I am a meditator. After getting myself a cup of coffee in the morning, I find a guided meditation on my Insight Timer app to keep me focused. Depending on the time I have in the morning, it could be short or long. The other day, I clicked on a short meditation, and the guided teacher said something that made me immediately cut it off and change to another one.
He said something like he told the client he was coaching, “You are not broken, and you are whole.” I immediately got irritated and shut it down.
I found myself repeatedly saying: “It’s OK to feel broken. I will hold your brokenness until you can hold it for yourself. It’s OK not to feel whole.”
I wrote several articles about the drama triangle a few years ago. “Drama triangle was one of the concepts from Transactional Analysis I immersed myself in during the years when I practiced in Taiwan, and it was very helpful to me. For many years, I tried very hard to be aware when I fell into the status of a victim. When I felt as if someone was persecuting me, I tried very hard to get myself out of the situation by not feeling stronger or trying harder.
Fast forward to a few years ago, I was deep in my EMDR training and felt as if I finally got it! I finally understood how to apply EMDR to my day-to-day practice, and I understood the Adaptive Information Processing model. I started to realize my “try harder” to get out of my victim mentality had a name called “Manager” in the Internal Family System Therapy (IFS) or “Apparently Normal Personality” (ANP) from a Personality Structure perspective. As I contemplated these concepts with the idea of “there are no bad parts,” I can’t help but wonder if I perceived my “victim” ego state as a “bad” part.
Fast-forward to a year ago. I was reading a book that was constantly mentioned on the Facebook EMDR community, “What My Bones Know,” by Stephanie Foo. I didn’t pay much attention to it until my close friend told me she was reading it and wondered how I felt about it. I got curious and purchased the audiobook to read. (BTW, I later bought the book because there was too much valuable information in there to keep rewinding the audiobook.)
I remembered “listening” to the book on the way to the Western Mass EMDR annual conference. My close friend recommended that I read this book, and we planned to meet after I returned from the conference. The conference location was about a two-hour drive from my place, so I had four hours each way to “listen” to the book.
It was a beautifully written book but very triggering. First, the author was an Asian American, and her family dynamics were very familiar. I have countless childhood memories related to the author’s relationship with her mother and her father, the relationship between her parents, and the whole extended family dynamics. My grandmother was my secure base, and she couldn’t rescue me from my mother while she was the author’s auntie in Malaysia. I listened to her describe her mother’s words in front of people and behind people towards her, and those behaviors sounded so familiar, and I could hear my own mother’s voice screaming at me with the exact words, except in Taiwanese or Mandarin Chinese.
Second, the author described Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy and Internal Family System (IFS) therapy, but it seemed both worked for her to a certain degree, and she bowed out until she started to work with the last therapist whom she heard from the podcast and did the interview. I always admitted to my client that I was the worst client ever. It usually lasted me about five sessions before I bowed out of the therapy. Mainly, I just felt I couldn’t connect with the clinician. So, the author’s experience was interesting to me. The interesting thing is that I have two long-term supervisors, one in Taiwan, and the other one is my EMDR consultant. I worked with both of them for a long time (three years with my supervisor in Taiwan and seven years and counting with my EMDR consultant.) I always accredited both of them, offering me secure bonding and helping me understand secure attachment.
As I was reading the book, I started to search for the answer to why I couldn’t connect to those clinicians. And why I could connect with the supervisors for a long time.
On page 226. the author went to see an IFS therapist whom she called Mr. Sweater-Vast. The therapist told her to talk to the part of her who was a puddle. She couldn’t talk to the puddle and was hoping for some guidance. Instead, Mr. Sweater-Vast told her to trust the process and be curious about her skepticism, or the therapy wouldn’t work.
Suddenly, I felt the light bulb in my head light up. “That’s it!”
(Sorry for the long introduction, but I am getting to the point of why this guided medication irritated me. Click here to read Embracing feeling Broken Part 2.)
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