Rocks & Flying Monkeys

This weekend I learnt the name for one of my childhood coping techniques.

As a child, when feeling distressed, I would centre myself in the idea I was a large boulder:

• Focus on the passive strength of just “enduring”;
• think of what was happening around me as “just another nasty storm”;
• Remember that boulders don’t rail at the rain or wilt under the heat of the sun;
• Boulders just “are”, & most people don’t notice them, or have their interest held long by a fallen rock – even if it’s “in the way”.

I would hold these thoughts so I could show no emotion, as I got older I learnt impassive acceptance was not enough. You had to “feel & show nothing” while also providing the right words to soothe the person causing the distress.

To find there is a technique called “grey rocking” & see how aptly it describes my “boulder self” has injected a small (& much needed) measure of calm.

To pull on that thread gently to discover “yellow rocking” has helped me feel less afraid I was being “manipulative” (even in self preservation, I have never been sure it is okay, but understood that it was necessary) Seeing these ideas presented as legitimate techniques has helped ease my distress at the hopelessness & basic acceptance of things being “unable to be changed” that underpins how my child-self survived. That grey-rocking & yellow-rocking are techniques being recommended to others eases my fear that I “coped wrong”.

This thread pulling also threw up references to “flying monkeys” as a reference to the orbiters of certain types of people. I grew up surrounded by & desperate not to be a “flying money”… to find that I was not absolutely out of line in feeling like there have been people in my life who have worked to ensure that certain aspects of my life are not allowed to change BECAUSE there was a mutual figure who viewed my existence as their “property”… has been more than meaningful. I used to joke that “it’s not paranoia if someone actually tried to kill you 🤷”, but was always aware that it DID sound fanciful. Arrogant even, who was I to think I was so important as to matter enough to be the focus of ANY type of attention.

I’ve always understood why people choose to stay in orbit round a difficult person & felt the tension born of my inability to either comply or effectively resist the demands of a key difficult person who had specific requirements on how I “be” in the world. Finding language that has been created to describe aspects of what I have experienced is both a relief & deeply sad.

Grateful as I am to find people creating language around these experiences, I am profoundly grieved to know enough of us have been through it that vernacular has evolved.