Allocation

Last week my counselor observed I have a problem with "allocating time."

I snatched at that phrase with both hands and curled myself around it.  It felt like a key.

Today I walked in and asked her for scrap paper.  She brought me cardstock.  I tore the sheets in quarters and began filling them with words.  

Allocation. Triage. Priorities. Resources. Flexibility. Values. Boundaries. Structure. Commitment. Block.

The quote from the guy in group who said "I'm tired of sharpening my ax."  Tired of sharpening my ax and never getting any cutting done.  And what does that mean, when one keeps having to come back to the whetstone because the cutting is just no good?  

Maybe we have the wrong ax.

For a couple years now, this counselor (mental health professional #21) and I have been working on this level of not enough resources and daily triage and the constant flexibility required to deal with the constant instability.  The Situation I Am In.

When she said the word "allocation", I felt like we broke through to the underlying layer, to an issue I will carry into any situation I am in.  

As I've held the word through the week, it has occurred to me that "allocation" is deeply related to "boundaries"-- as though we have boundaries between people, and allocations within ourselves.

And we started to talk about boundaries.  She tested my statement that I grew up in a family where boundaries weren't allowed: was it really that boundaries were not allowed, or that boundaries were not respected?  

She kept time with me for three minutes while I just went back in my head and stream-of-conscious listed everything I could remember about growing up and boundaries. 

After she'd listened so carefully to me, I asked her to describe what she had heard, not allowed, or not respected, and she firmly agreed that my experience was of "not allowed."  

I want to hold on to that, both to being willing to revisit my description and to open it up to someone else's interpretation, and also to the sense of being witnessed.

She had a whole new list of words for me after listening to me.  Words like Personal Space. Freedom. Intimacy.  Writing the word "Intimacy" on its card nauseated me, I doubled over, then allowed myself to get down on the floor and rock myself.

The cards lined up in patterns, it looked almost like a tarot reading.  Allocation was on one side, Values crosswise underneath it, and Block coming out from under it. Priorities formed a bridge from that central grouping to the line up of Resources, Triage, Flexibility on one side.  On the other side, Boundaries, Commitment, Stability, and all the words from my childhood.

And thrown off in a corner, under a chair, the word that I now know is the center of the *next* layer down.

Power.

We're not there yet.  We are closer than we were.  This is the farthest in therapy I have ever gotten.

===  

I realized that I'd led the way to this breakthrough by wanting to focus on mental blocks recently-- not on cognitive behavioral therapy techniques to get through a particular block, which we've tried to do time and again and which mostly hasn't worked at all-- but on the whole big issue of mental blocks and the role they play in my life.  The chaplain's mantra: lean into the pain.  Lean into the place of resistance.  It is always the way forward.