lasting psychological damage

I don't know about your vocational fields, but mine has been flooded by acronyms lately. Something called a Crit.ical Frie.nds Group (C!F!P!) was introduced as a method of internal professional development to improve our teaching and help us troubleshoot issues in our classrooms. It comes complete, naturally, with vaguely cutesy names for each step of its highly structured process. It actually feels like every part of my work world is filled with such vaguely cute processes and I am starting to feel myself resist, revolt, buck the system, consider an uprising.

But I am self-aware enough at this point to stop and examine my resistance. When I find myself in a meeting where I am STRUGGLING to maintain a calm, kind and professional facial expression in the face of considerable cutesy acronymish newness, and when I am surrounded by people I respect jumping on the acronym bandwagon and talking about how great such and such new program sounds… I have to ask myself? What the heck is my problem?

And I think I figured it out yesterday. And it is an acronym.

C. B. T.

This stuff sends me STRAIGHT back to the mental institutions, to programs like Cog.nitive Be.havioral Therapy (do scroll down to the criticism bit – it's my favorite!) that immediately turned me off and infuriated me, programs that can be used and then tested and shown to have Excellent! Results! to insurance companies so they will gladly pay for them when they won't actually cover so many other things that might actually help those of us averse to worksheets.

And it's totally unfair. Not my feelings about CBT – seventy five of you can come forward and say how wonderful it is and how it works for some people and it worked for you, but it's still fair for me to have an opinion about it because I was forced into it in order to regain my status as free and "sane."

But it is absolutely not fair that I have this crazy knee-jerk reaction to all things vaguely process-driven or acronym-named or psychological-seeming. It isn't fair to my colleagues who are onboard with these things and want to improve our professional development with them, and it isn't fair to myself because some of these ideas may actually be helpful to me if I would let my guard down and listen.

And also overcome the aversion to cutesy names. Which is harder still.

In other damaged drama work news, I am being peer reviewed this year and it is supposed to be all lovely and touchy feely good and full of loveliness and totally focused on what *I* want to improve and work on and la la la. And yet I am dreading it hard hard hard hardcore. I feel sick when I think about it. It is making me sad. It is exhausting me and making me feel distant from my colleagues. And so I must examine myself yet again (or have Wes psychologically examine and deconstruct me, which he is always glad to do – heh) to uncover what is going on there. And so I must admit that I don't really like criticism, even when kindly intended and helpful. I don't like it. I get very defensive and shut down. I then beat myself up for YEARS for whatever it is I did "wrong." And so yes. I am dreading this. And I am finding myself distant from my friends who are reviewing me as a defense mechanism, pushing them away or deriding them inside my head so that… what? So that their criticism will somehow hurt less? So that if I don't respect them it won't matter? Which is just ridiculous because it doesn't matter whence criticism comes for me. It is still a beast I haven't even started to tame.