I Always Do Something Wrong

As I’ve noted in several blog posts, I’m in a men’s group (Mankind Project); I strongly believe in the construct of same-sex circles as a place for authentic connections, and then coed as a second group.

I’ve done a lot of work since I began my healing journey, and particularly in the last 2+ years since I joined my MKP I-group.  I’m not the same person, and I am the same person in ways that continue to leave me frustrated. Even with awareness, even with preparation, with thought out intention of how I would handle a specific situation, a mere fraction of a triggering moment is sometimes enough to lock me into old patterns. The universe likes patterns—it is a conflict between structure and chaos, the tension between the two where creation and transformation occur- sometimes a rebirth and other times annihilation.

Patterns do not exist in a vacuum—they play off how our minds are wired; my patterns are carried by others but how it manifests will look different. Experiences come into play, but those experiences are often the end result of how we move through the world.

I just don’t think, I overthink, and I don’t just feel, I absorb the emotions of others, and my mind, with uncommon exception, is always burning rubber. Part of me is always scanning, reading the room with an emphasis on potential threats, processing, reflecting, looking for patterns, searching for meaning, projecting outcomes (future-tripping & scenario building), assigning probability confidence-levels to those outcomes, trying to leap ahead to where things are moving in order to be prepared when the forecasted moment arrives, trying to be ready for as many different possible moments as possible,  updating the forecasts, and it’s exhausting and stressful. My mind carries a state of worry about trying to make the right move at the right moment, and by the time the calculations are done the moment has often passed (this happens a lot). I often feel like I’m stuck in a tarpit within my own mind while there’s a party going on nearby, and during those times when I’m able to pull myself out, the party is over and I’m left to imagine what could have been.

Sometimes, I’m all I can handle. I tend to do best in 1-1 situations but anything more than that becomes a challenge as the permutations explode as every human is a world-set of potential variables. It’s not impossible, I have coping mechanisms, and for limited periods I can thrive, but it’s a vulnerable place for me to exist when I’m in a group of 3 or more. But my coping mechanisms are usually no match for the power of patterns.

Last week in my men’s group, I was asked to facilitate another man’s clearing, which is a holding of energy about what someone did, didn’t do, said, or about an institution or group, that’s out of proportion to the perceived grievance or harm. My judgment is that A LOT of people in America should be doing a lot of clearings! I’m not asked that often to facilitate. The truth is, despite not missing a circle in almost 2 years, my growth as a facilitator has been slow—probably the slowest of any man who regularly attends. I know this as a truth, and whereas I happy to step up when I feel like it’s necessary or needed, I’m otherwise resistant (and others sense that resistance and avoid picking me as a kind of giving protection); I judge any facilitation that I do to be an automatic failure because it won’t be as good as what someone else in the room could do. In a sense, that’s ok—failure is part of the learning process—but that belief pushes into a shadow-pattern.

So I’m standing in our circle, and a man is doing his clearing. I share his material. My mind is spinning. The man is sharing story, and I’m trying to take that in and relate it to my material—what insight/pattern was there to be had that I can bring to the table. I’m also hyper-aware of the circle and the emotions and judgments that I detect; in essence, my inner-critic takes center stage and is scanning for confirmation of my failure, of my not doing something right. I carry many negative messages, and one of them is, I ALWAYS DO SOMETHING WRONG. Oddly enough, when it comes to the exercise of knowledge, the running joke with my husband was that I was always right, and he used to say, right again!, usually with humor but sometimes in annoyance 😊. The pain, the meaning behind the negative message, lives in my thoughts, memories, its encoded in my emotional wiring, and my mere awareness often feels feeble against the weight of its perceived truth.

I was and am aware of the I ALWAYS DO SOMETHING WRONG message. It’s something hammered into my consciousness by my step-father who was perfection when it came to finding something to fault 100% of the time in anything I did. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand it; I thought I just needed to try harder, and so I did, and it didn’t matter—my very best was simply not good enough. As an adult, a long-term relationship with a narcissist reinforced that message. Being aware of the pattern, I had a plan for when I would be called to facilitate: If men in the circle started to interrupt, to tell me what to do, I would establish a boundary, and in a respectful way tell them to back off.

When the first interruption occurred, I was triggered—I ALWAYS DO SOMETHING WRONG. In my head, I was drowning—it felt like my mind was hijacked. More interruptions came. I split my awareness, trying to follow the man working while responding to what I was not doing right, and in an instant, the pattern, the negative message, swallowed me whole. Despite my awareness, the plan of what I would do, got buried into parts of my mind that I no longer saw.

There are several issues coming into play—a basic one is that the way I facilitate will not look like what most other men do, which is a problem given that there is a scripted form to the facilitation. If I’m sitting in the chair looking at me facilitate, I would be uncomfortable and I would want to remedy the situation to support the facilitator, the man working, and to make my discomfort go away; I haven’t considered what the biggest driver may be, but I would not be surprised if it’s my discomfort. Because I’m always churning with so much processing, even small choices create immense pressure. As a facilitator, there will be pauses, periods of silence as I try to process. I will break eye-contact, usually looking away and down to give my mind a chance to breathe. I carry the understanding that what I’m doing is a failure, even if necessary to grow which creates more pressure because I know that I’m proving the message right every second that I stand in the role of a facilitator. Things that seem simple to someone else are for me attempting to manage the advent of creation which is ongoing in every moment of universal existence. Because I ALWAYS DO SOMETHING WRONG, my mind is in super overdrive to limit the damage, to do as little wrong as possible, and essentially, to survive the moment and to not cause harm.

I do best when I have a co-facilitator as we can trade-off of each other. When the other man is talking, I have space to think, to check in with what I’m feeling, where I think the work is headed, and to reorganize my mind. But a clearing is usually just 1 person. Except when it’s not when men in the circle jump in to help. I do not just facilitate in the moment—that night and in the days to come, I will continue to be with the man’s work. But in the moment, I often freeze because I care about doing the right thing for the man working, and I know with certainty that it somehow will be wrong, and I continue to struggle with the discomfort of failure. Honestly, I should be ok with failure—and I think the discomfort is in part because of its connection to the negative message. I hated my stepfather for his endless criticism. Hated is a strong word, and it fits the intensity of how I felt and of how hard I tried to overturn that message.

What’s next? I need to do some work around my stepfather. I also need to do work around getting more comfortable with failure. It’s a fundamental part of the human experience, and in its way can be quite beautiful. Where is the meaning if it all comes all so easy? Grace is important—grace to myself for being a flawed human and for being a different kind of human. My want is to be ok with that.