Unprompted reflection: thinking back a year.

It's strange to have become a therapy-user who calls crisis lines and reads self-help books. I couldn't've predicted this even 5 years ago.

— Jeffrey Nordstrom (@jeffnords) May 9, 2016

There is no way that I could have ever imagined that I'd be in this place even a year ago. My life is practically unrecognizable to myself. From the outside, I think things look pretty-much the same, but on the inside the changes have been enormous and unprecedented. I'd like to keep most of those changes "on the inside," but I'd also like to share some of them a little. Just a little bit.

Here are the main "lessons" or things I've had to come to terms with this year, at least that I can think of tonight:

1. TRAUMA MATTERS: There is no way to completely escape, to completely let go of trauma. If somebody has experienced trauma in their childhoods, no amount of reason can fully eradicate it. Sidestepping long-running trauma, like there's some masterful behavioral or cognitive jiu-jitsu that can move around it, simply doesn't work. It needs to be dealt with carefully and competently, and the more intimate you are with traumatized people, the more likely that it will rear its head. And in those cases, when that trauma comes out swinging, it's destructive and hurtful—and not about you.
2. YOU CAN'T MAKE ANYBODY FEEL ANYTHING AND VICE VERSA: For years I've felt responsible for others' emotions. This year, through my readings and therapies, I think I've finally come to a place where I'm not taking responsibility for people's emotions anymore. I will take responsibility for how I treat people and try to treat them with the respect they deserve, but I will no longer beat myself up for how people think and feel about me. This goes the other way, too. I am working to take phrases like "You made me feel" or "You forced me to" out of my vocabulary in order to reteach myself my own relative agency. I still need to deal carefully with my years of misplaced responsibility, but this is a step forward.
3. ALTHOUGH PEOPLE'S JUDGMENTS OF MY CHARACTER MAY BE FOUNDED IN A TRUTH, I HAVE THE RIGHT TO NOT IDENTIFY WITH THOSE JUDGMENTS: Despite my overall skepticism, I trust people too much (My okCupid profile said as much). When somebody calls me a name or attributes a characteristic to me, when they say "You're like this," or "You're a ____," I tend to toss the idea around. Even if their comment seems utterly unfounded or hurtful, I tend to think "There must be some sort of truth in that. What might it be?" Although this is all OK, at this point I think I need to admit that I've overdone it, that I've accepted labels too readily, that I've treated baseless ideas as legitimate. I'd like to think I'm learning to sift out the bad ones, the faulty labels and misattributions; I'm doing my best to replace them with "Needs" and "Feelings," as identified in Nonviolent Communication. Just because someone says I'm an asshole doesn't mean I need to accept it; that accusation could very well be about them, or merely a projection.
4. NOT EVERYBODY SEES THE WORLD LIKE I DO: As a trusting, semi-rational intellectual, I have no high ground in my perception of the world. Although I'd like to think I've always been aware of how my mind plays tricks on me and I've always had a healthy skepticism of my own perceptions, I think I'm learning more and more about how emotions can create a very different angle on the world. Emotional thinkers see things differently than I do, and I think I'm coming to better terms with that fact. Unfortunately, this also means that I'm learning how my rationalism has backed me into corners with some emotional people, and how I've condescended to them in a typically intellectual manner.
5. ALTHOUGH CIRCUMSTANCES IN RELATIONSHIP STRUGGLES MAY BE UNIQUE AND UNPRECEDENTED, THE GENERAL PATTERNS OF DYSFUNCTION ARE COMMON AND ADDRESSABLE: As I've been reading more self-help and mass-market psychology literature, and even my reading of a clinical book about trauma, I've started to see my own dysfunctions and "crazy" on full display in print. This is humbling because I didn't expect to be so average. Nonetheless, the circumstances I've found myself in are certainly unique and I can't find a book that addresses them specifically because no book would consider certain elements of my current situation reasonable or even sane. But the patterns are there, and if I put my English degree twist-anything-to-connect-to-anything skills to work, I might be able to get out of all this with a healthy level of resilience and even grit.

My wife flew to Hawaii for the coming three and a half weeks. She's hoping to deal with some of her stuff there and come back refreshed with a slightly clearer perspective on things. I wish her the best.

Me, I'm here on my own with the girls, working through my own stuff my own ways: through competence and relationships at work, the maintenance of positive, empathic relationships with my daughters, through reading, and through creation of content of different sorts. I've set up the microphones at the computer and hope to track down some inspiration of things to talk about and create. Here's to hoping it works out a bit.

Setting it up for content creation.

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http://jeffnords.tumblr.com/post/144847123877/just-setting-up-a-microphone-so-i-can-get-some

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​ADDED MAY 26, 2016:

"mourn the loss the #trauma brought." Our culture finds #mourning a tough thing to accommodate, but it's necessary. pic.twitter.com/MHUVVRxjUA

— Jeffrey Nordstrom (@jeffnords) May 25, 2016