Last time, I promised to tell you something silly and exhausting that I’ve been doing for years. Shall we?
I work from home, so as long as I’m finishing projects, technically I can work whenever I please. Well, at some point I got it into my head that I needed to work until 5pm, Mon-Fri. No big deal, except that I start work at 7am. A ten-hour day is perhaps a wee bit much.
A few weeks ago, I contemplated ending at 4pm instead—wiggling my toes in the work-life balance pool, even if I wasn’t ready to take the plunge.
Wowza, did that ever bring up some stuff—just a one-hour difference!
By now, therapy has me pretty well conditioned: when shit’s a’ stirrin’, I whip out my journal and record the storm. What I uncovered made it clear just how strong my approval-seeking complex is.
Tugging this thread led to a kidnapping dream, a tarot reading, and a funeral. Let’s get into it…
For a very long time—honestly, as far back as I can remember—I’ve lived with a sense of urgency, a fear of “falling behind.” I’ve written before that this urgency feels interconnected with my hyperthyroidism, a state of being revved up, 24/7.
I’ve been working a great deal with my inner parts tied to this urgency, and things have begun to shift. Which led to the kidnapping dream…
I try to call my parent, but their phone goes to voicemail. I try again, and this time a man answers. I don’t recognize his voice. He politely agrees to let me speak to them, but when he hands the phone off, it’s not right—the voice is mine, and I’m terrified. I know that my parent has been kidnapped.
There’s a lot happening in this dream that I won’t be getting into here, but in journaling my interpretations, the relevant point is: when my Inner Parent was kidnapped, I felt defenseless. But it wasn’t any ol’ parent, it was specifically the Critical Inner Parent.
This led to all sorts of connections in my waking life, illuminating how the Critical Inner Parent tries to keep me safe by haranguing me until I overwork. For simplicity, I’ll stick to discussing this in the context of my romance writing.
Before working with this urgency, it manifested as borderline panic at not creating my book series as fast as I “should.” It took me three years to write The Fool & the Threads of Time, and while I was neck-deep in revisions, I was already thinking about writing Book Twenty-One (the series is based on the tarot’s major arcana), plotting how long it would take if I wrote a book a year, wondering if maybe I could manage two books a year, and then maybe I could —
Woah there. Hold up.
Having worked with this part enough* at this point, 90% of that urgency has dissipated, which is nothing short of a miracle. These days, I can feel it in my bones—an acceptance that the series will simply take however long it takes, and that’s a-okay.
* This is important: We don’t have to do this stuff perfectly. Which is handy, because we couldn’t do that anyhow. If we work on things enough, we notice changes—and guess what? That’s good enough!
I’m not lacking in motivation or time-management skills.
I’ve worked with my procrastination parts enough that they now ask me for help instead of throwing a wrench in things, “just to be on the safe side.”
I know I can get things done; the process simply takes time.
And not only that, but the taking-of-the-time is the fun bit! I don’t want to rush through the writing. It’s why I’m doing this in the first place—because I love to write. It literally makes zero sense to zip through as quickly as possible.
But what the kidnapping dream alerted me to was another layer of perceived danger—that without the Critical Inner Parent, I wouldn’t be safe.
Safe from what, though?
As it turns out, not working until 5pm left me in danger, not of taking “too long” with my book series, but the danger of not earning approval. In this case, my own.
If I didn’t work until 5pm, I wasn’t “allowed” to think of myself as having done a good job, of being worthy, of being enough.
It had nothing to do with moving me toward my goal. In fact, I was usually so pooped by 4pm that anything I wrote after that was complete rubbish. The next day, I’d heavily revise or chuck it out. Far from being productive, I was creating more work for myself.
But according to the inner rule, everything was in order, because the Critical Inner Parent operates according to the principle, “Work harder, not smarter.”
Growing up, I learned that “working harder” meant logging longer hours and, crucially, comparing yourself to others to ensure you were doing more. Notice that it has nothing to do with “does this actually move me closer to my goal?”
In fact, there’s no mention of a goal, aside from “working harder,” meaning that the only reward—if you can even call it that—is you get to work a whole bunch. Yipee.
This Critical Inner Parent, a complex in Jungian-speak, came as a package deal with at least two other elements.
- A sense of never being supported, whether by other people (“I have to do it all myself”) or financially (“I work long hours but have little to show for it”).
- A lack of connection with myself and others.
That’s the rub with complexes—they glue together pieces of psychic content that don’t inherently belong together. Psychological differentiation means teasing those apart. In this case, one of the things I needed to uncouple was “working hard” from “never feeling supported.”
Why does this matter? To take one example, when those elements are glommed together, I can’t tell the difference between times when I’m truly unsupported versus times when support is present but I don’t recognize or accept it (among other issues).
And here’s the kicker: if I do allow myself to see and receive support, the old formula breaks, triggering the belief that I must not be working hard enough. Because remember, the only pairing that makes sense to this complex is work hard + never feel supported. Mess with one, and you mess with the other.
To my Critical Inner Parent, working until 5pm had nothing to do with writing books, and it had everything to do with not seeing myself as lazy, which, according to my childhood programming, is synonymous with being unworthy of love.
This was a lot, and we haven’t even gotten to the tarot reading and the funeral! That’s where we’ll pick up next time.
