Approximate reading time: 7 min
It has arrived.
The BIG 5.0. is finally here.
Happy birthday me!;-)
It has been a pretty great week.
Last weekend I finished my final coding assignment that I have been working on for the past 6 months and on Tuesday I received my results.
I needed 50% to pass the module and 70% to get my CAPA Coding reliability…
(Essentially, what that means is that I will be able to use the Child and Play Attachment assessment (CAPA) to code pre-school and school-age children for their attachment strategies and also recognise markers they might have for complex trauma.)
And…
Wait for it…
I got 80%
I was so happy, I cried.
(Of course I did:-)
I don’t think I have ever felt more proud of myself.
So yes, I am telling the world!!!
It was the absolute best birthday present ever:-)
It feels like a lifetime of watching and noticing children and their struggles might finally be starting to pay off. Having this attachment lens to observe children’s behaviour through has made such a huge difference in how I work with so many of my students. It’s obviously still early days….I am still a novice…..but the excitement of knowing that all the hard work is starting to pay off has been an amazing feeling to have this week:-)
This week I also stumbled across this video by Heidi Priebe, which was somehow just what I needed to put myself
(and my up-down emotions)
back into perspective.
The video is based on the Conscious Competency Learning Model, which she has applied to healing insecure attachment styles. It’s not anything I haven’t heard before, but it has been my experience that, sometimes, things have to come around a couple of times until I am truly ready for them to sink in.
Allow me to untangle my thoughts:
I think this year, especially, I have been so bogged down with this ever-increasing doom that surely…by now…at the ripe old age of 50, I should have healed everything. I mean, I have been harping on for years about how I am working towards an earned secure attachment strategy……and yet somehow my accreditation still eludes me. Let’s see, I have been in therapy for years, I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life studying childhood trauma …. I got my honours in learning support, I studied Compassionate Inquiry, The Safe and Sound Protocol (based on the polyvagal theory)…and I’ve spent the last 4 years completing my master’s in attachment theory!
I mean dam….I’ve been working my arse off to be a earned secure human and yet there are STILL moments when I feel more wound up and confused than I ever have.
Like, WTF universe!
Enough already!
Hand me my bloody earned secure certificate, please, so I can live the happy ever after that I was destined to live!
But nooooooooo
For the last year or so, starting around about July last year, it feels like someone has taken all my thoughts, beliefs and judgments about life and thrown them into a blender.
Random story:
About 6 years ago, before I moved back to London…I decided to have ‘closure’ coffee dates with 3 ex-boyfriends whom I had dated during my 10 years living in South Africa. At that point in time, I had been in therapy for a couple of years, and I was beginning to understand the role I played in a lot of my relationships not working out …..so I think I just wanted to reach out and own that.
(Call it the ‘making amends’ stage of my life….)
It was incredibly therapeutic to be able to have an open, honest conversation about what had happened between us. All coffee dates, I am pleased to report, went down well.
(I am very grateful to be able to say that I have dated some really lovely men in my lifetime)
One ex, who shall remain nameless, jumped at the chance to reflect back to me how I tend to see the world through rose coloured tinted glasses, that I needed to accept that there are a lot of manipulators in this world and that I shouldn’t be so trusting of everyone and everything.
I remember leaving our coffee date feeling ever so grateful that I wasn’t dating HIM anymore.
Good grief, imagine living your life as a cynic…..how exhausting must that be?
Well, fast forward 8 years and all I can say is
OMG THE MAN was right!!!!
I am morphing into a cynic!
I feel like I have spent the last year debunking so many of the things that I have blindly believed in for so long. eg the law of attraction, psychics, spiritual healers, and self-help gurus. I’ve spent hours on YouTube binge-watching other fellow sceptics
(AKA realists)
who point out the lies, manipulation and tactics so many of these people use. It’s like I have crawled down this ‘critical thinking’ rabbit hole and as much as I would love to go back to my rose coloured world of blinkered hope and happiness.…I just can’t. Hell, there are a couple of people whom I have written about on this blog over the years who, frankly, I now think are absolute charlatans. Ok, maybe that’s a wee bit harsh…. let’s just say they are brilliant salespeople who have managed to create very lucrative careers from exploiting vulnerable people and selling them the dream.
So yeah, at the moment everything inside of me feels like a disorganised, jumbled up, chaotic mess. It’s a weird space to be in, really. It feels like everything makes sense and nothing makes sense. It feels completely hopeless at times and yet at other times it feels so bloody liberating.
Seeing the Conscious Competence Model again reminded me that I am still fluctuating between
Stage 2: Conscious incompetence
and Stage 3: Conscious Competence
I continue to learn new things, I am slowly starting to break down and disengage from old beliefs that no longer serve me, and I am doing my best to apply what I have learnt.
Sometimes I succeed.
Sometimes I fuck it up whole heartedly.
Most of the time, it takes a huge amount of focused attention and conscious effort…which at times can be a little exhausting.
But now that I am a fully fledged adult, of 50,
I am going to do my best to enjoy the chaos and to remind myself that at some point in time
Stage 4: Unconscious Competence
will materialise😊
