Tuesday, August 16, 2016

Umm, really, shame connected to powerlifting??

I’ve been reading a book – I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t); Making the Journey from “What Will People Think?” to “I am Enough” by Brene Brown. I am reading it as part of a professional development book club at work. I knew going in that I am already very comfortable speaking about shame in a professional manner, with my clients. You don’t do child abuse and child trauma work for over 10 years without getting comfortable with the concept of other people’s shame. I did hope that this book would help me learn new strategies and skills for advancing my conversations with my clients. What I didn’t expect was that I would begin to alter my personal life and I definitely did not expect that I would be writing a blog about shame and how it relates to powerlifting.
Brown talks a lot about the concept of “speaking shame” in this book. She is a long time shame researcher and what she has uncovered in her years is that shame is universal and it strives to disconnect us from others. When we “speak shame”, we connect and we make ourselves vulnerable but we disallow shame’s power. I have a quote that I keep up by Mother Theresa that says “Honesty and transparency make you vulnerable. Be honest and transparent anyway.” Loved this for my clients. Hid behind it as a clinician. I mean, I am transparent with my clients in a clinical sense. Again, you don’t get skilled at working with high risk families because you keep secrets from them or act in ways that are anything but totally honest and transparent. But, personally, I’m guarded and people see only what I allow. That’s okay, overall, as you don’t want to constantly be experiencing the “shame hangover” (the regret that comes after sharing too much too fast with someone you don’t know or trust), but I think it allows me to be a bit too fake sometimes, under the guise of professionalism. This blog is about speaking shame. Brown introduced an idea about shame being the thing that sends us into a strong reaction. Things like blaming others, being mean or attacking others, withdrawing – either shutting down or acting out. She introduces the idea of a shame trap and how we don’t always see ourselves in it until we reflect later. I don’t want to go on and on about the book – you can and probably should read it.
Now on to what I’m trying to say, I’m starting to notice more and more that powerlifting is connected to a huge part of my shame. Not that powerlifting causes my shame, but I’m discovering that my lack of growth and success in the sport is something I feel shamed about. I find myself wanting to scream “but but but” and lash out and react. Instead, what I am going to do is write about why and how shame has become a part of this (and is intertwined with some of the most shameful parts of my life). This is my connecting and reaching out. Some of it is directly connected to shame and some of it is my attempt at saying “please just understand”.
1) I started lifting in 2007 after years of obsessive dieting and undereating. I had figured out how to trick Weight Watchers into letting me be a leader while I was proceeding with being under their required weight range. I learned the very basics in person and then my brother wrote me a program. He warned me I would put on some weight right away. After a few months I promptly increased my intake to 1500 calories a day (yes, increased). While I’ve always resisted labeling this or having any formal diagnosis, to say that miraculously I overcame this would be a lie. I am not quite ready to share publicly the extent to which my maladaptive eating has impacted me, but I need to acknowledge that chronic, obsessive undereating has seriously impacted my ability to put on more strength. These patterns and thoughts don’t just disappear one day and this continues to be a work in progress.
2) My first week in the gym I had a guy come up to me and tell me that if those “kind of deadlifts” (conventional) were “too hard” for me, he would give me an alternative that would be even better for my ass. When I started lifting, women were scarce in the sport. Women who were in the gym were predominantly cardio bunnies and if they were lifting weights it was for aesthetic reasons. I’ve always had enormous shame related to my body image. I was an overweight kid and young adult until I found extreme dieting. Extreme dieting didn’t fix anything, but at least now when people commented on my body it wasn’t totally negative. I have overcome how my body image impacts my strength, but it took quite awhile. While I still have shame related to body image, for the last several years I can say, it doesn’t stop me from wanting to get stronger. But, this stole a lot of years of strength from me.
3) Sleep! Anyone who knows anything about strength training knows how important sleep is. Here’s the thing, when I started training I had a 5 year old and an 18 month old. I was commuting 2.5 hours a day, training over my lunches near where I worked. My days looked like – up early, kids up, I left the house by 7:15. Drove, worked, trained, worked, drove. Home by 6pm usually, unless the roads were bad and in Central Alberta in the winter, they often were. Try and be a mom and a common law wife – cook, clean, get kids to bed. I often didn’t go to bed until after 10pm because otherwise I heard that I didn’t spend any time with my common law. My 18 month old still wasn’t sleeping through the night either, so I’d be up at least once or twice. Oh, this doesn’t include the one evening a week I worked as well. This switched when I got a new job – only 90 min a day of commuting, but no gym at lunch. I started going to the gym at 5am. Now, going to bed after 10pm was really tough, but to keep the peace I did it. I was chronically sleep deprived... did I mention I was still undereating?! When I stopped going to the gym at 5am, I went at 8:30pm. I was a mom, after all and I worked full time. I wasn’t prepared to miss seeing my kids in the few hours I had with them. I continued to be chronically sleep deprived to try and be exactly what everyone wanted and needed.
4) I was unhappy in my relationship and this spread in my life like wildfire. I would stay at the gym later and later to avoid him. This impacted my sleep in worse and worse ways. It also meant I was avoiding him when I could and would try and see my friends. This made me feel like a terrible mother, which only served to throw fire on my shame related to motherhood. This buried me in sadness I didn’t know how to get out of.
5) Add these up and toss in a bit more – STRESS! I’m a bit of a high strung kind of person (my friends and family will laugh, because I said “a bit”). I started training right around when I also needed to start getting licensed. So, my first several years of training were riddled with young children, commuting, working full time just to survive, financial stress, an unhappy relationship, and licensing (which included several applications, supervision hours, a couple big ol’ exams) and a fairly big move. This has been followed by a major move to Moose Jaw, a divorce, single parenting in a city where “dad” doesn’t live, and so on. I also work a somewhat high stress kind of job (though it’s quite a bit lower stress than my job in Red Deer, which I loved). I’m currently in a much happier relationship but now I travel once a month to see him, which introduces a different kind of stress. My kids are older, so the same kind of parenting stress I had when they were little isn’t there, but brings new stuff.
6) Bowling was a really important part of my life for about 30 years. Now, I am proud of what I have accomplished in this sport and someday I might go back. But, bowling did impact my ability to get better in the gym. Bowling is not exactly an overly athletic endeavour, but it can be pretty good for chronic overuse injuries – like my right shoulder that would often flare up and cause problems in the gym. After I quit bowling a couple years ago, my shoulder got really bad, funny enough. Bowling is also a bit of a party sport. So, when I was bowling I was partying and partying isn’t exactly conducive to recovery from training. The partying also made my relationship worse and made me feel like a crappier mom, all spinning back on itself.
7) I was a lazy kid! This is going way back, but it has some relevance. My youngest would be a better lifter if she decided to start, even if she started at my same age (I was 27 when I started, so I was already behind a few years) because she has been a gymnast for several years. The strength and muscle base you build as a child can never be adjusted for when you start training at my age. I was a lazy, overweight kid who bowled. I can never make up for those years.
8) For the first 4 years of my time in this sport, I trained mostly alone. I had these homemade pink boards perched on my chest tacked there with duct tape on board press days haha!! I sent my brother videos a few times a month (nothing like what he does with online clients these days). I developed bad habits and then I’d come to MJ every few months and one bad habit would be “fixed” while I’d go home and something else would fall apart. I learned gear in MJ, but came home to train mostly alone. This is a sport where you might lift independently, but you do require a team. Even when I acquired a few training partners after several years, it was sporadic and somewhat unreliable if we trained together, but at least I didn’t have to duct tape boards to my chest every day LOL When I moved to MJ almost 5 years ago, I made some quick progress actually, because some of those bad habits got fixed right away. But, some of them have been more stubborn 
I am sure there are more reasons I’m not where I “should” be in lifting. I can’t compete with the young women in this sport today and most new lifters surpass me very quickly. Some of them are friends  I can be okay with this when I stop finding myself in the shame trap. I’m closer to being an M1 now than most of the Open lifters who are new to the sport and maybe it’s time to start shifting my comparison group. Or maybe it’ simply about what attracted me to the sport in the first place – being better and stronger than I was before. In that sense, I’m making gains and I’m doing okay. I have a lifestyle and a history that I cannot and would not change. It doesn’t need to shame me, but rather, I can simply use it as my understanding and explanation.