My New Year's Goal:

To be entirely self-involved

Photo by Nikola Jovanovic on Unsplash

I have spent a great deal of my life learning about others, through stories, conversations, nurturing my friendships, nose diving into my relationships, overly caring and invested in my students.

I have been (overly) focused on others.

As such, it is my goal for 2024 to delve, really dive deep, into me, and me alone. Entirely myself. To stop running from my shadow side, even amidst all the pain and experiences that I have had. To sit with my emotions, including the pain and the loss, to try new experiences and hobbies, perhaps a class or two, meet friends through meetups here and establish new community here, but mostly, to stop running from and to get to know myself much more intimately, more deeply.

Part of the problem that I have discovered, through therapy, is that too often I have not viewed my solitude as spending time with myself, while alone—

Being in a very honest and intimate relationship with myself.

Learning about myself.

I do know this about myself: I am often restless. I often feel the need to be doing something more. However, while this has led me to bad habits that I am reshaping in therapy, it is also important for my healing to recognize WHY I am this way. Because processing that helps me to understand how my mind works and how I grow from behaviors. I first need to understand why I am the way I am. My mind works this way. And I have always been this way.

I recognize this frantic, angsty, bored voices to be the one of residual, insistence, a voice of survival, because I DID have to be doing that for far too long. My family fell apart, while I was in my doctoral program. I did have too much to do. I had to keep moving. I didn’t have time to process, though I didn’t believe in repressing, I had to shove it aside and not to stop moving because I had to get it done. Dropping out or taking a temporary leave was not an option for me. I didn’t allow it to be.

Now however, I am still learning that I can stop. I can rest. I am learning to give myself permission to do so. Even though this means that I need to shut down the chastising voices that tell me that I haven’t accomplished enough in a day, wrote enough, read enough, exercised enough, DONE enough. I am the hero, the child of an alcoholic, and my worth was determined by my successes and actions. That is the inner child wound that I must work at mending.

As my therapist said, and it is such sage advice: thank that voice of urgency, that got you through the hardest times. Understand why it evolved—you did what you had to do to survive, and you had to do more than any person should have to do. You did survive and adapt. You learned that well. Your brain and lifestyle adjusted and it became your norm.

And I did do it: I endured. I finished what I had to get done. I finished the highest degree. I am a doctor. I finished my dissertation, while my dad killed himself and my mom had a mental breakdown.

But they are gone now. I am employed. I am safe. I am no longer in that space or urgency and survival.

I thought and hoped that I would just relax into that, that I would ‘get’ that once I finished. But I didn’t address my trauma, allowed myself to fall into an abusive relationship with more trauma, and then more suicide and deaths, and more things that traumatized me and left me to abandon myself and the healing that I needed to do. On me.

When that becomes your norm, ad it’s for that long, you need practice and some time to retrain your mind.

I have had to/am retraining both my mind and my parasympathetic nervous system to be able to relax. Peace and calm can be/should be the norm, not intensity. (It reminds me of that social media post that says that we trauma survivors are often not healing to be able to deal with the pain and tragedy that comes, but relax into and enjoy the joy.)

I have thrived on the urgency, but also stopped listening to my body and stopped being able to relax, and it is not healthy. Though my brain can go warp speed, and I juggled all the balls when life became very intense, and it is all I knew for years and years of my life, altering my homeostasis, that period has come to an end.

That is, if I allow it to be finished.

That said, I am thankful for my speed, and the voice of urgency, as it has helped me to succeed. Through it, and with it, I’ve accomplished a lot, and I do that daily. I exercise my body, I read and write, think and process, and do my job efficiently.

However, if I’m honest, the push and urgent voice within me is also too often accompanied by intense shaming, not positive self-talk and affirmation. That is also what I must change.

My therapist and I also discussed—

What would change if the urgent, angsty voice, became affirming and positive, not demeaning?

I am doing better with this, I am much kinder to myself than I used to be. However, I do have strides to make in this area.

My homework for this week was to put 4 year old Danielle, 12 year old Danielle, and 19 year old Danielle in conversation with one another. Allow them to voice their concerns and “duke” it out. With the mediating and wise and sage voice of Danielle now as meditator.

In doing so, holding these conversations and writing out this “screen play,” I am exploring the inner child, and working to heal the wounds that Danielle of varying ages has

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

experienced, ones that she is still carrying around within her.