Change Hurts

Change isn’t easy. Any change is a real pain in the butt. Even if you need it, even if it’s really necessary and you know it, It’s still a royal pain. It seems like it should be good, it should be really great to Get Past, to Be Free, to get “out from under,” but it’s still filled with petty problems and annoyances. Sometimes it feels like it’s never going to end, it seems like the goal will never get here, and, at the same time, I dread the looming deadlines. I want it to be over, but I don’t want to pass through all the crap that is between here and there.

Sometimes it’s not so bad. Other times I’m depressed: I want to cry, I can’t seem to focus and I want some routine to fill the time. Often, I just don’t want to think, and, sleep is hard. I suppose it’s the constant stress. I don’t know where I’m going and the prospects don’t look real good. Things are too expensive around here but I’d rather not move away. On the other hand, if you must, you must.

I managed to find some work, but that’s hard too. First of all, it’s a major step down from a 6-figure engineering job to Home Depot. My ego has some adjusting to do. And I’m not making enough to break even, I will have to continue to live off my savings. That hurts. It really brings home the debate about minimum wage. Years ago I could work jobs like this and make enough to get by, but now it’s hard to see how that’s possible, with rent and food and insurances constantly going up and wages have hardly changed in 30 years. I always got this point before, but now it’s more personal. All those years of minimum wage jobs used to be in the past, but now all that’s in my face again. I would have hoped that after 30 years, I would have earned some degree of choice in my life, but it seems like most of that is gone. All my choices lead to difficult outcomes.

My options were to stay in an unhappy marriage, with all it’s emotional frustrations and the endless “putting up with,” or to go it alone. With the kids gone, that means really alone. It doesn’t help that I let my wife define my social life for most of those years, not having any friends, or family, of my own. In the last few years, I have begun to change that, and now have a group of casual friends and acquaintances. Most of them have never met my soon-to-be ex, because she wasn’t interested in meeting them, being involved, or pretty much anything that’s important to me.

I made the mistake of letting her define who I was. I entered into this relationship so desperate for someone to like me that I was willing to put up with pretty much anything, thinking I could manage it. She took full advantage of that to try and remake me into, I don’t know, something acceptable to her and her friends, I suppose. I put up with a lot of it, because I thought that was what you do, that is what marriage is all about. You do things together and do your best to get along. It took me some time to figure out that I was on a never-ending path of subservience. It was a power game. I would never be good enough, there was nothing I could do to get the approval I needed to feel good about myself. No amount of success or doing or giving in would ever make things work.

For a long time, I would try to include her in my interests. At first, she acted interested, then, as time went on, she pulled away from all that. I thought that we should do things together, so that meant that I pulled away as well. It took me a long time to understand that I was erasing myself. We only hung out with her friends, her family, doing things that she wanted to do. The classic pattern of being under the thrall of a control freak. I know she has a different point of view here, of course, but this is my take, and I’m allowed to believe what I want, even if she doesn’t like it.

Various events and awakenings caused me to question the life we had. Not just my marriage, everything. I really tried to take her along, but she wasn’t and isn’t interested. I learned a lot from watching her and others along this journey. What I saw brought home the truth of something I’d heard when I first started. When I first began to understand the power that was available through breaking away from the common mold and awaking, I was told that you didn’t need to worry about the wrong kind of people gaining access to the kind of abilities that could make the dangerous, because their very nature would make that impossible. And then I watched, as this played out among all the people that I met on this path. Most of them interpreted the teachings and insights in terms of their existing world view, instead of changing their world view by accepting the teachings. I could see how that was limiting them and, in many cases, stopped them cold. That made me sorely question my own thoughts and actions. Was I going to use what I’d learned to further my agenda or was I going to adapt my agenda in light of what I had learned? This has been an on-going struggle. There are times when I feel like I’m doing a good job, and then I get slapped in the face with concrete evidence that I’m not being true to my values. I understand, intellectually, that this will be a process that will never end, but emotionally it hurts. I still want to “get it,” to understand, to “have it down” so I can feel like I’m “done.” But that’s never going to happen, and that really sticks in my craw.

My strong suit is to learn. That’s how I tackle every problem in life: I study to understand and accumulate facts. That works very well in any endeavor where knowing facts equals success. Unfortunately there aren’t too many of those in life. There’s always social stuff, the fuzzy subjects, that refuse to be reduced to facts and numbers and procedures. I’ve gotten that I need to face my fear in those areas of my life where I felt completely out of control. That it’s ok to not always be “in control.” Trying to control everything is what made my life miserable. It caused me to slowly back away from anything I couldn’t control, which is pretty much anything, so my life kept getting smaller and smaller. Giving that up is freedom, but it’s also really hard, which brings me back to where I started: Change is hard.

Things around me are changing. I have to change. I have to make decisions that will effect me for years to come and there’s no right or optimum answer. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the near future, and that keeps me on edge. Control is gone. People tell me when to work, where to be, what to do. My everyday choices seem to be evaporating while the hard choices won’t get done. I keep telling myself to trust and everything will fall into place, for the reality is that I can adapt, no matter what, but I don’t like it. I want there to be a clear path ahead of me that I know leads to the right place. Not having that hurts, physically and emotionally. I am starting to learn to reach out to friends for support, but it’s never enough and I’m always worried about using up their good will. So I ask as little as possible. I hate not knowing what to do when the situation is so important. Even meditation isn’t the comfort it was, probably another symptom of stress. I want to think this marks a transition, but, for now, it’s just one more unwelcome change.

I want to end this on a positive note, but I’m having trouble. I really wanted to write something and get this stuff out, but I’m having a hard time feeling the upside right now. There is one, I am sure, but it doesn’t feel that way now. I am so looking forward to having everything resolved and being on my own. I’m going to have to build a new life, boo, but that’s really the point of all this, isn’t it? They say you can’t cross a river in two jumps, and now I’ve gone as far as I can by just inching along, I either have to take that leap into the unknown, knowing that there is no going back, ever, or give up. I know I’ll look back on this, one day, and see it very differently, but for now, I’ve jumped and I don’t know where I’m going to land, and that friggn’ scares me.

Tomorrow, Tomorrow

A lot of things have been changing and it’s hard to keep in mind what is happening, from one hour to the next, in order to write it down. What seem so important in the morning, feels meaningless by the afternoon, when I have a chance to write it down. Perhaps that is just a symptom of the process.

In earlier posts, I talked about a session exchange with another practitioner who told me to “remove the mask” and start dealing with all the fear that I allowed to rule my life. Over the past few weeks I have been recognizing the game I was playing with myself. The game was trying to keep a foot in both camps and being “neither fish nor fowl.” By playing it safe and not wanting to look too “woo woo” to the outside, I found that I really couldn’t be any use to the people who really needed my help. Another thing I realized is that, because I’m not a licensed professional, (hypnotherapists aren’t licensed in California) I’m really not on equal footing with all the licensed therapists out there. The one that do hypnotherapy in addition to their other, more conventional, practices, or don’t see any value in it. That leaves me with a problem: If I try and compete along conventional lines (stop smoking, weight loss, phobias, anxieties, etc.) I will find myself in the position of trying to explain why anyone would come to me, instead of some licensed professional with, presumedly more training, and insurance companies will pay for.

So, what I’ve chosen to do, is to stop pretending to be a “conventional” therapist and embrace the “woo woo” side of things. This is really where I want to be anyway. There are many people out there that can’t talk to anyone: The things that are happening to them just don’t fit into our medical system. I have heard plenty of horror stories, some from my clients, about what the “conventional” medical and psychiatric response is to un-conventional symptoms. In my time, I was lucky to find a therapist that embraced some out-of-the-box therapies when I needed them. Many others are not so lucky.

So, in my fashion, I’ve come out of the closet, again. I’m embracing and own my weirdness to stop waffling on some of the hard questions. It’s real or it’s not, get over it. With that in mind, I’ve redone my MeetUp to reflect this change. Now I trying to attract the attention of people who are also in the position of having experience that they’re afraid to talk to anyone about, or they’ve tried and nobody’s listening. And then, when I meet them, I give them the straight dope. No more “some say that,” or “it could be like so and so.” I tell them what I’ve discovered and that they are not alone, there are plenty of people just like them. So far, it seems to be working, I’ve seen a steady increase in the number of members, and more people are signing up for meetings. They don’t all show up, but there’s no news there. It’s a simple fact that still hard to talk about this stuff, everybody’s afraid, whether they want to admit it or not.

I’ve started reaching out to therapists again as well. Same deal. This time I’m committed to explaining that my expertise lies in dealing with spiritual issues that other therapists are explicitly not trained to handle, and may refuse to acknowledge. Sure this will probably turn off any number of possible colleagues, but those probably would not have been any help to me anyway. But, even so, perhaps the conversation will plant a seed in their minds that might flower at the right time, when they’re confronted with the reality. The fact is, I can’t start a conversation with the struggling, without starting the conversation. I need to create a conversation and put it out there where they can find it. They are not all crazy, they are not alone, and they can learn to manage and even turn these experiences into something positive.

So, I’ve seen results from my changes to MeetUp, and I’ve started this conversation with potential clients. Not enough time has passed to see how much fruit it will bear, but the feedback so far is very encouraging. I’m sure I will get significant push-back from certain quarters, but that is expected. I want to redo my web site, but I’m still getting stuck on exactly what I need to say, and how to say it. I’m working on it.

What’s odd is that my outlook has changed as well. Everything isn’t “wonderful,” far from it. I have days when the dark cloud and nasty feeling just want to overwhelm me, but having this positive direction helps me through it. What’s really odd is that I read things differently than I did just a short time ago. Perhaps I’m allowing myself to absorb and understand things that I was pushing back on before. I didn’t want commit being one of “them,” so I put a lot of ideas and concepts aside, not really try to understand and absorb them. Now I see them as possible and that makes all the difference. There is a whole lot of very useful information and instructions out there, if you allow yourself to see it. People have been trying to tell us why we are unhappy and what we can do to take control of our lives for millennia, but we won’t listen. Though it may have a lot to do with how difficult it is to loosen the stranglehold of the cultural framework we are all raised in. Volumes have been written about that.

I’m thinking it’s time to revisit the concept of beliefs. I was having difficulty in explaining, before, exactly what a belief is. It seems so simple, until you begin to delve the power and pervasiveness of beliefs in this reality. I was reading something today that opened my eyes to the idea that beliefs go much deeper, and are much more powerful in shaping our personal reality, than I had previously understood. Which makes the ability to alter or removed beliefs, extremely powerful. Much more powerful than I had realized.

If life was a game, I would say that I’ve stepped up to a new level, with new powers and new challenges. Unlike a game, the transitions are not clearly marked, and they can be long and sloppy. Often, you don’t realize you’ve made a transition until some time afterwards, when you look back and see how much has changed, and where where the inflection point was. That’s enough for tonight. I’ll save the rest for tomorrow.