I grew up in a house that was predominately intellectual. Issues were resolved through discussion and reason; emotions rarely ever played a part. And when emotions did present themselves they were attacked. My family had two responses to emotional expression during my childhood: anger or Band-Aids. Either my parents would get angry with me for expressing an emotion, or they would try to take away the emotion so that I wouldn’t have to deal with it. Neither of these responses allowed me the opportunity to develop normal emotional responses to situations. Either I was afraid that I would get in trouble for having the emotion, or my parents would be so over concerned that I was emotional that they would try and fix what ever and not hear that all I needed was a chance to express how I felt. I grew to be afraid to express even those narrow acceptable emotions for fear of parental teasing. Showing emotions was a weakness to be avoided at all costs.
For example, as a child I was often the target of the neighborhood bully. I was scared to walk to school because I had to pass his house. I often went blocks out of my way to avoid encounters with him and his gang of friends. When I was unsuccessful in avoiding the bully and I came home in tears, I never once was allowed to cry it out, or talk about the fear I had of this person and what he was doing to me. Instead I was told to ignore him and tell the teacher. Then my parents would call his parents and virtually ensure that I’d get a repeat visit the next day from this guy. Over time I stopped telling my parents about his attacks because the aftermath of telling was worse than the attack itself.
Another example: I had mono in the 8th grade and while I spent several weeks in bed recovering I read a lot of books. One that my mother brought home from the library for me was called “Dove.” It was the story of a man who sails around the world and meets and falls in love with his wife along the way. I was captivated by the story. My father pooh-poohed the thing because, in his words, “it was a love story.” For several years afterwards I talked of wanting to sail around the world myself. My parents always were amused and sometimes made fun of this dream. I was crushed. I learned not to expose my dreams or things that I held dear for fear of ridicule and teasing.
Recently I learned that my father hated the very idea of emotional dialog. I had tried to write some letters to my parents in hopes of resolving some of the emotional issues with which I was struggling. Instead of hearing the pain and confusion that I was confronting, my father’s response was to get angry with me for “attacking” my mother and him. After a one-side discussion with my parents, where he did almost all the talking, he summed it up by saying words to this effect: “this kind of emotional dialog tears me up and I can’t do it. I refuse to do it again.”
I understand now that my entire life I have been given this message that emotional responses are bad over and over again. To the point where I believe at a very deep level that I am somehow wrong or bad for expressing any emotions. If I am not perfectly stoic and intellectual about things then I should be ashamed. All of this has left me emotionally crippled. I am unable to allow myself expression of any but a narrow band of emotions. When events unfold that push me outside the extremely narrow range of expression I felt was safe growing up, I am helpless and frustrated. I punish myself rather than express what are perfectly normal, acceptable emotions. For years I have had a terrible fear of my anger. I refused to let myself express that emotion in the moment. And when I finally did express it I did so in inappropriate ways, usually at people who weren’t deserving of it.
I can own that I am emotionally immature. I can understand the reasons why. What is harder to own and come to terms with is the fact that I have clung to this behavior for so long. I can choose to stay with my current set of behaviors and continue to be miserable at every turn. Or, I can choose to alter my responses and give myself permission to express what I am feeling in the moment.
My emotional response system was arrested at a very early age, I believe, and consequently when I am faced with the need to express a strong emotion today I revert in some sense to my scared little-boy inner child. He doesn’t know how to express strong emotions because he was prevented from learning. This is no ones fault, it is just the truth of how I grew up. Today I abdicate my emotional responsibility to myself by letting my inner child responses dictate my expressions.
I am not trying to make my parents responsible for how I respond emotionally today. That is my responsibility and mine alone. What I need to do is recognize that I have some poor emotional coping skills and that I need to allow myself to respond differently in situations rather than continue to use the same old scripts again and again. If I don’t change my responses then I have no one to blame but myself. I can change what I do and how I act. I can take the power over my emotions back from my inner child and make them mature adult expressions of emotion. I am not going to recreate the intellectual exercises in control that I grew up knowing and hating. Rather I want to build a normal, healthy range of adult emotional responses to life’s ups and downs.
My wife and I had a very difficult and important discussion last night. The past 2 months have been extremely stressful for both of us. The cause of my stress is visible and easy to point out, my job situation. The cause of hers is less open and visible. It is nonetheless just as important. The gist of our talk was about the one-sided approach we had been taking during this crisis. Most of the effort was focus on my issues and me. Far less time was devoted to her issues, feelings and needs.
She had the courage to point this out last night. It was done in a way that I could hear, a way that wasn’t accusatory, but that was honest and direct. The truth of the situation is that I had let her down in terms of being there for her. She was there for me; even though her fears were running strong and high. It wasn’t fair that I wasn’t being there for her. What was key to this discussion was her ability to present her side without attacking me, with out trying to make me feel bad about what had happened. What had happened was just the truth. It wasn’t pleasant, it didn’t feel good to either of us in the light of hindsight, but it also wasn’t something I needed to be beat up with, by her or by myself.
The other key to success here was my ability to hear the truth about myself, even when that truth wasn’t pretty. I have worked long and hard to be in a place where I can hear the truth about myself without needing to defend it or justify it. The truth isn’t good or bad, it just is the truth. I wasn’t being there for her, and I was asking her to deal with more and more of my stress by not dealing with it openly and honestly.
Before you think this was a one-sided exposure of the truth, she owned that she hadn’t been as forthcoming in expressing her needs and fears during the recent ordeal. She took responsibility for the actions and inaction she brought to the situation.
Because we each have the trust in the other to be supportive of our process and the knowledge that it is okay to be frail humans in their eyes, we are able to expose our deeper feelings openly and without reservation. It has taken a long time to build this level of trust, and it takes continuing work to keep that trust in place. Exposing your deepest self is at once liberating and terrifying. It takes a leap of faith to jump into that breach, faith in yourself to be true and honest no matter how hard it is in the moment. It takes belief in your partner that they are going to be supportive.
It takes passion about your self, as much to match the passion you have for your partner. If you fight for yourself and listen to your true needs, and if you express those needs openly and honestly then you can expect your partner to do the same. If you don’t do for yourself then you have no right to expect them to do for you. A true healthy relationship has balance. Not just between the two people involved, but within each of them.
When I first met my wife I didn’t listen to myself, and consequently I couldn’t hear others either. Now I actively listen to myself, and I am more able to hear others. I am passionate about my wife and about my relationship with her. I am also passionate about myself and my relationship with myself.
Things are calmer here than they have been for a while. My employment situation seems to have taken a turn for the better. While nothing is guaranteed all indications are I will be staying for at least another year. A new administration comes into power in January and my hope is that the financial situation next spring won’t be as dire as it was this past spring.
I’ve learned a lot about my self as a result of the past few weeks of stress and upset. It has been a great growing experience, however, it is one I hope I don’t need to repeat.
My wife and I are celebrating our 5th Wedding Anniversary tomorrow. Our time together has been magical, wondrous, and filled with laughter and love. Neither of us can believe it has been 5 years already. The honeymoon isn’t over yet. I have been extremely fortunate in that I married my best friend, my true companion, and my perfect lover. We have had to work very hard at our relationship; nothing good is ever easy or free. The work has been rewarding personally and as a couple. There is no one I would rather spend time with than Michele, and no one I want to be closer to than her. I would marry her again in a minute because I love her more deeply today than I did 5 years ago when I said, “I do.”
I have a depressive tendency to my personality. I think I have always known this subconsciously but I have only recently started to consciously think about my actions. I am not clinical, but I could slip down to that level should I stop trying to fight my inner voice.
There is listlessness to my actions and feelings most of the time. I have periods of happiness and joy, but they are not, in geek terms, the default. I am not sure if I can re-program myself to default to happy or even neutral feelings. I just know that I am tired of always fighting off depression.
I think that my depressive nature is one of the factors in the relocations my wife and I have made in the past 5 years. Being married to my best friend gives me great joy and happiness, so when the darker side to my nature starts to exert itself I want to make the cause something outside of myself. I have abdicated responsibility for myself in the past by making my job situation responsible for how I felt, rather than the other way around.
It’s like this; I get a new job and move to a new city. Everything is new and exciting, fresh and rosy. The excitement and happiness of new discovery allow me to mask my inner depression. For a time I can act and feel as happy as I want to be, and as happy as my relationship with Michele can make me. However, after the new has worn off and I realize that this new job and city are just the same as the last one I spiral down into my funk once again. So far we have moved cross-country three times in 5 years. In each case there was an alternative that would have allowed us to stay where we were. Choosing that alternative would have meant owning responsibility for my emotions. It would have meant taking a very adult stance in my personality.
Until recently I wasn’t capable of making this stance. I am faced with a decaying job situation once again. And once again my thoughts are turning towards leaving as a solution. However, I am struggling to face my inner depressive nature and find a way back to the light without having to leave. Leaving here means temporary relief only, and when the depression returns it will be even worse. Eventually, if I were to run enough times, the depression would become clinical and require outside intervention.
There is a pattern that occurs in addictive behaviors and I am following that pattern. You start by alienating family and friends then you run afoul of employers and non-criminal services. Eventually you are forced into mandated solutions. I have distance from my family, and few close friends as confidants. I have nearly reached to first stage of “losing it all.”
I want to keep it all. I want to be happy, and not be afraid all the time. I am tired of the weight of my moods and feelings. I am going to expose my process here for a very selfish reason: it prevents me from sweeping it back under the rug where it can be ignored. Also, it may help someone else who is struggling with his or her own demons.
An SGML fan, an XML fan, and an HTML fan are watching a movie when they notice smoke coming out of a trash-can.
The SGML fan says “We must convince the theater management to hire an expert to write a DTD for emergency-announcements, and sell them an expensive application for archiving announcements, and get them to hire a team to convert all their old announcements to SGML!”
The XML fan says, “There’s no time for that! We must train all the audience members to recognize XML, and then start a committee to investigate the possibility of starting negotiations to form a working group to write a paper on the future evolution of emergency-announcement semantics!”
Meanwhile, the HTML fan takes out his wireless PDA and types in:
<h1><blink><font color=red>FIRE!</font></blink></h1>
which he quickly hacks the digital projection system to display, saving the lives of everyone in the theater.
posted to comp.text.xml by Jorn Barger
I work as an independent software consultant. Currently I am sub-contracting through another company to the local state government. As consulting gigs go this is pretty cushy. The contracts are one year in length, with the cost of the two one-year extensions built in from the start. Basically if you can do the work and you don’t commit a serious political faux pas you are employed for 3 years.
However the is the slight matter of a budget crises in my home state. Contracts are not getting signed. Signed contracts are being voided. No one is safe, and no one knows what will happen next. The budget for my client agency was slashed. Only 2 of 15 people on my team survived the cut. The rest of us are in limbo, waiting for a decision about an alternate-spending plan. Under that plan my position would be restored. Only about 6 or 7 of the original 15 would still be here.
The outside firm reporting on this whole situation makes its report to the agency head today. Word is expected to filter down by tomorrow, Monday at the latest. To say that those of us in the know are tense would be a gross understatement. I came here almost 2 years ago after losing my job at a pre-IPO company that tanked. I’ve been laid off before so I know what that feels like. What I am not looking forward to is the aftermath. More than likely we will relocate (again). Springfield is just too small to risk staying when the sole source of contracts is this uncertain. We had hoped to last 9 or 10 years here before moving on again. Even if my contract is upheld do I risk staying another 12 months? Do I leave now and get the pain of relocation over with? A new administration is due in January, who knows whether that will be good for the contract climate or not.
I understood there would be risks working for myself. I weighed those against the gains for me. Even with this current crises I still feel as if the benefits the past 2 years have far outweighed the cost today. It has been a learning experience unlike any other I’ve had in 20 years as a professional. Now I need to decide if I’ve gotten the all the lessons this opportunity provides, or if there is some else to be learned.
Sigh.
I know that I tend to run back to old, destructive, behaviors when I feel threatened. An important recent discover of mine is realizing that I have contributed to leaving past jobs by shooting myself in the foot so I had to leave. I think, and this is only a guess, that I like it better when I feel like I am responsible for a situation ending rather than the other party. If I shoot myself in the foot, painful though that maybe, I am responsible for the end, not them. I can leave knowing (thinking) that they are okay. I think there are two primary reasons for my wanting to create this situation, my upbringing and my sister’s death. I have put most of my sister issues to rest, but I think a part of me is mad at her for ending the situation without my say so. I didn’t get to participate in her decision to end our relationship. So I try to control the endings of my relationships so that I make the choice and not them. As for my parents, I have always felt as if I was responsible for their emotions and feelings. Therefore I am responsible when they are sad or angry. When a work situation starts to go sour I want it to be my fault because that feels normal ~ that feels like home. If it feels like home then I can tolerate it. Making it feel otherwise is scary and hard. Even though making a situation feel safe and okay would be a good thing, I don’t let myself see that side of it, I just see that safe and good is different from what was normal growing up.
So, while I don’t like that I contributed to the end of prior work situations, I know that it is the truth and that I need to examine the reasons why so I can contribute to the end of future jobs in a way that is positive. Obviously I am going to contribute to each situation I am in; the only thing I can control is how I contribute. By not examining my participation in these settings I am letting my false-personality do the decision-making. Not a particularly good way to go about living.
At one prior job situation I acted as if the company was my parent. When the company merged I was mad at ‘my parent.’ I was going to force them to make me leave. I got my wish. At the next job I was afraid that I would be successful. I had never felt successful before, so it was an unfamiliar sensation and one that I wanted to avoid. When the going got tough, I left. My pre-IPO experience ended badly (as so many did). The layoffs had nothing whatsoever to do with me. I just happened to be let go. Where I did contribute to the situation was in the weeks that followed. I wanted everyone to feel sorry for me… trying on the martyr mantle; it was uncomfortable and unhelpful in the extreme. I also got to act out some vindictiveness by returning to that company knowing I was leaving soon.
Now I am working for myself. There really isn’t someone outside of me to act out against. I am the sole actor in this little play. If I give into to that negative parental voice inside of me, then I will repeat the lesson that the TAO offered up each previous job experience. If, however, I can listen to my true inner voice (the voice of love and the connection I have with the TAO) then I will get the lesson and be able to move on to the next.
My intellectual self is critical and judgmental. My intellect never sees the emotional or spiritual component to anything. I grew up with intellectual responses to everything being normal. That is not truth. Intellect plays a part, but only a part. There are three other sides to this pyramid: emotions, spirit, and physical being. The lesson is to incorporate all these in proportion to solve the lesson at hand.
I need to do the emotional work that comes up as a result of being in the world and in situations that bring up emotions. I need to address the spiritual needs I have, as I feel battered and bruised by the day to day interaction with other forces. I need to listen to my body and attend its needs by sleeping and eating properly. And I need to use my wisdom to temper my intellectual process so that it doesn’t run the show.
I am finding myself more and more frustrated with my job. For years I’ve told people that I get paid to play. However, the past few years this has been less and less true. There is a progression that happens as a software developer, you start as a programmer and advance through various jobs until one day you still think of yourself as a coder, but you are really an administrator of coders. This is fine (actually it pays better that coding) but you start to lose those perishable skills that made you good at your job in the first place.
I spent the first half of this year learning new techniques and languages so we could deploy a J2EE application. It was exciting, challenging, and most of all fun. Now our priorities have shifted and I need to re-introduce myself with a development platform I haven’t used in several years. I understand the language and the concepts behind it very well. But I am rusty when it comes to actually doing it. This is frustrating. Things that should take me a couple of minutes end up taking hours. I know that my skills will come back, but in the mean time I do not like this assignment at all.
The other piece that makes this job frustrating now, one that I haven’t experienced before, is the lack of creativity required. For years every new assignment held something new, something I could be creative with. Lately I’ve been doing the same kinds of tasks over and over. The need for creativity is lost. And the lack of creativity is missed. It is odd that I enjoy and even seek out repetition in some areas of my life, but that I don’t like it at work.
In the past week I received a new digital camera from my wife as an anniversary present. It has opened up a whole vista of creative possibilities. Almost too many as I feel overwhelmed when I look at all the picture possibilities around me. As I dive into this new creative experience I find the lack of creativity required currently at work less bothersome (I am finding release through the camera) and more troubling (work just isn’t as much fun anymore).
Over all I suppose I have some balance thanks to the camera, I am getting to be creative whereas prior to its arrival I didn’t have the outlet it provides. Still it shines a brighter light on the creative darkness at work. I know that in a few months when this project is completed I’ll have another opportunity to tackle something new and be creative again. In the meantime, I am frustrated.
I just had another lovely ‘service’ experience at the local Audi dealer. It’s one of these multiple marquee places handling Toyota, Audi, and Volkswagen. The underlying service model is distinctly American. That is to say a no service model.
Recently I had new tires put on my Audi. During that process the technician managed to gouge one of the aluminum alloy rims. The Sam’s Club people were very nice and their insurance carrier had a check cut and to me within 15 days of the incident. I called Audi and ordered the new rim and when they called back the following week to tell me the part was in, I set up an appointment to have it installed by them. My appointment was for 1:00 this afternoon.
I arrived 15 minutes early for my visit. At 2:20 my car was finished. One hour and thirty-five minutes to move a tire from one rim to another. The tire shop at Sam’s only took 50 minutes to do this 4 times, and that included the time spent taking pictures of the damaged rim. The Audi dealer service shop took 95 minutes to install one tire. Unbelievable.
Granted I am spoiled, as the other car in my current stable is a Lexus. Once you’ve been pampered by Lexus service you’ll never want to go back to the crappy American model. Recently my Lexus needed its 30,000-mile checkup. The nearest dealer is 75 miles away. They drove down in a loaner (same make and model as my ES300) left it for the day and drive my car back to their shop. After servicing the car, washing it inside and out, they returned it to me. No additional cost to me.
I’m as patriotic as the next American, but I am sick and tired of support American standards when that means poor service and no attention to detail. I deserve better. I demand better. Therefore my money will only go to those companies whose commitment to service is deeper than a fancy service emblem or slogan.
I must admit that I haven’t posted this sooner because I am slightly embarrassed. Previously I stated here that I wasn’t sure my brother would bother to call us when his second daughter was born. In fact he did. The phone call was brief and naturally centered on talk about the birth and everyone’s health. (I later learned that my brother didn’t have our phone number with him at the hospital. He had to ask my mother for it.)
Alyx Lee was born on June 23rd. She was just over 7 pounds and 21 inches long. She and her mother are fine.
He remarked that he understood my wife and I were recovering from a nasty cold and therefore he could understand our not coming to the hospital to see the newborn. In the next breath he speculated that we could come see them on Saturday. I thought not. There is still a gulf between us. My brother has no idea who I am or what I am, just as I struggle to understand who he is, and why he acts the way he does.
Obviously this situation isn’t going away. As much as I’d like to shove it aside and ignore it, I know better. My wife and I talked at length about going to see the new addition to the clan and came to the understanding that it was something we needed to do for our own sense of integrity. However, we need to approach this visit in a way that takes care of us. Going at his beck and call won’t make us feel comfortable at all. We need to plan a trip to his city and while there call and drop by for a short, spur of the moment visit. Yes, this is somewhat passive-aggressive, but trying to plan anything around their chaotic schedule is next to impossible and only leaves us feeling sullen and angry.
I understand the my own complex emotions about children is tied up in this issue with my brother as well. My wife and I decided before we married that we weren’t going to have children. This was not an easy decision to reach, and it has required some revisiting. The birth of my brother’s first daughter, and my parent’s first grandchild, was much harder emotionally that I expected. It is one thing to say you don’t want children and another altogether when family members start going nuts over a new child. I am human, and I have some very human feelings of jealousy about my brother’s new position in the family as a result of producing a grandchild. Because he and I don’t have any lines of communication we are unable to discuss this between us. I work on my emotions with myself and my wife. I am unable to work on them with my brother. This will continue to add friction to our situation.
I love my brother, his wife, and their family. He has taken on responsibilities I haven’t. I cannot know what burdens and joys his chosen lifestyle brings him. Equally, he cannot understand the joys and sorrows my chosen lifestyle brings me.