"..You are in this time of the interim
Where everything seems withheld.
The path you took to get here has washed out;
The way forward is still concealed from you.
"The old is not old enough to have died away;
The new is still too young to be born."
…In this place of dusk
…You know you have to make your own way through.
As far as you can, hold your confidence.
Do not allow your confusion to squander
This call which is loosening
Your roots from false ground,
That you might come free
From all your have outgrown.
What is being transfigured here is your mind,
And it is difficult and slow to become new.
The more faithfully you can endure here,
The more refined your heart will become
For your arrival in the new dawn."
'For the Interim Time', To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings, John O'Donohue, Convergent Books, 2008
It is an odd feeling indeed to encounter the dark, damp and dimply lit waiting room where you are to undergo your next transformation. Where you can shed the skin of your previous selves, to emerge- well I am not quite sure as what. But something different, and hopefully more evolved and more ready for the challenges of middle age.
I recently read something about eagles tearing out their beaks, feathers and claws to regenerate as a new and better version of themselves. This meme was doing the rounds of social media, however when I looked deeper I discovered that this is not true, simply an exaggeration of the regular shedding of feathers the birds undergo. It makes one wonder indeed how much other trash we are being force fed by our shiny video feeds.
So the ideal of shedding your old self completely is a myth, on any platform.
Nonetheless growth is painful. Actually no, it is not so much pain but discomfort. Especially when growth is precipitated, and accompanied, by a mood disorder. Followed around by its faithful midwife, which urges the new self forward through a painful delivery of manic episodes and the biting chill of bipolar depression. But perhaps these growths and realisations would be slower and more arduous without the swells of these overwhelming moods.
I started thinking about metamorphosis specifically because tomorrow I have an appointment to dye my hair. Partly to conceal the new greys that permeate my dirty ash locks, partly to look brighter and younger and partly to shed the skin of my current self.
A week prior to this my therapist had leant forward in her chair (after listening to my more recent reverie about my various parts) and constructed a neat diagram of the different parts of my psyche. It stopped me in my tracks, as I had never considered before the roles the various voices in my head were playing. Part of me resisted the whole process- thinking 'oh how indulgent to spend hours debating which parts of me did what. There are people out there starving and I am getting to know my various selves'. But apparently even that voice had an identity and a name and a purpose.
The general gist of schema therapy is that your inner child – that part of you who feels the raw emotions of joy, fear, sadness and shame- needed a 'healthy parent' early on in the picture. They required from this parent a sense of safety, belonging, autonomy, self appreciation and an opportunity for self expression within reasonable limits.
If we are not allowed to experience these things in early life, we develop "maladaptive" schemas which affect how we act, think and feel about ourselves. In my immigrant, single child, Eastern European family safety, belonging, self appreciation and autonomy and self expression were limited. I was the good, compliant, high achieving child beset by the unexpected tsunami of a mood disorder which crashed precipitously upon the shores of my early adulthood.
The clean up was a pain.
So a "critical parent" schema developed which always called into question whether what I was doing was good enough, efficient enough and going to make me excel and therefore be safe from ridicule and rejection. The hopeful, self-sacrificing, demanding immigrant parent personified. And you have to give this part credit- it wanted to protect and empower. But instead it created a "shield self" focused on overdoing and overachieving. Doing more than anyone else. A young teenage girl who wanted to always be perfect and who was afraid of failure like the plague. Who therefore took little risk and crumpled at the sign of falling short- or even being average.
But when she did too much, when she got that praise the critical parent was sated and she felt vindicated. Short bursts of "oh now I am OK".
The manic periods which crowned the deep depressions of my early adulthood were actually an escape from this "shielding self". The critic piped down as well. In these states my shield became liberated, risk taking, confident- of course it did not last and was a bit "much" as most hypomanic states are. Nonetheless it loosened me enough to conceive of a different way. Of existing. Perhaps then one should be grateful for the malignancies that live inside one's head- they are a catalyst to change.
After the conversation with my therapist, with the diagram redrawn and labelled and in my notebook which summarised our session (that you overachieving shield self), I started to see her come out to play; pushing me, guilting me, preventing rest or self care of enjoyment of anything till standards were met to satisfy the critical parent self. She is young and lovely in her earnestness, and believes she does the best for me. Who could blame her? She is behind my awards, and accolades and so much of the praise I have received during my tenure on this earth. You cannot condone her for continuing to push me to excel. And yet there is a wise healthy adult in the background who wants her to grow up, mature and realise the black and white thinking of a perfectionistic teenager is not a shield but an amplifier of the critical self.
I do not want to upend her- when I try she stops my sleep and throws me into disarray. I want to keep her, and love her and transform her.
Let's start with her hair.
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