Introduction to Meathead Therapy

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being yourself, express feelings, forgiveness, friends, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, joy, listening, love, marriage, parents, psychotherapy, relationship

This month I am featured in Psychology Today’s Healthy Connections blog by Maryann Karinch where she tells the story of what she calls my introduction to “meathead therapy.”

When my husband and I were young and first married we went to his Aunt Maureen and Uncle Meathead’s on Christmas Eve. Theirs was a modest gathering, but I loved it because the one thing that was not modest was the connection I saw between the people who came and went. Folks arrived at the door and each was welcomed like a king. They were offered a drink, some food, a seat, and all the time in the world, crowding onto the attic stairs when room at the table ran out.

The goal was to entertain, to tell funny stories even at each other’s expense, even as it exposed each other’s bullheadedness, ignorance or misery.

And I was spellbound.

These folks cared for each other. I’d go so far as to say they loved each other. My family didn’t sit around the kitchen table on Christmas Eve welcoming one another in with drinks and smiles and all the time in the world because of our handicap of taking life seriously and rejecting one another for our human foibles.

Since that night with Maureen and Meathead, and with my steadfast husband next to me, I have worked hard in psychotherapy and have learned about the healthy attitudes of accepting one another for who we are and learning to celebrate one another no matter how goofy we get.

I think the healthy connections we make are born of the dedicated showing up at each other’s kitchen tables no matter what the circumstance.

 Check out my story in Psychology Today.

 

 

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Maybe the purpose is to just keep trying

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being yourself, fear, Jane Butler, psychotherapy, relationship, writing

It is a crazy long and slow process of getting myself out of the cloistered existence I am so good at living. I have lots of excuses for staying hidden away, but psychotherapy has been my way out.

So of course you’ll understand that even though it may sound terrible to you, I gladly went to a group therapy weekend last year. A whole weekend of working out issues, with the help of strangers.

I spent my time that weekend trying to figure out why I wrote what I think is a very good book and have not tried very hard to get it published. We talked at length about what was holding me back from taking the next steps since I clearly care about this project and have worked hard to make it as good as I can. The large underlying problem is that secrets were the mainstay of my childhood so telling anything that might be secret to the world feels wrong. But an entire memoir seems pretty deliberate doesn’t it? I kept telling myself that sharing my ideas was somehow going to hurt people including myself and so I couldn’t possibly publish my book. Also there was the problem that the people who’d read it so far knew me and therefore their rave reviews were probably because they didn’t want to hurt my feelings, or liked it because they knew me personally. So people I was meeting for the first time that weekend agreed to read it to help dispel some of those fears.

I shipped three copies out into the mail to people I’d just met. And then yesterday, months later, a package arrived back to me. It was the manuscript and these words, I finished your book… I cried at the end and I can’t remember crying at a book before. I was so touched by the continual effort you extended to connect with your family and the love you did and did not share. Guess I’m being selfish applying your experience to my own life but I have been at a point where it’s been easier not to connect with certain family members than to risk continually coming away hurt and crying! But you have planted the idea that perhaps the purpose of life is to keep trying.”

Planting seeds of hope for building or rebuilding relationships is exactly what I wanted to do and I thank this reader I barely know for spelling it out, and sharing it so I can see better why I am so engaged in this labor of love, and that I AM able to convey this important message.

It is corny to say I felt the love at the Philadelphia Writer’s Conference?

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change, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, love, Philadelphia Writer's Conference, psychotherapy, writing

Here’s something I don’t understand so help me out and tell me. I know how I got out of being an unhappy person unable to connect and engage rationally with others, it was psychotherapy and lots of it. I have often thought that it is a form of love, sold for those who can pay and whose hearts are not clamped shut so tight they cannot be methodically and incrementally pried open by a professional. In general, in life, I’ve noticed other people who seem to know, claim that love is the power that matters.

It is the most powerful force on earth. I don’t understand how the prolific writer Jonathan Maberry got out of his issues, and he mentions a few, to share love freely as he does today. Or how anyone changes for the better. A profound transformation has to occur. It’s not casual, you don’t just think, oh I’ll embrace the concept of love now. Something more provocative has to occur. It must have for him, and for the others at the Philadelphia Writer’s Conference last month, because love is indeed what I felt there. The leaders were tossing it out so I snagged some and carried it home.

It is a powerful thing that finds its way to hurt and injured folks and changes them into people who extend themselves and who care and who try to make love grow. Maybe I am always just in the mood for love, but whatever it is I am struck by the power of the idea that benevolence, generosity, kindness, patience, understanding and the like can move mountains in me.

May I air our dirty laundry?

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being yourself, change, dreams coming true, express feelings, fear, goals, higher power, inspire, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, listening, mentors, parents, psychotherapy, relationship, teacher, trust

I wish I could have been aware when my children were little, just what it was that we were doing and saying with them that has led to this moment today. This moment today I am sure is connected, because my grown little boy is telling me that others see him in a way that is, I know, so similar to the way others have seen me. I am pretty sure that it is not genetics since change is a real thing and I have certainly made changes in how I act that defy genetics.

So just because he was told on his job evaluation this week, that he is capable and a valued team member but should own that and show less deference to the others, as I had been told many times on my own job evaluations, does not mean that that cannot change.

I have just learned that the very definition of functional includes being able to hear feedback, consider it, and adjust. So when my adult son tells me his story I encourage the possibility of change. I tell him that I paid a professional to help me make changes of this very nature, and that I struggle with the same issue of not recognizing my own abilities still, yet I see progress as I get help and actively work on it. In telling him this I am doing what I urge of my piano students all the time when I say, go home and teach your parents everything I just taught you and get a two-for-one sale on your purchase. What I learn by working with a psychotherapist to face my issues and face my fears about life, I go home and tell my kid so he can NOT be just like me, and instead he can be better.

Who knows, maybe then he will come back and teach me even more.

Stationary bike rides to dream locations

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being yourself, control, express feelings, friends, friendship, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, listening, physical therapy, psychotherapy, self-neglect

The best part of my day today was stopping in to see the fellow who was my physical therapist all year and from whose care I have now graduated. He cocked his head and looked a little embarrassed, incredulous maybe, when I told him on Day One that I was seeing a psychotherapist to help me identify the ways I have of neglecting my foot, so effective were they, that they were the reason I needed surgery instead of just physical therapy. I suppose few people admit to deliberately seeking professional help to understand themselves, but I am too something to hide the truth of who I am anymore. In the long run he barely batted an eye. I’d had plenty of practice neglecting myself, I told him, and having it end with this yearlong stint of twice a week foot massages with him, although possibly sounding wonderful, was disappointing. Don’t get me wrong, we had a lot of fun over the course of the year because of all the joking around with everyone from tiny old ladies who’d hurt themselves falling down stairs to the tatooed policemen injured while actually fighting crime. Silliness is the norm there with plenty of jokes about the exercises he had me doing that looked like sobriety tests, and my stationary bike rides to dream locations. Who knows what he was actually thinking when I stopped in bearing cookies today, but the look on his face told me that even after a year of listening to all my foot confusion and lack of body awareness, allegedly the result of a childhood full of denial now being teased apart through psychotherapy, we’d become friends. Seems like addressing my emotional issues head on in front of this guy was worth the risk of revealing myself, because I felt what seemed like a genuine acceptance and appreciation of Jane that I truly wish I was cultivating more often.

Real interaction with others

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fear, goals, inspire, Michael Welner, play, psychotherapy, security

A very passionate and knowledgeable forensic psychiatrist on television today said we should nurture creativity and constructive activities for children rather than destructive activities. Yeah! Take a look at this video of Michael Welner and see how he calls each of us to be responsible parents who encourage psychologically healthy activities in our children. Although he talks about video games for older kids I know we would be smart to avoid letting electronic games for our littlest children become substitutes for real interaction with others.

I had a dream my life would be

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being yourself, change, dreams coming true, express feelings, goals, higher power, inspire, isolation, joy, Les Miserables, psychotherapy, relationship, spiritual discernment

The chapter in the book on spiritual discernment I am reading (figuring out what you really want to do with your life) suggested I put the book down and imagine for a moment some dream I have ever had and whether it came true.

Well, twenty minutes later I regained consciousness and wished I’d had a way of capturing the wonderful story I had just told myself. It was the story of how I once dreamed there would be people in my life who knew me and cared about me and deliberately came to my door just to see me! What a crazy dream it was. You see, I grew up in such isolation, both physical and emotional, that that was literally the dream, that someone might seek me out because I had somehow reached them and they remembered me.

Today it is indeed true. People have called me simply to see how I am, or what I am up to, not to mention show up at the door just to see me, and this is a phenomenon of once I only dreamed.

So the story I told myself was all about how I want to share that possibility of change with other people, and tell them how I did that. How I managed to figure out how to go from someone essentially afraid of other humans to one who embraces and loves others to the point that they share that back with me. It was and continues to be a long hard road of encouraging myself to take the tiny baby steps towards change that make real things come about. I really want to share that with folks and in part because of my spiritual discernment class which I have attended only once, I am already dreaming new dreams of what I will have come true next.

Am I grown up yet?

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being yourself, change, express feelings, forgiveness, goals, inspire, joy, parents, psychotherapy, relationship

On 60 Minutes this evening Steven Spielberg said that the worst thing that happened to him in his life was his voluntary falling out with his father. The best thing that happened to him in his life was his eventual reconciliation with his father.

For me, this is all about learning and growing. I feel that even though the experiences I had as a child left me forever sorry my parent’s were not more capable, because they certainly failed me in significant ways, after a lot of work in psychotherapy questioning myself about what happened and why, I was able to accept my parents along with their shortcomings. We had a limited time here together, and so the idea of fleeing from Mom and Dad, or being angry at them, or trying to get something from them they could not possibly deliver, was a losing idea. I needed to change my way of seeing things, and recognize that I have the ability to change the way I feel. I faced painful feelings before I got there, though. Eventually I could see my parents with compassion and accept and forgive the things that happened.

Change is possible.

Looks like I am stuck with my own life

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being yourself, dreams coming true, express feelings, goals, inspire, kerosene, love, mother, paints, psychotherapy, sleep, Vincent Van Gogh

Okay, here is the problem with me following the same path as Vincent Van Gogh. He suffers from legitimate mental illness whereas my mental health issues seem far more controllable. He and I were moving along quite swimmingly in our isolationist feelings and loneliness, defeated by father’s constant disapproval and mother’s distant connection, when he became so unable to cope that he failed to make any meaningful relationships in his lifetime and I got married and had kids. Of course I purchased some profoundly helpful psychotherapy along the way which he could not, but really now, nearing the end of his story, dear Vincent is eating dirt, drinking kerosene from his lamp and squeezing the paints from his tubes into his mouth. In all my disappointing life events thus far all my thoughts about dissing myself in vile ways were never acted upon. I have never felt so low as to actually drink kerosene.

Vincent is in an asylum generally wishing he had people that mattered to him in his life, because much of his family long ago distanced themselves, and his one loyal brother got distracted by marriage and impending parenthood. Vincent is diagnosed with legitimate mental dysfunction, but suddenly he is also generating fantastic paintings on a daily basis after decades of studying, drawing, and painting.

I really hoped, unreasonably, that the similarities between Vincent and myself would last. That way, I too, might imagine that my future has me becoming a genius. Sadly his genius was not recognized during his lifetime, at least not in the story thus far, so following him to the height of his success while he was alive wouldn’t have gotten me too far anyway. If it turns out I am a genius and I don’t know it, I’ll be gone before I get to cash in on all the perks.

Looks like I am stuck with my own version of my own life once again, destined to be me. Living vicariously through this massive biography is good for the summer but soon I will have to get back to my real life.

Professional advice for those divorced from their bodies

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ankle, being yourself, change, express feelings, foot, inspire, phyical therapy, physical therapist, psychotherapy, trust

Today I told my physical therapist to visit my blog because I’d written about his kind and patient ways. Mortified at the possibility of having overstated things, I ran home to check it out. Not surprisingly, all posts relative to physical therapy are mostly about me. My explicit appreciation of his work and my heartfelt accolades for him are overdue. So I will say that every time I’ve shown up confused about how my foot feels, or unable to say what makes it hurt, or what I did that made it swell, for nearly a year now, he’s been convincingly pretending that that is normal. That that is a reasonable way to conduct life with one’s foot, ignorant of its well-being, ignorant of its status, and ignorant of its obvious connection to the rest of the body. According to him, when I first arrived last year, I was blithely satisfied with all that ignorance. He says he had to run us through a gauntlet of at least ten questions every time to get to the bottom of the status of my foot, aware that this key body part had been in a state of divorce from the rest of me. You see, ninety-nine per cent of the time I have the very handy ability to turn off the switch between my foot and my brain, happily avoiding the messy problems of dysfunction and pain. But he hinted at a world of integration, cooperation, and awareness I only dreamed of, if only to satisfy his incessant questions.

The day after visiting my doctor and falsely informing him that all was just fine with my aching foot, I felt free to confess this sin to my kind and understanding physical therapist because we both knew, since we discussed it at length three times a week, that the ankle had actually been feeling mighty lousy, and that I was just playing out my role as a longstanding divorcee of my appendage. We both knew this to be a significant blunder but instead of dressing me down, he helped me rehearse what to say next time, basing the words I used on the truth of what we both saw quite frequently.

Sometimes I took the discomforts of having my foot isolated as a point of discussion to my psychotherapist. He helped me face the confusion so I could cope with the fears of trusting ‘some guy’ with my foot, since I noticed that I often irrationally worried the physical therapist might hurt me. When I reported all this the next time the PT had my foot in his hand, he didn’t flinch, just kept me talking.

So, today, I award myself a theoretical gold star for showing up having stopped myself from swimming, one of my few sanctioned exercises right now, because my elbow hurt, asking my friendly professional for advice. This prompted him to flatter me with the great good news of personal growth in the form of greater body awareness! Yay! I know that my elbow hurts and I am not overusing it today! So this is my note of thanks for gently leading me down the path of a more satisfactory union between body and brain, and making it evident that I might want to continue to work on making the two friends.