Stand-ins

I still want to write Part 2 of this post. And I have many more things to say about my trip (I’m heeere! and it’s awesome and overwheming and I have seen more Westfalia vans in the past week than I saw in five years on the east coast, oh how I love you northwest hippie neighborhoods.)

But first I want to talk about something that has to do with both my trip, and how I changed my destructive relationship habits: Stand-ins.

Stand-ins are how I refer to those replacement things, things we use to create an emotion that we already want to feel. So to continue in the analogy of the theater, the stand-in is someone or something that’s the same size and shape as the real thing, something we use to adjust the lights. But it’s not the thing itself, the thing itself is a big star and not always available for lighting adjustments.

Okay, that sounds confusing and abstract. Here’s the example from my trip.

Traveling cross-country with a dog presents certain logistical challenges. Namely, the dog gets antsy and needs to pee and poop and run around and sniff gross things. So there is a lot more stopping than there would be if I was on my own. Stopping and walking around in weird places, like rest stops and behind gas stations and hotels.

And my dog is sweet and cute and generally pleasant to be around, but not what you might call obedient. As in, he knows his name but doesn’t come when called.

I know this.

But for some reason, every time we stopped on the road I would let him off-leash. He’d pull and pull and so I’d let him off to run around whatever scrubby grassy area we had found.  Each time, I sort of convinced myself that this time would be different and he would come when called. And every time he didn’t come back right away, I would experience this surge of panic, this anxiety and fear.

So I ended up spending a good portion of my first few days on the road in a state of anxiety and fear about my dog.

After several days I started to think, here I am endangering my dog’s safety and my own peace of mind every time we stop. Why the hell am I doing this?

And then I realized, oh, I want to feel anxious.

Moving is huge and and wonderful but it’s also scary. Of course I knew this intellectually, but I hadn’t been able to experience the fear emotionally yet because of how big and overwhelming it was.

I unconsciously manufactured the situation with my dog in order to have an outlet for an emotion that I was already feeling deep down.

To bring it back to my relationship patterns, my behaviors with men were a stand-in for something older and deeper that I was already feeling. Making that connection and healing that old stuff was what allowed me to stop needing to repeat the behavior. (More on that later.)

(Oh and btw I stopped letting Sawyer off-leash and we both made it safely to “the other side”!)

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