The era of secret poop

Flushing the toilet is easy, right? I mean, I’ve never, ever heard anyone say that it’s hard. Can you imagine?  “Jeez, dude, that toilet flushing I had to do today was just brutal.”  “Ugh, pushing that little lever down was tiring. I’m gonna need a rest and a beer after that fiasco.” Um, no.  

And then I had kids, and all bets were off. According to Evie (7) and Jonah (5), toilet flushing is an exceptionally difficult life task.

Our family attended an out-of-town wedding this weekend. It was fun, but even the best of events is kind of exhausting with kids in tow. After the hours-long "let's pack up our stuff and go" process, followed by the hour-long ride in the minivan, the sight of home was more than welcome. Home! My safe place, my refuge. I couldn't get in the door fast enough. Usually I’m greeted by the still-new-house scents of cut wood, paint, and something vague gluey…but not this time. This time, I was hit with a wave of stank that I’d consider to be a Nostril Assault. My haven smelled like a damn outhouse.

And I knew it wasn’t our kitty's fault. Willy ain't got time for that. He's all about that litter box.

No, I knew right away what the problemo was. And the problemo, as it so often is when something unexpectedly stinks, was the kids' doing. A poop was left in the kids’ bathroom toilet all weekend. So I got to return from a long weekend to a festering, stinking pile of poop.

This happens at our house sort of a lot. In fact, often enough that my husband and I have coined our own expression for it-- “secret poop”—because some kid poops and runs, we don’t know who did it, and we find it way later than we’d like.

Evie claims that she is scared of the sound of toilet flushing, yet she admits that she flushes at school. Jonah's excuse is that he is scared he will clog the toilet. He just started wiping his own ass, and so he goes through a lot of toilet paper in trying to get his rear clean. Understandable. It really is gratifying that he’s finally wiping on his own— it’s a victory, in and of itself. When it started happening, I thought it meant that I was going to get to have less contact with human excrement—always a bonus. Turns out that now I still get the esteemed privilege of being responsible for the care and keeping of everyone's poop, it's just that now I get to look at it, smell it, and maneuver it when it's not fresh.

 Sometimes (many times) the toilet is clogged, proving Jonah's point, but still, does he have to let it linger? (Yes, if you’re from my generation, you now have the Cranberries song in your head. I did that on purpose). Could he tell us about the problem right away so we don't have festering poop? Festering poop and TP leads to plunging, basically a poop post-mortem, and that's no fun on so many levels. Tonight my husband tried to teach Jonah about courtesy flushing, in an attempt to both salvage Jonah’s clean butt/pride yet prevent flush avoidance/poop festering/smell lingering/poop post-mortem. We'll see how that goes.

We've just been bribing Evie. Ten cents for every unprompted flush. Seems to take the edge off that whole “fear” thing.

After my third poop post-mortem this week, and hence my third time this week scrubbing out the bowl, I started making (possibly empty) threats. You know, like, you can't see your friends tomorrow if this happens again, I will take away your Beanie Boos, the legos are temporarily going to a secret place where only Mommy gets to play with them. I told them I’d punish both of them if I found any secret poop, since there’s no way to tell who did it. The kids were unfazed. I think they've got my number, and knew that this was just tired Mommy blowing smoke up their asses. I mean, am I really going to actually periodically check the toilet for flush adherence? Obviously not, or the whole evening poop post-mortem and threatening ritual would probably not occur.

But seriously, I swear to Pete if I have to clean the toilet one ore time this week, I'm gonna blow a gasket. 

Breaking the rules

I broke one of my own rules for being a therapist today.

I cried.

You wouldn’t know it from watching how “therapy” is done on TV, but therapists have a lot of rules to follow. Some of them are set for us by ethical codes of our profession—things like “keep client information private and protected” (duh) and “don’t have sex with clients” (double duh).

And then, most therapists have these other rules that we place upon ourselves, things that have less to do with the general ethical codes and more to do with our own personalities, preferences, and theories of how we help people.

“No crying” isn’t a hard and fast rule for therapists. In fact, it’s subject to some debate within our field. I poignantly remember getting close to tears once with one of my very first clients. Because I was still in training at the time, I brought it up with my peers and supervisors. Through discussion, I came to more fully appreciate a powerful truth: that therapy is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. I learned that probably each of us would handle this in our own way, and that this was okay, because we each have our own unique personalities and ways of helping people. And that day I set my own personal standard on crying in session.

But today, I deviated from my personal standard and cried. I will usually let myself get to “misty eyes,” and that’s my cutoff. That’s where I internally say to myself “Alright, this isn’t about you” and tuck in the tears. Today I couldn’t. My eyes filled up and a couple of tears spilled over. I wasn’t sobbing or totally losing my shit in any way. Yet it was definitely crying, and I know my client saw.

I like to think that I chose that no-crying standard for benevolent reasons—to benefit and protect the client. I want to prevent therapeutic interactions from becoming “the Allison show”—that is, the heart of therapy should be the client’s experiences, not mine. In order to really be effective, I need for clients to know and believe that I’m hanging in there with them, no matter what they’re talking about and what pain they are expressing. I fear that if they see me cry, they might start to think they are hurting me and start holding back on me. This is the last thing that I want, as people are often already holding back a lot in their lives outside of therapy, in order to protect themselves and others.

Yet, as with so many things in life, there is another way to look at this. And this other perspective could make me out to be a hypocrite (again, damnit!).  In my point of view, crying is simply an expression of sadness. I also believe that letting others see our emotions is a genuine and hence courageous thing to do -- showing others who we are and what moves us is one thing that helps us others feel connected to us. (I say these things to people all the time! All. The. Time.) So, in showing clients that I’m moved by what they have said, am I possibly modeling an appropriate expression of emotion and maybe even aiding our connection?

*big gulp, tiny voice* And, is it also possible that the real reason that I don't let myself cry in front of clients is because I dislike others, client or not, seeing my vulnerability? (Damnit.)

IDK, being a therapist and making therapisty decisions is hard.

What I do know is that my emotional control in therapy has been tested lately. I've heard some of the saddest stories that I've ever heard; often situations that are very personally relatable. And while I do work hard to keep my own personal baggage out of the therapeutic interaction, at the end of the day I'm still human. The things that people say, that I witness through listening to client's stories with my heart and playing those stories through in my mind-- they affect me. Some stories are told with such immediacy and detail that the hardest thing in the world would be to not see it through my client's eyes. Sometimes the pain in the room is so palpable that it steals my breath, like I’ve been socked in the gut.

To be both naturally imaginative and empathic is a blessing-- these attributes make me who I am, and they are the backbone of my work as a therapist. Yet these very same attributes are the ones that keep me up at night and that allow me to imagine terrible things happening to me and those that I love-- and they're the personal characteristics that are making me cry in session! Stupid paradoxes everywhere!

Anyway, yes, the tears have been happening and I think they’re likely to keep on happening. Sometimes they will behave themselves and stay in my eyes, and other times they may go rogue on me and escape. As you can probably tell from the rest of this post, I’m still not 100% sure how I feel about this level of personal sadness being out in the open for clients to see. I'm well aware that there is processing that I can and will do with clients if I cry, and that this can give me a sense of where to go from there. I'm just still not sure I should be letting it happen in the first place.

Instead of the nice tidy resolution that I seem to go for in these posts, today I’m going to have to leave stuff hanging. I’m still working on figuring this whole thing out. Maybe I’ll stick with my old no-crying rule. Maybe I’ll come up with a new rule. I'm just going to roll with the ambiguity of it all today, and find solace in knowing that I’m working on understanding.  Life’s messy, folks.

And in the spirit of dialogue and progress, I’d like to end this post with a question: If you were (or are) a client in therapy, what would it be like for you if your therapist was so moved by something you said that s/he cried?

On body image...and donut sex

Note: Originally published in 2011 on my old blog,  ideclarelifecrisis.blogspot.com, revised and re-published 2015.

9/21/2011

I ate a donut last night. My taste buds nearly imploded from all of the deliciousness. It was one of my favorites, a cream-filled longjohn (the fluffy white cream! None of that nasty Bavarian cream business). Granted, it didn't have nuts and its frosting was white rather than chocolate-- but these were forgivable shortcomings. Besides, it was a gift, and I don't look donut gift-horses in the mouth. I just shove the donuts in my mouth. Much easier.

So I’m sitting there, caressing my donut, devouring it with ardor. I rather paradoxically demolished that donut in the most gentle, most caring way you can imagine --think “food sex," that's how it is with me and donuts. Yet in the midst of my pastry lovemaking, this soft but audible thought pops into my mind, “I wonder how thin I could be if I didn’t eat this donut. Or if I never ate donuts.”

This thought came unbidden, just about as welcome as when "Oh damn, I forgot to put on deodorant today" or "Gotta add peanut butter to the shopping list" pops up during actual sex. (C'mon ladies. You know this is a thing.)

Those darned thoughts, they do what they want sometimes. The particularly villainous anti-donut notion of being thinner— and numerous variations of it—tend to come spilling out of the recesses of my psyche, often midway through eating something mouthwatering and not particularly healthful. In the past it was pretty easy to give in to the thought—to accept that yes, I’m supposed to be perfect, and yes, thinner is better, and Yes, I should feel guilty and shameful about eating donuts and YES, I'm a food/body failure, I suck at life, etc. Then I'd wallow for awhile.

I am pretty stoked to report that last night, something different happened. I'm eating my donut, and the thought about never eating donuts and being thinner occurs to me. But then my resilient mind bounced back with, “Heyyy....maybe thinner isn't better. Maybe I'm a worthwhile person, no matter what's going on with my body." Whoa.

This has not been an easy place to get to. For one thing, I'm curvy. Not like "curvy in all the right places" but like "curvy in a bunch of haphazard places where my body has decided to curve"). When I acknowledged that the wayward bumps and lumps weren't going away, I had no choice but to make friends with them.  I mean, we're not friendly every single day or anything, but I try to be kind to them even when I'm annoyed. Also, I've got stretch marks and sort of weird boobs and a big long scarred up place at the bottom of my abdomen (because BABIES) -- yet when in a good mood I'm able to see those as badges of honor. I healed from two major surgeries and got two kids out of the deal. My body has not failed me in doing its essential functions, so I'm striving for détente with it, rather than being a hater.

Furthermore, I love donuts. I really do. I’m not going to give them up to chase some illusion of perfectionism. Granted, I’m not going to eat one every single day. But I’m probably not going to pass one up if the opportunity presents itself-- I mean, that's insane. I don't recommend it.

So, if there's any point to all of this, it is this couple of things: 1) Work towards making peace with your imperfect body. It's totally worth it in the long run, and 2) Buy me donuts. I also like donut holes. And apple fritters.