Professor of Sherlockology and Advanced Snape Studies

I know there is a better way to deal with this and I know that I did not do this well. I believed that no matter what words I chose, I would either be minimizing the experiences of someone to make someone else feel less bad or I would be alienating and hurting other students for misunderstanding them and allowing them to take the blame for what is starting to sound like a linguistic misunderstanding. I erred on the side of not minimizing the experience of the student who felt shut out. 

As a consequence, I worry I have really alienated people from this course and the profession by "taking sides" and stepping in to mediate something in the most clumsy way possible. I feel guilt and shame for unfairness and inadequacy at my job. I am dreading interacting with these students and this class now because I clearly handled this badly. I tried something I had never done before and I failed. I knew I would fail, but I also knew not doing anything would be failing in another way. 

Fear of failing paralyzes me. It is what is making it hard for me to write my book. (What if it sucks so much?) It's also why I don't like to speak Swedish in front of people or don't like trying new things with an audience. Trying and failing is humiliating. When I fail publicly, I feel shame for hours. 

This week I had my first official EMDR session with my therapist. We identified a core memory - it was not from the physical abuse. It was about an incident after a soccer match where my father expressed such disappointment and contempt for my poor playing. It is deeply tied to my fear of failure. Failure is not something I perceive of an opportunity for growth and improvement. Failure is very personal. It's associated with my worth and whether people will want to have me in their lives or keep me around. Who do I think I am to deserve love and attention and respect and money or a job or friends if I am just so incompetent. 

Each visit was fun and deeply meaningful in their special ways. But in separate conversations with each, I found a trend emerging that I want to stare at and maybe take to therapy.

After listening to me talk at length about a number of things including a struggle with knowing my own values, my old friend observed that I had values and my own self but that I had been raised and trained to doubt in myself and not believe that I was capable of knowing them. She said that my authentic self was visible and is what got me to throw off my upbringing and reject the very overt patriarchal belief system* being imposed on me. This was a really good observation.

My newer friend shared with me something she and her husband had found useful for understanding themselves - The Enneagram System of personality types. They did say it was heavily used by Christian fundamentalists but not based in Christianity. I took a look and found it reminded me of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator which I find useful for thinking about certain personality features. The quick test very easily highlighted a personality type that resonated with me: Type 6: The Loyalist. When I read the description of this type, I saw the things that I have been consciously struggling with - things like anxiety, fear of the future, deep insecurity and self-doubt (I don't trust my own judgement). I've highlighted key words below that resonate with me.

The committed, security-oriented type. Sixes are reliable, hard-working, responsible, and trustworthy. Excellent “troubleshooters,” they foresee problems and foster cooperation, but can also become defensive, evasive, and anxious—running on stress while complaining about it. They can be cautious and indecisive, but also reactive, defiant and rebellious. They typically have problems with self-doubt and suspicion. At their Best: internally stable and self-reliant, courageously championing themselves and others.

Merging these two threads, I can see choices I have made and continue to make that stem from a need for support and stability - going along with my father's lies about the abuse to keep my family stable; scrambling to secure citizenship documentation and my passports during lockdown so I could travel/flee if I needed to; taking on the chairing of faculty searches or the faculty senate vice president to keep my department and university running when it seemed most unstable; taking on the president role of an European organization to grow it and stablilize it (my vision is not grand - it is to make it secure so it does not go under) when no one else was willing to take that responsibility. In all these tasks, especially the leadership ones, I feel overwhelmed by the terror of failure and ruining everything. I am overwhelmed with self-doubt and act with too much caution. 

It is still early days with this new therapist, but I want to hold on these pieces of information because they are linked. I am an anxious person who struggles with self-doubt and am fear-driven. I don't want to be this way, but I have been conditioned to doubt myself and my abilities. I know that anxiety is also a perimenopausal symtom and that may be spiking right now as well. But so much of my fear stems from self-doubt. I am tired of this and want to move towards self-reliance instead. I want to recognize my own strength and agency and to stop thinking of myself only as someone weak-minded and fearful who is acted upon by other stronger forces and personalities. 


*My father, who sexually abused me when I was a child, used to have explicit talks with me about the purpose and higher calling of a woman being to give birth and raise children. He used to disparage the women he worked with and swore that he would never have another woman manager again because they were too emotional. My mother never wanted me to leave home for university and thought all I needed was a little community college coursework before I married a local man and had children and was a SAHM like her. This was not my fate because my father persuaded her to let me go to Duke University (my first choice university) in part to make up for sexually molesting me. After I graduated, I did not have a career direction and spent a lost almost year back home working admin jobs. My dad wanted me to get a job with a bank. I instead found a position teaching English in Japan for three years, and have never looked back.