My psychotherapist meant that literally.
I am not a morning person. I wasn’t as a child, teen, young woman and now at middle-age. In college I earned a “C” in Classical Mythology because it was an 8 am class and I simply couldn’t wake up early and easily enough to not be late or even to make it at all. I was carrying 18 credits a semester, working full-time, and was pooped.
For a long time, I thought that something was “wrong” with me because I wasn’t a “morning person.” Then my therapist spoke the headline sentence that would change how I viewed myself at the time (as “broken” in some way).
Gina, some people just take a long time to wake up.
Truly, I didn’t know that. I had grown up in a toxic family-of-origin where one of my survival strategies was to live by human behavioral templates. That I made up. I didn’t have people around me to model behavioral spectrums and nuance.
They didn’t have the tool kit, so I didn’t have the tool kit.
Innumerable life transformations occurred for me during what became long-term psychotherapy. Among them, I was developing a tool kit.
Learning and living the reality that people’s behaviors are not monolithic is a significant relational tool.
Some behaviors are healthy, some are not. And you have both and everything in between in the same person in gradations of light and shadow.
The Plus in Prozac Plus
My therapist’s comment helped me begin the journey of thinking of myself as a whole person with daily changeable range and nuance, rather than as a dichotomous good-or-bad human.
That increased my sense of self; I stopped comparing me to others and demonizing my behavior.
People in my life – friends, lovers, workmates – who I had placed on pedestals, I now understood as simply human and imperfect. And behavior I once viewed as superior to mine I saw in more approachable light.
Once I stopped deifying them, I became less anxious about drawing boundaries. In the past, drawing boundaries meant risking relationships.
After my epiphany I decided if I didn’t feel safe enough to set boundaries in a particular relationship, then it was one I didn’t want. The fear of abandonment gradually waned.