What Are Your Values?

You think you had a bad day? I clogged my therapist’s toilet at 8:33am, our appointment was at 8:30. This was a water flooding all over the bathroom situation. This was a “it’s leaking in the basement” situation. Did they have a mop? No. Did we use a roll of paper towel? Yes. Did we use most of another role of paper towel? Yes. Do I like my therapist? Yes. But that was some stressful shit for all of us. Also, let the record show, as per usual, the culprit was the toilet paper, the main event went down just fine. Do I think it’s reasonable to have a therapist and her client tear through two rolls of bounty and move Ikea furniture to dry land together only to have her ask. . .”so how are you doing?”. No, I don’t. I feel like she should’ve asked “are you gonna get another therapist on the side to deal with this whole situation”.

Okay, I got my jokes off. Frankly, it wasn’t all that stressful, I can laugh about it. My work in therapy and with my nutritionist right now is trying to remove shame from page one of my values and techniques for understanding the world. I don’t know why shame has been so big to me. I know it has to do with my childhood. I know it has to do with shame that my parents put on themselves and escorted right down into my brain. I thought shame was what kept me from being an utter bag of shit. Like I thought that three months ago, or even two months ago. I thought it was shame that had me practice before a show, I thought it would be shame that would help the musicians in my sphere play better. I have doled out shame to every girlfriend, every bandmate and most every friend in my life. And I’ve given myself more shame than anyone else. I thought fame was the only thing that would do the trick, it was the voice of reason against my indulgent, lazy, hedonistic punk ass self. There is really no connection between these feelings and my reality. But, reality is not the only measure. These feelings aren’t the only option I have to go through life. Some years ago I realized I wouldn’t wish shame on anyone else, and with MAJOR exceptions I stopped putting that shame shit onto other people. But I kept it for myself, I kept it inside cause I thought it was the only thing keeping me on the straight and narrow.

Now I’m in the process of accepting that I might just be alright. Accepting that I might mostly do the right things, eat the right things, say the right things to friends, treat my kids good, be a good bandmate, be a good husband, be good at exercise. That I might not need to wagging finger of self-shame to scare me away from the allure of being a gaping asshole. With my nutritionist a lot of this involves working on intuitive eating. Intuitive eating involves trusting you and your body to seek out what is best for it. This was challenging for me to believe in, I’m a person who believes in rules. But I don’t believe that 35 years of being told I was eating the wrong thing by professionals, by society and sometimes by my family have been good for me. My mom didn’t herself to eat right, and she definitely didn’t trust me to do so. And I lived up to that. But maybe I never got to listen. I never opened that channel of communication about what my body needed before it got polluted with the thoughts of others.

Today we worked on writing down the values that mattered to me. I wrote down 17. I had to slowly cross them off until I was left with four. It was stressful, but it was illuminating. What is really at my core? What do I value? My therapist thinks that ranking, naming and referencing my values will help me. And I agree. It’s exciting and stressful to do this work. It’s also hard to do this work. Doing external homework is one thing: learn this chart, complete this form. It’s different when the work is looking inward, but it’s pretty amazing. I try to share a little bit about my therapy journey on this blog so that folks who are therapy curious might find their way to some therapy. If that’s you, awesome. If that’s not you, I hope you enjoy hearing about my journey.