Could you be resisting your own vulnerability?
The text came in long after I’d silenced the ASAP notifications from him, so there was a delay in receiving the message.
It said that he wanted to begin having our son 50% of the time, on a week on/week off basis and he’d like to start that new schedule tomorrow.
Months ago he proposed the same idea to which I reminded him that our parenting plan stipulated a number of things that he was currently out of compliance with and the question/desire was a non-issue. He complained and whined and reminded me that the parenting plan guidelines were next to impossible for him to meet and why did we have to keep following a piece of paper we signed six years ago.
So when this delayed text message came through stating he’d met the parenting plan stipulations in order to house and care for our son equal time, instantly I felt a brick wall stack up inside of me. I’ve been my son’s protector - against the world and his father’s selfishness - for 14 years.
That message took me back to the first go-around with my baby daddy, when my son was a toddler and we had lawyers involved, back to when I was asked to defend every nuanced bit of my mental health struggle, when he was paying me $100 per month to care for our son 80% of the time. It all came flooding back and I zombied around for a solid 3 days.
This level of resistance to a change in our mother/son routine was new and overwhelming. He’s a teenager now and moving through the appropriate transition of distancing from me, but this new schedule was going to double down on that.
It reminds me of sitting with a client, like you, telling me a story about injustice in her life. In her story, she is so sure she’s been wronged and her agony is not displaced. She has worked so hard to get to where she is - many disrupted nights, sickly digestion from massive anxiety, inability to focus, so much negative self-talk, and troubling self-doubt. She speaks of the visceral unfairness she feels in her chest, the spiteful words stuck in her throat, the anger that bubbles up in her belly, and the easy go-to strategy of blame.
The situation she describes causes her to feel totally out of control and from that perspective it only makes sense to wrong someone else.
What I’m describing so often turns into the justification of resistance to change. Then it turns into defensiveness and possibly rage. I’m not stating that anger and justification are the wrong approaches. I’m offering that there’s something else to consider here.
Perhaps the resistance is to your own vulnerability.
I know it was for me. This schedule change is appropriate for my son. He wants this. He’s of an age where spending more time with his father could be a really good thing. He has had 14 years of consistent raising; he knows he’s safe here, he can come back to me for reassurance and grounding. I know all of those things logically. But in my body, I could feel the fear around what it all meant for me - my changing identity, more open time, less purpose, feeling unwanted and not needed.
What are you resisting externally in your life that could actually be masking a resistance to your own vulnerability?
When you recognize that, you can relax. You can identify and vocalize your boundaries and perimeters in the external situation. And then you can get to work on caring for yourself inside of your tenderness. You’ll more easily be able to soothe yourself because you know what it is that needs soothing.
In my version of this story, I could remind myself, just like I remind my son, that I’m safe and whatever I feel has a welcome place. Just like I offer that to my son every day, I can give all of that to myself as well.
