Interesting insights into behaviour?

[ebichu64]

Sorry it's been so long between posts. Sometimes i feel I want to write about stuff but then I bury myself in knitting, gardening, online games, and I feel quite content with just me and the cat and not trying to contact anyone else until my partner gets home. I'm still on medication and they still make me queasy, but now I know I only feel sick and I'm not actually going to be sick.

 

I thought I was over the panic attacks, apart from getting the shakes when my partner's alarm does off but he needs it to get to work and earplugs help a bit. Then this morning I got a letter from work inviting me to a grievance meeting on Friday and even though I was expecting it my stomach started churning.

 

(Pause to put earplugs in - next door are having a new boiler fitted so there's drilling)

 

Anyway, I can cancel or reschedule the meeting if I can't manage it and the two people it's with are both people I quite like. I'm just being impatient and anticipating all the problems before they happen.

 

 

Anyway, that's the news but my real reason for posting was a couple of things that I think are interesting and I wondered if anyone had experienced anything similar about themselves.

 

The first was from an ex-boss who is also a friend. I emailed her about an incident I remembered to get her perspective on it. She didn't remember it, but she told me about my first day at work.

 

My POV.

It was the 14th November, right after Rememberance Sunday, I always watch it and I get quite emotional because of my Grandad, who was in the WW1 trenches, So it was on my mind and I mentioned it. She said not to talk about it too much because one of the other girls had just lost her father. So I was being conscious of her feelings, and concentrating on learning the new job etc etc. I remember thinking my new boss was really nice because she kept telling me not to answer the phone until I was ready, and was used to people just expecting me to do the job. I struggle sometimes but I've been doing admin since 1983 and all offices work the same way, so I can predict most of it,

 

Her POV.

She was talking to me and asking questions that first day and I was replying with single random words that didn't make sense. She expected people to be nervous on their first day in a new job but she thought I was terrified, and that's why she stopped me from answering the phone.

 

I had no sense that I was doing this, I was only concentrating so hard on "dong it right", that I was probably saying exactly what I was thinking - words that made sense to me because they were in context in my head, but made no sense to just listening to them.

 

 

The second one is from a male friend who has suffered from depression for a long time. He mentioned covering it up with comedy and "wearing a mask". I understood straight away. I was bullied and teased and laughed at all the way through school, and when I got to college, and the bullying stopped long enough for me to relax a bit, I started to learn how to be funny, so I could control when people laughed at me and why. I've got quite good at it, and I've even been called "cool" once or twice.

 

So I told him about that, and here's the important part, then I remembered that there was a short time when I was at college, that I used to say "hallo" to people by hitting them or biting them. I think this might have been because the kids at school had been so awful to me I hadn't had any opportunity to learn what the rules of being nice were, and I was copying what I had experienced as normal behaviour. Or feeling threatened and going on the offensive before they had a chance to be nasty to me. I don't think it lasted very long. I bit one of my friend's boyfriends when I met him for the first time and I have some guilt associated with that memory so she probably told me it was wrong..

 

So I was wondering if anyone else here had any similar experiences and if you had figured out why you did what you did.