The Boy Who Froze In Place.
I spent about 45 minutes on Saturday morning feeling pretty beat up emotionally. While that doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, it gets even more bizarre when I tell you that I paid a lot for the experience.
The person guiding me through this particular little journey through hell is someone who I’ve been watching for a while now, and I made the decision early last week to hire her as my mindset coach.
Yeah, even though I coach, I also have a coach. Why you ask? Because we’re all blind to the things about ourselves that we need to see, but just can’t.
My coach is someone who sees a lot, and is unbelievably amazing at helping people see themselves differently. While she has no credentials that would hint at her skills, I’ve found her to be remarkably gifted and incredibly kind in the work that she does, helping people break through the things that are holding them back.
So in a simple phone call on a beautiful Saturday morning, she shared her wisdom and talents with me, and helped me understand how one event, so many years ago, had shaped my life and controlled my behaviors.
The event was us nearly becoming homeless.
My dad used alcohol to deal with his pain from his own traumatic childhood, and he spent more than we could afford. One day a bailiff showed up at our door, and informed my tearful mother that we had two weeks to become current with the rent or we were going to be evicted.
I watched him treat her like she was loathsome and dirty.
I watched her experience intense and horrific emotional pain.
Unable to emotionally process all that was unfolding before me, I froze, and I’ve been freezing ever since.
Because although I wanted to help her, I was frozen because there was no obvious way for me to function within that situation. I didn’t have the money to get us current with the rent, and I wasn’t big enough to inflict upon him the physical pain that I wish I could have.
So I actually did the one thing that was applicable for me to do in the situation…I froze, and did nothing.
Which funnily enough was exactly how I would behave when my dad would come home drunk from the pub, and we would have to be very careful not to antagonize him in any way. Or when the Doctor I used to work for would flip from being a nice guy into someone who was angry and cruel.
Or when a man who was in a position of authority over me for almost 2 years would use his position of power to enforce his opinions and beliefs onto those over whom he held sway.
I would freeze, time after time after time.
And the funny thing is, I told myself I was being a peacemaker, and that I was reacting ‘calmly’. It’s incredible how we will often co-opt a virtue to explain our behaviors, to cast in a good light that which we find shameful, or distressing about ourselves.
In just a few minutes, my coach helped me see not only a pattern of reactions that finally made sense, but the meaning I was taking from those reactions to cover a feeling of shame that never needed to be there at all.
Because although I have viewed myself with incredible scorn, and a sense of shame, in most of those situations, freezing was an acceptable solution because I was not yet ready to function within those situations in any other way.
In most of those situations my responses likely would have been anger, quite possibly violence, and a worsening of the problem in a way that would not have served me or my family.
And yet I have judged myself so harshly for those reactions, wishing I could have done better.
So now, I am tasked with sitting with the feelings that come from a greater understanding, and allowing them to wash away the self judgment and recrimination that has anchored me as that young boy who froze in a moment where there was really no other way to be.
And as I sit with those feelings, I can see the other emotions that accompanied me in those time, of feeling helpless, alone, and unable to behave as the person who I wanted to be.
Releasing an anchor to the past is a powerful and yet emotional experience, because now I get to decide who I am going to be in the future as I am less locked into my past.
Which is a new and rather strange place to be.
And it makes me curious about some of the reactions from childhood that you carry with you to this day.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings