BrendaChenowyth

I used alcohol for years to avoid the pain caused by a lifetime of being ignored and put down and told I was not good enough. When every person you ever encountered in life made you feel worthless with their words and actions, how do you accept that it happened, forgive them, and forgive yourself. Because as many times as I hear it or read it, no matter who tells me that I am worthy enough and good enough, it doesn't click. Logically, all signs point to the opposite. It wasn't just one person or one time. When even your parents, the people who created you, the only people who you should expect to love you, could not, would not, and everyone else followed suit, no matter what you did, and without explanation, and CONSISTENLY.. how do you reconcile all of that as untrue and unreliable? It was consistent, it was never otherwise, how can I deny it, even now?

silentrun

It took me nearly 3 years to silence all those voices. Be gentle with yourself.

A trick I heard that helped me was from Steve Hasssan who deals with people who have been subjected to undue influence via authoritarian groups. It works for other things too. Imagine going back to the time someone made you feel that way. Knowing what you know now, and being an adult that can stand up for yourself, say or do what you would do now. Give yourself a do over. For example: I got into big trouble for taking an academic award. They raked me over the coals for trying to bring glory to myself. I had to take all the abuse and then on top of it I had to thank them for taking time to counsel me on my bad behavior. I can't even type out what I said to them in my mind the second time when I relieved that experience. It doesn't bother me anymore. They are a bunch of cowardly idiots just like i told them.

Reading Zen parables helped too. there is probably something on this blog that can help you.
8 Zen Master Stories That Illustrate Important Truths | Thought Catalog

Mostly, I just kept coming here and talking about it. If you want to get better spend your time with people trying to get better as well. Someone is always willing to offer support or great links, something will make sense. Bre Brown is really good and so is ZeFrank. You can come through it. I probably could have benefited from professional help but i didn't realize how screwed up I was.

Fav Bre Brown:
https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brow...me?language=en

Fav ZeFrank:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYlCVwxoL_g

flutter

Therapy. Seriously!

awuh1

I don't know much about you BC. I certainly don't know your parents. But I have a hard time with the idea that nobody has ever treated you with love. Consider responses to your posts here on SR. Has no one been kind and loving to you here? I think if you honestly reflect on this it would be hard to deny.

Your upbringing must have been extremely difficult. If you did not feel love from your parents it might be difficult to recognize it when others express it towards you. Consider the possibility that this harsh perception of things in the present might be coming (at least sometimes) from the effects of that difficult childhood, rather than (always) what is happening in the here and now.

As for the idea that your parents created you, well, I even take exception to that idea. I think Kahlil Gibran said it best.

"Children come through us not from us"

I wish you all the best BC

JeffreyAK

One of the things I learned in group and one-on-one counseling is, no one can make us feel anything - we always do that to ourselves. The consistent picture I'm reading here is that no matter what anyone says and does, you will take it as additional evidence that you are worthless. Maybe that's a good place to start, understanding why you are so self-critical?

BrendaChenowyth

Yeah.. Well meaning people (by that I mean mother) have told me to get counseling. But how much good does it to shell out cash, sit through the uncomfortable intake questionairre, and then have the "expert on all things psychological" look at me wide-eyed and say "Wow, I don't know what to say".. perhaps it is a way of showing me that my issues are very real and matter.. but maybe they just aren't going to be of much help.

I have also been told (mother) to go back on medication, you'll feel better. The idea is that when you correct the imbalance that keeps you in depression, you can fix the things in your life that make you depressed. So you take them and you feel better and just as in the depressive state you do not feel like there is a point in trying to get better, in this artificial happy, well and whole state, you do not see a point in fixing what isn't broken. You feel good, this is working for you. Why go through the pain of dredging up unpleasant things, when the symptoms that show you that there is a problem are gone?

I guess what is hard for my mother to understand is that my abuse and mistreatment was not a few isolated instances, it was routine and normal and all I really knew. She wonders (and I wonder) why I show no motivation to go out in the world and make friends. I'll give you an illustration: I remember being on a high school marching band trip, and we were all walking somewhere.. of course we were all in a big group but I was by myself walking somewhere in the middle of the group. A boy was throwing ice cubes at the back of my head. When I would turn he would say "What?? Turn around and keep walking!!" When I would ask why he was throwing ice at me, he would say he wasn't. His girlfriend was walking next to him, other kids were observing this and openly watching, but no one said I thing. I would make eye contact with his girlfriend hoping for some compassion, never got any. Why did I deserve this? One day not long after I asked him what I ever did? His response: "You were born."

This kind of encounter was typical as I grew up. When I was in my twenties I found a passion for ballroom dancing and I started going out to salsa clubs. I was finally feeling joy and making friends, or so I thought. I met a really nice guy who came to me and said he wanted to help me. He said "I don't think that anyone likes you, and nobody respects you, but if people think you're going out with me and you let me change you in to the kind of person people will like, I think all that will change for you." I began dressing and acting in a way that I was led to believe would finally make people like me. I became a laughing stock instead, because nobody actually respected this guy. But he was so nice and he said he wanted to help me. Why did I draw this person in to my life? How did he know that he could pull me in with his manipulation?

I guess I just want to make sense of it because I want to know how to stop attracting that treatment from others. It has been consistent enough that I have to believe that it is caused by something that I am doing.

BrendaChenowyth

The goal I think in all this exploration is self acceptance so that I can trust a person to love me... I want to have children. I can't do that without figuring out how to stop the pain cycle, because I know how easy it is for a hurting person to project their pain on to their children and keep that cycle going... I have had and caused enough pain, I don't want to create any more. It's just terrifying because I don't know how people I meet just somehow KNOW how to treat me, like that guy who hated me just because, like ALL of those people who hated me just because. It's like I have no control over it but at the same time the only consistent factor in the equation is me, the other people are the variables.

Dee74

Some good advice already.

One thing I'll offer is...it's not an event...it's a process.

It's like peeling back the skin of an onion...it takes a lot of care, a lot of patience and a pretty solid investment of time.

Some people need professional help with issues like these. I had a little counselling in the beginning and it definitely helped.

(btw I've never had the experience of a counsellor simply feeding me back my own words - unless there was a reason for it.)

I read some books too and some of them have already been mentioned.

What helped me the most tho was simply staying sober - staying sober and dealing with life, and it's ups and downs, sober.

For me my self esteem was rooted in what others had told me - I was not capable, I was clumsy, I was unlikable and ugly...I was an accident waiting to happen etc etc.

Living my life sober - really for the first time as an adult - gave me the raw material to fight those long held self beliefs and overturn them.

I am capable, I am strong - and my validation is internal and intrinsic - it is not dependent on my relationship with others.

That's what my recovery taught me

D

BrendaChenowyth

Childhood bullying is deeply misunderstood, I think. We tell kids "Just ignore it, they'll get bored and stop", never mind the fact that they are hurting deeply. So we tell them to stop feeding the problem. They come to believe they are the problem or the cause of the problem. We have kids taking their own lives because they can't go to adults when they're being bullied, without the adult responding with irritation and impatience, and suggesting the first solution that comes to mind, which is one that implies the kid being bullied needs to change their behavior.

ScottFromWI

I view counseling/therapy as a journey too. Therapists don't have any magic spells or pills that will just solve your problems. But the will help you identify where the problems are and help you find a path to a better place. They can help you find tools that will help too. But just like sobriety, you need to do most of the work. And there will definitely be time you hear things you don't want to hear....but you most likely need to hear them.

Cost wise, most insurance covers multiple sessions a month. If you have to pay out of pocket, many offer sliding fees.

BrendaChenowyth

When I can figure out how to avoid the visit copay, maybe I will go, in the meantime, I'm on a tight budget.

Mklove

Brenda, choose one goal today, identify one step forward. It starts there. Not sure what might make you understand your value, because it's there, very much there.

EndGameNYC

It seems that you've also learned that you're not "good enough" to allow yourself to get the help you need. I don't believe this is about money.

A single phrase, a single session, a couple of months or more in therapy is not even the tip of the iceberg. Your abuse and neglect took place over the course of several years and was reinforced along the way for many more years. You naturally learned to expect that other people had an equally low estimation of you as did your parents, and so that's how you saw them, even when that wasn't the case. Now, you're projecting that same dynamic on the potential usefulness of therapy, and on at least on therapist in particular. You've essentially learned to look for reasons/rationalizations to not expect or work for things that can make you and your life better in any substantive way. You're continuing the work of your early tormentors, and with something of a vengeance.

To address your larger question, I had to learn over a great many years and through several unfortunate experiences on my part, which included low self-esteem in the extreme that, among much else, allowed me to settle for less in just about every area of my life and for much of my life, the world I knew was very different from the world I later came to experience. My parents were not necessarily abusive, at least not for the time and place in which I was raised, but they often neglected the emotional side of things, themselves having to manage what slowly became an increasingly loveless marriage.

Perhaps most important, and something that is directly related to your experience of encouragement from other people not "sticking" or making sense, and your willingness to dismiss people who can help you as a waste of time an money, is that long and arduous work I needed to do in order to both see and acknowledge that there were significant differences between my parents and my upbringing as a whole on the one hand, and other, often helpful people, on the other. Without making that seemingly lifelong transition, the rest of the world and the people in it would have looked pretty much like the people who abandoned, neglected or tormented me early on. When we are hurt, the world looks like a cold, uncaring and hurtful place, with the added benefit that we go out of our way to make it so. It's a control issue. If I can't or won't make things better, then I can certainly make them worse. And this is what we all inherit from our upbringing: The insistence on not changing at any cost our early perspectives on people and on life generally.

Our early transactions with other people, and the feelings that they provoked, represent a completely redeemable inheritance from what we experienced at a time in our lives when we were wholly incapable of processing it for what it was. The more we resist both help and change, the worse we get. That's a guarantee.

Lautca

BrendaChenowyth: Okay, you totally have my attention! I understand what happened to you. I'm sympathetic, I know how you feel - - - been there, and I wish I could make it stop. Others have already done a good job of analyzing your concerns, so the only thing I can add is that you seem to be a perfect candidate for EMDR Therapy - Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. "Tapping" seems to be the same thing and some people do tapping on their own, but I wouldn't recommend doing EMDR and/or Tapping on your own because of the brief but intense periods of strong emotions that present themselves when the actual healing process is taking place. When I was 62 in 2012 I had EMDR therapy for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that provided rapid and profound relief from 55 years of paralyzing fear whenever I was in situations that no one else would even notice. As for my own experience during my mind's reprocessing of decades-old unresolved conflicts and harsh memories, there were brief but intense moments of tears and rage against those who had harmed me decades ago, but those were always followed by relief and calmness that has lasted four years so far, and I expect will last the rest of my life. Do you want to go for it?

Right here at SR, check out the EMDR thread from a few years ago by Willybluedog on 1-18-2012, use the search term "First session of EMDR Therapy" in the search box at the top right of the page. Unfortunately, SR will not allow me to post links to other sites, or even itself.

Also check out:

"Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing" at wikipedia

Lautca

BrendaChenowyth

EndGame... Where did you come from???? Thank you...


Lautca that sounds interesting but a little scary.


In the mean time.. I'm learning a couple new things... One, I need to do this in chunks, because I'm exhausting myself. Maybe even come up with a routine, like a certain time, not every day but more than once a week when I will explore these things and study and meditate and write... I think I need breaks, diversions, healthy habits, self care time... I need to do things that are fun for the sake of having fun, too... The other thing I'm learning is that I can and will bring about what I want and it will come to fruition when it is meant to if I'm patient... too many times I pose a question in here and get the perfect response back or I find a book or a youtube video about what I wish to work on, and it's just so right that I can't help but think I conjured it somehow... Maybe we really do attract what we think about, whatever is on the energy level that we are on and choose to stay on we continue to attract...

Notimetoloose

For me, time helped, sober time and as the time goes by a lot of it will fall away naturally.
The inherited beliefs and maladaptive behaviors can take some work like you said, do it in chunks and as feelings come up, sit with them, feel the sting of them and the feelings associated with them.
It can be hard and we can cringe at the memories but addressing them I found they had very little power anymore .
Mahatma Gandhi said, “I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.”

Berrybean

For me, personally, I needed to really remind myself each time that letting stuff go wasn't me them, it was for ME. For MY sanity. MY serenity. MY sobriety. As such it had nothing to do with fair or unfair; right or wrong; or forgiveness. That ME holding onto stuff because THEY we're unfair, unkind or wrong was just like punishing myself for those mistakes.

The inner child work that I did really helped me with a lot of this. It says in the Penny Parks book that we talked about before that often we don't feel we can let stuff go because that would be a betrayal of our childhood (or past) selves. So by doing the exercises in that book I was able to work past that, and become reconciled with my inner child and 'rescue' her, so to speak. That helped me let go of the last more easily.

Sorry if all that seems a bit mumbo-jumbo and waffley. I'm only just up and gathering my limbs and senses. Thing is, I know that if I intend to come back and post later it may well slip from my mind. Senile moments ya know lol.

Actually, mostly I have forgiven now. There are a couple of people that I've decided it is not MY job to forgive. I don't know if those people are still doing what they did too me, just to someone else. And you know, I don't want to go back to any crash-scenes to find that kind of stuff out. Maybe they're eaten up with guilt and remorse just like I was about some of my past harms (different kind of harms, granted, but remorse is remorse, and if I knew they felt that then I would want to forgive them - hopefully I'd manage it. ) But only God can know their hearts, so I've handed those 2 things over to him.

I spent so, so many years wearing my resentment and hurt like an invisible cloak and shield. Keeping everyone at a safe distance. 'They can't touch me', I thought, 'I'm safe niw'. But I wasn't safe. I was lonely and bitter. I was trapped inside my own invisible cloak with the memories and resentments. They were with me every day. Every down moment. Every night when I was going to sleep. Keeping my fear alive - fear that was what i deserved. That they were right. That others would treat me the same way. But, who was I punishing other than myself?

I will pray for you BC. I feel like you're getting close to being ready to start dealing with all your 'stuff'. I pray that you will find some peace and serenity as you learn to Let Go and Let God, and you find something or something to guide you safely through this process. It is not easy.

Wishing you all the best for your recovery. BB x

BrendaChenowyth

BerryBean, thank you. The farthest thing from mumbo-gumbo, believe me!

It makes sense that we need to forgive for OURSELVES, not for THEM.
There are three people left that I haven't forgiven. For two of them, I know that they were hurt themselves when they hurt me. The last feels subhuman to me. I haven't seen him in 25 years. He's become more of an idea than a real person.

I know all it takes is a decision... I know the only thing stopping me from healing that particular wound is me.

steve-in-kville

I think we also need to keep in mind that the bullying doesn't stop at childhood. It continues as adults. Ten years ago no one ever heard of workplace bullying. Now all of a sudden its on the tip of every HR department's tongue.

BrendaChenowyth

Yeah, I have been the object of many a frustrated coworker's passive aggressive bull crap. I am even now. The work situation that I thought I was out of? The new manager that said "Okay" I could go, wasn't thinking things through.. But I was able to talk about what was going on with me and the family member that was making me uncomfortable, and it turns out, he has driven away a few other caregivers who never spoke up about their "personal reasons" for leaving. So tomorrow I'm working there and I have been instructed to lock the door and keep the spare key we keep outside with me. Seriously, pray for me. I have pepper spray I just bought. It's like insurance, you don't plan to use it, you just want to have it. He's a functioning alcoholic and we know that they can be unpredictable.