Seeking approval, expecting rejection
If you haven’t read my previous post, , it’s probably best you go there now, before you read this.
If I know you, chances are that our relationship has been conducted within the ‘Seeking approval, expecting rejection’ framework. Don’t worry, you didn’t know it, and you weren’t responsible for it. You see, I was the one who was doing all the seeking of your approval, whilst simultaneously automatically expecting rejection.
This mostly happened without me realizing it too. I have always had this desperate need to fit in, be part of your gang, your family, your circle of friends, your community, your ‘tribe’.
But, at some point in the process of seeking that approval, that acceptance, I encountered rejection. It was nothing to do with you.
I was looking for rejection. And I found it.
So, this is how I fed the Black Dog.
I sought your approval and acceptance, when you had never asked for it, and didn’t require it.
And I encountered your rejection, when you never actually rejected me, or even thought of doing so.
And because I had sought your approval, but instead only received rejection, I then beat myself up for it. Because it had to be my fault.
And so the Black Dog was fed some more, and grew bigger and bigger.
It took several weeks of counselling before I discovered this truth about myself, although the reasons for it had permeated almost every piece of fiction I have written. (More on that in a separate post, about the hidden truths lurking behind the lies of stories.)
Towards the end of August I was feeling the lowest, the most isolated, I had ever felt. I was no use to anyone, and by now that truth had to be plain to see to everyone I came into contact with.
All I wanted to do was run and hide. From my wife, from my two boys, from my friends, but most of all, probably from myself.
Fortunately for me, the counselling sessions started soon after this point.
I have a few strategies for dealing with the Black Dog. One of the most effective is running.
When I go for a run, I easily outpace the Black Dog, leaving him panting and struggling to keep up in the distance. He does everything he can to persuade me not to go for a run: ‘It’s too cold. It’s too wet, you’re too tired, you can always go for a run tomorrow…’
I have learnt the hard way that the times I feel least like going for a run are probably the times I most need to lace up my running shoes and get outside.
Another strategy I have found that keeps the Black Dog at bay is writing. When I write, I enter a world he’s not allowed into. I didn’t set that rule, this just seems to be the natural order of things.
I open that door into my imagination, and step through.
He stays outside.
(Again, he does everything he can to dissuade me from writing: ‘I don’t know why you bother, you’re a crap writer anyway, who the hell are you trying to fool, thinking you can write books, wait a minute, why write when you could be watching TV, or lying on the bed gazing stupidly at the ceiling for hours on end…’)
But the counselling was different.
There was no running away from the Black Dog there.
In those sessions I confronted the Black Dog head on. Looked him in the eye, and saw my own, naked reflection.
It’s amazing what I found out about myself in those sessions. Amazing because what I discovered did not need dragging out of me whilst under hypnosis, I didn’t recover any buried memories, nor did I discover an evil, hidden side to my personality.
The reasons for why I fed the Black Dog so easily had been there all along for me to see. What my counsellor did was point them out to me, helped validate the experiences I’d had in my formative years, and gave me the tools to rationalize my emotions, and my destructive thought processes.
No more beating myself up, no more thinking of myself as a waste of space.
At the end of one particularly painful session, she said this:
It’s not your fault.
I think that may be the most important sentence of my life.
It’s not your fault.
If you identify with anything I have written here, if you feel worthless, beat yourself up for failing again, have this feeling that you could be doing better, if only you could buck your ideas up, if you think your family or friends might be better off without you, if you witnessed crap as a child that you still think about sometimes, all these years later, or if something happened and you were told, or even if you weren’t, but you still feel it’s true, that you were to blame, I’m telling you now…
IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT.
