I had to stop and think about how I wanted to reply to this thread . . .
GS, you sound wonderful, and as always your advice is very sound. I think I have been going through a period of feelings sorry for myself, at least a little. I've also been under a tremendous amount of stress and so much contact with my mother lately hasn't helped.
There are times when it seems like no matter how far I get, I look around, I still see a mess. I still see so many things that have to get done. Homework is a battle, etc. I feel overwhelmed, and I wish there was someone to turn to but there isn't. The people I should be able to count on, I really can't. I actually have a really hard time depending on other people.
One of the things that has made it difficult for me is that I got caught in a place of feeling sorry for myself. I was in a terrible place with parents and family who were not the least interested in helping me and I could not get myself out and could not find anyone to help. The problem for me in feeling sorry for myself is that I felt helpless without someone to help me, I felt incapable of helping myself. But that was not true. My biggest battle has been overcoming the shame and the sense of utter inadequacy and undeserving. Unfortunately much of those self-sabotaging feelings were powerfully unconscious and I had NO access to them to counter them - plus everything in my life seemed to confirm and magnify those aspects of my life. But I am learning to turn all of that around. A big part of that is addressing the anxiety, the overwhelming fear that I am a failure and will always be a failure and cannot turn my life around. And now I am addressing the falsehood of those lessons learned from my family in early, early childhood.
GS, I understand this exactly. This is my struggle too. I feel inadequate, incompetent, and totally undeserving of anything good. I've realized that I don't really care about the piles of stuff that I have here and there, but when I look at them I feel ashamed because I'm supposed to be able to:
Keep a spotless house
Have a perfect child who never misbehaves, does what he's told, and gets straight A's
Work full time, come home and be a perfect mom
Never worry about myself. I have to think of everyone else.
These are the lessons I learned from my family. From my reading I've learned that I was a lost child, a child who just faded into the background and kept the peace. That's me, the perfect child, the one who was too scared to speak up or put a toe out of line. So I rebelled silently, reading things my mom didn't approve of, doing passive aggressive things . I remember being fifteen and still coming home to watch afternoon cartoons. My mother thought it was silly, but I loved it. And I did it partly because she didn't like it. That's the way everything was. I wasn't allowed to have opinions or a thought of my own, and I grew up to be a doormat, letting people walk all over me because I'd never learned to assert myself. I'm trying to change that.
I see many (most) of us here on a Journey to free ourselves from the effects of an N and I think that the frustrations, confusion, sadness, disappointment and panic that we feel are the stops along the way in our Journey to personal freedom, out of the clutches of the N.
Sally, I think part of it is that these feelings have been bottled up inside for years. I've never been allowed to feel them, express them or admit that it was okay to have them. I think recovery is about learning what those feelings mean, and realizing they are there in the first place. Confronting those feelings takes a lot of strength and courage, because not all of them are pretty.
I was always so jealous of my friends whose families took vacations every year. Sometimes they just went camping, but every year, they went somewhere. My family never did anything like that. We went on one vacation. I was six. We didn't even go where we'd planned to go. My parents think vacations are a waste of time. They don't want to take time from work to go, and my mother wouldn't even go visit her only living relative because she couldn't leave my dad alone for four days. She was afraid he would starve, stray from the pln she has for him, do something she doesn't like, etc. Anytime anyone talks about their vacation, all she can think about is what a waste of money it is. Isn't that sad?
I don't want to be like that. And to not be like that, I have to face those feelings I"ve carried around all my life. So I think I"m a little raw right now because of that, and because of so many changes over a short period of time.
Tay, you have already come a long way on this Journey: you moved out of your parents' home, you're going to tell your NM to treat you like an adult (or else) and these are HUGE ACCOMPLISHMENTS. So, congrats on that.
Thanks, I really do lose sight of what I have done in the face of what still needs to be done.
Can we take a vow that we will never again believe this and that we will destroy the tape in our heads that says this to us??
Absolutely.
