4 posts tagged “self-esteem”

One of those days, one of those lives...

Not a great day in the Flamingo Dancer household. I am back in the dork neck collar due to a flare up with the back injury. I am so tired of it - the most positive I can be today is to feel blessed that I am still breathing...

Mr FD is experiencing another one of his intermittent crazy man episodes where he wants to tell the bosses to stick it and walk out the door and I have to talk him off the roof. It is like his brain chemistry goes awry and he becomes his own worst ememy and jumps at shadows. He has very low self-esteem but at the same time thinks he often has all the answers and has to save the company and then wonders why no one says thank you and raises him shoulder high for a victory lap. His whole identity is caught up in his job - like so many Australian men of his generation. I have to remind him that he is 58 and only wants to work another 5 years and took this job to enable us to live our dreams after that time... He is very impulsive, prone to angry outburts that he instantly regrets and becomes a high maintenance employee which tires and alienates people...but he is so loyal, so hard working, so honest, so earnest...a contradiction in  terms.

Today he is exhausting me and I feel like inserting a curtain rod through one of his ears and out the other ear and just hanging him somewhere until he either calms down or I feel able to cope with him.

Beware of the high maintenance husband.

I actually went to University for the first time at the age of 36. After a number of years at home raising our children we were finding it more difficult to make ends meet, and so I tried to re-enter the work force.  Doors shut in my face. It was made too obvious that they considered that my brain could only have solidified and my skills all but vanished.  So I applied to University and was accepted.

The first literature assignment I handed in came back with a mark of 12 out of 20. I stood in my lecturer’s office and cried because I thought I was never going to make it. Obviously I was stupid and was never going make it to ever graduate. Right in that moment it was all or nothing to me. This one setback, a low mark,  was enough to jump start my defeatist mind set and have me on the verge of running all the way back to my home sweet home.

However, I was able to muster the right or more positive responses to allow me to continue and even to flourish at University. I managed a credit for that unit in the first semester, and a High Distinction for following.

A friend had a similar experience when she embarked on journalism studies. One of the lecturers was an abrasive man who worked the students hard. Each week he made them do a general knowledge test and would be dismissive of anyone who would fail. His real method was to make the students aware that journalism was in fact a nasty business and you had to be tough to make it. If not there was the door. She ran for that door as fast as she could and for the past 15 years has blamed the lecturer for her “career loss”. She did go back to university but chose a course that had little hope of actually leading to a real career in Australia. She has worked in food service or retail every since.

So why did she default to helplessness so readily? She appeared not to be able to see that everything was not all or nothing. There is more than one way open to us. I assessed my options and decided that I had to work  smarter, she looked around and decided there were no options for her except to run away. Passivity, fear and depression have ruled her life ever since.

My friend decided that she wouldn’t just give up on this specific battle but with the tape on repeat in her head continually, she embraced the decision to capitulate on every issue. This feeling of helplessness that she took as her mantel  has allowed her to shun real responsibility for choices and the frustrations she experiences continuously.  My friend blames fate, circumstances and particularly other people for what befalls her. Somehow she never mobilized her own energy to overcome roadblocks to her goals.

How has she done this? She makes long lists of the negatives or disadvantages. Catastrophe  thinking.  I never hear her speak of positives. No little train that thinks it can. All defeats are so serious that she rehashes them continuously. Years after the fact, she is still generalizing it to her entire existence.

Why can I see these tendencies in her and she can’t see them herself? She willingly gives into them but never stops to think why is it so? Her frustrations bring her down and she sees all defeats as permanent and long term. She lives an immobilized life always waiting for the next hit which of course does come because she sets herself up in the crosshairs every time.  She surrenders before the first shot, when she perhaps should be singing I think I can, I think I can as she goes over the top of the trenches.

Do you like me more than you don't like me or don't you like me more than you do?

                                                                    Shelagh Delaney

I don't know who Shelagh Delany was/is but if this quote is anything to go by then the delightful Shelagh had some issues to work through... Talk about a complicated woman. Don't pull me into your Vietnam Shelagh. I have enough of my own issues to work through.

By the way, Shelagh, does my bum look big in this?

Apparently physical fitness is has more to do with our heads than our bodies  - SURPRISE! (Fear of fitness more than physical , smh.com.au/news/health ,  29-01-2008). "To make a difference, you need to reinvent yourself as someone who no longer hates exercise ...” says Pete Cohen, a health and wellbeing coach trained in human psychology and behavior. Cohen advocates behavior modification techniques such as self-talk.

SELF-TALK!  I hear this far away voice cry “Do not release the self-talk!” 

Any time I untether the voice in my head it tells me I am going to fail.

Actually the voice is my mother’s and it is saying “Can you do that?” which is what she said to me every time I tried something new when I was a child. Because we all know the automatic response to that is “Oh, no I can’t. How stupid of me to think I might be able too”. My sister and I have spent a life time living with that voice in our heads.

So,  I was amazed when, not long ago, when I was attending a scrapbook workshop with my sister and her adult daughter to hear my very own sister using her our mother’s voice.  Whenever her daughter said “I can’t decide between the pink or the blue. I think I will use the blue” my sister would instantly reply “Do you want to use the blue?” And of course the reply was “Oh, maybe I will use the pink”. Often my adult niece became some indecisive she did nothing but sat and looked at her unfinished page. It made my heart cry.

I tried to tell my niece that her photos would never mean as much to anyone else as they mean to her at that moment and so she should choose whatever spoke to her. They were her photos.

I was angry at my sister, but then I realized that she was suffering from the same problem. She was hearing Mother’s voice as she was speaking to her daughter . Another generation hamstrung by indecision and low self esteem, reinvented in our mothers image. My sister was so stressed about her scrapbook page that she actually could make few decisions and was obviously not enjoying a moment of the workshop. She was ramrod straight on her chair and stopped participating at the earliest possible moment. I knew that she would never attempt scrap booking again. I understood now why my sister never developed hobbies, or pursuits that filled her with passion.

I was so proud to look over at my two daughters on the opposite side of the table and they were giggling and having a wonderful time creating their pages. No worry about everything being perfectly coordinated or symmetrically aligned on the page. They were having fun. They were also creating the most beautiful, original, creative pages for their memories. I was so happy. Happy that they were enjoying themselves,  and happy that I had managed to keep my mother’s voice in my head and not implanted it in theirs.

Maybe I haven’t reinvented myself, but I have reinvented my family. That was something I could do, Mother!