I feel like I should come up with a specific tagline for posts were I’m dealing with internal polarization. (… After sitting with it for fifteen minutes, I have not come up with anything clever. I’ll just go ahead and share. By showing you my way of gaining clarity, I hope to help exemplify one of the ways you can approach internal disagreement.)
My morning pages quickly got me in touch with a feeling of pressure. I recognized the pressure as the feeling of being at war with myself. I was expecting myself to wholeheartedly commit to certain people. Telling myself I didn’t have to commit didn’t bring the relief I was expecting, nor did the thought of “letting the relationship be as it was”.
Two questions came to mind:
- Why do I expect myself to wholeheartedly commit to these people in a “we are going to be friends for the rest of my life”-kind of way?
- Do I want to put energy into a relationship with them long term? Do I see the relationship being a part of my life in ten, twenty or thirty years?
My attention is drawn to the story I keep telling myself about wanting to be engaged socially. I keep imagining me spending entire days hanging out with friends, multiple times a week, taking week-long trips together where every waking hour is spent in each other’s company, having a romantic partner around on a daily basis…
“Is the story true?”, I ask myself. I start to visualize what my life might look life if I’m not as social as I imagine. I picture myself spending most of my time to myself. Content and alone. I don’t spend big chunks of my day, or week, being with friends, but instead engaged in my own musings. I picture myself texting them on a daily basis and seeing them in person for only a few hours at the time, every other week tops. It brings a sigh of relief, and then judgement.
I’m a loner.
I’m being antisocial.
Not wanting connection must mean I’m damaged.
I must want to wallow in my own misery.
I’m letting trauma run my life.
I should want to be around people 24/7.
Successful people are socially outgoing.
The expectation I hold towards myself is that I should be zestfully outgoing, social, and extroverted. The reason I don’t feel that way is because I’m traumatized. If I healed, I would get in touch with the outgoing and social Me. If I could just let my pain go, I would want to spend all my time connecting with people, party, attend events etc.
I have never really seen the level of conditioning I have around being social. It feels like being social is at the top of the hierarchy, it’s one of the surest ways to gain status. I think I was pushed to engage socially as a kid. It makes sense, the adults who were responsible for me, both my parents and kindergarten aunts, probably wanted me to have friends. It makes sense if I wanted to be socially active to make them feel reassured that I was going to be ok.
Who am I, really? What feels soothing and enjoyable to me?
What comes to mind for now is to be immersed in my own projects, have the option to seek out friends when I feel like talking, spending time together in silence, or just joking around… I like to engage when I can see and be seen… Most often I don’t enjoy being very active and/or engage in a lot of activities. I feel good being in touch through text and voice messages, that’s enough, at least for now.
Gunhild Archer, MD in Psychology and Counseling 