who only by moving can balance

[I am using The Dialectical Behaviour Therapy Skills Workbook. DBT is a form of therapy that was developed by Marsha Linehan who would diagnose her 17-year-old self with Borderline Personality Disorder (CN for graphic discussion of self-injury, suicidality, and institutionalisation at that link).]

There are two intended audiences for The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook. The first is people who are in dialectical behavior therapy (either group or individual) and need a workbook to help learn the four key skills. We also wrote this book so it could be used independently by anyone who struggles with overwhelming feelings.

( Read more... )

( Lyrics to that one Vienna Teng song I keep quoting at people. )

Last night I sat on Brighton beach and listened to the waves come in and ate chips and onion rings and talked with sebastienne about this and that and the other and bravery - various different media we imprinted on, which boil down to: you can't be brave without being scared.

Which -- obviously resonates with all my current Feelings about being afraid, and the varieties thereof; but also ties in to something else I've been thinking, that I fake bravery by calmly and quietly making space in which other people feel safe to risk speaking their hopes, thereby neatly avoiding ever being the person who goes first or ever being the person who looks scared or, really, ever being the person who takes the risk. I close myself off with fear, and dress it up prettily enough that by and large people don't notice. (I'm perhaps being unfair to myself here: I put my shonky python up on github, and I put poetry up here, and both of those terrified me to the point of day-long adrenaline spikes when I started; and now they're just things I do, without fuss, and that represents more progress than I think about terribly carefully most of the time.)


A bit relatedly, I've been thinking some about compassion and generosity, and about how I might consider going about feeling compassion for people who've hurt me (specifically, I was thinking about how in the hells I might ever feel compassion for my father). And I... don't think I can. I think I can pick apart how they got there and feel pity for them, but that's condescending; compassion, I think, presupposes an equality I don't feel inclined towards; perhaps that I don't feel safe permitting? Something to come back to, I suspect.


& lastly for tonight - trees-post to come tomorrow - we have home internet again; and I am deeply frustrated that a gorgeous wing-backed purple corduroy sofa left on the kerb by some neighbours for rubbish collection tomorrow morning is just too awkward for me to have managed to get it down the stairs solo when I got home at 1am, so I am just going to have to hope that the "please don't take this away" note I left on it is respected and I can badger my housemate into helping me get it down the stairs in the morning, because it is squooshy and comfortable and the right shape for curling up on and I really want it, okay, and I even know where in my room it would live.


Goodnight, Dreamwidth. xx

At the moment I'm talking a fair bit with quartzpebble about how disorienting and terrifying executive dysfunction can be. We've both been offered PhD places at prestigious institutions, we're clearly both capable of doing very good work within the context of the academy, and yet some days we not only can't even begin but we can't reliably sleep schedule or feed ourselves. Finding diagnoses that explain it - ways that other people have spotted patterns that match our behaviour, that mean it's not an individualised problem of laziness or whatever - is an immensely big deal, and nonetheless I just keep on coming back to Onsind when they sing I only wish that I could find a way to accurately describe the effect that this has on me.

Internalised ableism, I suspect, is playing a role here; to large extent I've learned that feelings of shocked betrayal aren't a terribly useful response to one of my legs refusing to bear weight, and that neuropathy affecting my lower limb function isn't actually a moral failing on my part. I can even do this about obvious depression-related symptoms. But just the executive dysfunction...? Not so much.

I have no idea how to make this work with my job. I love doing my PhD and I love being in academia and I'm very, very scared about the extent to which being an independent PhD student, "not needing hand-holding" (or, less disparagingly, "being self-directed"), is valued -- because of all the ways in which I can't be self-directed.

Which brings us on to the stranger on the bus a month or two ago who decided that the wheelchair-using young lady was appropriate cripspiration and started telling me about how amazing it was I was leaving my house, etc etc, along with cheerfully recounting for me the story about how her father always said that "can't" is spelled w-o-n-t.

Over and over again (I only wish...) I come back to "can't" and "won't", to the difference between "this is not a thing I am capable of" (and, again, I find this easier to handle in terms of physical impairments) and "I am not willing to make the necessary trade-offs to do this thing", to learning to trust myself in setting and defending those boundaries, to being able to believe that just because I can pay a price doesn't mean I must. "Won't" is allowed. "Won't" is permitted. This thing, too, I may have.

I think perhaps you do not understand
how I love you -- or, better, believe
that I could: but
I do, and I do, and I do.
I love you not as light, nor as water, nor as yearning
but as rock beneath my feet, against my back,
as certainty and surety, in all its meanings,
with all its histories.

(if my emotional landscape is verdant
it is because water cannot but well joyful upwards
along my faultlines, my
earthquakes-in-waiting)

(there are not words enough to give thanks
for the gift you gave in showing
how one might tireless trust me)



(
  so let my silence speak
  in stead
)

(Still from finch's list of 21 prompts.)

I'm... not sure there is, really. I'm generally very open about most things, I think; even the one that springs to mind - that I'm not as cool as I pretend to be, that I'm more insecure than I present as, that I care more than I let on - is, I think, a mixture of, well, rampant impostor syndrome and self-delusion.

Because, well, I do talk about insecurity, though amusingly I wish I could do it better; I'm not pretending to be cool, I am authentically myself and that someone is Actually Pretty Kickass a lot of the time; and I think you know that I care -- about poetry, about music, about fannishness, about my people, about sharing the things I've learned the hard way so some of you can get there along a slightly easier path.

Perhaps what I actually mean is "I don't trust easily". I've talked recently about not really trusting myself, and that being the major block to meditation as a thing itself for me; and it's not that I don't think you're wonderful, don't think you're safe, don't want to trust you. I think it's this: that I am scared to ask for help, still, in ways that aren't structured; that I'm scared to show myself vulnerable and give people the responsibility of taking care of me. I have an absolute horror of making people feel obliged to look after me, and a lot of the time that keeps me from asking at all - but I can't find it very difficult to trust unreservedly without knowing that I'll be safe if I fall to pieces in front of you.

The realisation that I think my counsellor has been pushing me towards for the entire time she's known me? That I like helping people, and making sense of the world for them, because maybe if I do it enough I'll learn to/someone will do it for me. Which - is not the whole story, and is kind of twisted in its way (oh, but tiny child, let me hug you and love you and make you safe--), but is interesting to bring to bear on the matter of why and how I get so much out of this, and how I can get better at it, for others and myself.

-- so I've once again circled back around to trust, of myself and of others; this is something I'm going to have to spend some time working through this year. And it will be hard, and it will take time, but that's okay. I don't have to decipher myself all in one go.