- Matthew Good.
It still confounds me how in even in a family, people who have lived with me for nearly 26 years, still don't fully understand how to appropriately approach topics of sensitivity.
I just had an experience with my mother that triggered my own mental state that i cannot really explain. I have sympathized with situations that others have defined, such as the flight or flight response, or what John Gottman calls "emotional flooding", in order to understand what I experience frequently through every day of my life. It isn't quite anxiety, it is more full of inadequacy and shame, and when I recognize that a situation is moving my mental state into that space I do one of two things, leave or try to push through the situation. I have learned to be much better at pushing through situations that become triggers, and avoiding the inevitable mental shutdown that occurs once I become too flooded. I can't really predict when it's going to happen, but I can say that it happens more often in certain situations than others, such as learning situations where I m the student, situations of stress (not always conflict though that is included), and in situations or relationships where I feel emotionally/mentally/physically unsafe as an individual.
My relationship with my mother is one of those relationships that I do not feel emotionally safe. I hope that this doesn't come off as a harp of depreciation for her, because that is not my intent. She has raised me in a good home, with minimal physical discipline, and has always been concerned for my betterment, and taught me to be a good upstanding compassionate member of society. I am merely trying to describe what I experience. This blog is one of my outlets that I utilize to manage what it is I feel and experience. Anyways, I often feel judged by her. She has a fairly judgemental personality, as well as she's very sensitive, inflexible to surprises, and when someone is telling a story she tends to top it off with a statement of her own personal experience. She often will allow others their opinions but ultimately feels that she is right and offers that air of correctness whilst allowing others their view, as though one is entitled to what they think, but ultimately that's not truly good enough. Also, she rarely believes that her actions are wrong. She will often complain about most everything, expressing whatever experience as not fitting into her ideal expectation. She also likes to discuss what she feels about a family member with other members of the family, attempting to rally together and in a "team effort" influence that one family member to what she feels/views about them. Also if you ever offend her (even if you don't intend to) she will hand whatever event/favour that you asked of her in the near future over your head. "So this is how you treat someone you'd like to do ____ for you???" She also blankets her assumptions to be true in other aspects of life, freely offering up her criticisms, such as "if you communicate this way then you'll never be able to function in whatever future marriage you have." Now that I have insufficiently painter her personality let's move on to the story. (there really are lots of good things she does, but there are also lots of disabling things she does too.)
For example, we were discussing how her weekend went, which was a normal conversation. She had gone on a "Yoga retreat". Eventually the conversation moved on to a family friend whose teenage son is in a treatment centre for troubled youth. I add my comments that heroine has become a more common high school drug, it isn't just for the addict bums strung out downtown. She then says that it must have been the influence of bad friends, because isn't that how it is in most of these situations? (one of those blanketing comments)
I knew that she was directing her question to my own past experience of raving. Just because I went raving doesn't mean I did drugs, nor does it mean that my friends pressured me into doing drugs, nor does it mean i ought be judged for the choice to be there. Choices that an individual makes incorporate thousands of different combined reasons.
At this point in the conversation I recognized it as a place where the conversation is on the way to breakdown, and my own emotional flooding where that fight or flight response kicks in and my mind loses what sense it contains so I chose to leave the conversation, because I did not want to go into that with her. I said I don't want to talk about this individual anymore (though I knew her comment was directed at me). I was being honest and left. Well she got offended (cause I was in the wrong for leaving) and as she walks past my open bedroom door and says "you don't have to be snarky." She also loves to leave little bombs like that to shame whomever she's talking to for whatever they did she didn't appreciate. I expressed to her, when she passed in return, that it isn't my intention to offend her, that is her choice to feel that way. Open opportunity for going from bad to worse. Somehow she always manipulates my intention into something it isn't. She then points out her intention for the pointed cornering question by saying "don't pretend like I don't know about how you were involved with something that began with an R and ended with an E and is four letters, and how my car mysteriously disappeared at night." She's also really good at hanging onto past offences. That was over 8 YEARS ago that I was going to raves, yet she still categorizes me into the moderately delinquent slot she's got me in. She's never going to understand why i chose what I did, because she can't separate herself from the judgement long enough to consider the whole truth of the situation, thus I will never discus it with her. I set it akin to how soldiers will not talk about their war experiences with their family. Somethings are better left alone. John Gottman says that it's ok to have problems, an not solve them. That just means another arrangement needs working out to accommodate for the problem, like building a little boundary around it that both can appropriately handle the issue without solving it.
She accuses me of not even being conscious of when I am being "snarky", to which I reply that is because it isn't my intention, and i tried to make a repair attempt by making a joke out of it, putting my index fingers next to my head like little devil horns that are loaded cannons stating "I'm going to unconsciously sabotage my mother (pow, pow, pow)" making little exploding noises and moving my metaphorical cannon horns like they're firing. She didn't appreciate that very much, and says "see you're being snarky right now". She has a broad definition of what it means to be snarky, basically I understand it to be when she gets offended.
She says all of this to me like it's news that I stonewall people. I know I do, and if i recognize it to be a safe situation I am better able to work through those feelings of mental shut down and manage the inevitable breakdown myself. If it is necessary to tell people I am communicating with that this is something that I do, then i do so, in hopes that they will react to me so as not to further elevate the situation when that begins to happen, and work at bringing the stress level back to a place of safety. If it not safe that is when i either run away and hide to work through calming myself down, or i fight and try to ride it out without panicking.
I have had one panic attack that i can recall, it was in the Salt Lake airport. I was in the security clearance section, sitting, waiting to board my plane. Several planes had just landed at and around the gate at which I was waiting, so suddenly the area was packed with individuals trying to make their connections or to pick up their luggage. I started to feel very rushed, and terrified because there were so many people rushing around me, and my chest began to feel like it was being tightened. I had not where i could go, i was at the end of the gateways, with hundreds of people rushing in different directions, I felt trapped. All i could do was put my head down, plug in my iPod, crank the volume, try to make the world quieter, and breathe.
You're thinking, cranking the volume makes the world quieter? and I resoundingly say, Yes it most certainly does. So often the world gets so noisy. I hear everything, all at once, and it takes a great deal of ignoring to desensitize myself to all that is going on around me. Though there are times when I can get hyper focused in on things, like when i am working on art pieces I am creating.
They say ADD is a dysfunction of focus. Those people who say that do not have ADD. It is not a dysfunction of focus, my experience has been that I can focus on things just as long as the setting is right. My setting is not the same as your setting. You may like to have an open door to hear the bustle of the office outside, or you my talk to a co-worker working beside you as you get tasks done. For me if the stimulus isn't aiding what I am doing, it is detracting from it. That stimulus could be anything. I may like to listen to the bustle outside the office, and be able to work great.
I find that when the rushing and multiple loud activities are occurring simultaneously within close proximity to me that's when i lose ability to think. I hear it all going on, the boss giving instructions, the phone ringing, the clock ticking, the staff member coming to check their schedule, the radio playing, the casual conversation across the room, the customer coming in to fill in details of an order and the sound of their pen on the paper as they leave them, the receptionist typing on her keyboard, her chair wheels as they slide across the carpet, the money counter in the back room. In addition to hearing it all my mind then creates visual images to match the sounds it is receiving. Can you understand how this can be confusing for a person who is linear in their thinking? My mind is not a linear tool, it understands everything in vision and multiple dimensions. I can spout off details of a setting, or aspects of a page i read, including the layout, or possibilities of how a person acts and why they act that way, but ask me to memorize and work through a formula, and it doesn't work so well.
I just do what I can do to accommodate what i can accommodate about myself, but i don't try to "fix" myself, because someone concludes that because i act or think this way I am broken, whilst offering a label to write off who I am.
Too many people search for labels to things they don't understand.
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