expecting different results

In yesterday’s post “why I hate grad school” I wrote of my experience undergoing the moments around my graduate review. With a days distance and some perspective I think it is fair to say that I don’t deal with stress well. This isn’t the first time I have said this. I think my inability to cope with stress pops up in many forms: especially with my kids.

Parenting is hard. When you are engaged as a parent it is almost impossible to get much else done. Children need care. They need attending. They need assistance. They need to know not to flush an entire roll of paper towels down the toilet. They need to know that pulling hair and hitting and stealing their sister’s toys are not acceptable forms of dispute resolution. But mostly they need to know I love them and that I am there for them, and they only get this when I am fully engaged with them. In fact, most of the problems that I have with kids, both in their behavior and my stress come when I try to do too many other things when I should really just be with my kids. Sadly I have tried many times to negotiate work and school and kids simultaneously, and it almost never turns out well. Quite the contrary. What I actually end up doing is teaching myself how to react stressfully to stressful situations.

Did you get that? I am not sure I did so I am going to keep saying this until I learn it. By setting up stressful situations in my life, I am not teaching myself better management skills. I am not multitasking. I am not “being efficient.” By setting up stressful situations in my life I am teaching myself how to get into stressful situations. Worse I never handle stressful situations well, so I can’t even say that I am teaching myself how to deal with stress. That would take forethought and some advanced planning. No, all I do is perfect the ability to throw myself into situations that invariably end up with me freaking out or losing my temper and wondering why life is so damn hard.

Graduate school is another example of this. At some point early on in my graduate career I felt abused. It is hard to say now, looking back, if I was abused or not, but feeling put upon I reacted badly, that is, I reacted like I do in any stressful situation: I freaked out and got angry. This set up a pattern for how I was to deal with these graduate “encounters” for the next five years; through two degrees and two schools.

In writing this I am having this “no s**t Sherlock” experience. This is the kind of thing people talk about all the time in therapy. Living with an alcoholic, for example, creates in most family members of the alcoholic a kind of rehearsed response to their behavior. But it isn’t fair to pick on people just in therapy. This is how we learn to treat our friends. This is how we learn to be with loved ones, with co-workers, and in short. We rehearse the stories we tell ourselves, like actors on the stage, until we become so good in our roles that Laurence Olivier himself could not do as good a job.

Yesterday’s response to my gradate faculty was unfortunate. But it is really MY unfortunate, because it is the response that I have come to expect from myself. The question it, I only have a few more chances to do this right, and do I want to use that time to unlearn some of these behaviors and change the way I interact with these people. Or do I move on and hope that next time will be different?

Well- one thing they say in therapy a lot it “insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.”