{"id":5736,"date":"2018-05-16T07:35:12","date_gmt":"2018-05-16T11:35:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=5736"},"modified":"2018-12-16T18:12:05","modified_gmt":"2018-12-16T23:12:05","slug":"persistence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=5736","title":{"rendered":"Persistence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bren\u00e9 Brown expresses resilience as:\u00a0 \u201cI know how to get there, I\u2019m persistent, and I can tolerate disappointment and try again.\u201d\u00a0 ibid p 65<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When I first read it I thought \u201cThat\u2019s not me.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know how to get there, how to prove that I deserve to live, that I\u2019m not defective, how to change myself so someone will love me…\u00a0 I\u2019m not persistent, I\u2019ve quit over and over again…\u00a0 After a disappointment I often stop dead, don\u2019t send out the brochures or put up the flyers…\u201d\u00a0 As Dr. Rankin<\/a> said to me long ago \u201cWhen something goes wrong, you conclude you can\u2019t do it.\u201d\u00a0 Then I look back only to last Saturday, when I was cast into complete despair by the diagnosis of plantar fasciitis, and the realization that I had to start all over with another healing process.\u00a0 But this time I knew, from so many times in the past, yes I quit completely, but after a day or two something in me picks herself up and keeps going.\u00a0 It\u2019s not something I did by will power or decided on the conscious level, it\u2019s something that happens, something deeper in me that keeps going.\u00a0 On the conscious level I\u2019ve completely collapsed.\u00a0 My persistence comes from a deeper level.\u00a0 And who can that be but the real me?\u00a0 The collapse is to some extent conditioned behavior, but the persistence is not.\u00a0 It\u2019s different from pushing myself.\u00a0 Pushing myself is conditioned.<\/p>\n

When I was a teenager, I was devastated by being rejected by a boy who, I was told, was interested in me, and then fell in love with a friend instead.\u00a0 But I did not blame them, and I did not close my heart and decide that I would never love again.\u00a0 I think now that this is a characteristic of the real me.<\/p>\n

Imagining that I hadn\u2019t persisted, I saw that in the one thing that mattered, I persisted and persisted, and never quit.\u00a0 What I was trying to get to, though I had no name for it or understanding what it was, was my true self or the truth about me.\u00a0 For a lot of my life, until I was 42 in fact, I thought I was defective.\u00a0 In 1984 the information about the effect of parents\u2019 alcoholism on their children became public and I understood that all the \u201cdefective\u201d stuff about me was what I had learned from alcoholic parents, not who I was<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If I had learned it, I could unlearn it. \u00a0I went to COA groups, got into therapy, worked on alcoholism and the 12 steps.\u00a0 At the same time I was diagnosed with systemic yeast.\u00a0 This was in 1984, while the doctors were still saying there was no such thing.\u00a0 Eating a strict diet and taking yeast-killing medication, made me feel considerably better.\u00a0 I felt like I came out of about 4 layers of fog, but my intuition said there were more layers to go.\u00a0 My conditioned self said I wasn\u2019t working hard enough, but another part of me knew that what I needed was some new theory or technique or method.\u00a0 So I went to different alternative practitioners, and sought out different therapies.\u00a0 I tried out a lot of things, even continued doing them for several years before I realized they weren\u2019t working.\u00a0 I got better at deciding something wasn\u2019t working sooner.<\/p>\n

Finally I understood that I had been traumatized, after a friend had tried to tell me this repeatedly \u2014 but my parents were never violent, how could I have been traumatized? \u2014 I read in Peter Levine that an infant can be traumatized<\/a> by being left alone in a cold room. \u00a0The helplessness of a baby is extreme, so it’s more vulnerable to being traumatized by things that wouldn’t faze an adult. \u00a0I began to see myself as wounded, not defective, it totally changed how I worked on myself. \u00a0I kept trying to get to the bottom of the wound, the truth of how it affected my life, but still had the sense that I wasn’t getting there.<\/p>\n

When I finally got to Erica, I got to the bottom. \u00a0Understanding how serious it is to be traumatized as a baby, and have your brain and nervous system develop under the influence of trauma, really helped me understand why I had had to work so hard for so long to get better.<\/p>\n

As my therapist Karen has often pointed out, when I can do something, I don’t value it, thinking that everyone else can do it too. \u00a0For the first time, I’m wondering why I think that. \u00a0I’m guessing that it was because my parents criticized me whenever I got it wrong, but didn’t praise me when I got it right. \u00a0So I learned that when I got it right, it was just what was expected, not anything special.<\/p>\n

When Erica says something like “I’m so impressed with how you handled that,” I’m surprised. \u00a0It’s taken me a long time to see that I am, in truth, a hard worker who has learned a lot of valuable things. \u00a0I look back to the time I was at a retreat on the issue of peace. \u00a0I got talking to a participant, who happened to be a therapist. \u00a0I told her how, before my work in Somatic Experiencing, I used to be disabled by my anger. \u00a0My knees would literally get weak. \u00a0After I had worked with S.E. for some years, I got angry one day about something the government was doing and I went straight to the phone and called my congressperson to register my displeasure. \u00a0I was surprised and delighted with myself. \u00a0The therapist said “What you have done is HUGE.” \u00a0 Later, I gave a talk, at my friend Beverly’s UU Church, on Journey into Courage<\/a>. \u00a0While I was talking, I could see a woman in the front row wiggling with excitement. \u00a0When I was finished and available for questions, she said she was a therapist and what I had done was HUGE. \u00a0Those experiences planted a seed of the idea that I had worked harder and more persistently than I thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bren\u00e9 Brown expresses resilience as:\u00a0 \u201cI know how to get there, I\u2019m persistent, and I can tolerate disappointment and try again.\u201d\u00a0 ibid p 65 When I first read it I thought \u201cThat\u2019s not me.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know how to get … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-present-day","category-spirit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5736\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}