PurpAnd

I’m still going to counseling… I enjoy it, I’m learning a lot, but most of all, it’s helping. Before I started counseling I thought I was the epidome of the well-adjusted human being. I was generous and selfless, I had a healthy perception of myself, and the relationships with my friends and family were stable. Sounds decent enough, right? All those things are true and while I felt I was balanced… I was not. It turns out well-adjusted doesn’t really mean what I thought it did. Allow me to expand…

Generous and selfless - great traits to have, in my opinion, unless they take over your personality. When this happens, as I experienced, you tend to give in to things, you tend to disconnect from what you really want because you are preoccupied with giving. This leads to being taken advantage of (either intentionally or unintentionally) if people recognize your pattern of behavior. Again, as far as “faults” go, this one isn’t as bad as some (i.e. being violent or abusive) because the only person you’re hurting directly is yourself. I’m recovering from the over-giving mode now. I’m learning to say no to things and I am rediscovering what I want and I am actually making strides to build a world around me that represents things that I enjoy.

Healthy perception of myself - Hmmm, tough one. I could easily write about this for pages and pages and I think it can be tough to explain, but I’ll give you the short version. The healthy perception I had of myself wasn’t actually healthy at all. It was contentedness and pride, and comfort for that matter, in knowing that I was presenting the best version of me based on what I thought other people wanted. This is so not cool. I believe it created unncessary stress because I worked so hard at being someone I am not (not a completely different person, but one that I felt needed to be perfect for everyone else). I am still struggling with this one because I am horribly hard on myself. I am starting to turn the corner though when it comes to things like being ok with failing and not being liked by everyone. This relates to the last thing…

Stable relationships with family and friends - Sure they might have been stable, but were they good, solid relationships? Not as strong as they are now, I can tell you that. See, what happens when you try to be someone that you’re not is you begin to lose what makes up the real you. Looking back I would guess that I had a handful of different versions of me depending on who I was with at any given moment. I would expect this to some degree (i.e. acting different around your boss versus how you act around your significant other), but I think my changes were more dramatic than the differences between those typical relationships. This also is something I am working on consciously. It has actually been kinda fun and completely comforting to know I don’t have to mold myself to how I think others want me to be. What has helped is thinking about how I am around my sister. She and I have grown pretty close since college and I don’t feel an ounce of fakery around her. If I can carry that feeling with me all the time, I think it will work out great for me.

So well-adjusted for me actually means I was fine tuned to how I thought I should be. As I work on these issues, I am seeking true balance in which there is less of a need for adjusting. I know that these are changes that don’t happen overnight, far from that for sure, but I am pleased with how things have progressed.

I am curious if any of you have similar experiences? You don’t have to share on here, you can pop me an email if you want, but I would hope that I am not the only one who has found value in something as simple as sitting and talking with someone for an hour a week.