Self-Criticism and Family Boundaries: Lindsay Gibson Q&A

But if you think about the feeling associated with it, I always think of it as, "I'm not worthy. I'm not powerful. I'm not enough. I didn't do it well enough." Those are the feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness in the schemas that cause us the most problems in life.

Instead of arguing with you about whether your schema is objectively true or not, although it's a good thing to cover that at least, I'm saying it's a bucket with a bunch of holes in it. It doesn't hold water very long. You have to get at the emotion underneath.

If it's an emotion like feelings of helplessness, inadequacy or low worth, those really need to be faced full-on and acknowledged. That's where you want to ask yourself, "Where did I learn to feel this way?" Then you ask, "What purpose did this serve in my growing-up years? What was the purpose of feeling this way within my family system?" It probably has to do with something that kept you safe.

If you were powerless and inadequate, someone else got to feel powerful and competent. If you didn't feel like you ever did things well enough, you might consider that maybe there was somebody around you who needed to look down on somebody, even if it happened to be their own child.

You have to get at the feeling first, identify it, and assume you're feeling that way within that schema, that understanding of life, that little pattern, for a very good reason. You're feeling something that served you at a time in your life when you were very small and felt very unsafe. You need to go back, trusting that idea, and find out: how in the world was it to your advantage to make yourself so small?

I think we all have to be scientists. We all have to have the curiosity of a scientist and the courage of an experimentalist.

Experiment, take a risk. The worst that can happen is maybe it wouldn't go well, and question answered.

If it keeps coming up for you, what I would do is talk with someone you trust about it, but also write down why it could be that you're feeling this urge to reconnect right now. We're not doing that to put you in a court of law under cross-examination, where you have to tell the whole truth and we're going to get to the bottom of this matter, and they're going to be guilty or you're going to be. No, we're just trying to get our feelings on paper, and our wishes and hopes.

Is there a healing fantasy in there? Are we perhaps hoping that now we're feeling a little bit stronger, we might be able to handle it differently this time?

Whatever it is, we want to approach this question consciously and in full awareness of our emotional state and our fantasies about what will happen.

When you approach the question in those ways, you begin to get a sense of, "I'm scared to do this, but I want to do this, so I think I will do this." Or it might go to, "I'm feeling pressure to do this. I'm feeling like I ought to do this. Gosh, it's been six months. It's been a year." Whatever the little flag is that comes up in your mind, the little flag on the calendar that says, "It's been 18 months since you've spoken to them."

When that comes up, maybe that is not necessarily a good reason. Maybe that is some kind of left-brain counting out the days and months, saying, "Don't you think it's about time?"

You answer that with, "I'll decide what time is enough. I'll decide when I feel like it. If I go into something this delicate after all this time of estrangement and I'm not feeling it, then I'm going to be off balance. I have a higher likelihood of being defensive, and that's not a good way to go into any encounter like that."

I would never recommend that just because of the amount of time that's passed, or because a person thinks it's okay to do that for three months, but somehow it's not okay to do that for a year. If there's that kind of made-up rule, because there are no rules about estrangement, bring it out into the daylight and question it.

Is that true? Do I feel ready to do this? Yes, it's been a year. Yes, it's been 18 months. Yes, it's been six years. But how am I feeling about this now? Has my life been going well without this contact? What will this contact bring me? How will it serve my purposes in life, in terms of my recovery from whatever it may be that has troubled you, like anxiety, feelings of inadequacy or depression?

Or maybe you just find you have more joy in your life when you're not dreading the next holiday where you have to have forced contact.

I encourage you to think all of this through consciously, and then go into it the way you go into a cold swimming pool: one toe at a time. Decide, given the situation and your feeling of strength, how strong do you feel going into this? How connected are you to yourself? If that's all in good shape, and you think you can stay connected to yourself if you go back into the relationship, then you may decide that you want to experiment and see how it goes.

But you want to do it, like I said, one toe at a time. You don't go on a two-week vacation with them, with no escape, for your first time out. Think of what would make you comfortable.

We run through that by asking, literally, how would you initiate the contact? Would you feel more comfortable with chat? An email? A handwritten letter? A phone call? You get to decide how you want to contact the person. If it progresses well enough that you want to see them, why not try a very short visit?

People say, "Well, if I'm going to travel all that way, I need to stay at least a week."

No, you don't. You can do something else for the rest of the week. You can pick the amount of time you think you can stay connected with yourself. What really makes these visits so painful is that feeling: "I not only am not enjoying being with this person, but I find myself feeling like I have to be something other than who I really am."

When you start feeling that, it means your connection to your own self is slipping away. You need to figure out how to get yourself out of that situation and into a space, maybe just sitting in your car in a parking lot, or going back to your hotel room. Someplace where you can reconnect with yourself until you can feel like, "Yes, I can be me again," and then try again.

This is all within one very short visit. Someone's saying, "Do a full inner check." Absolutely. That full inner check allows you to see: am I still able to hear myself inside? Am I still able to know what I'm feeling?

The narcissistic personality is very interesting because they really seem to enjoy conflict. I don't know if they do or not; maybe that person is miserable doing that. But they sure seem to create a lot of tension, conflict, criticism, control.

When you're on the receiving end of that, it's very hard not to get reactive. Not only with these personality types, but with any unpleasant personality type, you want to try to stay in an observing, objective mode. Narrate to yourself inside: "This person just made fun of something that's very important to me," or, "This person didn't even respond when I asked them a question. I'm observing this."

It's like I'm an anthropologist: I'm visiting this strange tribe. This is what these people do. Interesting. I can remain objective, stay centered within myself and connected to myself while this is going on.

I can get through this visit or encounter, and my life will go on. I don't have to keep hoping I will find the magic answer, because what's the magic answer to someone who doesn't want to listen to you? Someone who wants to fight? Someone who doesn't even notice or care that you're there? Is there a magic answer to that? I don't think there is. I think it is what it is, and you have to be okay with that.

You can't be okay with it, of course, as long as you are emotionally reacting as if, "Hey, I don't like this reality. I don't like the way you're always looking for conflict. I don't like the way you're not paying attention to me. You're not being responsive. I want this situation to change."

Go for it. Do everything you can to make the situation change, if that's what you want to do. You can tell them how you feel, express yourself, ask them what's going on that every conversation turns into an argument. You can try that and see what happens. Be an experimentalist, take a risk. Of course, do that.

But if you've already done that and the writing's on the wall, please turn back to yourself. Please turn back to your own life with people who really are safe, people who will respond to you and make you feel glad that you made the effort.

How might one reconcile the constant grief that seems to come up when memories resurface?

If anybody has not seen the movie Wind River, there are two fathers. Both have lost their young adult daughters. The one who lost his daughter a long time ago is counseling his friend who just lost his daughter under tragic circumstances. It's the most beautiful advice. I don't know if I can paraphrase it well enough, and my apologies to the director and screenwriter if I get this wrong.

His advice was something like: you're going to feel like pushing this down so far away from you to stop the pain.

You have to be aware that's a normal response, to push it down and push it away. But if you push it too far down, and don't feel the anger and resentment and tragedy of it, feel it all, you're going to lose the good memories too. He said, "You will lose her twice." When you get rid of your grief and pain by not feeling it, by deadening it, you also get rid of your emotional memories of her and lose her twice.

I was almost sobbing.

It was so beautiful, but it was so true. When you went down and kept going down into your true feelings, which is what the true self is made up of, the real experiential side of yourself, you will feel what's there. Just like in the movie, if there's grief there, you'll feel that. But if there is goodness, happiness, good memories, you'll find that too. You don't get to pick and choose.

This is not the dollar store; you're not shopping for the feelings you want to have. You are accepting that whatever you feel is legitimate and important.

You ignore it at your own risk, because when you ignore your feelings, sooner or later you're going to get symptomatic, because the true self will not stand for that.

Sometimes people say, "I can't stand the feeling. It's too much. I feel like I'm going crazy." Of course you do, because at that moment the feeling is bigger than you are. That's why you need someone in your corner who can allow you to visit those places, visit that grief, who's not going to pressure you: "How long are you going to stay down here? How long is this going to be a thing for you? When are you going to get better?"

When you can go to someone who can let you fully feel it, at the time it doesn't feel like you're getting better very fast, because there's so much grief and pain to process, and it can take a long time.

But let's look at what it looks like after you have processed it, because I think there's a lot of misconception about this. It doesn't look like everything is tidy and put away, and you can look at these memories and not flinch, not shed a tear. That's not what we're after. What we're after is expanding your true self to be large enough to hold all of this.

When we're little children, if we have an emotionally mature parent, the parent steps in and holds that for you. You can fall to pieces, be overcome as a little kid. It can be too much for you.

But if you've got an emotionally mature parent who wraps their arms around you, or looks you in the eye with a face that lets you know you are not alone, that they get it, understand, and are holding you in their heart, the grief is shared with another person. It makes it bearable.

Meanwhile you are growing, that child is growing. They're getting a little bit better each time at visiting that grief and integrating it into the personality, really into the mind and heart. If we arbitrarily decide we've spent three years in therapy grieving this and that ought to be enough, how do you know what's enough? You don't.

About expanding yourself: one way we expand ourselves in grief is through crying. I think it's Daniel Siegel, in an anthology of healing through emotion, who wrote an article or chapter in that book. He said he's convinced there is a neurological hookup in the brain between brain integration and tears. When we're trying to take something in and come to grips with it, and grief is certainly a huge experience, often too big for us, we have to keep making running passes at it.

As we integrate it and come to grips with it, the tears are the sign of the integration.

When people who are grief-stricken feel maybe they shouldn't be crying so much, it's like they're saying, "Maybe I shouldn't be letting my brain integrate this so much." I don't think any of us want that. That's not a good end goal. The idea is that we are going to expand ourselves to be large enough to hold all the big feelings we have.

People who grow up with adequate, emotionally mature parents learn from the parent that it's possible to let go, find a safety net, or maybe we should say find a safety net, then let go. We can return to ourselves having visited the grief as deeply as it affects us, and return from that enlarged, bigger, more able to deal with what's happened to us, and closer to our truer self, which is a huge bonus.

You don't get a choice in terms of whether you deal with it. You deal with it consciously or unconsciously. As a therapist, I invite everybody to consider taking the conscious route.

In parenting, if you had an immature parent and then become a parent, you have this phenomenon over and over again as your children grow. You have this overwhelming evidence that, "Oh my gosh, my mom wasn't there for me in that way, and it's so clear I have to be there for my kid in that same way."

I know so many people experience that. Here you are with these young people, and you have a front-row seat to their emotions, their needs, how things affect them, how incredibly sensitive children are, how big an impact parents have on them. Anybody, but parents are special, so they have a huge impact on their children.

You also know firsthand how much attention children really need. It's unreal. They need that interaction, that interest, that attention. That "Mom, look at me" is them building a self, becoming a person. If you resonate with that empathically, you want to respond, because they are so genuine about all of that. They're also, in their best sort of way, so shameless about reaching out for the attention they want.

Of course, as you're having that experience with your child, and maybe giving them something you didn't get, that is going to take you back to your own experience, especially if you feel good about it. If you're conscious of your child's need and give it to them, then see how positively your child responds to the attention, you're going to feel good about that.

Right on the heels of that, you're going to feel, "Wow, that's not the response I would have gotten from my mother," or, "My dad would never have stepped in to help protect me when I was growing up." All of that travels together.

I think we need to really accept that, because it's like we were talking about with how these memories get linked. If we push down the bad memory, we also push down the good memories. When we realize how important this is to children, and right on the heels of that realize we didn't get it, that's one complex situation emotionally.

Again, the idea is self-enlargement: yes to both of them. Yes to your feeling of, "I'm able to give this to my child. I feel wonderful about that. Yay, Mom!" And, "Oh my God, imagine what would happen inside them if they got a response like I got," which might not actually have been a response. It might have been neglect.

Imagine what that would do to them. Imagine their little faces if they didn't get treated with the kind of love you're giving them. It's a huge emotional thing.

The important thing is that we're not throwing away parts of ourselves that get very complex, very contradictory. We try to say yes to this and yes to this, and enjoy that we are large enough beings to contain it all, because it's all part of your truth, part of your life.

You may not have realized exactly how incredibly painful what you went through, or what you didn't get, has been for you until you have this other life to compare it to. The most important thing is to observe your own process enough and feel all of it, so it can be integrated in a real way. That's what growth is all about.

I neglected to say that on the last question, but what integration is all about is growth. There was a child psychologist who looked at how children learn things and advance in their development. Of course there's learning, there's taking stuff in.

But then the child has to take apart what they've already learned that isn't complete. They have to take it apart to make room for the new stuff to come in. Then they integrate it, put it all back together, and now they've got a more complex, more integrated understanding of life.

That's the way it goes: take it in, deconstruct yourself enough that you have room to put the new stuff in, go through a little period of discombobulation, and finally integrate it at a higher level. Now you have the new thing; you are the new thing through that process of integration. That's how I look at it.

If you can feel it and integrate it, then hopefully you can take pleasure in the difference between what you experienced and what your children are being given by you.

When I hear people identify themselves as a rebel, I think of a person with a lot of energy, who is willing to be active, and who doesn't yet have the skills to work with people in ways that get them to want to help or contribute to their success, which is a tremendous loss to that company or family.

People who are rebels are independent thinkers. They spot stuff that's probably really going on. They have an acute sense of fairness. These are wonderful qualities that can be used in any kind of job.

But I think it's important, in whatever we do, to see it from the other person's point of view. Not because you are capitulating to them, but because you want to get as much of what you can get as possible. Part of that, a lot of the time, not all the time, is that you want the other person to want to help or support you.

A lot of times that comes in when they experience you as a safe person: someone fair and kind, willing to see things from their point of view. Getting along with a person, finding common ground, or trying to work out something where they end up being a supporter instead of someone squaring off with you, those skills are tremendously helpful.

If you were a rebel in your family system, and that was the best way you found to deal with the dysfunction, of course you may see yourself that way in your job. If you notice the same dysfunction, you're liable to reach for the thing that made you feel like at least you had a handle on yourself, at least you knew who you were. You would reach for that again, of course.

But I'm encouraging you to also look at learning ways of working with people in a non-confrontational way that gets you more of what you want. I don't look at that as playing the game. I don't look at it as a sellout. I look at it as being very realistic about what will work to get you more of what you want.

The other thing is that when we call out dysfunction, it tends to make other people much more defensive and much more dug in against us. If you have an opportunity, not to learn how to get more power, but to learn how to work around and communicate non-confrontationally but directly, by stating what you want and asking for help, which rebels sometimes have a hard time doing, then you become more skillful in directing your action.

You want to be a guided missile in your life trajectory. You don't want to just be moving to be moving. You want to know what you're going after and use the most emotionally skillful way to get there.

Thank you, Dr. Gibson, such a pleasure always.