In this post about the therapeudic effects of personal blogging, he interviews another blogger who delves extensively into her personal issues and has been for 10 years. I hadn't read her before and her blog didn't make me wanna rush right out and read all of her stuff, but what ended up in Dr. Rob's post hit so close to close to home that I promptly had an anxiety attack and struggled with nausea off and on the rest of the day.
It could have been me writing this part:
...I came from a decent family; had two loving parents who'd been raised in stable homes. My family was good folk. Hardworking folk. German and Irish immigrants mostly, with a little bit of Iroquois. My parents had been married 30 years and I had an extremely close relationship with my mother. I probably hadn't had an idyllic childhood, but that was my own fault, because there was something inherently wrong with me at my core, from birth, and that was the reason I was suffering. I was too stubborn, too sensitive, too selfish. Nothing particularly bad had ever happened to me; I was merely inferior to everyone on earth, and there really wasn't anything good about me. Because of this, I was eating disordered, in and out of controlling and abusive relationships with jerks, addicted to a handful of different substances, alcohol, pills, sex - anything that would put me out of myself, to be honest. Not to mention, I was at war with a depression that had gripped me since before puberty, the source of which was just...fate, I guessed. I was in a lot of pain, and I had tried to commit suicide twice the previous winter. Because I was bad at everything, I failed at both attempts, but I was pretty certain I wouldn't be alive much longer. I couldn't take the hurt because I was weak.
I use a totally different way of getting out of myself. Instead of drugs and sex and things, I dissociate, sometimes to the extreme. Other than that - this could be me, right down to the geneology!
This just... clicked. But then I read this paragraph:
Its difficult for people to understand how you can think you are a bad person when there is no evidence supporting that fact--I got straight A's and no detentions, and truly believed I was a bad kid. But you're brainwashed. Your ability to self assess is taken from you, and feelings are not allowed. No one can feel. If they did, they walk the fuck out, so it's declared selfishness to feel things. Moreover, the message is: you do not matter as a person, beyond the material, or your ability to sacrifice for the family, and so you further suppress feelings. Sit on them. That's a dangerous way to move through life, particularly if you're seeing things through as cracked a prism as mine.
And that's where I lost it. Because that is me all over the place. I truly believe I am a bad person and that I was an evil kid. And yet if I try to explain this to people, they don't get it, they never get it. I've never yet managed to successfully explain where this deep-seated confidence in that reality springs from but I know it is there.
But she felt that way too. And she had so many things similar in her life to what I had in mine. And she ended up screwing up her life in so many ways, as did I. But she came to the conclusion that it was her LIFE that was messed up, that it was her LIFE that was bad, her situation - not her. And she came through the other side and is starting to see herself as not a bad person and that maybe she wasn't a bad kid.
Honestly, that very concept terrifies me - that maybe it isn;t/wasn't me after all. Maybe I'm not bad and it was the circumstances that were bad. The conditioning is so strong from The Mother - she built it right in there that psychology, therapy in particular, is awful because it introduces the concept of "toxic parents" (her terms not mine) that assume the problems of the child are because of the parents. She used to say I was a perfect example of pop psychology bullshit (also her terms) because nothing in my life necessitated the way I behaved and the depression I fell into. It had nothing to do with her and yet they labeled her a toxic parent and how stupid and horrible that concept was and she would go on and on about it. It never occurred to me to dispute her because that would have put me right there with the infamous "them" which she railed against so strongly. It's built in to never question her role in my failings and always place it squarely on my being a bad person and fate choosing me randomly to assign "bad" status to.
But if she can walk away from the cult mentality and work towards a better life and self... and I saw so much of my own thoughts in her words... what does that say???
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