Journaling to Get Answers When You Wake

 

I am still transitioning from a 32 year career as a therapist into retirement. Work was more than a fulltime occupation so it has taken awhile. A lot of factors caused me to decide to retire when I did. Some were tediously financial. I just can't review them one more time except to say that it worked for me. More pertinent factors, though, were emotional, psychological and even collegial and not. Interestingly, my clients did not much figure into the equation, nor did my love for my work. It was time.

I find that my decision to retire had a lot to do with the larger themes of work I have done in my life--the core issues of one's growth and development. In particular, today, my retirement had to do with resolving the issue of others' choosing to do me harm.

I have, from time to time, been the object of obsession for a few people in my life. As a pre-school child, I was incorporated into a vengeance obsession by a man who hated my father. This man intended to kill me, but obviously did not.

Later, I was the object of my teenage cousin's masturbation obsession. I see now I was just an  available entity.  I believe my mom took care of that with the help of an older cousin. I don't think any of this abuse was discussed with my dad and I knew somehow not to do that when he returned later that fall from work. 

Then, in high school, there were 2 guys that would now be said to have stalked me. Both were age mates and I'm sure were simply nuisances in the way other girls experienced love struck boys, too, but I did not find it endearing or just a boy thing  I beat one of them up, swinging him around by his polo shirt until it was stretched to double its size. When he fell down I kicked him until he crumpled up crying. I remember my words from all these years ago, "Now leave me alone".

The second was easier to scare off. Once I was over the flattery of him appearing here, there and everywhere in the neighborhood, he appeared at my school. even transferring he said from his private school to be near me. I'm not sure the was really the reason for the ransfer. Looking back NIW I tink it was probably a forced transfer because he was so uncontrollable. o my school and saying he'd done so to be near me, I began to be afraid of him. One day he followed me home from school, from a distance, taking the unusual turns I took to see if he were really following me. I asked him what he was doing at one point. I was suddenly afraid of him. He said he wanted to know if my mother would let him live with us because his father threw him out... When I got home, with him along side and circling me, I told mom. She said "stay here" and went out to where he sat on his bike, having sent me in to ask if he could live with us. That was that.

In college, an older and married Iranian man who was also a student, would cruise the parking lot after our German class saying "get in, get in". I had quite a trek across the parking lot to my next class and he would drive around the lot slowly to come back to me as I walked. When I wouldn't get in, he'd open the passenger door, lean over and say crazy things like "I just want to teach you the things a woman should know..." This had happened maybe 3 or 4 times, each time with something similiar being said. He said once, "you know what I like about my wife? She gets up early to make herself beautiful for me". I would say no, thanks and keep walking, but on the day he said he wanted to teach me things, something very righteously vicious boiled up in me. I stopped and went to his car. The passenger door was open as usual. I closed it and leaned into the window. He said "I knew you liked me". I said, "the next time you do this, I will shoot you". He said something to the effect that I wouldn't kill him. I said "you're right, but I will shoot you". He laughed and pulled away fast enough to squeal his tires. That was the end of that. In class after this, he wouldn't look at me, but would busy himself reading.

I told my roommate about this and she said she couldn't be my friend anymore because she was a pacifist. I asked her if he tried to rape me and I defended myself, you would think I'd done something wrong? She said she would--that violence is never ok. I posed some hypothetical situations to her, trying to regain her support and approval in general. I loved her a great deal and was terribly hurt that she thought I should allow someone to hurt me. I felt devalued, less important than an abstract. I remember one hypothetical that I posed to her was what would she do if she had the power to keep someone she loved from being killed in the moment of danger. She said she would let it happen because she could never commit an act of violence. I tried to persuade her that letting another person be killed would be violence itself, but she said no, it wouldn't be. Her conscience would be clean. I understood this all to mean that my life was less valuable to her than her ideals. It hurt me deeply.

I got very depressed after this and had insomnia for months. I went to a priest on campus to discuss it. He was a sort of non-violence expert, a student of Merton and an ethicist/conscientious objection advocate/advisor (this was during the Vietnam draft). He said that he believed that in my hypothetical she would have consented to violence by her lack of intervention--violence by assent. He also said that rejecting me in the first place was an act of violence. I never discussed it with her after that and took some solace in having discussed it with the priest. I began reading Merton and fell in love with his writings. When the semester ended,we changed roommates. She told some other girls that I was crazy and dangerous and that's why she had to change to another room. I went back to discuss this with the priest and he said, "she is continuing her violence" and something else to the effect that I could choose to be a true pacifist and walk away from it because no one would be harmed by me doing so. I do remember him laughing and saying "It was all about being a pacifist, wasn't it?"

There are more examples of being at odds with someone because I thought I was going about my business and doing the right thing. I imagined these people intruding upon my free passage and my feelings of safety and peace of mind. You never know, though, how you are pulling these kinds of experiences to you. Therapists and mentors have suggested that my personal attributes and behaviors have to be examined. What I have looked at mostly--the recurring themes--have been my confrontive nature and saying what I think, along with refusing others' attempts to control me. Those aren't always the same thing. Voicing my opinion is not always confrontive, for example, but some, more men than women, have not liked these things about me. It has off and on been painful to me. I have been told that I expect others to like me and told in a way that makes it seem pathological. I've argued that expecting others not to like me seemed more like pathology to me.

So, back to the decision to retire. I still have the firm belief that others shouldn't bother me and that they shouldn't bother me directly or passively. Also, I still believe that everyone should deal with emotional issues quickly and get them behind us so we can carry on. This last belief is what my husband has said is very endearing to him and one of the things he has liked about me since we were "kids" (20 something, really). He's a fan of not letting emotions make decisions, clearing the air, shaking on it and getting back to square one. This was the explanation he gave me to clear up the cognitive dissonance I felt one day when he proclaimed, "I love you, Marie. You think like a man".

I don't think he meant a battering, narcissistic man. I think he meant the kind of man he is and his brothers are and his uncles, his grandfathers, nephews and friends are. That's a man horse of a different color than I've encountered elsewhere.

So, a strangely colored man horse found me particularly distasteful in my workplace. Finally, he was revealed as who and what he is and that healed emotional issues for others in my office. What I had to do to heal myself was journal--extensively. I also spoke with a psychiatrist or 2. One is my doctor and the other is my friend. The best help I got from both of them was to revisit my tendency to draw out the craziness of others. My doctor said that's why you are so good at your work. You squeeze out the pathology and get down to fixing it. My friend said, "oh, Marie, you know exactly how to deal with guys like this". He wouldn't elaborate. He laughed at me as he is wont to do.

So, I set about journaling. I journaled and I journaled like a non-literary man. I said the facts as I saw them and stripped all emotion from them as best I could. When I woke up the next morning, I heard the words, "You have an opportunity to be merciful". I applied that principle to the most recent troublesome man in my life. When I look at him now he seems broken and fearful. That has relieved my burden to see him more clearly. I don't understand why he hates women, but I have come to see that he does hate them if they are strong and give him no favors. On the other hand, if they are strong and give him favors, he follows them around closely and gets them lunch and other small favors of ingratiation.

I asked my 12 Step sponsor about the concept of mercy and we had a good conversation about it. We decided that many people have the ability to ruin the lives of others and that by choice they can or they cannot. In this situation, I can continue his torment or not. I have a great deal of information that could be very upsetting if I shared it. I choose not to.

I have never chosen to hurt him. I have fantasized about it, but I only acted to stop him from hurting me by confronting and speaking my mind factually. In the end, he hurt himself far worse than he hurt me. Now he flees from his office and has panic attacks in the hallway.

He has figured into my decision to retire, but it is not to get away from him. I'll be happy not to see him anymore, but really, I will be happy to be away from his unhappiness. There is nothing left in him but unhappiness and he drives it around all day and sits in it and talks in it. The joy of being there has been overtaken by the unhappiness that encapsulates my joy. My joy is in session with my clients. We laugh a lot. We dig through pain and then we take our "commercial breaks" and laugh before we dig through more. It is amazing work. I have been so lucky all my career.

I think this man has come to symbolize toxicity, unhappiness, cruelty and all the decisions one has to make to have those and have them every day, all day. This is a step out of my family of origin's dysfunction. I tell people I don't have a family, my parents are dead. They were my only family really. The rest made too many decisions to be toxic, unhappy, and cruel to each other every day. We left them. My parents knew there were choices to make about things like that. I am so glad they did.

So, after all this work of trying to find out what I have symbolized to my tormentors, I journaled myself into finding out what my tormentors symbolize to me: the opportunity to be merciful and to walk away.

photo: Magic Highway, Marie Monroe