Freedom from the Cage
It's always felt just out of reach...
I wrote in 2022:
I feel like an animal in a cage. I can sense the freedom outside but old mental habits from the cult still hold me prisoner. I want to feel free to say what I need to say to get my kids the accommodations they need at school. And I do it. But the mental anguish I go through first feels like a prison.
I plan a trip, and I’m really good at it, but mentally I feel like I have to account for every. Single. Damn. Thing. Or I’ve failed. So I go on the trip, but the mental work is so heavy. I feel like I can sense what it would be like to go on a trip without this load, but it’s not in my reach yet.
Occasionally, I experience a moment of freedom. A mistake that I greet with laughter instead of shame. Peace in the daily chaos instead of an expectation that if I had just X or Y then things wouldn’t be so crazy.
I've actually found a key that unlocks this cage. Zoloft! I hesitated so long about trying meds, but freedom from my usual anguish is amazing. I can have an assertive conversation with the insurance company or the optometrist's office without getting flooded with angry feelings. I went to a 504 meeting at my child’s school without any anxiety beforehand.
I relate differently to my kids too. I've been working for years on pausing, taking deep breaths, letting go of trying to control them, etc. But now I can sit calmly with my daughter while she works on her viola playing test that's a week late and she promised her teacher she would do tonight. I no longer have this tight grasping feeling inside as I do so.
I used to constantly have this feeling that if I don't plan for everything that could go wrong, everything will crash and burn. Now I feel like I don't know what will happen, and that it's still okay. It's much easier for me to trust that my kids and I are creative people, and we will figure out how to handle what we need to handle. (I've been telling my kids this for years but didn’t really feel it inside.)
In the cult, we were supposed to trust that God would work things out, but our minds actually controlled God. I had to always listen for God's voice and if I missed it, he might not tell me again and I might walk right into the thing he was warning me about. I couldn't just trust that God would work things out, bring good things to me, etc. because I had to BELIEVE that he would. If my believing failed, then God wouldn't do it.
In her master’s thesis, Carolina Fernandez describes the Law of Attraction as "the ideology of mind as omnipotent." She doesn't go into the religious uses of this type of thinking, but I realized while reading her thesis that even in a religious context, that's what we believed. Our minds could control God. Our minds were the key.
That’s so much pressure.
Although I’m glad I started Zoloft (and wish I had done it years ago), the mental work I've done since I left the cult is still important. I've read about how to be assertive vs passive or aggressive and have practiced that. The difference is now being assertive doesn't ruin my day with anxiety. I’ve practiced mindfulness and watching anxious thoughts float by instead of getting wrapped up in them. Even now I’m in therapy to continue this work because even on Zoloft, I experience anxiety. The difference is that anxiety is not my constant companion anymore.