All By Myself

Coming home to an empty house today, for the first time in a very long time, was accompanied by a sense of solace rather than fear. Okay, maybe a little bit of fear. It’s been a while since I’ve been left alone with myself and my thoughts. But maybe tonight, I can understand just a little, the goodness in the ‘quiet me-time’ that people so often speak praise of.

I didn’t use to be like this I don’t think. I remember a time when I was comfortable, just me, myself and I. In its own right, perhaps it is true that it was a much darker time. Having just recovered from losing someone I shared most of my everyday with, friends passing and going, finding my place in a new crowd; in the face of change and transition, in fear of the volatility and fickle-minded nature of people, being alone was the safest.

There would be no room for tempers and tantrums, miscommunication or dramatisations, no chance left to the possibility of disappointment in the absence of inflated expectations. Little did I realize that in shutting everyone out, I was creating space instead for a kind of self-righteous anger, an ugly bitterness that swallowed the faintest hope for something new, anything better. How stupid and petulant I sounded then, pinning my pride on this defense mechanism that was instead destroying everything that could be, a self-sabotaging machine if you will. I believe because of it, many opportunties were missed, many memories tainted.

Things are different now. I finally belong to someone that I love, even if I’m not entirely sure at this point if he feels quite nearly the same about me. I have opened myself up to be vulnerable to those same untrustworthy people, only to have found precious friends in them. Somehow, some of that anger dissipated, and after treading (oh so very cautiously) out of the fortress I’d built up around myself, I had learnt to take chances again – to be okay with the fact that I bruise easily, to learn that you can pick yourself up after taking a fall, to take gambles even if it means risking it all.

It was probably the greatest lesson I ever learnt, and life could only really begin after I had understood.

But somehow along the way, I also think I began to lose a bit of the strength that angry little girl of ‘05 had. Don’t get me wrong, I have no intention of reverting to the person that I was. There is no glory in pride, nor prizes to be won in thinking that you are all that you need. But you got to admit, she was at least a little bit cool. In spite of it, there was a certain streak of self-respect, a quest for self-assurance.  You see the trouble with having people around all the time, is the trap of dependence. And there is a fine line between letting people in and being contigent on them. I know this because I have trouble entertaining myself when my boyfriend is doing his own thing – whether he’s out and about, or whether we’re in the same apartment – without being eaten up alive by insecurities running amuck. I know this because I have become so uncomfortable with the idea of sleeping in an empty house. I know this because I collapse into a mess if I go a whole day without seeing Devon.

The other thing about people, is the noise. See I learnt this once in a jeep an old friend used to drive us around in. We were heading back into the city, and packed to maximum capacity in the vehicle. I remember that there were two distinct loudmouths in the car, but in chorus with the normal chatter of the other four, it was a ruckus. And I wanted to scream, I wanted to holler a thunderous ‘SHUUUT UUUUP’ in their faces, but all I could really do was draw up an imaginary soundproof bubble in my corner of the car, and will my ears shut.

So yes, noise. Sometimes, it gets so loud that you can no longer hear your own thoughts, let alone the voice of God. So much so that now, I can no longer seem to string together a sincere prayer, nor muster the discipline to sit down and write a coherent piece, or to reignite a much loved pastime of my childhood, pick up a book, and read it from cover to cover.

By now, I think I’m starting to recognize the value of this. Just this – me at my desk, music playing quietly in the background, thoughts translated into text. More pertinently, as much as I am desperately convincing myself that I am the only person in this apartment, that there is nothing lurking in the shadows waiting to get me, the truth is that I’m not alone.

I sleep with the twinkling lights of the city beneath me. I sleep knowing that my beloved is tucked in his bed just 3 minutes down the road, and our best friend settling into his new apartment just across the corridor. I sleep resting in the love of family who is wishing only the best for me many miles away.

I sleep protected by a God who holds my world, the world, in His hands. And I think it is in silence, that one can most tangibly feel the warmth of His embrace, and hear most clearly, His small still voice.

Waiting

I feel like I’ve been spending the better part of the last 3 years waiting. Just waiting.

Waiting for change, for a turnaround; for you to come around, to come home; waiting for realizations, for revelations; waiting for the phone to ring, for love to come knocking on the door, for opportunity to present itself; waiting for you to notice me, for miracles, for fairytales.

Today, I find myself in that posture I’ve come to know so well. This time, with a new view to gaze upon as I do. It’s quite something, watching the city from a bird’s eye view, at dusk. I find that darkness is ever the stealthy thief, creeping its way through the sky, chasing away the light without you really even noticing it – until the lights seem to burn a little brighter, the contours of clouds become unintelligible, and the pockets of blue, and pink, and purple melt away into nothing but an inky blackness.

Then, you know, night has fallen.

The cars crawl through the streets like ants, and people march like toy soldiers. Offices are vertical grids of glaring light, and apartment blocks loom like the shadows of unfriendly giants. And I wonder about that person, staying late in the office and the family that anticipates his return home; that person, boxed in the thick of traffic and the lover she would fly to get to if she could – Where are they going? Who are they meeting? What are they thinking at this exact minute? How many of them might I have accidentally bumped into on the street, stood in line with, got served by, sat in the same movie theatre with…

It’s a strange, surreal feeling thinking about just how closely are all our lives are intertwined. I mean actually, aren’t we all rushing around for the same thing? Don’t we slave away at our desks and industries, work our way up the corporate ladder, for the same thing? Some distill our motivations down to a piece of plastic or paper. But I still think that people give ‘money’ far too much credit. To me, it is but a mere means to a much grander end. And knowing that allows one to recognize that it is in no way the only means to that end. Its power perhaps lies in how society has deemed it most common and convenient to acquire, a currency if you like, to the things we really want.

Rather, we are tied together in the human quest for these elusive constructs: Happiness, Love, Fulfillment, Purpose.

And sometimes, I’m tired of running around like a headless chook. So I simply sit, stop and stare. It’s a kind of meditation practice I’ve come to master, I suppose. “Like leaves on a stream, attach a thought to each leaf and watch it float away”. I try to attach a thought to each car, and watch them drive out of my peripheral view. It’s ironic how I’m attempting to use this mindfulness exercise on myself after I scoffed at the activity in class. But idle waiting is like the hunter who rests at the foot of a tree, waiting for the rabbit to land in his lap.

So this pain that burns in my chest must be for something – for the lives that I have yet to touch, for the stories that have yet to be retold. Just like how this dead space must be for something – It must be here for me to find peace in the silence and misery; to talk to Him because I’ve simply forgotten that He’s there, all the time; to be comfortable with myself again, because lately, I’ve been living with a stranger.

Not just to simply wait, wait for something that will never come. Life was never meant to be squandered by waiting, in vain.

Arrivals

I don’t know why I feel so stifled.

The Hungry Caterpillar

Resilience

Today was an infantile attempt at staring him straight in the eye, and opening my mouth to speak blurt out my mind. I was trying to narrow it down with J over pasta at Tiamo’s today – just what is it that I’m so afraid of, and it got down to a few (maybe two) dot-points.

• That raw, vulnerable emotion would be met with stone cold rationality. This is almost, always the case with you. It’s like a roadblock almost, that freezes me in my tracks and disheartens me from taking another step further.
• That my words would not give justice to the point that I was trying to bring across. This is a global impairment. I come head to head with it every time I feel a gurgle that starts deep in my stomach and bubbles up into my throat, threatening to be spat out in a cascade of – there’s no better word – verbal diarrhoea.

Turns out my fears in both senses were recognized. There was stuttering and awkward silence, sentences that tripped over each other, words that tumbled out in rumble-jumble, questions that were posed and met with quizzical stares. And yet, despite and in spite of it all, they were right, it wasn’t half bad.

Late in the afternoon, the psychosocial perspective guys gave a talk on resilience. They opened with a simple definition of it. With a little help from Wiki – it’s simply, the “positive capacity of people to cope with stress and catastrophe,” or the ability to spring back/recover quickly from difficult sitatuions. Derived from Latin, it simply means ‘leaping back’.

But what I gathered is that resilience is a frame of mind. Call it optimism, hope, it’s a perspective you take. All the evidence against can rack up, but quantity and quality don’t even seem to matter, because it is a choice. It is why not every son of an alcoholic father becomes an alcoholic himself. It is why it doesn’t mean that all sexually abused daughters will never get the chance to experience what it means to be able to experience real love in their lifetimes, or learn how to conduct a healthy, functioning relationship.

And that’s the beauty of it. That little seed of strength that lies in every person may even be what the whole field of psychology is banking on.

So all this talk of resilience has made me realize that I’m quite the tough cookie. No, not the glass always half full, blind optimist, or fanatic hopeful. I don’t even want to use the realist – it seems like a wastebasket category for people who are afraid to be associated with the naivety of optimists or the hopelessness of pessimists. The fence-sitters.

But I have choices. Someone quite wise said that it’s about choosing what brings life over what brings death. And today, I can choose to see the good in the conversation we had.

I choose to see it as a small step towards communication. I want to learn how to be comfortable sharing my thoughts and emotions with you. I pray that one day you will learn that emotions and feelings are just as important as, if not more than logic and pragmatics – and that love, in one grand sweep, can render all these irrelevant and show itself to be the greatest of all.

We’ll get there.

I’m an ENFJ

The last few days, a couple of us have been on a sort of little self-discovery rampage. And what better, more efficient way to find the answers but through a brief personality test, supposedly based on Jung’s and Myer-Brigg’s typology. After 72 yes or no questions, it churns out a chunky, detailed, descriptive narrative that claims to depict said individual’s make-up from childhood, to adolescence, to mid-life, well into the golden years. This interestingly enough, culminated in us spending yesterday evening trawling through the literature.

Last way I’d thought we’d spend a Friday night.

So personality tests to me are a curious thing. There seems to be an innate fascination with them, and I’m no one can debate the latest spate of test results that come up left, right and centre on Facebook feeds. Everything from the semi-respectable, “What is your most dominant trait”, to the cute “Which Disney guy is for you?”, to the lewd, “What would your stripper name be?”, to the seemingly innocuous, “What is your personality ice-cream profile” and to the downright ridiculous, “What Barbie Doll/Mighty Morphine Power Ranger are you?”. Some even provide directive answers to many of life’s major decisions, “What is your ideal career/partner?”. Heck, even “What kind of tattoo should you get?”

It’s like we’re all trying to find ourselves in relation to objects and contexts, fictional characters and media personalities. It seems ironic, contradictory even, that we look to a score, or a label to tell us what we should already know.

But really, I was surprised by how seriously I was taking it – this deluge of information on my profile – and perhaps more struck by, was that feeling reassurance (?) that it pretty much hit it right on the nail. On the other hand, D & G (haha, get it?) were scanning through their respective acronyms, picking out the parts that fit and for those that didn’t, trying to fit a triangle into a square.

It’s a question of insight, and self-awareness I suppose. No wonder these are such highly valued tools – for the layman, the harmless amusing test that comes up on your Home feed on Facebook; and for the psychologist, the battery of assessments we arm ourselves with, poised to administer on any client who walks through the door. All of us spend our lives trying to organize our experiences, to put a name to who we are, to fit form to our being, some way or another.

On a geeky note, I was called back to MS’s lecture on validity. For the benefit of non-psychies, validity is simply – “whether a test measures what it purports to measure.”

And with this knowledge, I begin to wonder about the utility of such tests, and become increasingly suspicious of the possible detriment of defining oneself by its result.

So I’m thinking, that at best these paper and pen tests can serve no greater purpose than just being a guide. In research, self-report questionnaires, no matter how much they have been cross-validated, and checked, there is a need to understand how a phenomenon occurs in reality. I wrote a paper on this just recently, based on Boorsboom et al.’s (2003, 2004) ideas on validity. Needless to say, it was pretty challenging, but quite illuminating; especially in light of what we all do every time we click on a link to answer a quiz.

In sum, I think it’s important to understand most personality attributes are too complex or heterogeneous to be reflected empirically, and a valid test should be concerned with understanding the nature and meaning of what it says it’s measuring. This would mean of course, understanding how attributes vary in different groups of people, and how these translate into differences in test scores.  So let’s take the context of a borderline patient for example, one would have to consider what specifically constitutes ‘anger outbursts’ and ‘impulsivity’ and how these influence test scores. For the stats people, we’re looking at causal relationships rather than correlational ones. And this could be done by causally explaining responses on a test with recourse to deeper mechanisms, by a ‘theory of response behaviour’, that is, where there are clear expectations of how attribute variations leads to varied item responses.

Of course, this would be too much brains to expect from your average Facebook app and their miniscule or next-to-nothing budgets.

In real-life, maybe describing such tests as a guide is too strong, even. A skeletal frame or outline of the people that we are and are yet to be, serving nothing more than to aid in our processes of self-discovery. It is our job to build meat upon the bone, to garner the richness of all life offers, to explore every possible facet of an identity that is continually being shaped and sharpened, to relish in the wondrous mystery of the human mind – that there will always be a part of me that I will not fully understand, and it’s okay. To not be confined to the OCEAN that is dictated to us by Costa & McCrae,  or the label of ENFJ conferred upon me by Myer-Briggs.

Because I want to believe that people can change, and that we all hold the power within us, within God that resides in us, to have a say over the direction our life takes, or the person we want to be.

Aaand… we’ll leave the ancient debate of whether personality is fixed or malleable // whether a leopard never changes its spots to another day.

Surrender

Something always brings me back to you.
It never takes too long.
No matter what I say or do,
I still feel you here ’till the moment I’m gone.

You hold me without touch.
You keep me without chains.
I never wanted anything so much,
than to drown in your love and not feel your rain.

The past five days have been illuminating; as absences of you always prove to be. It is always a harsh lesson in identity, where strengths I never knew I had are called to the fore, and weaknesses long forgotten, rear their ugly heads.

J put forward an interesting distinction while we were having lunch in the graduate common room the other day, on the very different, almost oppositional effects of distance on a relationship. “Is it a matter of ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ or ‘out of sight, out of mind‘?” she boldly queried.

And I didn’t know quite what to answer.

The answer was plain to me of course. The former, for sure. It’s the only thing that could explain these feelings, this irrationality, this inexplicable attachment.

And then it occurred to me, that I had no idea what his would be.

Old friends come knocking on the door as the evening wanes, and promise to sit with me through the night.

I am still the same girl as I was last year. In spite of status changes and perhaps more outward shows of newfound affection, the insecurities linger, and I am trapped in the wild fears conjured by a restless mind, not quite sure how to picture an accurate reality.

So this is my lesson in surrender, and I will be all the stronger for it.

You loved me ’cause I’m fragile,
when I thought that I was strong.
But you touch me for a little while,
and all my fragile strength is gone.

Set me free, leave me be.
I don’t want to fall another moment into your gravity.
Here I am and I stand so tall, just the way I’m supposed to be.
But you’re on to me and all over me.

Disparity

Sometimes, it doesn’t seem fair that it hits me so much harder than it does you.

Why I do what I do

The good, the bad, and the ugly.

Achievement motivation

Psychologists put forth significant effort to earn a graduate degree, and we tend to value competency, mastery, respectability, upward mobility, and financial achievement.

Connection with others

Therapists may experience a form of depth and authencity in the therapeutic process we do not necessarily experience in other familial or social relationships.

Empathy or identification with vulnerability

Our own personal life experiences may have provided us with a strong sense of empathy, or even identification, with others who feel vulnerable, hurt, wounded, pained, and undervalued.

Voyeurism or vicarious living

“My life is kind of boring, if you want to know the truth. I don’t really do that much other than hang out with friends and watch television. But I love listening to the crazy, wacky stories my clients tell. I love being able to ask them personal questions without them getting offended, things I could never ask people in any other setting. “So what’s your sex life like? “What possessed you to ever do anything like that?” “What is your deepest, darkest secret that you’ve never told anyone before?” I just really enjoy being able to peer inside the windows of people’s minds and hearts. Everything else in my life pales in comparison.”

Prestige and respect

” I don’t make nearly as much money as my sisters do. I don’t have the fancy office or the sports car. But people do look up to me. When they find out I’m a therapist, they treat me like I’m important, like what I do matters to people. I get respect and I like that a lot. It’s worth all the money in the world. And you know what? I respect myself. My sisters and my friends might be successful in business, raking in the bucks, but I know what I do really matters. And at night, I sleep like a baby because I know I’m doing my part to make the world a better place.”

And perhaps most relevant of all, and something I feel I must set aside in a category of its own:

Rescue dynamics

“I grew up not feeling very important or very good about myself. I didn’t feel useful to anyone, least of all myself. But now I get to save people. I know I’m not supposed to believe that or say that, but that’s the way I feel. Every time someone comes in miserable and leaves better off, it’s because I did something that helped – or that’s what I’d prefer to think. I thrive on being able to save people like this, and it makes me feel important.“

Motives acknowledged by clinicans according to Baker, 1992; Disclosures by clinicans by Kottler, 2003.

His-story

So there has been a topic I’ve been breaching for weeks. Actually, about 8. But yesterday, as I was gushing to D yet again about another information-loaded day at school, an idea sparked and this is me attempting to give it form and figure. I was lamenting about the fact that as riveting as the material presented in lectures, seminars and workshops have been, it’s been a tad overwhelming. An onslaught of information so fast, so furious, and yet so terribly fascinating, that integrating it all and making sense of what I’m being taught has proven to be quite the challenge.

And then I forgot my old friends – pen and paper, and words. So here are the beginnings of my first clinical notes, I suppose. The exercise of scribbling down short snippets of observations and points-to-note, now to document what I’m learning, and later on about my patients, certainly appeals strongly to the annotator in me.

I want to just start by saying what an enormous privilege it is to be where I am, at this stage of my education. I will unabashedly exclaim that I’m one of those people who have been blessed with the opportunity to potentially make a living out of what I love, simply, to put passion into practice – and I hope that this is a gift that I will never squander, nor take for granted.

So perhaps I should start with the first lesson that I feel compelled to write about since beginning my clinical training. It was an epiphany of sorts in one of the early workshops on history-taking. It’s a really simple one, in fact. At risk of stating the obvious,

Everyone has a story to tell.

And if you dig deep enough, implore hard enough, are daring enough to let curiosity ask the difficult questions… there are no boring bits either. No matter how bland you think you are, or how dull you think the person next to you is.

So on that particular day, I had to share one of my own. One very close to home. I was strangely at ease with it. Although, I’ve often noted this (slightly worrying) comfort derived from my open book policy – but perhaps this is a conversation for another day. In any case, I put my hands up to play client, and found myself slipping on Dad’s shoes. They were black, but had lost their shine, and were worn at the edges. And clunky, oh so very heavy. And as the flurry of questions came, his many worries and troubles pervaded my mind, his thoughts of hopelessness and worthlessness took turns to batter at my esteem, his words spelling defeat and impending doom became my own.

And I daresay, almost like it was the first time, I really listened, and understood.

The afternoon saw us doing another activity. We were asked to get into pairs, draw our family tree and share with our partner about our histories in whatever propensity we were ready to.

So my partner was one of those people in the cohort whom I would simply label ‘colleague’. Those that you don’t talk to beyond ‘Hey, how’re you going?’, unless there is work to be done collaboratively. Sometimes, I catch myself staring at her traditional garb, covering her from top to toe and find myself wondering (perhaps rather condescendingly) – How could I  begin to understand her world? What could we possibly have in common? How could we ever relate to each other?

Well, my partner surprised me.

Without going into too much detail, she shared in vulnerability and honesty.  She explained her genogram, all the boxes and squares, intersecting lines and crosses painting a rich, vivid history of the drama and dysfunction that marks every family. That she was so forthcoming with her issues, took me aback. But I relaxed a little in my chair when I realized – We’re all psychologists in this room, after all.

No wait, we’re all human.

And it is our pain that knits us together, and our weaknesses on which we build strengths upon.

I think I conclude, at this very early stage of my career, that one of the most fundamental qualities of a good clinician is an inherent interest in other people’s stories.

I hope I’ll never tire of them. I hope that I will always respect the sanctity of each one. I hope that I will never cease to appreciate the beauty of the complex, multi-faceted, and highly individualized nature of every story I come across.

So much more to say, lots of lessons past that I need to recount and catch up on, lots of skills that I need to process more deeply and make second nature. Stay tuned.