Life isn’t fair. This one took me years to swallow. (Hello privilege!) I fought pretty hard to hide from it though. I wanted to keep it all inside. The unspoken pain that I tried to shove down, because I didn’t want it to be there. I thought that if I kept shoving it down that It would go away. Boy was I wrong.
It kept biting me in the ass no matter how many times I tried to run away from the truth, my truth. Finally I had no choice but to confront my past, otherwise it was going to destroy me.
I missed this growing up, like so many other things. I kept trying to fight reality. Like maybe if I fought against it hard enough, than eventually the parts that I didn’t like wouldn’t be there anymore. I can run off excess weight, why should this be any different? Silly Jenna.
Sometimes, even if I stand in the middle of the room, no one acknowledges me.
Dan Piraro, Bizarro (comic strip)
Eventually the elephant in the room can’t be ignored anymore, nor does it want to be. It’s quite amazing how freeing it is to speak your truth to someone, even if it is only in a therapist’s office. That’s okay. It’s a safe place. The challenge becomes when you have to take it out into the real world. That part is scary, for sure.
Radical Acceptance
Emotions get in the way of most things. Shame, guilt, and anger keep us from accepting reality in the same way that those same emotions keep us from forgiving. Neither radical acceptance nor forgiveness condone the facts of what happened. It just frees us from the emotional bondage that it keeps us wrapped up in. That part is key.
Tara Brach calls it RAIN on blame. I mean, she did write the book on Radical Acceptance. (I should probably read that one.) Recognize. Allow. Investigate. Nurture.
Recognizing the emotion requires stopping, something I was never very good at. Go! Go! Go! was my philosophy, which I don’t recommend to anyone. Then I had to allow the emotion to be there, which mostly involved a bit of screaming and a ton of crying. Trauma can be quite exhausting to work through.
Investigating I can do. I went to college for mass communications, (I still abhor public speaking, but that is a whole other topic.) and I was on the newspaper staff in high school. So yeah, I am basically a nerd. Finally we came to nurturing. This one. This one took some professional intervention.
Inner Child
Poor little Jenna needed to process some past traumas first, so my therapist and I wove EMDR throughout my sessions. This gave me the opportunity to learn about all these funky emotions, while simultaneously learning how to nurture my inner child.
I always thought this was woo woo talk before, this inner child work people talk about on the interwebs. But it works. It seems like all the stupid shit works. (I should make a note of that. Try more stupid shit.) I literally needed help understanding my emotions. They had gotten so big and over-the-top that I simply couldn’t handle it on my own.
I keep pictures of myself as a little girl around me now, along with trinkets from my childhood. I talk to the painting of me that Jeff gave me as a gift years ago. All of this done to remind myself to be kind to myself, to choose myself before others.
The is such a U-turn from where I was not very long ago. I thought I was broken. I was so very wrong. I was just a hurt little girl who never learned how to be in this world. I’m still learning. I will forever be learning. Isn’t that supposed to be the fun part of this one life we have?
Choose
This was my word of the year, although I mean it more as a phrase. I choose. Fill in the rest as I need. We do have some choices in this life, and some are foisted onto us. In regards to the ones we can make, I think what we need is right action. I am assuming we are on the same page on what is right and what is wrong here.
It starts maybe with making the best decision with the information that I have now, and then redirecting when I have new information. Here’s the kicker: don’t follow up that decision with a bunch of shame and guilt. (I’m talking to myself here.) I mean, you will because that’s what us human beings like to do. Silly reptile brains.
Move on. Let it go. I hate all of those phrases. I have not seen Frozen, and I probably never will because of that song. However, it’s fucking true. (Man, that hurt to admit.) People used to say those things to me, and I would just stand there like a deer caught in headlights. What does that even mean? Someone please explain this to me.
From a practical perspective it means feeling all the emotions, not just the “good” ones. That is exactly what I was trying to avoid this whole time. The only way out is through, they say. Why are they always right? I’m kidding. They are not always right, but in this case they are. I hate them so very much.
Mad love, Jenna
