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duggarsetal · 1 year

Text

Transcript of Dav Beal’s Instagram Live

(I know I process information a lot better when reading, so thought it could be useful for others)

Edited a little, since Dav used a lot of “you know”, “um”, “uh” and “basically”

He talks for a while about his music practice, which I’ve included, but the part about Bethany/their marriage/his therapy is bolded, as it’s likely the bit you’ll be most interested

Be warned, it’s a hefty read.

So I’ve been trying to do more music stuff. I really enjoy music. But I’ve found out, or realised recently that I spent a lot of my life just kind of, enjoying things and just doing them as I felt like doing them. Which meant that I didn’t necessarily get really good at any one thing. So, I have piano. I play by ear a little bit. And I can play some ukulele, and I can play some guitar, a little bit. But I’m not great at any one of them. And I can sing a little bit, but I’m not great at singing. So it's interesting because I really don’t want to just be getting by on a tiny level really in these areas. I don’t wanna be doing a little bit of piano, little bit of guitar but never really have skills that can actually be used. Like what if I could actually play really really well. And I could then use those skills, I could take them somewhere, and I could offer that. So, this is one of the things that I’ve been doing more this year. Just taking more time to practise. So I’m practising guitar. I’ve got some chords right now I’m struggling with. I think it’s D minor. Struggling to transition from G to D minor. Takes me a while. Or basically any chord to D minor. Then my big problem has also been all those rookie noises that you get when you don’t put your finger down the right way. Especially on D. So, it’s getting better; And then I’m practising different [things] - playing with a pick, without a pick. I got a little membership on guitar tricks for a little while (unintelligible). But that’s just one of the- it’s a matter of finding - both finding the time, but also finding the right path - whether to get a teacher or not, things like that. So with piano I’ll look up a youtube video for example, and then I’ll practise what they’re doing, or what they talk about in the video. So one of them was to try to help break the connection between my hands. So (plays piano using left hand only). There’s one scale on this hand, and then (plays piano using right hand only). Okay, on the other hand. Then putting them together (plays piano with both hands simultaneously). Okay, and then, what the video encourages to do was to, basically, go slower on one hand than the other, so (plays piano with both hands at different tempos). So that would be one of them and then you do that in every key. So (plays piano with both hands at different tempos) and then (continues playing piano with both hands at different tempos). And then with the time, the idea is to become smoother, be able to play to a metronome, and all that stuff. Another one was kind of a jazz… (plays tentatively). Yeah (plays piano). So it was (plays scales to a jazz tempo). And then it’s back the other way (play scales to a jazz tempo). So things like that basically, trying to bring in new finger exercises, because what I’ve found is that if I just treat the instrument like something that I do for pleasure without actually pushing past the little barriers to get better, then I’m just always gonna be roughly at the same level. And the other thing too, is specific songs, or individual songs. Like some of the ones I was playing before. I had to do (play chords on the piano) some songs that I like and so I’ll try to learn to play those.

Interesting thing about my journey is that I've had a lot of… I’ve had potential. And I've had a lot of people tell me that I have potential. And I've had a lot of people tell me that I'm talented. And that belief that I'm talented has been one of the number one things that has, that I’ve used to keep me back. I’ve basically thought “Oh I can kind of get by without trying very hard because I have ‘talent’.”. But it turns out that's basically just a bunch of BS. It doesn't really exist. At least not for me in that way. There is natural gift, or natural ability, I think. But if you want - I was talking to an animator guy, who has been in the industry for a long time, and says when you’re, really when you get to the top of the animation - field of animation, the top artists, if you say to them, “Oh wow you’re so talented”, that could really come across to them as offensive, because you're basically discounting all the incredible amounts of hard work that they've put into their craft. And so in the same way, oftentimes, it really is more hard work than talent that's gonna actually get me somewhere in my life. So I am trying to embrace that paradigm shift and pursue improvement in specific targeted areas.

So the guitar, the piano, my work, which is in the field of motion design. I’ve been working to level up in that field as well, trying to get 3D animation training. For the last three months or so I’ve been taking a course on School of Motion to learn a 3D programme called Cinema 4D. And this has been awesome because, well a couple things, it’s shown me how much I have not really grasped the fundamentals of design. I've done a lot through intuition and kind of seeing, trying to figure out what looks good. But I really haven't had a really strong grasp of fundamentals. Like value, and colour theory, and composition, and lighting, and things like that. So the course has shown me a little bit of where I needed to improve in that, in those fundamentals. But it’s also given me a huge amount of knowledge within, for this particular programme. AndIi think it's revitalising my career in a lot of ways. Giving me this kind of sense where I don't just have to stay at the level that I’m at today. I can dedicate myself, put more time into honing my skills and developing my craft. Because I decided that I don't wanna be the sort of person who just kind of gets by in all the areas. I want to be crushing it, I really do. I want to be crushing it. I'd rather be crushing it than just being mediocre in all things.

And this is one of the downsides of the ‘nice guy’. As I've read about, from Robert Glover, is that the nice guy - the guy who's always trying to please women, for example, is always trying to get girls to like him, and to really find his sense of self and identity in what other people think, especially females. That guy often never really gets great at anything. He often just stays at this mediocre level. And that’s tragic. It's one of the biggest tragedies, is what he says. It’s one of the biggest tragedies of the life of this guy, is that you have potential, lots of potential, but the ‘nice guys’ - of which I would have put myself in that category, at least up until pretty recently. We have a tendency to really not develop very far in any field. And so, that’s gotta change. So I'm going to. That’s why I’m making these changes, one of the reasons, that I’m doing this in different areas of my life as well. But it’s really important to really get a handle on where are you going? And what are you doing? And this doesn't just apply to guys, this applies to girls too. It’s difficult to to really figure out what to say yes to,and no to when you don't have some sort of mediating principle. Like a life mission or something like that. And your life mission could be as simple as “provide for my family” or “take care of my parents” or whatever. You can find meaning in all kinds of different things and it could be building a career. The life, the mission are - I think that there are better and worse missions that you could have. And there are missions, where your life purposes, that are more helpful to people, to other people than others. But at the same time, I think just having direction, or just having something that's what you're doing, really helps to weed out the distractions from things that you should be about.

And so this is just one of those mindsets that I've come upon in the last several months. And I really just started to realise that I struggled with, in my life was so others-oriented, I would say. It’s where you make people and their approval the centre of your life, and then you say yes or no to things depending on how much you think saying yes or no will shake up or stabilise those people around which you have chosen to orbit your life. The problem is we can't control those people. I never could control my wife, or my friends. I couldn't control what they thought of me, much less anything else about them. So, what that means you end up basically a no -self. Like you have no identity. All you have is the reflection that you're getting back from other people and it turns out that that's a very difficult way to live . It turns out that it's very resentment prone. If you build your life around getting the reflected sense of yourself from other people, then resentment will probably be skyrocketing because you always offload responsibility onto other people. So if I build my life around Bethany, for example, in a way that, emotionally, I’m orbiting her, and trying to make sure that she’s happy all the time. What that means is that every decision I make, I have the potential to offload onto her, blame her for the consequences, rather than taking responsibility for myself and my own decisions.

So, for example, if one day Bethany is in a bad mood, has a bad day, and I try to do things to make her happy, so that she won't be in a bad mood. Before I would often do that, but with a bunch of strings attached - “Once I do this nice thing for her, now she has to be really nice to me”. And she has to basically have the mood that I’ve ‘paid’ for (laughs). If you're having a bad mood, and I’m gonna pay, I’m gonna do this action - not out of unconditional love - I’m gonna do it as a quid pro quo. I do this action - I wash the dishes, or I take care of the kids, or whatever - and then you won't be in a bad mood, right? And then you'll like me, right? And then we’ll have a good relationship, right? And that’s just not how it works. That can't be how it works. And I realised that, I wouldn't say the hard way, I would say that I got lucky, in the sense that I'm not twenty years into my marriage figuring this out, but it has taken quite a bit of time.

Another thing that happened is Bethany and I would have these conversations, and they would be so devastating to me (chuckles), She would express something she didn't like, for example. A lot of these conversations had to do, interestingly enough, with her, with celebration. And with the fact that I wasn't celebrating her accomplishments and achievements in a way that was, that would've, that she would've thought was loving. But, in those conversations, rather than taking what shes saying and going “okay, well that, that’s a great perspective”, or forming my own opinion instead, what I would do, in order to alleviate the tension in our relationship, I would take on the weight and the blame of everything, in the conversation. So if she said “you did this to me” or “you’re uncaring”, or something like that, then I would basically get to this point in the conversation, after arguing for a while, or after trying to ‘reason’, I would get to this point where “you're right, i’m the most selfish”. Cause I could kind of strain to see it from her point of view, and be like “okay she thinks I’m selfish, so I'm going to basically admit that I'm the most selfish, I have all of these problems”, right. And uh (chuckles) what it would, those conversations would end up being devastating for me. And I didn't really know any other way. So the only way out of those very intense conversations was, that I, that I knew, or that I chose, was to basically take on the blame of everything, and then I would kind of keep a lid on my emotions in that conversation. Really, like, just tight and keep the lid on and I wouldn’t lash out in anger. But what I would find is that after the conversation, she'd be better. She feel better emotionally and that I would just, I would kind of be like, “okay, we diverted the storm” or something like that. Then the next day, typically it was the next day, I would just be really devastated, and just having a really rough time of it. I would be thinking back on our conversation, and just a lot of resentment, just be really resenting her for basically putting me in a position where I've had to take the fall in our conversation and that was the pattern.

And so these conversations would happen every couple of months, maybe, and it would just be a really bad one and then it started to get worse and I started to have these suicidal fantasies (laughs). They call it passive suicidal ideation, where you’re not really about to end your life, but you are fantasising about it. And I like the word fantasy, because my fantasy had to do, not really with me feeling so worthless, necessarily - that, that probably was in there somewhere. But what made my fantasy compelling, was how bad Bethany would feel if I were no longer here. And (laughs) I had some moments where the, those suicidal fantasies were more dramatic. And that’s when I decided I needed to do something about this, and so I went and got some therapy.

Wonderful therapist, he really helped me with a lot of things. One of the things was EMDR, which is eye movement desensitation- densative - uh, Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing - EMDR. But he would, we would sit, I was looking at a computer with him on zoom or whatever and he would hold this wand, and it would go back and forth, and I would follow it with my eyes. And while we did that, I would hold certain memories from childhood in my mind, and he would lead me through and process some of this stuff. I think of all the things we did together, that was probably the most interesting, and the most beneficial. He was a great therapist. But, near the tail end of that process there was something that kept coming up during those EMDR sessions, and it had to do with me as an adult who has agency, who is not a child. And I think what I realised through that process is that I had a lot of difficulty disconnecting myself emotionally from my family environment.

So when I was back at home, at my family’s, before I moved out, a lot of the emotional issues had to do with freedom, had to do with uh, not , hmm… So I basically, my family - in my mind - became a cage. My family were - their being - became a cage. Now, I moved out at twenty, which was probably several years too late, or later than I should’ve. But what kept coming up in the EMDR therapy was just disconnecting from that. Disconnecting from being a child who has no choice, or young person who has the feeling that they are in a cage. And through EMDR I started to latch onto this idea of being an adult, and having agency, and having responsibility, as an alternative to being overwhelmed in interpersonal relationships. So that was one of my biggest takeaways from therapy.

And then I started to learn about this other concept where, rather than viewing yourself as a wounded child who needs to have a secure attachment in order to be healthy, this other approach was teaching the idea that it isn't really a wounded child, so much, that is having the issues here. It is the adult self that is recreating the patterns of childhood. And what was the interesting, maybe subtle, difference there, is that the adult is recreating relationships that he or she knows. So I was recreating the relationships that I knew. And the operative term there is I was creating. I was reenacting [sound cuts out momentarily] …really encouraging to me, because that also meant that I could stop recreating it. Rather than having to have someone give me my attachment needs, and make me feel securely attached for me to be safe in a secure relationship, I could actually take control, I had the locus of control inside, and I could actually make changes actively, as a grown up and as an adult.

And so I’ve started doing that, and I've started to treat myself more and more as someone who has agency and has responsibility, and isn't just going to be buried with the emotional states of other people. And, it was really interesting because I can't remember the last time um, Bethany and I had one of those difficult conversations, interestingly enough. It unhooked me from that, and the interesting thing too, is plenty of the time, Bethany will still have something that she still wants different about me, or something that she’s expressing - an area that she thinks I hurt her, or something like that. She’ll still express it in much the same way as she used to, but the thing that has changed is I don't get carried away, and take all the blame for what she's expressing now. I allow her to have her own thoughts, and feel the way she feels, and she has every right to those feelings - and at the same time, I'm not using her as the litmus test, or as the mirror for how well I'm doing. That's the key. I'm not using the person that is my committed emotional relationship to dictate my sense of okay-ness or enough-ness. That has been switching into something that is internal, something that I can reference without anybody else telling me “oh you're doing good” or “you're not doing very good.”.

Um, so - someone asked “what's your favourite band?”. My favourite band… I don't know. I've been listening to more Johnny Cash. I was never a huge Johnny Cash listener until recently when we were at our, at our new house, preparing to move in, scraping the ceilings and stuff, of all the popcorn, and I was listening to a lot of Johnny Cash, so that would be one of my favourites right now. I really like The Highwaymen, which was Cash and Willie Nelson and two other guys that I forget, or I don't even know their names.

Why am I telling you this? (laughs) Honestly, I was recording a video to post, a music video, a video of me playing the piano. And I kept recording it again and again and again and again, which is interesting, and it would never - I would always make a mistake and so I decided it might be a lot more interesting and a lot more confronting for me to do a Live, where I have to play piano, or play an instrument without the recourse of being able to rerecord it. So that’s why L decided to do a Live.

Alright everybody, have a good rest of your day.

#dav beal #bethany beal #girl defined #long post #tw suicide mention

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