Old Friends and new friends

Obviously not a fun week for me. I missed two days of posting! Not like me at all.

Well, the suckiness is almost finished at school. A couple more loose ends to take care of and I'll be finished with it. Really not excited about going through that again. Sometimes I wish this was more of an anonymous sort of journal, so I could just tell you what happened. But that's not the way it is, and I want to talk about this, so you're going to have to put up with a little generalization. In a nutshell, I had to hold some students accountable for some pretty serious issues, and it was the first time for me.

In processing all of this stuff during the week, I had an epiphany, of sorts. Everytime this kind of thing comes up, I always wonder "why?" Why does this bother me so much? Why do I care so much that people like me? Why is it so hard for me to confront people? Why do I seem to want to believe people when they say I'm a bad <insert word of your choice here: person, teacher, student, etc.>

An answer came to me yesterday that finally made sense. Let's start with some definitions:

Childhood: A time in which we learn to cope with the world around us. We build defenses, form alliances, learn habits, etc. All of these things protect us in some way from external things that feel too harmful or scary. This is where our compulsive and addictive qualities come from.

Adulthood: We start to unravel the knots of our past and examine them, deciding which defenses and alliances are still useful to us and which are not. For example, let's take "feelings". As I grew up, feelings got stuffed down somewhere deep and dark inside. Especially big feelings. This was important and necessary to my little five-year old brain. (and fifteen-year old brain, and . . . well . . . twenty-five-year-old brain) Anyway, now I'm starting to find ways in which those methods aren't really working out the way they used to. So I'm trying to change those habits.

And as I try to change those habits, I feel myself getting pulled back. Confronting someone is scary for me because there is some part of me that believes I don't have a right to be in the confrontation.

Why?

I think because that idea (that I don't have a right . . . ) is one of the foundational corner-stones of my five-year-old brain. My old habits and old ways of thinking were built on that premise. And abandoning that premise means abandoning all of it. Everything.
After 29 years, those old habits tend to feel like old friends. Old best friends. And it's hard to say good-bye. And if you even look back, they are always there, ready to welcome you with open arms.

So any little push back into the "I'm a bad person" corner really does a lot of damage right now, because . . .

<<he stretches the analogy to the boundaries of its fragile elasticity>>

. . . because maybe I don't trust my new friends well enough yet.

Sooner or later you need to cut the ties, right?

Posted: Fri - December 12, 2003 at 01:20 PM

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Old Friends and new friends

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