.
When Do I Get to Live My Own Life?
Ten Personal Stories
by
Paul Rice
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Paul Rice
Foreword
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” Steve Jobs
This year, 2011, at age 56, is my answer to the title’s question.
In my first $.99 eBook, Getting Well for the First Time, I dedicate one section to some of my failures to live my own life. That section ends where this eBook begins, with my central question: When Do I Get to Live My Own Life?
It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do. Let me rephrase that: of all the things I’ve tried to do that are actually possible to do, living my own life has proved to be the most difficult. The contents of this eBook are ten variations on this theme.
I thank my daughter, Melissa Rice Rivera, for her photographic contributions, including the cover photo of her sixteen or so years ago. I thank my son, Frederick Mozart Rice, for the cover design work. I thank Dr. Arthur Janov for providing the process by which living my own life is achievable.
At age 16: In my parents’ house
I was effectively done with high school after tenth grade. I’d already taken almost all of the highest-level classes, but I had to hang around for two more years.
That situation existed because of the state of the Miami-Dade County public school system in 1970. My parents kept me in public high school because it was bad form for my father, their employee, and an assistant principal at one of their junior high schools, to place me elsewhere, such as college. My 16-year-old son wouldn’t currently run into a similar problem in the Fairfax County, Virginia, public school system in 2011.
Part of that experience was fun. I enjoyed student-teaching chemistry, as I could talk with whomever I wanted to at any time. The teacher was happy to have me around, too, as he’d slough off onto me everything he didn’t want to do, which was a lot.
Most of eleventh grade was a waste of my time, though. I pinched myself and jittered around in my seat to stay awake in Spanish class, for example. I was born and raised in Miami, and I already spoke passable Spanish by the first or second grade.
I didn’t participate in any athletics that year, although I played on the golf team during tenth grade. I stopped playing golf after I injured my left wrist. I often felt pain, but my parents didn’t want to pay an orthopedic specialist to diagnose the problem.
Music was an increasingly interesting escape for me. I played along to popular songs on the stand-up piano at the end of my parents’ living room. I wrote down simple tunes I composed, too.
That I enjoyed myself while playing the piano seemed to be too much for my mother to take. She played the organ and piano at various churches as a professional since she was age fifteen. She taught piano to each of her four kids at early ages.
All of us refused to play piano after about age seven or eight, though. Our mother ruined our experiences anytime we played when she interrupted and turned what we played into a piano lesson. So I hadn’t played for eight or so years before I started again at age 16.
One day while I played the piano, my mother started to harass me even more than she usually did. She criticized, interrupted, and did everything she could to distract me from what I enjoyed.
None of her act-ups caused me to stop, though. I continued on with my musical entertainment.
All of a sudden, she grabbed two fistfuls of my hair and started to yank. I stood up in a rage.
Here was a woman who was smaller and weaker than I was. My mother thought she could act any nasty way she wanted to toward me, and I couldn’t reciprocate.
And my mother was right. All I could allow myself to do was to take whatever abuse she heaped on me. My parents trained me to be defenseless against them.
After my mother let go of my hair, I stormed into the room I shared with my younger brother and shut the door. I never played the piano in my parents’ house again.
Later that year, after my left wrist felt less painful, I bought an acoustic guitar. I thought that if I played a guitar in my and my brother’s room with the door shut, my mother would leave me alone. I asked a good friend to teach me how to play the guitar, and I adopted it for my musical expression. Even today, when I follow along with music, I touch guitar strings in my mind, not piano keys.
I can’t play the guitar anymore, though. I had two surgeries on my left wrist eleven and seven years ago, and neither one of the surgeries was successful. My left wrist still hurts most of the time.
I confronted my mother over the phone four years ago with her hair-pulling incident. She denied that it happened!
She upset me to no end. Why would she deny my experience?
One possibility was that she didn’t remember it because she was age 78 four years ago. The possibility that feels most likely to me, though, and was why I became upset, was that her denial of my experience was what she’d always done to me. “That cut doesn’t hurt; stop crying.” “You aren’t hungry; it’s not dinner time yet.” “You aren’t full; eat what’s on your plate.”
My mother was the arbiter of my experience when I was an infant. Nothing changed, in her mind, during the five decades that passed since then.
That phone conversation was the last time I spoke in the public world with my mother. I couldn’t spend any more of my life dealing with a person who denied my history. I couldn’t let her judgment and perception of my experience override my own.
As I grew up, I could barely tolerate my mother’s orders to me on what to do, how to act, what to think, and how to feel. That she even attempted to deny our history decades later reminded me of her lack of love and respect for me as an individual.
My mother went through the motions, acted her part, and spoke her lines. She put on a show of love for the benefit of other people, not for me.
I felt this exact feeling six years ago as I took this picture of my mother and my first granddaughter, Susanna Concepción Rivera. Susanna didn’t enjoy the “horsie ride,” the performance was painful for my mother, and the rest of us at the table and in the Friendly’s ice cream parlor were obliged to applaud the act. We were all props in her play.
My mother’s performance reminded me of similar shows in my childhood where, in front of an audience, she acted the “Look how much I love my children” play with my siblings and me as props. She didn’t make me feel loved in private, though. She needed an audience to warm herself up.
As a child, I needed the real thing, not the scripted show of love. I don’t know for sure, but my mother was probably too involved with attempts to satisfy her own needs to get around to satisfying my childhood needs. The end result was that neither of us got what we needed. I didn’t get what I needed from my mother when I was so dependent on her. And her audience’s applause and approval couldn’t substitute for her parents’ love and approval that she needed so many years earlier.
At the ice cream parlor, my mother gave the superficial appearance that she was engaged with her child, me; her grandchildren, my daughter and son who sat at the table; and her great-granddaughter. My mother was just engaged with herself, though, with her unconscious needs and feelings. She probably never gave a thought to how much pain she caused me when she put on her shows of love for me in public, and then didn’t demonstrate the same love for me in private.
In the private world of feeling therapy sessions is where I talk over and over again to my parents. I consciously re-experience my early, unconscious, unsatisfied need for my parents’ love. My painful feelings also come with that early need, such as feeling that something was wrong with me, and that somehow it was my fault that I didn’t feel loved.
The pain I felt as a very young child is still with me, although the context in which it made sense has long since passed. If my painful feelings stayed in my unconscious, their pain would continue to run my life.
Girls
I didn’t understand at age 16 why I wasn’t attracted to girls who were attracted to me. I was smart, I was good-looking, and I wasn’t a social recluse.
And I couldn’t act differently than what I felt, either. I couldn’t accept a girl’s affection when she was attracted to me for the person I was. Her unconditional affection provoked a painful reaction in me. Her affection became a painful reminder of how I didn’t receive unconditional love as a child. I’m sure that I confused the girls who were attracted to me, and probably made them feel that something was wrong with them.
Instead of reciprocating a girl’s affection, I was attracted to a girl, G, who gave me the opposite of affection. G was standoffish, and did very little in the way of makeup as did other girls in high school. G wasn’t athletic, and she was sarcastic. G’s body language signaled, “Stay away from me” and “I’m hurting.” For example, when G walked, I could tell that the platform shoes she wore caused her pain.
G was part German, a trait I was attracted to as well. I later married a half-German woman.
I knew G’s parents didn’t live together. She participated in so many after-school activities that she was never in a rush to go home. For instance, G was one of the editors of the school newspaper.
G was the perfect girl to fit my problem, as I recreated my childhood situation of feeling unloved. I kept trying, time and again, and never stopped trying over the last two years of high school, to feel loved by a girl who didn’t even like me. And, of course, my efforts failed: G seldom even talked with me.
My younger sister told me what G did with her life the next few years after she finished high school. G started college, dropped out after she got pregnant, and lived alone with her baby. She couldn’t afford to return to college.
At age 16, I couldn’t accept the affection of girls who were attracted to me. I made up reasons to myself as to why I should avoid girls who liked me. I instead struggled for the affection of a girl who didn’t care for me, who made me feel unloved.
That replay of my early childhood experiences wasn’t my conscious choice of how to live my own life. I was in the grip of unconscious painful memories and their automatic reactions.
So I didn’t get to live my own life at age 16. The time and place where that might happen moved to some faraway future.
At age 53: In feeling therapy
Four years ago at age 53, I knew that the causes of many of my physical and emotional problems lay in my unconscious. I’d made very little progress in living my own life up to that point. My unconscious forces and feelings ran my life.
For example, I unconsciously felt that if I completely screwed up my life, I could always go back to live with my parents. My unconscious feeling was that although I’d return to a place where I was told every little thing to do about how to live my life, living with my parents was somehow a viable, if a last ditch, option.
My unconscious feeling was the exact opposite of what I consciously wanted to do! I strongly yearned for autonomy during my adolescent years and earlier. I couldn’t wait to get out of my parents’ house. I couldn’t stand living with them, to the point to where I considered suicide at age 12, as I describe in my first eBook, Getting Well for the First Time. I thought that my life would be great when my parents no longer directed every little item in my life. I was forced to endure living with my parents until such time in the future when I could finally live my own life.
Two opposing forces battled inside me for decades. Which one was stronger? Could I consciously live my own life, or would I continue to unconsciously waste my life?
My unconscious feelings and forces that ran my life showed themselves in subtle ways. For example, in my day-to-day purchases, I always bought the cheapest items. That’s what I saw my parents do, so that’s what I unconsciously felt was the right thing to do.
I didn’t take thriftiness to the visible extremes that my parents did. For example, I didn’t make trips to the bakery outlet store to buy cheap bakery products that had an expired shelf life, and then fill up a separate freezer with the bakery products as they did.
I took cheapness to less visible extremes. I worked in a building that had a CVS drugstore on the bottom floor. On breaks, I often browsed through their sale items for snacks.
What I liked or disliked didn’t affect my purchase decisions that much. It didn’t matter that I worked at a high-paying job, and could buy what I wanted, regardless of price. It didn’t even matter that I knew I was allergic to the food!
The overriding concerns were my coupons and what items were on sale in the CVS weekly ads. As a result, I often ended up in some food-induced misery.
I unconsciously recreated my early childhood situation in several ways. I’ve been allergic to peanuts, for example, for as long as I can remember. I remember having allergic reactions to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at my grandmother’s house before I was age 5. My vision would cloud over, and I’d become short of breath after I ate peanut butter.
Another part of my childhood was that I became conditioned to accept that what I wanted didn’t matter. I had to accept whatever anyone chose for me.
Also part of my childhood experience was that I learned to not express my feelings. I was punished when I complained or otherwise showed what I felt in public. When I expressed my feelings to my parents in private, they stonewalled and cold-shouldered me.
So my unconscious was in full control of my life when I bought a cheap snack at CVS with peanuts in it that I didn’t really want but allowed to be chosen for me by their coupons or weekly sale. I recreated my childhood physical and emotional misery as I experienced allergic reactions to the snack, then I couldn’t complain to anyone because I caused the problem myself.
My experience was the opposite of consciously living and enjoying my life. But that’s what I did at age 53 almost every workday.
My unconscious feelings and forces that ran my life showed themselves in less subtle ways, too. For example, I couldn’t stand delays. I made the twenty-mile drive into work early so that I rarely waited in traffic. I structured my daily tasks such that there were few reasons for me to not drive home at a certain time.
Since my drive home was already during the DC area’s long afternoon and evening rush, I usually drove home on local roads rather than on the interstate highway. I preferred the predictable delays due to traffic signals over the unpredictable traffic jams on the interstate highway.
What was so intolerable about a traffic jam on the interstate was that once I got into one, I couldn’t get out of it. The situation made my painful feelings of helplessness rise up from where they resided, my unconscious. My repression to avoid my painful feelings was so strong that I did anything to try to keep down my feelings of helplessness, to keep my unconscious feelings separated from my conscious-awareness.
These are two examples of how, at age 53, the way I lived just sucked joy out of my life. My unconscious was hands down much stronger than my conscious-awareness.
After four decades where I tried or investigated everything else to enjoy my life, some of which I put into words in my first eBook, Getting Well for the First Time, I started feeling therapy in 2008. The central process of feeling therapy would enable me to become more consciously aware of painful memories I’d previously only been dimly aware of on unconscious levels.
My body’s systems would integrate my painful feelings so that they’d become more a part of me and less troubling to me. There’d be less of a barrier of painful feelings between my unconscious and my conscious-awareness.
This was enormously appealing to me, because, as I write above, I felt certain that the causes of my problems lay stored in my unconscious. That the re-experiencing process of feeling therapy promised to be painful seemed of little importance compared to the pain of not enjoying my life.
Yet my pain and the many ways I tried to avoid pain kept a limit on how much progress I made in feeling therapy. Week after week, during therapy sessions, my tendency was to miss the point of feeling therapy. I tended to disengage my consciousness when painful feelings arose from my unconscious.
Disengaging from painful feelings was initially a survival instinct in order for me to not get overwhelmed by them. Disengagement continued to be my initial conditioned reaction to painful feelings.
I couldn’t get well doing that, though. I couldn’t resolve my painful feelings if I remained unconscious of them. I needed to consciously re-experience the traumatic events, and consciously feel my painful feelings in their historical context.
When I integrate my feelings into my conscious-awareness, they’re no longer painful to the same degree. Less pain allows me to subsequently experience fewer out-of-context reactions to my current situation. I better understand and recognize my reactions as appropriate only to their original time and place. I can make better sense of my current feelings.
These may seem like minor points. But the byproducts of the re-experiencing process of feeling therapy make a whole world of difference to me. They become the difference between me being trapped into unconsciously acting out my past in the present, or being free to consciously live my own life in the present as I want and need to do.
Questions
I was taught at an early age to give in to other people’s judgment, and to not question their orders. That conditioned reaction is still active in me. My tendency to disengage my conscious-awareness and to allow someone else to dictate my actions is another way I go off track and don’t live my own life.
Feeling therapy doesn’t require me to give in to my therapist’s or to anyone else’s ideas or feelings. Feeling therapy’s re-experiencing process enables me to remain consciously aware while I “give in” to my own feelings. I extend my conscious-awareness into previously untouched levels of my unconscious where my painful feelings are stored. I know what I feel while I’m feeling it during a therapy session.
Here are some of the concerns I wrote down before I started feeling therapy 3 1/2 years ago. Only one or two are completely resolved at the time of this writing.
Do I even care about other people? How can I relate to other people if I don’t care about them? What stands in my way that I don’t feel for other people?
Why don’t I even care about myself? Why do I let my health go? Why do I let loveless relationships drag on?
Why do I get absorbed in books or music and neglect to relate to other people? To my family at home? To strangers on the train? Why do I stay at home and deny myself the social contact that I want so much?
If I don’t care about myself, how can I really care about other people?
If I’m not honest with myself, how can I be honest with other people?
How can I empathize with other people’s feelings if I don’t feel my own feelings? Sadness? Happiness? Worried? Alone?
What happens if I pretend that I don’t need other people?
When do I get to live my own life?
I’ve focused on this last question for a long time. But my focus arrived only through a series of other questions:
What do I want?
Why do I want what I want?
If I don’t get what I want, what will happen? Will I change what I want?
If I myself change, will what I want also change?
Do I want it, or do I need it?
If I get what I want, what will happen?
By age 53, I’d struggled many times to get what I wanted. With respect to people, I had people who listened to me, people who accepted and respected me, and people who were there for me. I had everything I wanted.
None of these personal relationships made a lasting effect on me, though. I always wanted more. But getting more didn’t satisfy me, either.
I looked around to see if there was anything I could do to enjoy my life. I appeared to live the life that I chose; yet I repetitively felt unsatisfied.
What I later learned during feeling therapy sessions was that I had one big problem: almost everything I did was an act-out. I continually acted out my early needs with people in the present. But these people weren’t the people who could satisfy the early needs that I felt - to be listened to, accepted, respected, and loved. The present context was never the right time or place for my act-outs of my early needs.
I needed to understand everything about this missing piece. It seemed improbable that I’d live my own life until that piece fit.
At age 30: In a submarine
There was nothing like hitting a round age number to get me to review my life. I turned age 30 while I was the supply officer of my third submarine. We pulled into port in Norfolk, Virginia, over the July 4th holiday. I stayed a few nights with the other officers in the bachelors’ quarters of one of the Navy bases.
The part of the birthday bash they threw for me that I’ll write about is going to Chi Chi’s Mexican restaurant, drinking margaritas, and getting publicly embarrassed by the restaurant staff singing “Happy Birthday” to me. Normal stuff. The other stuff was sailors on the beach in the summertime.
What I felt at the time was that I hadn’t yet fulfilled my basic purpose in life, to procreate. I don’t know what brought on my feeling. Was it my family’s conditioning? Was it my social culture? Was it my biology?