A Mother’s Love – Part 5

As the sun has reached its pinnacle this year (summer solstice), I can feel a familiar anxiety rising in me, which has become so present over the years, but especially the last few; time is running out.

We, humans, are on the clock and encouraged to believe that we need to make every second of the time given to us count for something; our value will be judged on our perceived productivity or by how impressive our social media accounts look to others at the end of it all.

I feel the pull of that story every single year.  I have highfalutin ideas about the things I want to achieve in the allotted twelve-month period dished out to me by society at large, and then I get to this point, just after the sun has reached its peak showtime moment, and I start to have a little meltdown about how little I’ve done so far, and what is still left on the agenda.

I am greeting this panicky moment this year like an old friend.  I have been in this territory before.  Many times over.

I have done the work of changing the story – my worth is not defined by my productivity, my contribution to the human race and the rest of the natural world has value, even if it doesn’t come with a loudspeaker announcement and jazz hands.  The little moments of connection and contribution I offer are more than enough, even if nobody actually notices them.  I do not need to be putting something new and unique into the world to be worthy of love, care and respect.

My mind knows all of these things to be true, and yet…

It also knows that this other narrative exists, and like all other human beings, I am a pack animal, and my nervous system is hard-wired to believe that my survival depends on being accepted by a tribe of people who are willing to have my back, which means…

I also have a drive to fit in.

This narrative about my value being dependent on me being productive, useful, or impressive to others in order to be worth caring about was most definitely reinforced by my experiences in childhood.

And try as I might, as a kid, I could rarely get it right.  I was too loud, had too much energy, too quiet, bone-idle, having too much fun, being a spoil sport when I didn’t want to join in, too sensitive, too emotional, too magnanimous (who even says that to a nine-year-old?).  I was too much, or not enough, most of the time.  And my nervous system learned that I needed to show I was trying, but never to try too hard because that would be too much.  So, now it sees the world around me talking about Q3 business goals, and holidays in the sun, and personal growth challenges achieved, and it looks at me and goes ‘What have you done?’, ‘How are you going to make up for your lack of brilliance this year?’, and ‘You know there’s less than six months left, right?’.

My nervous system has learned to believe that it is life-threatening not to fit in, to defy society’s expectations, to just be who I am, and over the years has tried on many an adaptive strategy to keep me safe in an environment where it feels doomed to fail.  It has tried people pleasing, it has tried hyper-independence, it has tried aggressive defense, it has tried being a rebel, it has tried being loud and in your face, it has tried hiding, and all of these strategies, at one time or other have meant that I have reached the ripe old age of forty-seven, soon to be forty-eight, so they must have been pretty effective.

So here we are again, my nervous system has heard the call, and it has triggered the we are about to fail alarm, the little friend that I am sitting with currently and having a conversation.

In the past, I believed that doing all of the aforementioned work to ‘change my experience’ would rid my system of this unpleasant social learning, and I would never have to feel this anxiety ever again.  But I have learned now that this is not the way that healing works.

I learned this alarm in relationship with my parents, my wider family, and my community.  I came up with my survival strategies in relationship too.  And if I learned these things in relationship, and they have worked to keep me alive, that means there are people that exist in the world with whom these ways of relating will serve me really well.  So, if my nervous system were to wipe out this particular alarm and eliminate these strategies, that would leave me too vulnerable.

So the alarm persists; the cue comes, and my system presses the button that says ‘We must panic now!’.

But, and this is a big but…

because of the work I have done to change my internal narratives, and update my expectations in relationship to include the idea that some people in the world are kind, accepting, and loving, and I have done the work to bring some more flexibility into a nervous system that was rigidly wedded to the alarm end of the spectrum, the alarm is now much quieter than it used to be.  There’s also a gap between the alarm sounding, and me responding with one of the autopilot programs so well used in my history in which I can initiate a conversation with my system.

And the conversation goes something like this…

Thank you for reminding me that there are some people in the world who will judge me harshly and will be cruel in their treatment of me.  I am so glad I have you to help keep me safe.  Can we take a look around us right now, though, to see if any of those people are actually close by?  I think it might be safe to carry on contributing to the world in the way that we are doing right now, as much as we can, when we can, and the people around me are showing me that they appreciate me for who I am, and whatever I choose to offer in relationship.  I am loved, and I am safe.  You have given me a very good reminder that I don’t want to get close to those people who will behave poorly towards me, and I can choose who I give my time and energy to.

And, because I have done this work, and because I can have this new kind of conversation with my nervous system that just wants to keep me safe, I can choose to behave in ways which are waaay more life-affirming.

I started today with a swim in the river, with a community of folk in my local area who all love the water as much as I do.  And then, before I got on with the massive, never-ending to-do list of jobs that seem to have some sense of importance right now, I went for a walk with my partner.  Neither of these things was productive; neither of these things was reported on my social media profiles. I didn’t even take photos of the experiences.  And yet, both nourished me, and both contributed something to the world in ways which might not yet be entirely visible.  I feel satisfied just having achieved this, and the extra side-bonus is that I actually ticked off some items on the official to-do list.  This feels like it has less meaning for me, though.  I’m pretty sure those items will be replaced by something else tomorrow, and the list will only temporarily be shorter.

One of my ongoing projects, one of the things I have not yet ‘achieved’ is restarting this blog thread.  There is a part of me, hanging out in my nervous system, that would like to give me endless amounts of sh*t for not being further along with this project than I am.  And here is a little bit of proof, that we cannot erase our histories, we cannot even control whether we will still be impacted in the here and now by our past experiences (notice no-one ever complains about the bits of history that have taught them to behave in ways which are still serving them well) or the narratives of the communities we are surrounded by; the grooves etched into our record keeping nervous systems are ours for life.

But we can choose how we respond to alarm calls in the here and now.  And we can etch some new grooves into our behaviour repertoire.  I can thank my system for trying to keep me safe, and I can sit down and write a blog post, not because I promised I would, not because people will judge me if I don’t, but because this is one of the ways I want to contribute to the world, and it feels nourishing to write like this today.

I’m back, baby!  I see you, sun, singing and dancing with your jazz hands, and I raise you a blog entry.

Thank you, fellow journeyer, for accompanying me through this post.  If you feel so compelled, please reach out to me and let me know how my words have impacted you. And if I have held your interest, or you have even enjoyed this experience, I shall be back again soon (maybe) with another instalment.