Tagged: Trauma Recovery

Deciding to Work with My Inner Critic

I was talking with my mom this weekend about how I feel a great amount of anxiety after leading a group or even just socializing in a group setting. In these situations I don’t feel any anxiety at the time, while I’m with the group. Things are usually going well and I’m usually having a good time. The anxiety comes later, after I’ve returned home and usually when I’m settling down to sleep.

It’s during this quiet time that my inner critic starts to shout: “What have you done? You’ve given too much of yourself away.” Then a feeling of dread flows down my body and tightens in my stomach. It feels awful and makes it difficult to fall asleep. Recently I’ve been able to cope with these feelings rather well, at least compared to how I handled such anxiety in years past. I’ve become more adept at focusing on my body and noticing where it feels tension. I breathe and follow that breath in and out of my body. Eventually I’m able to fall sleep.

But I’d like to find the source of these feelings and eliminate them, or at least learn how to work with them better. I’d like to feel confident of the value I bring to a group and not feel anxious just being me and being fully present.

What really surprised me in talking with my mother about my experience is when she said she experienced something similar in the first years after she left my father. She described some of the thoughts that would come to her mind and I realized they were the same thoughts that my inner critic speaks to me. Things all along the lines of “don’t reveal too much about yourself” and “don’t tell anybody anything they don’t absolutely need to know.”

I shuddered a bit. These are all the words of my father, who drilled into us at every opportunity that we should keep our cards close to chest, never let anybody in, never foster community, etc. My father is not a well man. He fits the profile of an individual with Anti-Social Personality Disorder. He feared healthy socialization and actively dissuaded us from it and sometimes punished us for it.

So it’s no wonder that I experience anxiety when around social groups. I was already aware that I have a strong inner critic. What I realized in talking with my mother is the extent to which I often don’t perceive the presence of my inner critic. It’s more pervasive than I thought. For example, I know that I often get headaches. But yet, there will be days where I suddenly realize I’ve had a headache for the past several hours. The pain, for whatever reason, in these cases becomes a kind of background noise, casuing suffering yet going undetected.

So I’ve decided I’d like to get better at detecting and then working with my inner critic. I want to realize sooner when it’s giving me a headache.

My Zen Community runs a weekend workshop at least once a year, if not twice, on working with the inner critic. I have known about the workshop for sometime, but have found one excuse or another for not attending. One happens to be coming up and after this week’s conversation with my mother, I registered for it.

The retreat is in about six weeks. I’m both looking forward to it and not. I’m excited about learning some new tools to healing this aspect of myself. I also am anxious about staying at the monastery for the first time and about having to reveal and be present as myself in front of a group. All in all, I think it will be a good experience.

I’ll be sure to post here about my expereinces after the workshop.

The Evening News

I’m very thankful to not be a famous person. I’m able to move about with relative anonymity. The messy details of my personal life, with all its mistakes and wonders are private and I’m able to share them by choice. I can’t imagine the kind of pressure it creates for those who do not have this choice.

There is a notable exception to this, however. It’s the news coverage of my father’s murder-for-hire plot, his subsequent arrest and resulting prison sentence. News of his arrest appeared in the local Sacramento newspaper and the evening news. Some months later, after his sentencing, the evening news in the Bay Area, where I was living at the time, did an extended story, complete with undercover video footage that I hadn’t previously known even existed.

When I first found out about the story I was very angry. I felt violated. Here they were broadcasting footage of our family’s shop (part of the undercover footage; my father had conversations with the under cover “hitman” there). Once my initial anger subsided I realized that they were trying to make a decent point: that crimes of the sort my father committed (solicitation of murder) do not carry a strong enough penalty in California. So I was left with just a strangeness and an uneasiness. I haven’t watched the video in a while. I used to watch it when I would find myself missing or otherwise thinking about my father. It’s actually the most recent thing I have connecting me to him, as strange as that sounds. I can’t recall the last conversation we had. It was probably some time in 2000, at the latest. I did go to his arraignment, but we did not speak. It is so very odd to see your father in an orange prison jumpber and shakles.

Last week it came to my attenion that the local evening news in Sacramento had run another story about my father. It’s shorter than the previous news segment, but nevertheless unnerved me in the same way. I can’t quite figure out why such a piece of information is news worthy. Over the years I’ve tried to distance myself (both figuratively and litterally) from the chaos and violence that my father brought upon me and the rest of my family. But yet I can’t escape it entirely, because at any time some tv news station might decide to do another story on it. Or I’ll have a flashback. Or a memory will resurface. Or someone will issue a turn of phase in a stern voice and it will remind me of my father, and of being a frightened child.

When I watched the most recent news clip, I found myself asking the same set of “why” and “how” questions. How could my parent do something so wicked, so contrary to life as to want my other parent murdered? Why does a tv news reported get an opportunity to speak to my father when I do not? The list goes on and on.

What I’m realizing it that I’m never going to know the answers to those questions. They are unanserable. And in actually, I’m asking those questions as a way to re-invent the past, to change what cannot be changed. Asking those questions keeps me out of the present moment.

So wait I’m going to from now on when those questions start spinning around in my head is sit and focus on my body. I’ll concentrate on how it’s feeling in the present moment. I’ll follow my breath. I’ll notice any spots of tension. I’ll notice what kinds of feelings come up. And I’ll stop trying to answer those unanswerable questions.