The material presented
here is not Al-Anon Conference Approved Literature. It is a method
to exchange
information, ideas, feelings, problems and solutions on a personal
level.
Me and my husband take our son to a psychologist to help him with his adhd and my husband and I alternate going with our son. My husband went yesterday and he told me that the psychologist noticed that I am very hard on myself and that I pressure myself to be a perfect mother. The psychologist also said that I am a great mom and my boys are lucky to have be but I am just very hard on myself and I have anxiety.
So my husband tried to point out that this was actually a positive thing because the psychologist gets to see our family dynamic in its reality and that the psychologist said of what a wonderful mom I was. I seem to be holding onto the part where the psychologist said that I have anxiety and am very hard on myself. I feel embarrassed that he could see through me. I can usually act pretty confident overall and people have always mostly thought I was confident (but underneath I was very sad and had low self esteem) I do this thing called Dressing your truth which has helped me know what kind of personality I have "soft and subtle" and that has been HUGE to me and helped me immensly with my confidence and then of course Alanon is amazing and I do believe I have been making great progress. I am just embarrassed to go back to the appt. next week. I know I need to focus on my son and helping him. I feel selfish to make this about me. I just wish I was the confident mother who I want to be. I know it is never good to worry about what others think of me....that is something I have always struggled with. It is amazing how I can do so good for so long and then one thing can put me right back into the craziness of my mind.
Thanks for listening and for all of the support here. I hope to one day be able to respond to more posts here....I am trying to learn the alanon language to support others-that is why I am not responding a whole lot. But I love reading everyone's posts. It is a great help.
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It is very difficult to have a pity party when I am celebrating all the gratitude I have in my life!
It will aither work out, . . . or, . . . It will work out."
Hugs, Great share look at you grow!!! Easy does it and be easy on you!!!
Hugs P :)
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Stepping onto a brand-new path is difficult, but not more difficult than remaining in a situation, which is not nurturing to the whole woman.- Maya Angelo
I understand I too thought that any human frailly or emotion meant that I was not perfect and therefore not a good mom or person ,
That the therapist discussed your issues with your hubby while you were not there would upset me as well. I think that I would ask the therapist to discuss what he sees in me to myself at my sessions and then at our joint sessions . It is painful to have them repeated to you by hubby.
I like you often overlooked the truth of what was said . Remember he also said you were a great mom who had anxiety and was hard on yourself That he saw that makes him a good therapist for your child.
Having anxiety and being hard on yourself is very human and no doubt the being hard on yourself feeds the anxiety Alanon always urges us to be gentle with ourselves and that beating ourselves up is not an alanon tools
Give yourself permission to be human. That was one of the very powerful gifts of this program. You are working a program of recovery and the inner responses will change Trust the process
Remember the alanon definition of Fear: Face E very thing and Recover
Welcome Daisy! Glad you found us and and are feeling progress from from working Alanon.
I related to this statement in your post - "I feel embarrassed that he could see through me. I can usually act pretty confident overall and people have always mostly thought I was confident (but underneath I was very sad and had low self esteem)" I've made some progress in this areas thanks to working the steps of Alanon with a loving sponsor, a nonjudgmental higher power and at one time the help of an excellent therapist. The trouble I was having was that I was always "ON," when around other people. My insides didn't match my outsides. If someone could spot my vulnerability, I felt my insides had been exposed without my permission. From my experience, when my insides exposed through conversation about me with others without my being in the room to comment; I would feel even more ill at ease if I learned about it later.
The Alanon program offers mutual sharing, respect for our own boundaries and that of others and confidentiality. My Alanon sponsor has been someone I've trusted with my feelings as was my therapist. It took time to trust each of these people but that trust was built on mutual respect. Alanon is a gentle program and we offer one another guidance through sharing our own experience, strength and hope for growing as individuals. None of us are "authorities." We support and love one another unconditionally in this way as the imperfect beings we are who aren't striving for perfection just celebrating our individuality and growth one day at a time. If we didn't make mistakes, we'd have nothing to learn. I am making them everyday. So what. lol No embarrassment to realize I'm human. No perfect people club out there. The price of membership to a club like that would be way too high. It would cost my serenity.
You sound like a very loving mom. I am betting your kids feel very loved by you. I learned that self love was important too. Each day I do my best to start from there and then give outward. I try to be good to myself in order to keep serene. If you haven't done anything nice just for you today, I hope you'll take a little time out for you. You deserve it. We all do. :) TT
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Surround yourself with people and elements that support your destiny, not just your history.
I finally found a link to a cognitive behavioral therapy tool I use now and have for the last 4 years through my therapist. It works, I assure you it works. Now this page has a whole bunch of ideas on how to handle our internal critic. I only ascribe to the #3 tool, I've tried the rest, none of it works but 3. Because our reaction to what others think of us, comes from our internal belief system. Once I changed mine and became friends with it - what others though of me became an external peice of information I could choose to use or toss and I did not react emotionally to it.
If you find that a critical voice statement is still troublesome after using the techniques above, it may have a positive intention it is unwilling to let go of. We can now negotiate with the voice to determine a more useful way of achieving the positive goal.
IDENTIFY THE POSITIVE INTENTION OF THE CRITICAL VOICE
Ask your voice what it is trying to do that is positive for you. Common responses include:
I want to stop you making a fool of yourself
I want to motivate you
Im trying to get you to do the right thing
Im ensuring you dont feel bad
ESTABLISH AN ALLIANCE
When you hear a positive intention you completely agree with, thank the inner voice for its assistance, insight and cooperation. Notice how the voice may be causing the opposite of its positive intention e.g. criticising you might lead you to stop trying, rather than finding positive and encouraging ways to improve and succeed in any particular situation. Now ask your inner voice, if a better way of achieving that same positive goal but in an easier and more helpful way could be found, would the critical voice be willing to make the changes to enable you to try out the new behaviours over the coming weeks.
GENERATE ALTERNATIVES
The critical voice can hardly refuse this enticing offer and when agreement is made, access your creative part and keep accessing it until you generate as many useful and helpful ways to achieve the positive goal as possible.
It sounds horribly silly, no I do not have this conversation out loud. I even now tell my inner voice when it's wrong! The other night I was chewing out my 15 year old for his total lack of respect for women (his dad is like this, that is where he learned it) and that I expected better, demand better and went as far as to say "if you want people to see you as a man, you better act like one because men who are disrespectful to women are cowards". My internal critic immediately jumped in "that is so rude!" and I internally said "thank you for your input but he's a big boy and needs to hear the truth now". And that was that!
And my son has been ironically much more respectful since that night. So sometimes that voice is trying to help, in destructive ways and we have to teach it how to be constructive and when to sit down and "shut up" LOL.
Oooops I should know better, I mean to say it works for me. It's the only thing that got me to stop my inner critic after almost 40 years but that does not mean it will work for everyone
The great thing is that it sounds as if you have a perceptive and insightful therapist. He will see your A's real reality too. I have been to therapists who have been snowed by the act, and it's impossible to move on when they believe what they're being told (which is generally "Everything is fine, no problem here!") So it sounds as if you're in a good place to make some real helpful progress.
You are right, he did say I was a great mom and I really need to look at the positive in what he said. I also think that maybe I can use this psychologist as a mirror to the fact that I must really still be insecure. Maybe I have been fooling myself. Maybe it was my HP trying to show me something. I do really think I need to have more fun. I seem to be "doing" everything lately and not enjoying fun things. I should take myself to the movies or something. I have tried affirmations and I did not really like them because in my heart of hearts I knew I didn't believe them. Having a conversation with my inner voice (the little girl inside) has helped some. I did some therapy for quite some time to help heal the little girl. Apparently she needs more reassurance and more gentleness....YES, the gentleness-we just had a F2F meeting about being gentle with ourselves. I am going to work on self love each day. I seem to be forgeting about me needing the self love. I think because I was feeling good in my program I slipped back somehow...I got too busy with too much "doing" and then I got somehow sucked into worrying about what others are thinking of me. It is a daily thing. I haven't started the steps yet-I think that would help alot but I have asked one lady and she cant. I guess I could start step 1 on my own? I am powerless, I am powerless, I am powerless...over what others think of me.
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It is very difficult to have a pity party when I am celebrating all the gratitude I have in my life!
It will aither work out, . . . or, . . . It will work out."
((((Daisy)))) Would it have been more acceptable for you to hear the feedback from the source rather than from your husband? I once called my counselor on a similar "slip" he made within the confidence of our sessions. He made a remark that broke an agreed upon protocol and I spent a week with the consequence until our next session. As I use to mutually agree with my own patients "You get to call me out if and when I break a protocol and show disrespect for the relationship, you and the protocol." I was then and still am a "what you hear here...stays here even when a person as close to me as my spouse is involved". What I did with my counselor was that we had to deal with the problem of that before we dealt with on going issues.
That he could see thru you is an asset in a counselor. If he couldn't see beyond or inside he wouldn't be worth his price. Any good counselor has the assets and training to put the pieces together and here at MIP and in our face to face Al-Anon meetings we get to use those skills too although we don't counsel each other opting to console instead. We don't give advice, we share experiences. In mental health "sharing experiences is often a No No!! The counselor doesn't reveal the patient does; for justifiable reasons.
Ask yourself the question "how would I feel about this if he were to talk to me directly about it in the security of his office and not pass it on to anyone else first"?
Again let me repeat...my response comes from the experience of being a therapist and never allowing my discoveries to be sprung on my patients most certainly by someone else.
I also like the responses you have gotten here...recovery is about progress not perfection either in who we are or what we do or how. God don't make no junk and God leaves room for improvement. You're okay and totally acceptable...you haven't been ordered out of the garden.
No embarrassment to realize I'm human. No perfect people club out there. The price of membership to a club like that would be way too high. It would cost my serenity. 