personal

Uncategorized

My life looks both very different, and not really all that different, depending on whether you’re on the outside looking in or vice versa. Year Two of the Pandemic, Day 71 sees me half-vaccinated and waiting for a second Pfizer dose in early July; still working with heavy client traffic in both practices, still doing multi-day intensive training courses whenever I can afford them, still pursuing new professional certifications to help support my clients, still working with supervisees and trying to keep them, clients, colleagues, and myself, as sane as possible while COVID-19 ravages on and on. South of the border the CDC has removed the mask mandate for fully-vaccinated persons while Ontario extends its third lockdown and border closures into June. A new Indian variant of the coronavirus is making its way into North America and challenging what we were told would be okay with delaying secondary vax doses.

I work, I sleep, I pander to the cats. These parts of my life look the same. I haven’t left my house much in the past fifteen months; that part is new. And as much as I miss travelling and visiting friends, I really enjoy being able to sleep in as late as I want EVERY weekend. I have embraced grocery delivery services and Skip The Dishes and now boxed meal plan services like I was born to them (though the boxed meal plan service is largely to counter my increasing reliance on Skip to feed me). And with the completion of the backyard project I started in the First COVID Summer, I feel like I have joined a Sooper Sekrit Club of outdoorsy folks that I’ve been envying for their outdoor spaces for years.

In the past fifteen months it has also become apparent that I now have only two modes: On, which is reserved exclusively for work, and Off, which is what happens once I am done for the day. It’s been a learning curve to adapt, but I’ve had 15 months to get used to the idea that Off is a necessary state no matter what anyone else says. It’s not lazy or unambitious or disorganized. It’s the point at which my brain has to switch gears or I will get zero rest and speed myself right into the hell that is BURNOUT. It’s hard on relationships but critically important for survival as a therapist and as a human.

COVID has done a couple of very important things for me. (1) The love I have for the backyard space that didn’t exist a year ago knows no bounds, and when I need to turn my brain Off, that’s my favourite place to do so. I have embraced Off, you see, as Respite Time. I don’t need to Do anything, or Attend to anyone; I don’t need to be “on”. The critters in the backyard who have come to accept me as a safe presence who also dispenses food means they accept me (warily) on their terms, though I get scolded if I go out without peanuts. (2) The work that had already begun on learning to live with depression has really hit home in accepting that not only can I NOT do everything on my own, but I don’t even have to TRY. All of my clients might be delighted to know that I’ve finally gotten as hardcore about calling out my own “shoulds” as I have been about calling out theirs. No, I should NOT singlehandedly be able to run an entire household, balance a budget, manage two practices, maintain the outside property, and keep myself fed. Farming out food delivery was a good energy-saving strategy but to go one step further and farm out meal PREP and PLANNING is simply brilliant. Someone else mows my lawns every two weeks. Once I can afford it and am willing to have live human beings in my house again, I’m going to hire cleaners as often as I can manage. These are options that go beyond “privilege” and well into the realms of “luxury”, and I am keenly aware of that. I also don’t have a village to support me in these things, but I do have some financial latitude that can take these tasks off my plate and free up the mental and energetic real estate I need to keep doing the work that I do. That’s prioritization and a set of choices I can live with, and will so long as I can afford them.

Having recently read Emily and Amelia Nagoski’s book, “Burnout,” I am keenly aware of the price demanded of caregivers for the work that we do, and the excessive cultural messaging to “get back in line” when we try to break the patterns imposed upon us. COVID took away most of the things I do to recharge and respite myself, so I’ve had 15 months to look inward at what best balances the demands of the work; the answers have been both surprising and emboldening. Almost every one of them would qualify me as “selfish” for putting my self-care first. But it’s been critical to getting through this year-and-still-ongoing trauma, and will remain so for some time to come, I’m sure.

I have nothing but mad respect for my fellow caregivers who ARE managing all their SHOULDs and then some (my heart goes out to the parents who have also had to become teachers this year, many on top of also running households AND being full-time career people to boot). I don’t know how y’all are doing it without setting the world on fire when I can’t even handle pants most days–well, not entirely true; I do know many of you simply AREN’T handling it well at all. I have those conversations with you day after day after day in my virtual office, so I know the truth. I’ve already been proselytizing “Burnout” up and down my social media channels and thrusting it virtually into clients’ hands, and I will likely continue to do so until we claw our way out of this pandemic into whatever the world looks like on the other side. I want women to realize they’ve been suckered and conned into playing a game that’s been rigged against us since the outset, and at the end of the day, letting go of the belief that we have to be ON for others all the time with no shame-free thought of respite for ourselves is the cruellest form of gaslighting we’ll ever experience.

It took 15 months of a global pandemic for me to get free of that belief (and guilt), to be perfectly okay with what the house looks like on the outside when I don’t do all my dishes regularly, or only have the lawn guy come by every TWO weeks. It’s been a relief, frankly to have the pandemic as a platform on which to let all those old expectations and assumptions about what I thought I HAD to do as an adult, go. Simply… go. I’d really be just fine, I think, working and living this way indefinitely, though preferably without the threat of a killer disease hanging over all our heads. I still love my work, love my clients, love my home (inside and out), but I have also learned a great deal about how I had been relating to a lot of these things in some pretty unhealthy ways.

On the outside, the pandemic has meant being locked down, locked in, stuck on pause. But it has also meant being able to turn inward, slow down or pause, re-examine a great many things we’ve just been too busy to stop and contemplate before now. My clients have been learning that; hell, I’ve been teaching them that.

Guess it was only a matter of time before that lesson finally came home to roost in the therapist’s house too.

Emotional Intelligence, Family Issues, Language, self-perception, Uncategorized

One nebulous advantage of being a Marriage & Family Therapist, trained in family systems theory, is that we have ample opportunity to explore our own origin stories, as well as those of our clients. We gain new perspectives or information that reframes our understanding about where we come from, and how that changes our perception of who and how we are in the world.

In psychotherapy, there are generally some firm boundaries around “safe and effective use of Self” for therapists that are all about understanding and/or mitigating how WHO we are impacts HOW we are in our work with our clients. Understanding the formative and often invisible impacts of our families of origin can be a part of that work, as our early models often influence our values and inter-relational patterns in all kinds of relationships. We don’t use it necessarily as an excuse to talk about ourselves in client sessions, though careful and limited use of personally-relatable anecdotes can be a useful tool for illustrating to clients just how much we do (or don’t) *get them*.

Then again, I’m also a writer by trade long before I was a therapist, and a principle tenet of writing is to “write what you know”. Since people are often curious about how therapists wind up becoming therapists, I thought I’d for once break the silence around personal stories, and share my own origin story. In doing so, it also helps me recognize that a lot of this has the ring of well-honed narrative, meaning that every time I tell some of these stories, I’m (subtly, perhaps) reinforcing those storylines and their underlying values in my head. I’m also giving myself an opportunity, however, to reflect on those storylines a little more and see whether there’s anything to be altered in the current moment, applying years’ worth of reflection to temper something I’ve been telling myself, in many cases, literally all my adult life. As an exercise, I’m going to bold the parts of it that are the internalized scripts, the narrative lines that I’ve carried and polished the longest.

WHO AM I, a story by Karen, age 50 and 3/4

To start with, my family structure itself was odd. My parents met in Toronto in 1965 when my recently-divorced mother and her four-year-old daughter were trying to make a new life for themselves. The mid-60s weren’t exactly hospitable years for divorcees and single mothers, and my mom has admitted that what she was looking for was financial support more than romance. My mother’s first daughter was a handful, however, and sometime just before my parents met, my mom made her daughter a ward of the Crown; in short, voluntarily relinquished her into the fostercare system. Mom had also had a second child out of wedlock after the marriage ended; he was given up for adoption at birth.

My father was working as an industrial architect with a side passion for big-band jazz. I’ve got ancient newsclippings of my dad on an upright base playing with a then-unknown black kid by the name of Oscar Peterson on the piano. My dad was 17 years older than my mom. They connected through unknown-to-me circumstance. Two years later, they had me; I was planned. I grew up knowing about my half-sister, as she came and went from my life on whirlwind visits. I don’t remember how old I was when I discovered the birth documents for my half-brother, probably around 8 or so, but thereafter I know I internalized the idea that “I was the one she/they kept”. I also internalized the idea that if they gave away two other babies, obviously they could give ME away any time they wanted, too.

As a young adult, I took to describing my homelife as a “Cold War zone”. My relationship with each of my parents was okay and as “normal” as one might expect for the 70s and 80s–their relationship with each other was a different story. Of note: my parents were never married; they both commented over the years that having each been burned by previous marital heartaches, there seemed no good reason to go through the motions a second time. The scripted line was, “They lived together for 19 years, and hated each other for 17 of them,” which, while lacking in the accuracy of the minutiae, certainly encompasses the overarching tension of my homelife. My parents never slept in the same bed, and round about the time we moved into a small town when I was 7.5, they didn’t even sleep in the same room on the same floor of the house. Mom always maintained it was because of Dad’s snoring (which was prodigious), but I never believed that was all, or even the bulk of her reasoning.

It’s worth noting: I never knew my dad’s family. His parents were long dead before I was born, as was one of his sisters (Scarlet Fever in her case); what family he had through his remaining sister was scattered on the East Coast. I have a vague memory of meeting a couple of his cousins or nephew/niece when I was very young, but I remember their dog better than I remember them. I also met the daughter of his first wife once in my early teens when she came west to visit, but that once was all the exposure I had until I tracked her down through FB last year to inform her of Dad’s passing. My mother’s family is its own tale of dire dysfunction, including her alcoholic mother with undiagnosed suicidal depression (though some of my mother’s tales ring the bells of Borderline Personality Disorder); my mother tells of the day my grandmother tried to kill herself by driving the family car off the road… with my mother and her younger brother loose in the back seat. My grandfather was unwilling to confront or deal with his wife’s obvious mental health issues, so he didn’t intervene even when she beat her daughter or emotionally terrorized either child. MY mother finally fled as a teenager, as soon as she was old enough to work to support herself. She married young; her first husband was an abusive alcoholic. She was 20 when her first daughter was born.

Both of my parents were high-functioning alcoholics. My mother also suffered from undiagnosed depression. Neither of my parents finished high school. Dad enlisted in the army at 18, which got him to Europe for the last rounds of WWII. His work ethic meant both a workaholic, emotionally-unavailable father-figure, and that my university education was paid for long before I graduated high school, about which I was constantly reminded, and an investment I promptly lost by failing out of my first year of university. I was the first generation of the family to attend university; between my mother’s and her brother’s kids (her 2 daughters, his 2 sons), only two of us completed undergrad. I’m the only one with a post-grad degree. None of us has had a stable, successful marriage (including our parents). Only one of the four of us ever had kids. The eldest in both sets of siblings has significant mental health issues including drug or alcohol issues and numerous run-ins during “troubled youth” with law enforcement. That left myself and my younger cousin to be the “good kids” in a widespread system of familial dysfunction. My running joke for a long time was that David (said cousin) and I were the white sheep of the family, notable for our rarity.

So… that’s the bare-bone systemic model in which I grew up. Even glossing over so many details about the intergenerational and inherited trauma normal to family systems, that’s a lot of self-defining scripting I’m carrying forward into my adult life, the echos of which still occasionally rattle the windows and shake the walls of my current life.

When we dig into the narratives I’ve bolded, there’s an incredible amount of tension touching on several aspects of my core family dynamics:

  • The incredible pressure of growing up as “the one they kept”, believing that if they could give the other children away, I had to be EXTRA GOOD to make sure that didn’t happen to me.
  • The weight of expectation tied to my going to university, even if I proved terribly unready for the responsibility of “being launched”.
  • Being the Adult Child of Alcoholics (OMG, I don’t even know where to start with what I’ve learned about this one, but here’s a good suggestion).
  • The dynamic of seemingly overbonded mother and underbonded father (and let me tell you, THAT dynamic has been a major undermining factor of EVERY heterosexual relationship I have ever had, including both my marriages).
  • Undiagnosed mental health issues galore, up to and including my own until-recently-admitted depression and anxiety.
  • The “Cold War” aspect of my parents’ relationship as the foundational model I took away for “how intimate partnerships should look” (and my own deeply-disconnecting behaviours when stressed in relationship).

It’s not uncommon that “relationship issues” such as faltering intimacy or communications challenges in relationship are what drive an individual or partners into a therapist’s office. One of the reasons the family of origin snapshot is such an integral part of my own intake process is that it shapes for me a picture of the significant early and formative influences on the participants in the current conversation.

Having spent so much time navel-gazing my own origin story, and listening over the years to how I tell my origin story, I’ve learned something about how to listen for those polished-sounding phrases, lines and phrases that crop up time and time again in conversation. I can’t always put my finger on what it is about a particular choice of wording in a client’s story that sets my Spidey-senses tingling, but my accuracy is (in my not-so-humble opinion) better than just average in catching the tones. There’s just something about a precise choice of words; or something about how they all run together like a phrase we haven’t actually had to think about constructing for a long time, dropped in the midst of an otherwise thoughtful conversation.

(I’m not ruling out the idea that I’m just projecting onto my own clients, at least some of the time; on a good day, I’m self-aware enough to be aware that’s a potential inadvertent-thing-wot-therapists do, yo.)

We all have these stories, these pieces of personal narrative we just carry with us as shorthand descriptions of things that actually carry an incredible significance to those willing to get past the polish and gleam of scripting. I joke sometimes that my job as a therapist is to be a “professional disruptive influence”, and more often than not, what I’m looking to disrupt is the attachments we invest in those safe scripts. Scripts around our origin stories, like any other experience, in many ways function as cages that contain complex emotional experiences. Language is a tool we use to define and shape experience into something we can wrap our heads around. Dispassionate versus passionate language and delivery, for example, is discernible through listening to word choice as well as tone. Applying language to an experience is, in and of itself, a very cognitive process, and in pushing emotional experience through cognitive filters, we already begin to separate ourselves from the immediacy of the lived and felt experience. Our word choice actually informs our brain how we want to qualify and quantify that experience; we can use language to embrace or distance our selves from the feelings. Our origin stories are the stories we have been practicing and polishing the longest of all our scripts. Sometimes we need to just scrape off the years of accumulated polish to see the actual grain and bones of the experience underneath, to understand what happened in different lights and perspectives, and maybe learn something new about ourselves in the process.

Grief

The post is late today because I’m having a little trouble getting myself into coherent shape. On Sunday morning, I had to put down the second of my two cats, four months to the day after losing the first. Prou, my bonded companion and favourite furry nuisance, passed in late September when she surprised us all by hiding renal failure until she was too sick for me to do anything but make an abrupt, unexpected, and wholly unwelcome decision right there in our vet’s office. I went home to console myself with her sister (literally her litter-mate) Mia, who while very much loved had always been the more aloof of the two ladies, content to rule her portions of the house with disdain and occasional neurotic feline antics, allowing her sister to seduce and entrance the humans who fed and cared for them. Mia had been dealing for the past few years with age-related arthritis, and had recently been dealing with some new respiratory issues; the vet and I had only just been talking about the option for an invasive scoping procedure to identify the issues when Prou’s unexpected death eclipsed everything.

Many of my clients in the home practice had grown accustomed to Prou’s presence in the office; she often curled up on my lap while we worked. Many commented over the years that her presence helped keep them calm even if she didn’t interact with them directly, and her purr was loud enough to gentle many an anxious soul. Mia was rarely ever interested in visitors. Prou’s death hit the practice hard, but for me, there was still a lovely black floof to care for, who seemed suddenly interested in accepting my increased availability and attention even when it came with a strong side order of sadness or abrupt tears.

Two weeks or so after Prou died, however, Mia had what the emergency vet at our clinic could only describe as a “neurological incident” (I just call it a “stroke”) that left Mia almost completely blind, and further incapacitated in her mobility. Over the next few weeks, she seemed to make a great recovery. She never regained her sight, but she was content to explore slowly and unsteadily around the familiar household environs, and call to me for company when she wanted me. We developed entirely new routines around our time together. I discovered entirely new things about Mia, including just how much she adored face rubs and skritches along her cheeks and having the insides of her ears rubbed. I learned to move NOTHING unless I had to, though she seemed delighted when the Christmas tree went up; she and her sister had always had a great love for hanging out under the lowest branches of the artificial tree. They never climbed it, but the stiff branches made for great fur rubbing and back scratching rigs. I spent almost as much time every year cleaning off clumps of cat fur as I did taking down and packing away the ornaments and lights. It delighted me that Mia was happy to make it as far as the living room several times over the holidays.

In early January, though, the rate of oscillation between her good days and bad days began to increase. Her mobility deteriorated to the point where she finally gave up her kingdom seat on the master bed, and came out to the front of the house less often, though she would still call for me when she wanted company wherever she was. But even those calls decreased in the last few days, and there were other signs. The last three nights of her life, I was sleeping on a camp bed on the floor so she could find me, because this is just what we do. We rearrange our lives for these creatures; they are so dependent on us for everything, when all we need from them is companionship. It’s a grossly unfair system and one that devastates us badly when the inevitable ends find us. Even when we see the inexorable, inescapable end points, we’re never actually ready for them when they hit.

I suspect Mia had another stroke sometime in the wee small hours of Sunday morning. By the time I got up, she couldn’t pull herself up, couldn’t walk even with help. Her distress levels were through the roof and she couldn’t or wouldn’t focus to accept her meds. I sat on the floor in the hallway and just held her against my chest for a while, something this cat almost NEVER permitted ANYONE, not even me, to get away with; it was her lack of struggling but her obvious discomfort that made it unarguably clear that she wasn’t going to make it much further.

This wasn’t what I had wanted for her, not what I had planned. After losing Prou in the vet’s office without much warning, I had wanted beyond all else to have Mia be able to pass at home in some comfort and familiarity. But we didn’t get that luxury. My vet’s office isn’t open on Sundays, and even if it was, it wouldn’t be guaranteed that we could get a same-day house call. So I had to bundle my dying companion into a carrier, out into the cold and across town to the emergency vet hospital, where they are lovely and compassionate, gentle people… but they didn’t know us. They hadn’t already gone through one grief process with our household only four months prior. They had no history with Mia, they were just willing to accept my information, request, and payment, and do what was by then a necessity, a foregone conclusion. Once again, in spite of having months to prepare, I found myself crouched over a struggling companion in an impersonal clinical room, holding them and sobbing and apologizing for somehow failing them.

Because that’s what we do when we love these furry beasts. We absorb an exorbitant degree of responsibility for their dependent state. We build palatial spaces for them in our hearts, even when they’re being furry jerks who chew things they shouldn’t, throw up in unexpected places, shed hair on everything we own hide our socks, and find endlessly interesting and unique ways to tell us exactly how they feel about life, the universe, and everything. And yet for those of us who let them into our hearts, even knowing how heavy the grief will be somewhere down the road… we wouldn’t have it any other way. Even if it means coming home from a vet’s office twice in four months with an empty cat carrier that wasn’t empty when I left the house… we know. We do it anyway.

This time around is abysmally more difficult, though. When Prou died in September, I still had Mia. And even knowing post-stroke I might not have her for long (or more accurately, entirely BECAUSE I knew I wouldn’t have her much longer), any part of my life that wasn’t about work became about her. So with her sudden (albeit not really unexpected) absence, the past few days have been a harsh lesson in the weight of silence. It’s almost unbearable when there is nothing and no-one else in our space with us any more. The silence is deafening. I realized almost immediately how much of my attention is still focused on awaiting the call for company, or waiting for the movement of a small shadow at the edge of my peripheral vision. Every little creak or household sound triggers a kind of breathless anticipation, awaiting The Companions who… are simply gone. Wherever their next lives have taken them, they are no longer here. The letdown from every one of those moments of anticipation is crushing. I thought it was hard after Prou, and it was, for the loss of my bonded companion. But the silence left now by the absence of Mia as well is so much harder. For all that Mia and I didn’t have the same bond Prou and I had, making much of my life about the process of caring for Mia in her final months made what connection we had the stronger for both her need, and my willingness to move pretty much everything be there for her.

There is a general sense among the humans who have been companions to these marvellous creatures that there is no right or wrong way to grieve them when they go. Some say it’s proper to give time to respect and appreciate them; some prefer to find new bonds immediately. I might be better able to tolerate that absence were it not in the silence of a life and world without another living, interactive presence in my space. I don’t know what to do in this level of aloneness. It’s not a question of whether or not I am “ready” to take on another companion animal, or the process of getting to know potential companions; it’s a question of how long I can handle being alone in the silence. Moreover, I don’t *WANT* to spend any more time in this silence than I have to. It’s not the kind of silence that simply being social with other humans will fix; I know the shape of that particular feeling, and this is not that.

I don’t know what the next step will look like. There’s no negating the grief; that’s not the concern here, nor the point of taking any next steps any more than cleaning away the evidence of Mia and Prou’s existence is about negating the grief. I will never erase their presence and impact on my life, I will never fill the feline-shaped holes they leave in my heart. The grief simply is. The pain simply is. The silence simply is. None of this is welcome, and none of it is escapable. All of this grief is evidence of having *HAD* these wonderful creatures in my life, and I wouldn’t trade this pain for the world if it would mean not having had almost 17 years of their company.

We’ll see what the future holds, but ultimately, I doubt it will be long before there are new residents in the house; it’s largely just a question of finding the right matches. They will never be replacements, only additions. They cannot deflect the grief, but they might help mute it a little. Only time will perhaps dull the bulk of it.