The Familiarity Constriction

daniel jacob self
Jul 9, 2023
4 min read

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❣️ Are you a current client? First time here?

I'm self conscious

I want to take a moment to talk about what you're going to hear here.

This is a place where, through the medium of heightened, poetic prose music, and sometimes even dance, everything from the minutia of day to day neuroses — so often written off as petty or melodramatic — to the depths of isolation and despair — so often obfuscated, lest it show us to be weak or sick or incapable — can be given voice without judgment.

Many of us silence these parts of ourselves, but especially, ironically, those of us who facilitate healing for others.

All of the philosophies and practices I share in my writing and my facilitation are the fruits of my own lifelong healing journey. The wisdom that I've been gifted by mentors and family and friends. The community around me and the community within me. All the parts of me: the angry, the hurt, the joyful, the resilient, the despairing.

So much of what I'm able to offer to those I work with comes from some initial moment of pain or discomfort in me that has led me to seek out greater wholeness. Which I'm then able to share with you: my community and my clients.

So often we see the fruits of a healing journey, but don't get any insights into the labor: the twists and turns along the way.

We see the shiny outcomes, but not the pain that often motivated us to seek the healing out in the first place, or keeps us committed to the work of collective healing.

So Self Conscious is, in essence, the place where I honor my 'uglier' sides. The parts of me, that in my journey of learning to care for them, have proven that old Leonard Cohen quote so very true.

"Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."

Self Conscious is also the place where I honor my inner angsty teen and, let's be real, my inner angsty adult! I hope it might speak to yours as well.

However, please know that the monologues in Self Conscious, while based on my own experiences, are works of artistic expression.

Some of them come from different parts of my life. Some of them were written when I was much younger or are about experiences when I was much younger. Some of them are amalgamations of different moments in time, sometimes told with different details for the sake of the heart of the artistic expression of each piece.

As Pablo Picasso once said,

"We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie. That makes us realize the truth. At least the truth that is given to us to understand."

So my only request in breaking with the norms that would encourage me to keep this form of artistic expression very separate from the rest of my work in this world is this:

If you are someone I work with in a coaching, therapeutic, or facilitating capacity, please take a moment to discern for yourself if you would like to hear these more vulnerable parts of my journey.

For some, it can be radically humanizing and affirming to hear being able to see the humanity and vulnerability of someone who holds space for us and offers guidance. For some, it can feel off putting or distracting: taking away from our experience of having a place we're able to go that can be wholly and fully about our experience without the complexities that can come from the awareness of another person's struggles, feelings, differences, and similarities.

So I ask you to give yourself the gift of discerning for yourself.

What would be most in alignment with your own healing journey right now?

And to remember that what you do here will not necessarily be current time, literal truth, but artistic expression: drawn from experiences across my lifetime— some of it expanded or shifted for artistic purposes.

All that being said... if you decide, you'd like to listen. I hope you enjoy.

I encourage you to listen with the parts of yourself that perhaps have always felt too melodramatic, or too much, too sensitive, or all alone in parts of your pain.

I hope you can laugh with me at the neuroses and perhaps cry with me at the moments of hopelessness. Some perhaps relatable and some perhaps very different to your unique travels through this sometimes beautiful, sometimes painful journey of life.

If you do proceed, thank you for receiving these vulnerable parts of me.

If you decide not to proceed, thank you for honoring what feels right to you right now.

If you do proceed, I hope if nothing else, these pieces resonate with and help certain vulnerable parts of you feel they deserve expression. No matter how small or how large.

And as always, please join in by commenting below.

I'd love to hear what you connect to, what you feel moved by, and what comes up for you as you listen.

Because ultimately...

I don't know.

What do you think?

I'm self conscious

Let's talk about family... for a minute.

Have you ever felt as though you both love your family with all your heart — feel the depths of your connection to the people whose very existence helped shape and form your very being and presence in this world — and at the same time, felt like every time they say anything, however innocuous — actually, often especially when it's of a particularly innocuous nature — it feels as though someone's scraping nails down a very personalized chalkboard pressed closely up to your highly sensitive ears?

... Just me?

What is that? How can I love people so much and simultaneously feel... allergic to them?

Why does it often seem to feel easier for me to feel the depths of my love for them when they're... somewhere else? As opposed to when they're nearby: and I feel the metaphorical angry hives begin to rapidly welt across my intrapsychic skin.

I think at least one piece of the puzzle might be that particular blend of distinctiveness and reminiscence that family seem to specialize in.

I can't help but notice that, as a broadly generalized theme, the people who tend to drive me the most proverbially bonkers as I move through life, attempting to be a loving and caring person along the way, are the ones that in some way or another remind me of some aspect of myself... in a few notably consistent ways:

Either, they seem to be struggling with something — some way of feeling or acting or speaking, some way of handling a certain timorousness or other — in a manner which I feel I've worked hard to work through so as not to do any longer...

Or, they seem to embody with loud, carefree abandon a particular trait or way of being that I feel ashamed of or particularly dislike in myself and am currently working on healing or changing, yet which this Brash Hypothetical seems to see no problem with whatsoever — even as I sit here working so earnestly to shift it in myself!

Or else...There's something about them — some element to how they show up — that touches in me a reminder of a great fear I carry:

There seems to be this not-fully-conscious list living inside of me, bobbing around somewhere, just on the threshold of my awareness...

A list containing a series of behaviors — ways of speaking or acting — that, were I to discover I unconsciously embodied, would cause me to feel such deep embarrassment and anger — red hot shame and dislike for myself — that I might melt into a molten puddle of make-me-disappear right where I stood!

And so....

When some theoretical hapless human happens to show up in my particular sphere of hyper-awareness exhibiting a trait which pings any of these three inner alarm bells, I have to work quite diligently to find my way back from my most disdainful cigarette-smoking, leather-jacket-wearing cool kid into the state of open, empathetically contextualizing kindness and connectivity from within which I attempt to meet the vast majority of fellow beings whose path I happen to cross in this life.

If this recognition of seemingly shameful sameness seems to be a relatively reliable rubric for my transformation from Easeful Caring Communicator to Eyeball-Rolling Dismisser of my Fellow Travelers, with how much more marked rapidity would these same mechanisms of self-discernment be likely to spring into action when I am around my family? The very Collective Theme from which I am an Epigenetic Variation. The very Chord of Sameness from which my whole life can be seen as one big Ancestral Riff.

Okay, so that seems to make pretty good sense.

But so then what?

Because at the heart of me, beneath the gnarled up ball of Insecurity-Inducing Reminders from which I seek to differentiate myself when brought face to face with my Manifest Origins, I feel immense gratitude for all of the trials and tribulations that my forebears have gone through to get me to the very place where I can find myself growing and changing and differentiating enough to feel annoyance at certain aspects of how I might no longer wish to choose to be, to begin with!

And yet, the chalk board nail-scraping experience persists.

Perhaps, in part, to remind me of why my particular little microscopic allotment of this Intergenerational Relay Race is so very important...

Because for everything they've been able to give me, there are things they simply haven't. Because they didn't have it to give. Because it hadn't been given to them.

And for all the things they managed to discover and gather and offer to me that they were never offered by those who came before them, there's yet more I wish to give to those who come after me.

And that's all, I suppose, exactly as it should be.

So... gratitude, then, and diligence in my own journey of growth and healing.

Because pretty soon — if not already — despite my very best efforts... I have no doubt I will be providing the nails-on-chalkboard experience for those whose relay race has yet to come — who can see just that little bit further than I can.

And I hope that, when that time comes, I'll be able to listen and show as much care to learn from their experiences as those who have come before me show toward learning from mine.

Whether I'm showing up with all the earnest, caring, connective empathy in my deepest truest of hearts...

Or rocking my Eye-rolling, Cigarette-smoking, Leather-jacket-wearing, Disdainful Angst-ridden Teen that I fear may never fully desert me.