Unpicking negative self-talk in writing, an example…What is a safe place?
(August 10) – Unpicking negative self-talk in writing, an example.
Side quest.
Harrumph. Ran into a critical voice thing to unpick.
From the latest writing class homework email response, from Dean:
“So well done giving this a shot. Just by doing so, you have learned and won. And I have no idea why you thought you failed. By doing as much work as you did, you learned a ton. Total win.”
Thoughts:
–It was a rough assignment, a ton of work IF I had followed the directions.
–I made things harder and didn’t get the original assignment done.
–I probably spent more time working on the assignment than if I had followed the directions.
–I went deeper than the assignment asked.
–I’ve had Dean yell at me for not following directions before. I always wig out initially. Eventually I can go back and say, “All right, why did he give me negative feedback here?” It’s Dean; he’s blunt. If he were THAT mad at me, he’d be clearer about it. Most of what I get from him is “What were you thinking?!?!”
–I’m either thinking “hehehehehehe” or “I totally got this” when I didn’t. I usually just go “awwww busted!” when I ‘m in “hehehehe” mode.
–I used to get lashed out at anytime I behaved with confidence, so I’m triggered.
–It *feels* like behaving confidently or just not in-confidently around Dean is risky.
–It isn’t actually risky. It just feels that way. What’s he gonna do? Hit me? Exert some kind of unethical control over me? Think poorly of a student showing up and doing their level best, even if they faceplant sometimes? GOD FORBID he get grumpy sometimes. Sheesh.
–I was tired when I sent off this assignment. Just scraping the bottom of the barrel. This is when I’m most vulnerable to thinking I’m a terrible idiot.
So:
–I’m going to continue to push assignments to the last minute, because I’m GOING to keep riding hard down some rabbit hole that nobody but me cares about and I’m gonna be exhausted and sobbing that I don’t have five more minutes in me.
–Instead of saying that I failed or did a bad job, I need to focus on saying that I will continue working on the assignment later. If I need to say anything at all.
–Whether or not Dean likes me is immaterial. I like him; I tend to like people LIKE him. He’s a great teacher. When he explains things I get it. Good enough.
–On a lot of assignments, my curiosity is piqued enough to dig deeper in a particular area. That doesn’t mean I failed the assignment, just that my process derailed me from the initial assignment and I have more work to do. Work that I don’t have time to do now, because there’s another assignment with MORE work to it coming up, but stuff I can circle back to in a year.
–When I actually fail an assignment, I need to ask, “Did I have the resources I needed to succeed AT THIS TIME?” Did I not understand something? Did I go completely off the rails on the assignment? Did I not ask what the intent of the assignment was? Did I just run out of time and spoons and half-ass it?
–My feelings of success or failure are irrelevant. DID I DO THE WORK? Did I ask questions? Or did I just blindly follow the directions?
–I’ve never really been the person to follow directions exactly. If there’s wiggle room, if I can color outside the lines, if there’s a way to reframe the question, if there’s time to have second thoughts, I’ll do that. I get to have that as my process. Dean knows enough writers that he knows that writers just sometimes DO that. He does that. He can be snarky about it. That’s okay.
–When I’m tempted to think I know what I’m doing (before I do the work) or that I already know better than Dean, I need to step back from myself and go, “Aren’t you curious whether you can take the idea even FURTHER?”
–I’m basically in a situation where I’m not going to get yelled at for going all ham on something, but where I assume that I know better and don’t need to look deeper.
–If I’m looking deeper and coming up against ????, then I’m probably doing well enough.
Which is what Dean’s saying: “By doing as much work as you did, you learned a ton. Total win.” But I have to dig around before I can believe it, I guess.
He’s said multiple times that there’s a shit ton of stuff to learn that he’s not even going to try to teach at this point. So it’s not likely that however deep I’m digging, that I’m going TOO deep.
I didn’t fail. I asked the hard questions, worked my freaking ass off, and have further to go. Or I half-assed it. Those are my options.
Onward to this week’s material.
Midjourney’s idea of “negative feedback.” Yeah, all right.
…
(August 11) What is a safe place?
I’m still working on what a sense of safety or a safe place is.
Pondering today:
–For some people, a safe place is a place where they can handle any expected occurrences. (Reasonable level of safety.)
–For some people, a safe place is a place where there are few or no threats. (A designated safe space? Not sure what to call this. No red flags.)
–What about places that create a sense of safety? What would that look like? Positive consent? Patience? Trust? This would be “green flags,” the opposite of red flags.
Examples:
–“I can handle it if someone wants to hug me.”
–“Anyone in this space who wants to hug me, is a safe person to hug. Additionally they will ask before hugging.”
–“Anyone in this space who wants to hug me, will tell me they’ll want a hug if and when I ever feel like giving one, and I will make sure I get THEIR consent if I decide to get that hug, rather than assume that it’s a good time.”
I used to be the person who freaked the fuck out if I got a hug. I didn’t know what to do. I was taught not to want or not-want physical contact; what I wanted had nothing to do with it. Touch or lack thereof was a role I had to perform. I really didn’t know what it meant. (Holding hands, that I could grasp. I’m not sure what really got screwed up with the hug thing but it was rough to get over.)
Then I had Ray. She was a snuggle bug and LOATHED being apart from me. You can’t negotiate with an infant and it’s really hard to negotiate with a toddler. I got used to constant physical contact. Mostly. I don’t really regret learning how to be okay with touch, and I REALLY don’t regret giving Ray the all contact she wanted. As many problems as she’s had to deal with, I think not having that basic sense of connection and safety might have led to worse.
As we got out from under the ex’s thumb, we had to re-negotiate touch, as adults. There was zero room for error at the time; it took almost a year from the relationship breaking to getting out of being trapped in the same house, and a lot longer for things to stabilize. If Ray and I had fought while being stuck in that house, it could have gone very, very, verrrrrrrry badly.
What people see now as a “tight” relationship between mother and daughter, is the result of some direct, explicit rules that we had to work out over time. I had reached the end of my rope and no longer had my bottomless patience for being touched or a lot of other things. I could no longer just adjust to be the mom that she was used to, and honestly she was getting old enough to need me to step back as a mother anyway, and into more support and friendship. (I do pull a mom now and then, if she pushes her luck as a person.)
What we established were rules that I don’t always stick to (freaking ADHD, I am a talking a mile a minute to someone with their headphones still on), but am always responsible for (“sorry, sorry!”).
Lots of little things, but I’ll stick with the hug example.
–Touch requires two-way, non-pressured consent.
–In practice, this goes quickly. “Hug?” “Hug.” If it’s “Hug?” “Not now I’m busy,” then the hug consent requires a refresh. “Now hug if you still want one.” “Yes please.”
–In practice I’ll also make cute baby goat noises and behave in a dramatic fashion sometimes, when she’s not paying attention. Or I’ll whine if I don’t get my hand held while walking (this is very practical and we still do it as adults; she won’t know how to deal with a crowd, and I’ll just wander off. But mostly I just like it.)
–I will not sneak up on her, but I *will* stare at her for a few seconds, then grab her to hug her. This is rare. If I’m lying down, it’s far more common for her to walk up, make eye contact, and then floop on me for a few minutes. She’s a freaking cat and thinks it’s funny. During the pause of the eye contact, if I don’t want her to touch me, I’ll say, “Nooooo,” and she’ll swish her tail and walk off. Later, when I’m actually ready for a hug, I’ll ask her if she wants one.
–We both accept that some comedic muttering if we give a “no” is okay, but no genuine resistance. We both take it as a “no hug now but later please” request, but we’ve also been riffing off each other’s sense of humor for some time, and suggesting that one is feeling cat-ish is pretty well understood as a running joke.
We talked all this out: This is what I want, this is what I don’t want, if I do X then I’m just joking, I know I said this was okay but I take it back I had to work hard not to yell at you and cry so I don’t think it really is okay, I know what you said you normally need but what do you need today?
Usually that’s the first thing we check in on when she gets up: What do you need today? XYZ. What do YOU need today?
–If I’m working on pain in the ass shit, I don’t want to be touched; I’m fighting someone or something and I can’t switch gears fast enough not to be mean to everyone who comes into my sphere. I will lock down around people until I fight through, then be like, “I did the hard thing! Hugs!” when I get done.
–If Ray’s working on pain in the ass shit, she may or may not want to be touched but she NEEDS to vent and she NEEDS signs that I will not be critical of what she’s doing and anything I say that sounds that way is just me going, “Brain has options if you want some, no requirement to use them.” Before, anything I’d say would be taken as harsh criticism; now, I bring her tea and a cookie and go, “What you are trying to do is hard and a huge pain in the ass. Nobody hand codes HTML more than a few times. We all just use templates.” Sanity check.
–She also knows, though, that I feel 100% fine with her not using any information I give her. I don’t need to make her choices but oh GOD I will DIE if I think that someone is about to make an uninformed choice, and we have talked about that explicitly, at length. I often preface things with, “I don’t know that this will help, but–“
–Our relationship is usually a safe space because we have talked, and talked, and talked about it. We only started talking about it after I started doing therapy and got an assignment to read a bunch of books on the situation I was in. And THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE was particularly helpful, too, and has informed a lot of the choices I make with yoga and dancing and walking and eating habits and whatnot. We have both put a ton of work into our relationship, we’re both operating in good faith and always have been, and neither one of us is an asshole.
But: those things only gelled into our current relationship because of the extended emergency of survival. (Other people go through similar things and don’t end up with the same sense of trust in each other, but it wasn’t until the divorce that we were able to learn to trust each other that much–or maybe it was just me.)
Current mental check-in:
–If you’re in a space where you can handle any expected issues, great! But that’s not all there is, and it can get draining, because you’re constantly on guard.
–If you’re in a space where there are few to no threats (and interactions are based on reasonable consent), great! I want to say this is where most solid friendships and other relationships fall.
–If you’re in a space where you have hashed out a really good, positive, explicitly delineated (boundaried?) relationship, that’s inherently individual and not something you can set rules for, for a GROUP. Which is what I’m trying to figure out. Dammit.
But maybe I can set rules about making rules.
Mental experiment, Ray inviting friends over to play board games:
–If you want something, you have to ask for it AND accept no for an answer (“Can we move the tables together, even if it means taking apart all the computers, or could we get an extra folding table? I think just one table will be too small for six people”).
–If I want to give something, I have to ask if that’s okay, AND accept no for an answer (“Can I cook!?! Is anyone allergic to anything? They don’t have to eat it, I’m just excited to cook for people”).
–You have to consider other people’s requests in good faith, not to get along so much as to figure out whether you’re just being triggered to accept/refuse, or whether you do or do not like something (“Okay, I said I wanted to cook but I’m exhausted and frustrated today, so is pizza okay?”) You can’t just push through.
–“Yes, please” “No thank you” and “Check back later, I’m busy” are all good answers (“I can’t talk about this right now, Mom, I’m in the middle of FUCKING HTML AHGGGGHHHHHHHH I NEED TO BITCH FOR A WHILE OKAY?!?”).
–This might just be my own personal GRRRRR, but: saying “anything’s fine” when it isn’t or when it puts a burden of deciding on me is unfair. (“Mom, will you cook for us?” “Yes! What do you want?” “Anything’s fiiiiiiii–sorry, I shouldn’t make you make all the decisions here. Will you make us meatloaf and garlic mashed potatoes? Or suggest something else if you have a bug up your butt about cooking something specific?”).
–You are only good to go on something when everyone consents, so your first order of business is picking a default state for when not everyone consents (“Nobody can agree on jack shit today so we’re eating pizza and playing House on the Hill”).
Okay. That all checks out so far. Onward.
…
Night selfie.