Dodge Mode
Dodge Mode
I enjoy the vision and love the work, but I hate the timeline required for results to show. I want to shorten the time by doing more on short notice to speed up the process. Unfortunately, that is not how it works.
A few years ago, someone reached out to me immediately after a break-up to ask if I could make them forget the relationship, and I had the hard job of explaining that therapy is not a memory erasure service.
Sometimes, I can relate to clients wanting to wipe their memory like a hard drive so they can start on a clean slate, but that is not how the human experience works.
Interestingly, traumatic experiences are not the only things we seek to wipe out in all honesty — our foolish choices and their adjoining consequences are worthy of erasure.
If we could erase our mistakes, baggage and failures, we would have no story and no life because our lives are the collectives of our stories (born by our experiences, education and exposures).
However, this knowledge about experiencing life does not make living less costly. If anything, it frustrates you to know you are not at the end of any given experience.
Even I am guilty of wanting to speed up my process.
When my father died, I was speaking to my grief therapist honestly explaining my 90-day recovery timeline during which I expected myself to experience all my emotions and get on with life because that is what my Honey Pie would have wanted but also because I hated waking up every day without a sense of purpose.
My therapist told me that I could not grieve on a timeline and had to experience each emotion as it came. My unwillingness to work, my desire to sleep even if I just woke up, and my unusual introversion was grief.
There was a particular month when my body hurt so much that someone asked me, “When last were you in the sunlight?” I had not been in the sunlight for weeks. Like a patient with a medical prescription, I went outside with my skipping rope the next morning, skipped ten times, and went back into my room — I was done for the week,
Challenges make us hate the present, and we begin to resent living. Interestingly, even words have past, present and future tenses — you were never supposed to get stuck in any timeline.
I know your past was terrible, and your future is so bright we all need sunglasses, but all you can grasp is this present you are trying to escape.
Get out of dodge mode.
A few years back, I named one of my bad habits ‘Dodge Mode’. This was a mode I got into when I realized chaos was coming. If I was at a dinner table with a family and noticed a cold war brewing, I got in that mode and became chatty, dodging their drama or I would find a nice excuse and get out of there.
However, it began to escalate — I would see someone making terrible mistakes, and because I did not want to be the one who pointed out the trouble, I would just quit the relationship so they could crash alone.
Well, being a young therapist did not help as much — it became easier for me to spot patterns, making it easier to run from any and every person. I would not even give them a chance to fix the problem. I lived on three assumptions:
- They are adults — they know what they are doing.
- They chose to do this — they do not care about the consequences.
- They did not ask my opinion — they figured this out and I might be the wrong one.
In reality, I was afraid of conflict and did not want to come off as jealous.
I avoided triggers so much that I had no new stories. All my stories were from secondary school at one point — I had dodged and missed whole seasons of my life.
Some of us are not dodging other people but ourselves.
You secretly hate the fact that you are gaining weight, but instead of confronting the emotional storm that makes you need food to cope, you dodge it by spending on clothes to appear hotter than you feel.
The way you are handling the problem is what needs addressing.
To dodge is to avoid a blow. Unfortunately, we tend to avoid life in the process.
How I got out of dodge mode in my relationships
Knowing what was getting triggered in me: I did not mind them misbehaving and figuring stuff out. But every time someone was outrageously misbehaving, it triggered the teenage girl in me who always got accused of whatever went wrong.
I did not commit the crime and I do not want to know whoever committed anything. Just get me out of here!
Every time I ran away, I was not done with the relationship, I was just triggered and feared being accused falsely of being the cause of anything. To make matters worse, at the beginning of my career, people considered me highly promiscuous. This meant I could not even like a man in peace without being looked at like I seduced him.
Be honest with yourself — what does your present situation trigger?
Confronting the underlying hurt: getting accused was what always got triggered but betrayal was the underlying hurt. How dare you not tell everyone that I was not the one misbehaving?
When I knew betrayal was what I was dealing with, I knew which therapist to go to and I learned how to select better people.
Knowing I could not put healing on a schedule: this was hard because I felt since I now knew what the problem was and had put in the work, healing ought to happen immediately.
Healing is a process! So, to enjoy your healing, you must enjoy waking up every morning and just living regardless of what has not fallen into place.
When I came to terms that I could not heal myself in 90 days when my dad died, I settled into the process. I did not cry as much but I remember eating at midnight because that was when I had an appetite. I also gained an additional 10kg of body weight that everyone seemed to appreciate except me.
Whether it was recovering from grief or betrayal, I needed to know time was a non-negotiable element that would eventually work for me as long as I did the right thing.
Bringing my community on board: this is where you have the hard conversations and negotiations. Let your people know where you need help but more importantly, let them know your boundaries and why those boundaries exist.
Emotional blackmail is the boundary no one crosses for me — everybody who is important knows and everyone who is not does not even get the option.
When your community knows what hurts and they decide to be hurtful, you know where they automatically begin. This is why you need to be picky with your community.
Daring to trust: this is scary but very rewarding. Everyone I knew that hurt me was less than the population of a typical household which meant they could not be my metric for judging the whole world. I had to try again.
Incomparably, I had to trust myself again that I had grown and I now knew how to choose better. Did I make mistakes? Absolutely but I learned to pay attention.
I had to forgive myself for failing, for missing moments in my life because I paused my story to grieve my past and for giving up on love when I was the hurt one.
Yes, you might look crazy for grieving friendships, the death of a loved one, a career that ended abruptly etc. Yet, you must grieve it appropriately so that when you let it go this time, you never have reasons to return to it.
After the grief and everything when my Dad died, I realized every piece I ever wrote about him was written in bright colours and was never stained by the darkness of losing him.
That is how I want to live each day — colourful without grief and hurt messing up the day’s beauty and if it must, well I better make something artistic out of it.
