It’s common parenting advice to remember that your children will come to speak to themselves the ways that you routinely speak to them. For folks who have endured emotional mistreatment and neglect as children, an important part of self parenting is listening to the different “voices” in our heads — the different parts of ourselves that make themselves available to our conscious mind — and to try to influence them to speak more honestly and kindly to each other and to us.
I didn’t mean to start blog like this, to start my posts on self parenting on a day like today, or to start with a topic like the effects of toxic positivity; I thought I would start with successes in taking care of myself and list some tips I’ve learned along the way. I’ll do that in a future post, but in the spirit of engaging honestly, I want to start by admitting I fucked up today.
I fucked up today by not listening to myself. It’s frustratingly difficult to learn to listen to yourself as an adult when you don’t have much practice being listened to as a child. Did you always feel behind when you were young, like everyone else had a secret rule book that no one had let you in on? The secret trick of acknowledging and being with my own experience has been one of the hardest for me to learn in my adulthood quest to “catch up” to people who grew up securely attached.
It’s hard because it requires time and patience. It requires me to sit and listen to many different parts of myself, some of which I may judge to be needy and annoying, some of which are like a puzzle to discern what’s really going on, and some of which can be downright dangerous and lead to thoughts (and occasionally actions) of self-harm if they’re handed the reins of my entire system of being.
Really, I guess, I fucked up by not listening to myself yesterday but sometimes you have to make a mistake many times before you get enough feedback to realize you need to correct it. Especially when the mistake is a problem in listening to your own feedback. It’s a vicious circle, until something cracks and the smooth edge of its curve becomes jagged and untenable.
Yesterday there was a movement in the CrossFit workout I did that I knew would aggravate my lumbar spine, where I have some mild scoliosis. I changed the movement, used a modification and subbed in something different that I thought would work the same muscles but not cause me pain in my back. I was wrong; the modified movement still hurt, but I did it the prescribed amount of times (three sets of ten) anyway.
Sometimes pushing through is a good thing. It’s almost never the case when my alarm rings at 4:20 in the morning that I’m excited to get up and work out. Pushing through in those moments is the only way I keep my commitment to myself to make the $100+ I spend on CrossFit a month worth it. Most days I am grateful to my early-morning self for getting up, putting my contacts in, and getting in the car by 5. I’m even grateful on the days I plan as rest days (Wednesdays, usually), since sleeping in until 6 am feels downright luxurious compared with getting out of bed 90 minutes earlier than that.
What does all of this have to do with toxic positivity? Positivity isn’t necessarily toxic, but it becomes toxic when it gets in the way of genuine connection. Positive self-talk can seem like a good crutch — a good stopgap — when listening to yourself seems too burdensome or too difficult.
One of the effects childhood trauma (what’s called “little t” trauma, including emotional neglect and mistreatment) can have on its survivors is an altered pain tolerance. Since, as a child, I became used to denying and suppressing my emotions, it’s logical that my go-to is denying and suppressing anything I feel, including pain. Sometimes this is useful, like when I’m trying to make it to the end of the workday before I let in that I have a bad headache. Most of the time, though, it means that I have to stop. And breathe. And let my mind quiet. And breathe again. …all before I have an accurate sense of what I am feeling.
And sometimes I get it wrong. This morning I woke up with a pain in my side in a very predictable place considering what I know about my scoliosis and I stopped. I breathed. I went through the normal “I don’t want to”s that usually run through my head when my alarm goes off at 4:20… and 4:29… and 4:38. But before 4:40 I had decided to get out of bed; that moving would be better than continuing to lie in a twisted state on a mountain of pillows trying to get comfortable with innately mismatched legs and uneven hips.
“Motion is lotion” is one of the CrossFit mantras, and I like it. Sitting still can fuck with you, especially on a mental level. Most of the time you will be glad you got up and moved, especially after the workout is done, but even during it.
Today was not one of those days. One of my thoughts this morning was to do yoga, to stretch instead of working on the lifting and metabolic conditioning that I knew were waiting for me at the gym. I wish I had listened to this part of myself.
In place of listening I leaned into the toxic positivity of “I’ll just keep going.” So instead of doing the resting my body was asking for, I…
- pushed through and worked out
- was unable to do the majority of the workout due to predictable pain in my right side (from the insufficient modifications yesterday)
- was unable to do the rest of the work out due to unpredictable pain in my left side (which I think was my body’s way of saying please sit the fuck down)
- cried most of the way home from the gym, which I left late
- amazingly left my house for work on time, then cried most of the way to work
At this point, I was thinking — I was saying to myself out loud, “It’s okay, Lily. It’s going to be okay.” This is something I typically love to hear, especially when I’m in distress. The imagining of someone holding me in my saddest, loneliest moments, not seeking to cover up my discomfort but still reassuring me that it will all work out in the end is a balm I’m not sure I’ll ever get enough of.
… Except when that positivity becomes toxic. Sometimes kind and caring words can ease and even alleviate back pain. Sometimes, though, you need a stretch, a massage, a hot bath, and a day off. If anyone tells me it’s going to be okay when it’s clearly not going to be okay, I get angry. Even when the person saying so is myself.
I get angry. The toxic positivity is like a tupperware lid, smushed down onto leftovers that are too big for the container. The crying, sticky leftovers can only be crammed in for so long. Even if it seems like the top might stay on, one tiny touch (like a comment from a coworker I would have laughed at on any other day) and wooosshh — the leftovers pop out and anger washes over me.
So I did make it to work this morning, but I only stayed ten minutes. That rush of anger is familiar to me from fights I had with my ex-husband right before we broke up and from reading emails from soon-to-be-ex bosses right before I quit working for them. It is a waterfall of hot emotion cascading down my face and shaking my whole body, and the rocks at the bottom are not pretty. I went to work for ten minutes this morning, and then I called in sick.
I cried a lot in the half an hour after I left the building. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I drove away and by the time I got home I had to sit in my car and lean over my steering wheel sobbing for the length of a song on the radio before I could find my keys (in the ignition) and go inside.
It felt like a failure of self parenting. My little inner child stomping and screaming “Why won’t you listen to me? No one ever listens to me!” like I know she wanted to do countless times when all of me was actually that age. I feel ashamed that I didn’t listen to her at 4:30 this morning (or, even better, at 5:30 yesterday morning when I first hurt my back).
What’s toxic about toxic positivity is that it puts up an obstacle to facing that shame and directing yourself back to the question; What can I do now?
I am sorry I didn’t listen to my discomfort yesterday morning or this morning. I am sorry I didn’t take the 30 minutes of crying on my way home from the gym as a sign to call in sick as soon as I was home in front of my computer. This isn’t a gargantuan mistake. Sometimes it’s true that if I can just make it to work I’ll feel better, just today was not one of those days.
I am not sorry I got angry at the comment my coworker made. Anger like that makes my whole system sit up and listen. Something is not right here; it says, something is very, very wrong. In fact, I am kind of proud of myself that I took that anger seriously enough to say “I’m going home.”
I’m also proud of myself for making chicken noodle soup. Soon I’m going to restart the GAPS diet, so noodles won’t be on the table anymore, but today I had lots of cups of chicken stock I just made and a package of rice noodles I bought from an Asian foods market in October. Throw in some cut up chicken and canned mushrooms I sliced up and bam — instant comfort food that isn’t giving me indigestion!
I allowed myself to be “negative” — to be angry and feel it, to be in pain and feel it, to sob in a parking-lot and only vaguely wonder if anyone was watching me. I allowed myself to feel like shit, and I really felt it, so that now that I have fed myself, washed my face, and taken my bra off, I can say “It’s going to be okay.” It’s not toxic positivity this time. Because I believe it.