{"id":5944,"date":"2018-12-06T10:05:42","date_gmt":"2018-12-06T15:05:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=5944"},"modified":"2018-12-06T10:05:42","modified_gmt":"2018-12-06T15:05:42","slug":"being-stuck-in-a-process","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=5944","title":{"rendered":"Being Stuck in a Process"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Being stuck in a process” reminds me of a pattern Dr. Rankin discovered. \u00a0I had started therapy with her in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, in 1997.\u00a0 She was a specialist in mood disorders.\u00a0 I had been seeing her for several months.\u00a0 It was May and the planes were starting up. \u00a0I suffered from an extreme reaction<\/a> to the noise of small planes. \u00a0On Friday I had a session with Dr. Rankin.\u00a0 I asked her if it was OK to \u201cwhite-knuckle it\u201d through the noise.\u00a0 She said \u201cOf course.\u201d\u00a0 Then she said she had observed a pattern in my behavior.\u00a0 I would start a project that had several steps.\u00a0 I would do the first two steps just fine, but if I ran into trouble on the third I would conclude that I \u201ccouldn\u2019t do it.\u201d I would fail to see that I had already managed to do part of it successfully, in fact I would even define those first steps as failures.\u00a0 This was enormously interesting to me. \u00a0I started being able to see when I did it, and finding a way to keep going.<\/p>\n

It’s still operative in my life. \u00a0Looking back on my childhood, I see that my parents were too impatient to help me when I got stuck with a problem. \u00a0They would make me wrong for asking for help. \u00a0I remember once my father said “If you didn’t know how to do it, why did you even try?” \u00a0I remember wondering “What ever happened to ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again’?” \u00a0I thought I could see through what he said. \u00a0I had no idea of the power of a parent’s words to affect a child. \u00a0That idea was repeated over and over in many different ways. \u00a0The lesson I learned was that if I wanted something to happen, I had to do it all by myself, and that if I got stuck, there was nothing I could do about it. \u00a0I see now that that’s a perfect prescription for depression. \u00a0Given the PTSD and alcoholic parents, it’s not surprising that I suffered from severe depression for most of my life. \u00a0Until I was 55, in fact.<\/p>\n

I also have to give myself credit for not quitting in my work to change myself so I could have a life. \u00a0I suppose that’s where knowing I have to fix it myself is actually functional, because I don’t blame and manipulate others. \u00a0In the process I have learned that “trying to fix myself” doesn’t work, that I do have to get help, but teachers and therapists actually offer<\/span> to help. \u00a0I keep learning that what I’m trying to do, to heal from my childhood wounds, is much harder and taking much longer than I ever imagined.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Being stuck in a process” reminds me of a pattern Dr. Rankin discovered. \u00a0I had started therapy with her in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, in 1997.\u00a0 She was a specialist in mood disorders.\u00a0 I had been seeing her for several months.\u00a0 … 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":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trauma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5944","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=5944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5944\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}