Sense of Then

I’ve worked through a lot of grief memories this last year with my inner child. I’ve talked to a lot of people who don’t or can’t address or parent their inner child. I hadn’t thought of it as a difficult experience, just a painful one. Maybe those two things go hand in hand. I have had a lot of experience with therapy over the years, notably with my recent therapist, to whom I have been completely truthful, even when memories or feelings are painful or embarrassing.

Back in the day, my mother’s best friend was some sort of counselor. Her child was my best friend, and our two families spent a lot of time together. That other mother’s insight helped me because, after my dad died, a counselor came to my school and talked to me. I had another counselor come to my junior high to talk to me, but when I made it to high school, my best friend and her family were long gone to another state — and when I last visited with them and told them how I really felt and how I was being treated, their access to me was cut off and they were told to mind their own business, that I was overreacting, dramatic, and looking for attention. This started my experience with seeing a therapist in an office where they would bill for services.

I went through a lot of therapists at the time because once they came to the conclusion that I was mad at my dad for dying, and I should write him a letter to read to the therapist, I would tell my mother that the therapist wasn’t helping, and I didn’t want to see that one anymore. I wasn’t mad at my dad; I was mad at my mom for not seeing me as a grieving child whose world was upside down, but instead requiring me to accept her new husband and follow his arbitrary, authoritarian rules that only applied to me. I don’t remember her ever asking me follow-up questions about why I couldn’t find a therapist who worked for me, or what we talked about that made me not want to go back, or any curiosity about what was happening inside me.

That is a thread I can carry throughout my entire life: her lack of curiosity about me.

She’s asked me things that might have seemed curious, but they were posed in the context of “why are you different than us?” rather than “what does this experience feel like for you?” They’ve always been exclusionary questions with an underlying message of “you are different, so you are wrong” versus “help me understand you.”

That absence of curiosity followed me up until a couple of years ago, when I finally worked through the shame it made me feel for being myself.

I had many different therapists in my adulthood, too, mostly because I didn’t know what I was allowed to say due to a long history of getting in trouble for speaking my truth, and I didn’t know how I felt about anything because of that same long history of getting in trouble for expressing my feelings. The last place I felt safe talking to an adult was with the counselor who came to my junior high school. She had helped me work through regular teenage problems, and, in her own way, the extra problems I had by being labeled as a difficult or troubled teenager.

I was never intentionally difficult or problematic. I was simply a confused and disoriented child who felt like she lost access to her mother, not long after losing her father.

In my mid-30s, I had a therapist who helped me through significant anxiety that came out as related to my job. I think at the time it was because the person who was in the position of my manager was triggering me in how she treated me — she treated me a lot like my mother did, in that something was wrong with me. She would triangulate her employees and encourage them to talk badly about each other. I had already worked with her sister at a previous job, and we had an established positive professional relationship. The person in the position before her appreciated what I brought to the team and my direct communication style. This manager treated me as if she had to keep shoving me back into a box of her own expectations, rather than helping me grow professionally.

I remember this manager pulling me into her office because she didn’t like my emails about my time-off requests. She would tell me that I was supposed to ask her for time off, not tell her when I would be late, have to leave early, or need a day off — even when I made sure to get my work done and didn’t need anyone’s help to meet my goals. She told me she’d talked this over with another coworker, who had helped me get the job, and that coworker wasn’t able to explain my behavior — because we’d only ever been coworkers, not actual friends who knew each other — and then the manager told me to be more like my coworker and not like myself.

I would have intense panic attacks when I was at my desk, but then I would go outside and feel better. My therapist at the time would let me call her when I was experiencing the panic attacks because they were so intense that I felt like I had to get outside or I would suffocate to death, and then once outside, I sometimes physically could not go back into the building.

At one point, my autoimmune disease was impacted as well, and I spent a week or so in the hospital bargaining with a higher power I didn’t believe in, but really wanted to survive and go home, versus the very real consequences staring at me.

I never really associated that old manager with the original wound until now.

Eventually, after I had returned to work and healed enough to resume normal activities — including the manager’s apparent irritation with me — I was terminated. It was the best thing that could have happened, and I remember thinking that at the time.