Mark Smith: “Often you’re trying to keep your ugly truths stuffed down beneath your psychological defenses. Your spouse will often be an expert witness who will rat you out and expose your soft underbelly.”
“Your therapist has a scalpel and he’ll make you bleed. It isn’t about feeling better, it’s about getting better, and that starts with knowing who you are.”
“Your defenses get eviscerated and this exposes your shame, but it also gets at your heart and soul.”
“Marriage is designed to tear down your defenses. It’s designed to hurt you. Marriage is the big truth-teller. It ain’t gonna tell you much truth for most people the first five years. It’s gonna tell you some lies.”
“If you were abandoned in your childhood, you’ll be abandoned in your marriage. If you were raged at in your childhood, you’ll be raged at in your marriage.”
“For most couples, the good times disappear after about seven years and then you slowly drift apart and there’s this emotional cut-off and that’s when the bombs goes off.”
“The things you learn about yourself aren’t shaming truths at all, they just feel shaming.”
“Almost everybody needs to be in recovery for something be it co-dependency or counter-dependency or workaholism or sexual addiction or depression or abandonment issue. Recovery is just knowing the truth about who you are and working on it.”
“Therapy is just a get-acquainted meeting where you go every week and get better acquainted with yourself.”
“Our defenses are meant to keep us from knowing too much about ourselves but people who come across us, they know but it’s not polite at parties to just come out and say it but everybody’s thinking it.”
“Your spouse’s job is to introduce you to yourself.”
Luke: I took this writing class and I was struck by how difficult it was for all of us to take feedback. I’d get copious notes from the teacher and I’d only review them once or twice because it was so challenging. We all got specific feedback from the teacher and from each other about what was working, but was it hard for us to incorporate it as opposed to the relief of living in our set beliefs about what works. I still have all the feedback recorded so that over time, I can take more in. Denial is a protective device that stops us from feeling that the world is shifting under our feet and that reality is not what we think. Moving out of it is slow unless the pain of living in it becomes more intense than the pain of changing.
* My tee hee personality has been dormant the past six years or so but I’m noticing it coming out this weekend. The boost from the modafinil and the prospect of good things on the horizon makes me giddy so I’ve been getting obnoxious and lost two friends over the past 40 hours through spontaneous disparaging comments. I will try to dial it down and be good. The past six years, I’ve been feeling small in a big world, but now I’m drifting into grandiosity where I say and do stupid things, but it’s so much fun feeling like King of the World!
