Avoidance

Image by John Hain from Pixabay

I have finally finished school! (Again...I know) I hope this will leave me a bit more time for this blog. I have missed writing and I can tell when I haven't done it in a while. One of the many changes going on in my life right now is that my therapist of six years is closing his practice. If you have read this blog, he has been a big part of keeping this recovery journey going. At some points, he was able to provide support to keep my nose above water. This notification was not a complete surprise. He has been working on his doctorate for most of our time together. His availability had been declining and I figured a job change had been coming for some time. I am super happy for him and can't verbalized enough how supportive he has been through all of these years. 

I was quite surprised that I was able to connect with a new provider so quickly. The last time I went shopping for a therapist, it was 2-5 months, depending to connect with someone. I hope that others are able to connect as quickly as well. Therapy can be such an important tool in finding the stability, recovery, or direction. I had my intake with the new provider last week. Intakes are always rapid fire questions to get some background, figure out some jumping off points, and get enough information to convince insurance to pay for services (sigh). Earlier this week, she sent me a treatment plan. I came with some things that I really want to work on that prevent me from experiencing all the happiness that I have in my life. The treatment plan is highly reflective of everything I wanted to address. It was a very hopeful feeling.

For as long as I can remember, I was motivated to attend work. I would work when I was sick. I would pick up shifts. I would be there. Even in the midst of my use, I still got up, hungover, and went to work. I am sure that my memory of that time is a little fuzzy but I am pretty sure my attendance was decent. I was late a lot, but I did show up. Fast forward to about 2014. Something changed. I was in graduate school. I wasn't having the greatest experience with the school and found the internship to be difficult. I started pushing the lines of what I could get away with in terms of calling in and not attending class. In short, I got away with it. I was still able to get everything done. This behavior started to roll over into work. I took a semester off and worked full time. I started getting into conflict with people and started calling in. I justified this because I was just support and the world would go on with out me being there. I would spend an hour calculating out if I could afford not to go, decided I could, and then called in. Rarely was I actually sick.

I started out with the counseling job pretty strongly. I was motivated by making a good impression. Well, at about a year in, I started with slowly with calling in. I didn't find the consequences of calling in all that horrible and just kept down that path. I did have some health issues going on during that time. I think a lot of my illnesses were driven by stress. I was constantly stressed. I was unhappy in my job/environment. In 2018, I started doing some more exciting things like buying a house. I had all this motivation and drive to decorate my house, paint, etc. Then, I broke my foot. I have lived in this place since 2018, and have completed maybe one or two projects since that time. I lost all desire. I think about what I would like to do. I have lots of ideas. I fail to activate, so to speak. 

I talked with my new provider today about how frustrating this is to me. I feel like I should need external motivation to do things I am interested in doing. I fight with myself when I have fun things planned. I don't attend things that I want to. One of the benefits of my current position is that I really "can't" call in sick. I mean, I can, it's just that no one is available to replace me. So, for me to call in sick which I have done once in the past two years, I need to do it early in the day. I can't simply wake up an hour before my shift and decide I am too tired. In my mind, there is no option. I have to go so I have no problem. I am wishing that I felt the same way about my other job and my social life. I want to, yet, I don't. Why?

I have felt for a while that I had developed a habit around this lack of attendance. It became "easy" to do? I didn't really get in trouble for it? There have been consequences to that behavior, but apparently not significant enough to create some change. Honestly, I will adopt a whole lot of misery to avoid change. Change is hard. Change requires effort for more than one day. I may not have 100% success as I am learning to make and sustain change. Ugh....that sounds harder than just staying this way, limping along. Right? I have become acutely aware of how much this bothers me now and I do want to figure out how to get back to how I used to be years ago. 

We talked about findings some ways to "activate" so to speak. Usually if I actually get up and start moving, I rarely go back to bed and will go. I told her about how I will have an hour long conversation with myself about going and not going, going and not going. Then I manage to stress myself out and I just want to crawl back into bed and avoid the world. Avoiding is the issue. I am avoiding my environment by going back to sleep. I am avoiding things because of anxiety. The more time I spend avoiding things, the stronger my ability gets to justify the avoidance. I only have to justify it to myself so it doesn't take much to do it. 

In early recovery, I was challenged by my provider back then to push through some of those thoughts and go out. She encouraged me to find things that I liked. Take a class. Go make some art. Meet up with friends. I was willing to make any change I could so that the quality of my life would improve. Early recovery was incredibly hard. Many of my "friends" were gone. I had to learn to socialize without alcohol. I had financial issues related to all the use. I was lonely. That was plenty of misery to support a desire to make some change. It worked too. I feel like I was the most successful in 2012-2013. I was doing DBT. I was socializing. I was spending time with my family. I took some classes. 

Now, the "misery" is not as extreme today as it was back then. I am stuck. I have been stuck for quite some time. What I learned today is that I am feeding avoidance. Once she said that, I was like "Duh! Of course I am! How did I not see this?" Some times it is these little things that are so profound. I was challenged to view these internal conversation as my desire versus avoidance instead of me fighting me. Shifting that language is highly meaningful for me. I don't need people to criticize me much because I am EXCELLENT at providing plenty of negative feedback to myself. Me fighting me feels like more of the same. The avoidance part of me is very strong right now. The desire part of me is getting a bit frustrated. I want to use that frustration to drive some personal change. I think that is possible.

I will be sure to circle back to this topic as it is an interesting one for me to consider while I am making some changes. I feed my avoidance for a lot of years so it is going to take a bit of time to get this ship moving in a different direction. I hope to provide you all with more entries over the next month!

Thanks again, as always, for reading :) 

​Julie