Home a bit later than I want to be, but that’s fine. Due in bed around midnight, and am sufficiently worn out again from work. I like it. I met my $ goal for the night, then stopped at the hibachi and snagged some veggie lo mein, and am now finishing this post, which I started after my nap earlier.
So I got to class on time, but told the advocate that I didn’t meet my 8 hours due to working too late, and he said “this is why we have naps.” So he talked about how a nap can work wonders for missed time. I got home after class and took a 90 minute nap to match a cycle of sleep. It was perfect. Then I spent 4-6pm as personal time, which is now an official thing, and read some evening dailies while I played Erik Satie (Daniel Varsano on the piano).
Speaking of class, we talked about IPSRT today, and how understanding your social rhythms are as important as taking care of yourself. Every social interaction you have either stabilizes you or shifts in your moods in some way or another.
For example:
– I wake up every day and the first people I usually talk to (lately at least) are the people in my class or the servers at the cafe if we’re on that campus.
– I might check socials and lightly interact with folks on there in down times during said classes or over lunch.
– During lunch, I also check in with Discord friends and servers.
– I text my sister after I get out of classes every day to check in and see how things are going.
– Around 4pm, I call my friend who lives close to my house and check in with her.
– There’s always one conversation in DMs on Discord that I want to check up on after classes as well, and that’s an ongoing conversation, so it usually ends for the day around the time I start work and she gets off.
– There’s a few other Discord DMs as well, but those are usually checked right before I start work, which begins at 6pm, and those aren’t active every day.
– I am aiming to make one of my group meetings a daily thing specifically for the socialization of it (being around folks who get me is super helpful).
These are what’s called my social rhythm. I don’t really like to be around people that want to get close. But I love getting to know people and hearing folks share their experiences with situations similar to mine. I like keeping in touch via Facebook, but I don’t want to bring them home with me, if that makes sense. So my rhythm reflects that I’m quite an introvert who keeps a small social footprint.
Creating boundaries for ourselves is how we protect that social rhythm. Without the boundaries, we can’t protect ourselves from reactive contact instead of predictable, or toward situations or conversations that rupture rather than repair.
So you learn by experience which situations or people are healing or hurting you, and you have all the agency to say “no, I will not deal with this, today.”
Growing up, it wasn’t like that for…yeah, all of us in the room. Learning to establish boundaries isn’t our collective forte. Learning to say “I won’t endure this anymore,” and leaving our situations behind was a boundary that we set to protect ourselves. Continuing to discern what/who we need to keep and what to step away from is where we are now.
I listened carefully here, because I know that somewhere between knowing what I was living in was killing me and me actually leaving, someone articulated something akin to permission for me to actually leave. And I lost a boundary with that person…well, I never had one because I didn’t know who they were to begin with. I didn’t have boundaries at all, to be fair.
But that intro inadvertently opened a wound (the mother wound, as it’s called). But it’s okay. I’m working on healing it. It needed to be opened so it could be healed correctly. Honestly, I just hope they know it’s not their fault. They’re still one of my favorite people, and that won’t change as I heal. The way I show it will change, but they’d have to do something pretty fucking mean to change that.
Like, I feel really bad about everything. I know deep down inside, I’m just really scared that everything I’ve learned in my life is true. I know it isn’t, but I only have concrete proof that I’m not a bad person if I stay far away from people. Every time someone is kind (not nice, but kind), I end up chasing them off because I get so excited about them being in my life, and then I look for them when I’m traumatized, I reach out, and they’re like “fuck this I’m out.”
I’ve never been intense about it except with the person who “gave me permission” to leave where I was a couple of years ago, and even then, it didn’t get intense until someone triggered my abandonment trauma by saying I needed to move on since I was being ignored and the community didn’t accept me. Which was a bald-faced lie, but I couldn’t see that at the time because trauma. *jazz hands followed by sobbing*
So learning to create boundaries that protect me from those kinds of interactions will help me avoid such triggering events in the future. Being able to know who actually heals or strengthens me when we interact will help, should I inadvertently run into a situation like that. Because nothing is failsafe. And nobody is 100% their best every day. It could happen again. But I know who I can actually talk to about those kinds of things now.
Healing really is a process, and it’s definitely not linear. But the more you learn about yourself, the more you learn what needs attention, what tools you need, and (with the proper therapy) you learn how to use those tools.
