A Blow to the Head

So I've been taking beginning sailing lessons over the past two weeks. I've really enjoyed them and last Friday decided to take my wife out on a boat during "Family Night" at the sailing club. My wife has sailed before and she's the one who got me the lessons as a Christmas present. The boats we are learning on are two-passenger, fourteen footers.

We were out on the water and things were going well. The wind was up and we were moving along pretty well. I had turned the rudder to face the boat downwind and put the sail out to ninety degrees to catch the wind. I looked back to check to see if the rudder was positioned right [foreshadow] and when I was looking back up WHAM--The boom had come across quickly with a change of wind direction and smacked me right in the face. I was thrown out of the boat as it, in turn capsized.

Luckily, the sailing club has some really great and capable people. Before long some of them came out in an outboard and helped us out. They towed the boat back to the dock and made sure we were alright. My wife is a great sport. She was unharmed and acting very sensibly. I was doing ok as well. Except for a bit of a gash right above my left eye.

Off we went to change clothes and pay a visit to the ER to get a few (3) stitches. The whole scene unfolded in a calm and safe environment. I was never particularly freaked out, except perhaps when I looked in the mirror and saw the vivid color and ghoulish quality of the wound.

But it was very interesting to watch where my thinking and mood went over the next few days. See, this is not the first time I have gone into the drink while in a boat. It has happened three times before, which turns out to be a pretty high proportion of the times that I've been a "skipper" of a boat. The first time was in a small sail-boat when I was in high school. And the other two times were in sea kayaks. What I started to realize in the days after this recent accident, is that the theme seems to relate to my childhood.

When I was growing up my family went along steady state for periods of time. My first four years were relatively stable, then parents divorced and dad disappeared. After that I was the only child of a single-mom who was battling to succeed in a professional job with untreated bipolar disorder. From then on life could be relatively steady for periods of time, but with the constant threat of disruption.

Mom's moods went up and down much more than the average person. Was she going to crash on the couch when she got home or go running? Was she going to be talkative or irritable? Was she going to take us out to dinner or yell at me for not doing a chore correctly? I was highly tuned into her mood, which formed a great deal of my mental environment as a child.

Mom's judgment could often be questionable. She was not a particularly good judge of character, which meant there were a number of folks I was exposed to over the years that she later railed against as being terrible people. There was a major car accident we were involved when I was about nine years old in that was her responsibility.

Simply put, there were enough wild-cards coming towards our family that I was likely always somewhat on edge. "What's next?" My body was always prepared for the next impact, though what was coming was unknown. I carry the stress of that "bracing for impact" gesture every day. I'm not really ever free of it. I believe it affects my life quite a lot, though at a subtle level.

Which brings us back to sailing and boating. When I went to the next class after the accident and got into the boat I could feel my whole body tense. Whereas I had been feeling more relaxed and at ease navigating the boat prior to my accident, now I could feel fear rise up in me. I felt the most tense when I came around into the same kind of turn where the boom had hit me four days before. Physical memory. My body remembered the trauma and began to tense and brace for impact.

It seems to me that my body, my organism, my being remembers also the traumas of my childhood. Physical memory of a more diffuse nature. Something in me flinches and opens to fear when there's a trigger. In my adult life I have consistently gone into "rescue mode" when I am around my mom. Something in my basic make-up assumes that something will go wrong and that the consequences will be bad for me. So I go on alert.

One way this has come out is waiting by the phone (before I had a cell phone) while she was driving to our house for a visit. I assumed she was going to have troubles and so I was ready to get in my car and go rescue her at a moment's notice. Deep down I just knew something was going to go wrong. The shoe was going to drop. Brace for impact. And be ready to help out during the aftermath.

This same pattern has repeated countless times over the years. For the most part I think she has been unaware of the level at which I do this. Scanning what she says constantly for clues about possible traumas in the making.

The thing is, my mom has been doing better and better in recent years. She is more able to get around successfully now than ever, in my opinion. I am holding that pattern with her even though she needs it less. It seems very helpful to my mom for me to check in with her regularly (which I do, more or less weekly). But my "rescue mode" isn't really needed. It's from the past. It doesn't serve the present for me or her.

So how do I break (or is it adjust?) this pattern of mine? And how do I get over the part of me that assumes that the boat I am in is going to capsize (and which can make it a self-fulfilling prophecy)?

One piece my wife offered me this week was the idea of my being called to competency too early. She wondered if my sense of competency was affected by two things: First, being called by the situation of my family to take responsibility before I was ready. And second, that my parents were not able to effectively show me how to do things. I really had to guess at a lot of what I what I needed to do to become a functioning member of our culture. I didn't have a steady model for how to be a competent person in our world. I think I have done ok with what I have been given, but there are definitely gaps. Often the main issue is not that I am not able to do something. It's that I haven't been oriented in how to do it. And this has happened so often that I have a habit of low confidence when it comes to mastering a given activity. I wasn't given the model of a person excelling at something to know what that looks/feels/smells/tastes like. I have gifts but many of them still live in potential even though I am in middle age.

So basically I got a hit from at least two directions. From one side is the fact that I was never educated by my family to become competent and confident in activities, whatever they may be. And second, the "boat" of my family-life as a child frequently felt like it could capsize at any moment. The overall affect is that I can feel a bit tenuous about life, at a base-line level.

The good news is that I have resources at hand which can help me (and have helped me) in re-patterning myself: I want to evolve. I am willing to work at it. I am willing to look dumb and/or weak at times if it helps me grow. I have a tremendous support from my wife and family. I want to serve the world and find the way that helps me to do that.

I'm not sure this blow to the head has had the affect of making me think more clearly or not. But it sure has begged the question "Why did this happen?" on two levels. First, what sailing technique or awareness do I need in order to avoid this kind of accident in the future? And second, what deeper pattern of mine is this pointing to, and am I getting the message!? Will I learn from this experience or not?

If I get the message I will both be a better sailor and know myself at a deeper layer.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben

The Phone Call

The last few days I've been feeling depressed. I started feeling burdened and sleepy and cranky and like I wanted to cry every twenty minutes or so. I can get lost there if I don't do things to pull myself out. Sometimes I go to the gym. Sometimes it just passes after a few days. My wife has been trying to help me see what the trigger was, if any. It seems like this time there was definitely a trigger.

My mood started to drop very soon after my mom called. I was sitting at our dining room table talking to a colleague when the phone rang several times in a row. I had turned the answering machine down. It seemed like there was an urgency of someone trying to contact us, so the next time the phone rang I picked up. It was my mom. She was speaking in an urgent voice. I asked if I could call her back in ten minutes as the person I was talking to was about to leave. She said yes but also had pressure in her tone.

When I called her back I was fully expecting her to tell me about some kind of family emergency. Basically, mom was just in a manic state and was spinning around a relatively minor family issue. She was also projecting fantasy thoughts around a friend of hers. I spoke with her for about fifteen minutes and made a number of points which she found to be very reasonable and calming for her. Her mood began to wind down. She was still caught up in the fantasy thinking but the elevated mood was coming back down to a stable place.

The whole thing was really not that big of a deal. It's something I have done countless times. It has been a fairly regular part of my life since I can remember. I had to be the adult because, in that moment, she was not able. My adult thinking had to replace the manic and fantasy thinking she was in the midst of. I've been doing this since I was a child.

That conversation seemed to be the trigger which made me sullen and cranky for about 48 hours. My wife wondered aloud if I was suffering from "learned helplessness". What often happens for ACMIs is that, as children, we see our parent in a state of chaos and try to take control in some way. They way we do this depends on where the deficit is for the adult.

In my case, I tried to take control in a few places.

First, I tried to calm my mom and offer a rational view-point. Over time this dialogue evolved into a situation where she and I had quasi adult conversations and even presented as "peers" in public rather than parent-adult. An example of this is that from the time I was 13 or 14 waiters would often bring me the check in restaurants rather than her.

I also tried to be very capable at all the aspects of running a household. I knew how to cook, clean, mow the lawn, etc so that daily life could keep moving along. I took on a lot of mental responsibility for the running of things. I would remind her to get the oil changed in the car. I got my driver's license on my sixteenth birthday because driving with my mom was often very stressful.

A big problem with "taking control" however, is that children really aren't able to save their parents from the symptoms of their illness. So at some level we take responsibility for our parent's well-being and then circumstances unfold which show us how powerless we are over the situation. No amount of my cleaning the house, cooking meals or speaking to her in a calm tone was going to keep my mom from having a manic swing or becoming psychotic.

That's how I learned that no matter what I do, it won't be enough to keep the train wreck from happening, if that's where the train is going. Since I was experiencing this from a child's viewpoint, it just seemed like all my efforts were for naught. I was powerless in a world which could swing quickly from intense boredom (my being neglected) to an emergency which mom's mental state was causing or contributing to.

For some reason, another piece of my story has also been bothering me as I loll about in my crappy mood.

When I was fourteen and my mom's future husband moved in I felt like I received no credit at all for all of the adult responsibility I had taken on up to that point. Boyfriend asserted his dominance over me by repeatedly slapping me down when I cursed at him under my breath one time. My mom sat there looking on and let him do that. This was about four months after my dad killed himself.

You'd think she would have had me in counseling or something. But my mom was less than a year from having a psychotic break which would have her in the psych hospital for several weeks, when she first received a diagnosis. She was focussed on her new relationship and was also becoming less and less grounded.

The manic state apparently is able to take in a lot of impressions and sort of "forget" the ethical context around them. My mom had a very strong philosophy of "no spanking" with me. She talked about this often. It was a badge she wore proudly. But somehow she was able to let her boyfriend smack me down right in front of her and not say a peep. Mania was able to come around that and justify it. "It's the kid's fault. He's unruly. He deserved it." That's still what she says to this day.

Mom and her boyfriend went on to get married and have a mutually abusive relationship (mostly verbal) for eight years. Mom still speaks poorly of him even though they've been divorced now for almost twenty years.

But she didn't stand up for me then. She just sucked up all the energy I had to give and then was perfectly willing to have her boyfriend use violence on me to "help me learn my new place in the pecking order". She had no idea what I was doing for her all of those years. She was completely oblivious to what my feelings were during my entire childhood. And how could she understand my feelings today if she was chronically unaware of them during the time I was growing up? I do not share my feeling life with my mom. I never have. Today she will ask me about my life in a perfunctory way. I share as little as I can. There is a force inside me that will not allow me to share my feelings and true aspects of my life with my mom. I just bottle right up.

This is why I find it extremely difficult to even know myself what my own feelings are. I am often stoic because no one ever acknowledged my feelings when I was a kid. Mom often shared with me what her feelings were but she never asked me what I was feeling. So we built up a pattern where I was the one listening and empathizing and she could go on and on about what she felt and what she needed to process. I am able to be very tuned in to the feelings of others. But not my own.

So after I spoke to her on the phone yesterday, deep layers of frustration, anger and despair came up for me. First was the despair from my past when I sacrificed a lot of my childhood in order to help keep her afloat. Second was my deep resentment that I still play the role today of helping her maintain a more or less even keel. And third, because I will never be entirely free of this burden until she dies, and probably not then either.

And, of course, I share none of this with her. In fact, I hide it from her. She has no idea I've been in a mood these past two days and that she was the catalyst. In my mind I have to be the strong one and suck it up. She is the weak one and needs my support.

So my mood skulks around in the basement. It ranges from wanting to cry to wanting to punch someone to wanting to go back to bed two hours after I woke up. I know it will pass. My wife asks me when the group counseling is going to start.

I am hoping to start that soon. The group I am slated to join (facilitated by my counselor) is supposed to have an opening within the next several weeks. I wouldn't mind starting sooner rather than later. I have a huge amount of anger and sadness which I need to process on my path of healing. The group counseling seems like a good next step for me.

If I do this work maybe the next time my mom calls needing me to talk her out of a state I won't need 48 hours to recover from it.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben

Reflections on the Visit

Coming back from visiting mom I am awash with mixed feelings. I acknowledge my real love for my mom and simultaneously feel fairly intense anger towards her. I think she's doing great and I worry about her welfare. I perceive she is as high-functioning as I've ever known her to be while I am regularly disturbed by the perceptions she has/ comments she makes/ fantasies which often play a large role in her every day life.

It's a good thing my wife came with me this time because it was hard for me to be friendly toward my mom for the first few days. I just sat there quietly with a serious look on my face while she talked. She could tell I was mad at her. Very mad. Cellular mad.

On day one of the visit she told me a few things I had not previously been aware of. And I still don't know whether to fully believe them or not because her memory has been poor in the past. Can I trust her memory now? I really can't say. Anyway, she told me that my dad had been fired from his teaching post at a University soon before he packed his bags and drove out of my life.

Second, mom said that some months before dad left she asked six-year-old me if I still wanted to go to his house on weekends. According to her memory I said, "No" and she relayed the message to him. My saying so was a key part of his decision to move out of state, according to her memory. Quite a bit of responsibility for a little guy. I mean, aren't adults the ones who are supposed to step up and take responsibility. Children learn to make good decisions themselves by modeling their parents' healthy decision making processes. If the six year old is playing the role of the adult in the family, we've got a big problem. And we did.

She also told me that I came home from dad's one time with a photo of him mooning the camera. Naturally, she wondered if my being at his house was all that healthy for me.

When I put myself in her shoes it's easy to see that she had been dealt a pretty challenging hand. In my adult life I have never faced a situation as difficult as the one she faced then. I honestly don't know what I would have done in her shoes.

On day two of the visit mom and I were on a walk and I was able to share some aspects of my process which I had not yet brought to her. I told her that my personality had built up around supporting her. I told her that when I was six years old and experiencing several months of molestation by a babysitter, dad abandoning me, her undiagnosed mental illness and her workaholism that I created a survival mechanism. The mechanism involved reducing my needs to as close to zero as I could and focusing my child's mental energy toward helping her to survive. And that I maintained that particular mechanism, greasing the cogs on a regular basis until just recently.

Right now, anyway, my mom's answer to me and my pain is to refer back to how difficult her childhood was, to her pain. How she did not receive nurturing from her parents. How her parents worked all the time and used shame as a child-rearing tool. How she had nannies who took care of her and her sister and how weird some of them were. She wants me to see that she was really hurt during her upbringing and that she's not to blame if she didn't have the parenting knowledge and skills that would have made such a difference to me when I was growing up.

I can definitely see her point. And yet, she and I are going to have to come to some new understandings about things. I have no intention of unleashing my anger on her. But she does see my anger, not something I've shown much to anyone. I am physically incapable, at this point, of continuing to suck it up for her benefit. That's what I've done since I was six years old.

At the same time I know from my counseling experience that my anger is something I have to own. I have to work with it and transform it. It's my work. It is most definitely not her, or anyone else's job. Still, I wish she would say she's sorry.

So I'm glad I brought this new level of my process to her. She is beginning to get the picture of what I have hidden from her all these years because I did not want to burden her. She is starting to see how difficult my childhood was and how I feel deeply wounded at a level which comes across in my basic gesture. And she gets that I am deeply angry at her.

Up until recently my mom was projecting fantasy over much of my upbringing, creating a myth of how things must have gone. I seemed to be doing well in life; was a successful teacher with a happy family. She could rest secure on her laurels as a parent while she held up the picture: "super-human single mom beats all odds and raises a well adjusted child into successful adulthood." The persona I was projecting as a teacher could have easily led her to buy into that myth.

The problem with all of that is that I was not able to hold that persona up long term. The weight of my childhood experiences were pulling down on me to the point where I burned out of my teaching job and am now looking at a few years of intense soul searching, counseling and less demanding work-life to be able to move forward in a positive way. It's not that the picture I was holding up as a teacher was false. It's just that it was not the whole picture.

Now I am beginning to come around the whole picture. To see my strengths as well as some of the places where I was very deeply wounded. Places where rage within me lives. Places I am not proud of.

So it appears to me that mom and I are in a transitional stage. When I was a kid my personality built up as an extension of her. She and I did not have healthy boundaries. Up until recently I did not have a clear sense of where my mom ended and where I began. She could play me, at times, like a puppet on a string. Neither she nor I had a clear sense of our own individual core.

There is a part of her which does not respect me and which would have me do her bidding without feeling the need to say thank you. Part of her would be perfectly happy controlling me like she might control her hand when she wants to make the turn indicator in her car signal "left". Part of her sees me as a child with no individual self, eager to serve her will.

Luckily, that is a part of my mom, namely her lower nature projected through the lens of mental illness, which has been steadily losing power. Now that I am more empowered I will stand for that shit less and less. These days I let slide only a fraction of what I would put up with even ten years ago. And I have zero intention of letting any of that backslide.

So progress is visible, especially if one looks at things from the perspective of several years. Mom is committed to her meds. Every day, twice per day and she says she rarely misses a dose. Her quality of life is better than it has ever been.

Mom has acknowledged to my wife and me that she has been looking to our example as a model. The health of the family I am lucky enough to be a part of is likely something my mother has never before seen up close, let alone been a part of. The relative stability of my life is a huge gift to her, as well as to me, and she acknowledges the truth of that.

So we have plenty to be thankful for. Nevertheless, it is a long process and one which takes boat-loads of patience.

I am willing to be grateful for what is there and continue to work hard over the years to come to gradually transform both the relationship and the pain I feel in her presence. I don't see any other viable options.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben

Visiting Mom

So I am going to visit mom this week and it kinda freaks me out. I visit her every year and she comes to visit me and my family a few times a year. I call her dutifully every week. The phone is way easier than being in her house. My life is so different than it was. I have grown a great deal since I left home. I am significantly less in my mom's "orbit" than I was even ten years ago. I have built my own life which is very different from hers. I feel good about where I am. But I still get freaked out about paying her a visit. And being an only child I can still feel very much the orbital pull.

Especially since she's been pretty manic lately. In the past month she's questioned whether she's ill anymore and now talks about being "healed" from her bipolar. It's true that she is high functioning in many ways. But one of the symptoms of bipolar is "lack of insight" about having the illness. It appears that what I see as "manic" just feels to her like somewhere on the scale between "good" and "great".

I imagine that when she is tending on the manic side she experiences her thoughts flowing creatively; she can see connections between things which ordinary people are oblivious to. The flow of her life becomes majestic and covered with sparkling dust. In the last few days some issues have come up for her which, in my opinion, are covered with sparkling dust.

The first issue is that she is simultaneously in a manic state and questioning whether she even has a mental illness. It was a week ago that she told me she's not so sure the term bipolar refers to her and that she thinks she might very well be totally recovered.

The second is in regard to her personal life. She met with an old friend for lunch a few days ago and has been spinning elaborate fantasies ever since. If I contradict her she gets very mad at me. So what I have to do is very carefully and diplomatically find the right timing to inject a few factual statements into the mix. This will allow her to ground to reality and come down from the cloud of sparkling dust.

I feel stressed out. My wife has to deal with all this too. It's stressful for both of us. And the two of us have to be ready for whatever my mom sends our way. If we are not grounded in our response, there could be sparks flying and lead to an unpleasant experience for all involved.

Last December my mom stormed out of our house on Christmas Eve because, on the spur of the moment, she wanted to stay with us an extra several days past the 26th, which had been our agreed departure date (she'd already been staying with us for a week). We knew she would be fine if we said "no" and so we said "no". Our being very grounded and consistent allowed the situation to resolve within twenty-four hours but it was just a very stressful way to spend Christmas.

A few years ago when I visited she had a panic attack and we went to the ER. Last summer we were on a boat trip during my visit and she fell in such a way that she was VERY lucky to have walked away unscathed.

To put it simply, it is often a stressful time. I enjoy many moments with my mom but find that there is a stressful theme that runs through our visits. A big part of it is, no doubt, that we have massive amounts of unresolved issues between us. We behave in a loving ay towards each other. And at the same time there is a mine-field between us as we try to hug each other.

I am not terribly sanguine about our resolving these issues any time soon. If we make some progress in the years to come I will be very happy and think of it as a huge success.

As I look towards this particular visit I have to carefully help mom come back to reality in regards to at least one basic point: continuing to be committed to taking her pill twice a day. I don't think she's going to stop doing that but one never knows. If she were to stop taking her meds my life would likely become a lot more stressful than it is.

Her psychiatrist moved out of town four months ago and gave her prescription renewals for six months of pills. She had not contacted a new psychiatrist until I mentioned it a few times. Then she realized the one she had planned to see had also moved out of town. It looks like there's someone else who's available so it should be fine in that regard. But her nonchalance is a bit troubling to me. I see the treatment she's getting as THE foundation stone on which her high quality of life stands. So I would feel more assured if she took it more seriously.

Then there's the issue that I think she may be misdiagnosed. Her diagnosis is bipolar 2: hypomania. However as I have looked into her diagnosis I have seen in bold letters that the person must have "no psychotic episodes" to have that specific diagnosis. My mom has had two psychotic episodes of which I am aware. So I think her previous psychiatrist may have given her the wrong diagnosis. How do I bring to her that I think she might have a more intense form of bipolar than she thinks she does when she is questioning whether she has bipolar at all?

Now you may be seeing how I have become a very diplomatic person due to my upbringing. Most of my life I have been tuned into my mom's mood on a regular basis. As a child I was tuned into the daily swings. Now, as an adult I am tuned in on the week to week level. If she is manic I find a gentle way to let her know my perception. If she has fantasy thinking I try to offer sensible advice without telling her what to do. She gets very mad at me if I tell her what to do.

I care for my mom and want her to have the best life she can have. I also am protective of my own life. If she were to go too far in mentally ill thinking and need greater support, that could involve me at a level I'd rather not be. In other ways my mom is very healthy so I can count my blessings in that regard. But I can sure feel my neck and back muscles tensing up as I come to within twenty-four hours of being in her house.

Time to go to the gym.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben