Sometimes I Can't Contain Myself
But I know what to do
After two weeks off, I’m back! Thank you to all of you subscribers for coming back with me. I hope you have gotten some time to rest, too, because we all need it. We have to repair and refill our cup. Which brings me to today’s newsletter, so let’s get to it.
I’ll pose you a question that has been consuming my attention lately: Are you a good container for your life?
This may seem an odd question. Like, of course! But also, huh? To explain, let me start with a story…
When I was still living in Seattle, I started a support group for victim-offenders in the King County Jail. Victim-offenders were domestic violence victims caught in a vise created by laws that overlapped each other in ways probably never imagined by the legislators who created them. The first was known as a three-strikes law, which meant that anyone convicted of their third felony got life in prison, end of story. The second law made all domestic violence convictions mandatory felonies. And the third law required an arrest every time the police were called out for a domestic violence disturbance. In theory, none of this may sound bad, but in practice the way they intertwined created a nightmare for my clients.
Why? Because their abusers figured out that, for the most part, police didn’t understand the complexities of domestic violence at all. They simply knew that the law required them to make an arrest. So, they would arrest the person who was the most explosive or problematic. If the abuser remained calm and accused their victim of being the abuser while their victim was emotionally distraught and/or angry, they could manipulate the situation to get their victim arrested.
Many of these women were also mothers, which meant they were then sitting in jail knowing their children were either with their abuser, staying with family who were also often in crisis, or potentially moved to foster care. Domestic violence cases were only tried once a week, on Friday afternoons. If a woman was arrested on Saturday she had to sit in jail, potentially with no guarantee about the safety of her children, for nearly a week, maybe longer. Pleading guilty to the charge was the absolute quickest way to get out, but that meant a felony conviction. After two cycles of this, abusers could forever hold the potential of life in prison over the heads of their victims, ensuring they would never call the police again.
The whole situation was further complicated by the fact that many of these women suffered from addiction. While incarcerated they would get clean and clarity would ensue. We would talk about the cycles of abuse and addiction and the realities of the various systems they were navigating. They understood their options, even if these were few and far between. Then they would be released at midnight (processing inmates for release inexplicably took 8-12 hours) into one of the most active drug-trafficking areas of the city and all that clarity would go up in smoke— sometimes quite literally.
Despite having grown up around addicts, working with those women was the first time I really understood the importance of an internal sense of structure in navigating what is often a painful and dangerous world. Addiction is an illness, not a moral failing. What the illness of addiction obstructs (as does the systemic disempowerment of chronic abuse) is the ability to contain yourself, to hold the complex enormity of your discomfort, fear, trauma, or sense of disconnection along with your obligations, challenges, and dreams. Substances can make you feel that it’s possible to escape beyond your individual self, with all of its complications, into something vast and connected, but this is an illusion. Over time, using makes you more porous, your pain and anxiety more acute, your challenges ever bigger.
This is why in-patient treatment is so essential for hardcore addicts, and why my clients were able to get clean when they were incarcerated. Jail provided a container, a hard stop that they weren’t (yet) able to provide themselves. To be clear, being in jail didn’t make my clients better. It didn’t help them heal. But it did, if only briefly, prevent their abusers and dealers from being able to get to them. That boundary allowed them some breathing space, the opportunity to think clearly, to step outside of the cycles they were trapped in and see their predicament honestly.
Those women changed me. Witnessing their need for containment from some outside source, I began to see it everywhere. The need for an external experience of structure is what draws some people into the military, religion, or traditional, heterosexual marriages, for instance. In some ways, it’s easier to live within these heavily prescribed confines. The rules, and the consequences if you break them, are clear. There may not be freedom in it, but there’s some relief from the anxiety that often comes from infinite choice.
I have been lucky enough, despite family history, to escape the worst ravages of addiction myself. But I can’t deny the various ways that I have submitted to external containers– of relationship and identity– that created structure for me when I couldn’t contain myself. When I wasn’t ready to take full responsibility for the direction of my own life.
How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go.— Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful
In a recent interview, and in her recent memoir, poet Maggie Smith talks about experiencing herself as a Russian nesting doll, a Matryoshka. Every iteration of herself she’s ever been is nestled inside of her. When I think about this need for containment, I imagine it similarly. We each are a set of nesting dolls of all the ages or iterations of ourselves we’ve ever been. But then we are contained within still more containers– family, community, job, friend group, religion, nation. If we carry iterations of ourselves that feel damaged, leaky, or vulnerable we may go looking for containers outside of ourselves that feel sturdy enough to provide the structure we alone cannot. Over time, we may figure out how to contain ourselves, and in so doing provide more space for the enormity of who we are. Because, of course, expansion and contraction, containment and that which can be contained, are always in conversation with each other, always reaching towards a dynamic balance.
As our container gets stronger it can, conversely, become more flexible. It can stretch further, contain more. But then those larger containers we’ve enlisted to contain us may not be big enough. They may chafe, sometimes unbearably so, until, like an egg, they collapse and fall away. What a thrill and a terror, to break out of a container that once seemed to be the whole world.
In the face of this, the challenge is how to become a strong, yet flexible, container for myself and my life. Not to create some perfect reality in which I stand alone, separate and unaffected by the world, but instead to figure out how to hold some structural integrity in the face of all the many things in this life I can’t (and shouldn’t) control.
Being a good container for my life means that no matter what happens, I know I’m going to be okay. I will expand or contract as necessary while still maintaining a clear sense of who I am.
Here are the top three things that have helped me become a good container for my life:
Boundaries: The ability to set clear and appropriate boundaries, both with myself and other people, can’t be overstated in its importance. Binaries aren’t useful in many aspects of life, but when it comes to fortifying my container knowing where the line is between me and you, mine and not mine, okay and absolutely not okay, is essential. My boundaries may be vastly different in different relationships. They may evolve or change over time within a relationship. But any relationship, community, or institution that doesn’t respect the necessity of boundaries, and the right of everyone to have them, is not a healthy container.
Taking care of my body: Plenty of us are differently-abled, so to be clear, having a stereotypically healthy, strong body isn’t essential to being a good container for your life. Still, my body is my literal container. Within the constraints of the body I have, doing what I can to care for it so I am as healthy and well as I can be helps fortify me for the emotional/psychological/spiritual container work we all have to do. It’s also worth saying that not everyone is great at taking care of people who are unwell, so if and/or when you are unwell, if someone you’re in relationship with makes things worse instead of better…? I’ve ignored that reality before, and it was a mistake.
Being alone: There are times when being alone is unhealthy. Isolation is often unproductive. But learning how to be single, to enjoy my own company, and live alone have been instrumental in developing my confidence and clarity about who I am, what I do and don’t like, and what I can and can’t handle. Sometimes, even now, I can’t contain myself. Feelings overwhelm me and spill out everywhere. Being able to retreat to my own space, my physical, safe container, allows me to gather myself back in again.
*Bonus thing: Time. It’s maddening to me, and I’m sorry to report, but time, and the inevitable trial and error that it creates space for, has probably been one of the most important aspects of becoming a good container for myself. I was not a good container at 20 years old. (I leaked like a sieve.) I wasn’t even a great container at forty (My divorce was like the Hoover Dam exploding). Learning by doing, making mistakes, and having to clean up my own mess allowed me to develop into a relatively stable container today.
But life continues. Grief is inevitable, and tragedy possible. Systems surround me— just like they did my clients in that jail— that seek to break or exploit me. Larger containers within which I live now may someday crumble, either because they no longer fit my life, or for reasons completely beyond me; I may crack and crumble as a result. But I know how to repair my cracks. I know what relationship containers I can retreat to until mine feels solid again. Whatever comes, I’ll be okay.
I found the world to be
Woefully lacking
In safe places.
So I became one.
— J. Warren Welch
Loved this Asha ~ and interesting timing in relation to the noticings in my recent newsletter, and our continuing conversation in the comments over there...
In the “old administration” I was married to a man who would be come completely obsessed with a hobby (bread baking; origami; gardening; mandolin; i could go on) buy every book, perfect his skills and then in time drop the hobby and move onto whatever next shiny thing was that caught his attention. Friends would ask me how I could stand it, to which I would reply, “As long as I’m not a hobby he drops, I’m good.” It was only after we got divorced that I fully realized that I probably had never even risen to the level of being a hobby.
I was merely the container holding everything together.
Post-divorce, I think it was my time living alone (which I absolutely LOVED) that ultimately created the capacity for me to trust I could be complete and sufficient to myself, but also live with another human being.
Beautiful metaphor. Thank you.
"In a recent interview, and in her recent memoir, poet Maggie Smith talks about experiencing herself as a Russian nesting doll, a Matryoshka. Every iteration of herself she’s ever been is nestled inside of her. When I think about this need for containment, I imagine it similarly. We each are a set of nesting dolls of all the ages or iterations of ourselves we’ve ever been. But then we are contained within still more containers– family, community, job, friend group, religion, nation."