. It’s like playing music and not getting the resolution of the tonic note. You’re just hanging there. But I think that, too, is an illusion. Mom Mind does not “complete” anything. She is just misery because her mom died and that’s what she learned from her dad.
I’m realizing how important it is for me to object to Mom Mind, not just for my peace of mind, but for my Inner Child. As a kid I could never object to my mother. In fact, I still can’t without causing a massive fit and then pleading phone calls from my dad to apologize to her so she calms down. The pain has never been worth objecting to her. When I was a kid she would scream at me not to “talk back.” She would actually cut off my words and whine and shout. “Don’t talk back to me! I’m your mother!” She is invested in an archaic and harmful understanding of hierarchy between parent and child. It doesn’t end when childhood ends.
This is why my blogging and my writing, for any audience, at any level, are actually important. I even feel nervous writing that as if I’m overestimating myself. I used to brag about my opinions, like they were the greatest things in the world. I’ve had my years of doing the grandiosity thing. That faded into the insecurity thing. If I don’t have the “best,” most perfect, most deeply educated and well-reasoned and eloquent opinion, I’m not sure that what I have to say is worth writing down. It doesn’t always feel worth objecting to the Mom Mind that requires perfection. She tells me I don’t count. But when I write, it’s a way of telling them no, that with all my imperfections I still count. I felt my shoulders rise in tension as I wrote that. I lowered them and breathed in. It’s still a process for me to feel that what I have to offer is okay and that I don’t have to be paralyzed unless and until I come up with perfection. This is an aspect of Mom Mind I’m trying to soften in myself. I do get to “talk back.” Always. And I try to encourage others to do the same.
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Another update from Anxiety Land. I finally met with my shrink whom I see once every few months. He is “the meds guy” and not my regular therapist. I was having a bad time and we decided to go for Lexapro which targets anxiety more specifically than Prozac. I’m still taking Prozac/Fluoxetine and Propranolol, a beta blocker. It’s been feeling good. I think it’s the right direction.
My Endless Self-Help series has had me reading a lot of memoirs lately. I read Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle after seeing the movie. This might be worth blogging about. I also just read Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It trilogy (and some related books). More to come.
Ace of Anxiety 