Guilt and Siren Songs
Member
Thread Starter
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: NJ
Posts: 197
Guilt and Siren Songs
Hi everyone, hope you are all keeping well.
Well it is one week exactly since I went no-contact with my codie mother and alcoholic brother. My boundaries have been respected and they have not attempted to contact me.
I and my family are doing well. So far the ripple effects have been minimal.
Underneath and I hang onto this, I remain calm and resolute that I have taken the correct course of action.
I am anxious (and I was prepared for this) of confrontation. Unfortunately, we all live far too close for comfort, so if they choose, they could appear at my door. Now I know how I am going to handle the situation if they arrive and use deep breathing, etc to calm the waves of anxiety. Tbh, I am fed up of being anxious and scared. This comes from years of living in a violent home. I was conditioned to keep the peace at all costs, don't make Mum or Dad angry. If violence erupted, submit, keep quiet, endure, it'll all be over soon. This is one area I plan to tackle with a therapist.
Two emotions that I wasn't prepared for were guilt and hope.
I feel guilty and I am furious with myself for feeling guilty. I know that my actions have caused emotional pain. I accept responsibility and feel sad that I have been the cause of that pain. But.... that is not what I am feeling guilty about.
I feel as if I have been a bad girl, naughty for doing something wrong and I am waiting for the punishment. Is this perhaps fear rather than guilt that I am feeling?
Given the years of abuse that I have suffered, I have the right to say NO MORE. So WHY am I feeling guilty?
This one is even more bizarre - unsubstantiated, unfounded hope. I have been having fantasies where my mother and I have a rational discussion and she is calm and totally supportive of me and what I am trying to achieve. I imagine writing to my brother and explaining all my actions and him reading the letter going yes, I totally understand, I respect how hard it has been for her to do this.
WTF am I doing to myself? It's like self-sabotage. Don't I want to succeed in this?
I have worked so hard to go no contact. I got up off the floor and said NO to the abuse. If I re-establish contact, I may as well get back down on the floor and put a sign on my back "Kick Me".
Why is my subconscious working so hard to create golden fantasies that are totally unrealistic. Do I believe that they will happen? Not a chance.
What is going on here. Can anyone explain?
Well it is one week exactly since I went no-contact with my codie mother and alcoholic brother. My boundaries have been respected and they have not attempted to contact me.
I and my family are doing well. So far the ripple effects have been minimal.
Underneath and I hang onto this, I remain calm and resolute that I have taken the correct course of action.
I am anxious (and I was prepared for this) of confrontation. Unfortunately, we all live far too close for comfort, so if they choose, they could appear at my door. Now I know how I am going to handle the situation if they arrive and use deep breathing, etc to calm the waves of anxiety. Tbh, I am fed up of being anxious and scared. This comes from years of living in a violent home. I was conditioned to keep the peace at all costs, don't make Mum or Dad angry. If violence erupted, submit, keep quiet, endure, it'll all be over soon. This is one area I plan to tackle with a therapist.
Two emotions that I wasn't prepared for were guilt and hope.
I feel guilty and I am furious with myself for feeling guilty. I know that my actions have caused emotional pain. I accept responsibility and feel sad that I have been the cause of that pain. But.... that is not what I am feeling guilty about.
I feel as if I have been a bad girl, naughty for doing something wrong and I am waiting for the punishment. Is this perhaps fear rather than guilt that I am feeling?
Given the years of abuse that I have suffered, I have the right to say NO MORE. So WHY am I feeling guilty?
This one is even more bizarre - unsubstantiated, unfounded hope. I have been having fantasies where my mother and I have a rational discussion and she is calm and totally supportive of me and what I am trying to achieve. I imagine writing to my brother and explaining all my actions and him reading the letter going yes, I totally understand, I respect how hard it has been for her to do this.
WTF am I doing to myself? It's like self-sabotage. Don't I want to succeed in this?
I have worked so hard to go no contact. I got up off the floor and said NO to the abuse. If I re-establish contact, I may as well get back down on the floor and put a sign on my back "Kick Me".
Why is my subconscious working so hard to create golden fantasies that are totally unrealistic. Do I believe that they will happen? Not a chance.
What is going on here. Can anyone explain?
Member
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: Georgia (the state, not the country!)
Posts: 108
Unfortunately, I can't explain as I'm not there (yet). Perhaps some other folks who initiated no contact might be able to.
If I did, though, I know I'd feel guilty for dropping the rope. Because even though it's not ultimately final, it feels sort of final. I am done with you (at least for now) and I don't want anything to do with you, not now. I'd feel crappy about that, mainly because it's how my codies would want me to feel. And I'd be sad that things have reached that point. As for the hope ... is it possible you think this might change them? I wish I could tell you it would, but you know better than that, don't you?
I once had a therapist who asked me to write up my idea of a perfect dad. I based it on one of my college roommates' fathers, and wrote up this glowing idea of what a great dad would be. After I'd finished reading it to her, she said, "OK, now tear it up, because it's never going to happen."
It was harsh. But she got the point across.
I'm not saying your family won't change. I'm saying you aren't the one who controls it, contact or no.
I think it's only natural to have a sea of emotions now. You've taken a huge step. But while you're feeling your feelings, please don't forget to take care of yourself. Do something good for yourself, will you? Since I'm not there to give you a hug.
Stay strong. Love.
If I did, though, I know I'd feel guilty for dropping the rope. Because even though it's not ultimately final, it feels sort of final. I am done with you (at least for now) and I don't want anything to do with you, not now. I'd feel crappy about that, mainly because it's how my codies would want me to feel. And I'd be sad that things have reached that point. As for the hope ... is it possible you think this might change them? I wish I could tell you it would, but you know better than that, don't you?
I once had a therapist who asked me to write up my idea of a perfect dad. I based it on one of my college roommates' fathers, and wrote up this glowing idea of what a great dad would be. After I'd finished reading it to her, she said, "OK, now tear it up, because it's never going to happen."
It was harsh. But she got the point across.
I'm not saying your family won't change. I'm saying you aren't the one who controls it, contact or no.
I think it's only natural to have a sea of emotions now. You've taken a huge step. But while you're feeling your feelings, please don't forget to take care of yourself. Do something good for yourself, will you? Since I'm not there to give you a hug.
Stay strong. Love.
Member
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: Anywhere but the mainstream.
Posts: 402
cannot avoid answering in a rant, sorry IMO you're hitting the deeper layers of logic-detouring thoughts your brain developed in order to survive your upbringing. It was stressful. Growing up in a home where anger is erratic and undeserved (and even worse, targetted at children, whether physical, verbal or emotional), you had to find a way to mentally endure without losing your sanity. From very early on you developed coping skills (healthy or unhealthy) to buffer the stress - stress that, quite frankly, young children should never be exposed to.
I believe in the drive human beings - like all other animals - have to survive. We need to be cute/well-behaved/likeable in order to ensure love from adults and be nurtured into adulthood. When we are born into an abusive household, we still need to survive and we still need to be nurtured. We also need to be loved. So we find ways with the limited knowledge we have to ensure those needs are met. We develop strategies (hero/lost/blacksheep/mascot) that work for us at the time. Because we also need to be loved, our brains develop ways of convincing ourselves that we are being loved. Truth is not our brain and body's concern; survival is.
Because you're moving forward in recovery you're eroding the deeper channels of all the thinking that kept you believing you were being loved. (and by this I'm not saying that your parents did not love you at all; the truth is their love did not equate with the love you believed you were ultimately getting) You absorbed the structure your parents were modelling for you. You were conditioned to be loyal and to accept disparities between the worth of your parents' well-being and your own. You accepted more responsibility than was appropriate for a young person in order to believe you had enough control to ensure your survival.
And now that you're pulling away, you're feeling the depth of those feelings of responsibility.
For how many years have you practiced loyalty now? Even up until recently...
You have years of this habitual counter-thinking that ultimately demonstrates to your mom that you are loyal. Your brain is still wired into believing that your mom (who dominated your care and environment for years) is still the key adult in your life. Now it's like your actions are giving your brain mixed messages, and it's revealing a very common theme that many, many ACoAs go through: guilt. Guilt that our parents do rely on us, and if we leave to better ourselves we are abandoning them. Perhaps guilt that if we leave, we may never finally get that ideal parent we convinced ourselves we ultimately had.
I wouldn't be surprised if you started dreaming about this too. IMO it means your subconscious is actively taking these dusty dreams out and having another look in light your self-reassessment.
Funny how we say around here that the only person you can control is yourself. That may be true to a certain extent since we can control our actions, but often not our emotions. Keep guiding yourself with your actions, and give your emotions time to catch up. Journal out all the stuff your subconscious is trying to air out. Give yourself permission to talk about the golden fantasies you don't accept. Sure the adult in you rejects these ideas, but the child in you that is still waiting to have their needs met doesn't understand yet why it has to let go of these hopes.
It may seem like self-sabatoge, but it's also a chance to confront, set the facts straight, and re-align your emotions. Hang in their, IWTH. I remember spending a full week crying in the evenings, replaying over and over in my head my AF and I having a conversation about learning to use computers, since he had just bought one. We were going to do it together. It never happened. I cried because I could still feel the hope that we were going to do it together. Such a silly trivial thing that only I remember, yet it was not so silly and trivial to the child who had pinned a high hope to that dream. FYI he still doesn't know how to turn one on.
Aside: I do believe that despite the unhappiness and suffering dysfunctional families endure, they work. They work to keep us alive long enough to reproduce. From a genetic and evolutionary standpoint, reproductive strategies that do not endure do not survive. They are outcompeted and "bred out", so to speak. Because survival is so important, sucessful strategies tend to be pretty hard-wired (consider the rate at which adult children from dysfunctional families find partners much like their opposite-sex parent - many of us perpetuate the survival strategy). That's why breaking out of your family's survival strategy requires SO MUCH self-awareness. In some cases you are literally fighting generations' worth of knowledge on how to survive.
I believe in the drive human beings - like all other animals - have to survive. We need to be cute/well-behaved/likeable in order to ensure love from adults and be nurtured into adulthood. When we are born into an abusive household, we still need to survive and we still need to be nurtured. We also need to be loved. So we find ways with the limited knowledge we have to ensure those needs are met. We develop strategies (hero/lost/blacksheep/mascot) that work for us at the time. Because we also need to be loved, our brains develop ways of convincing ourselves that we are being loved. Truth is not our brain and body's concern; survival is.
Because you're moving forward in recovery you're eroding the deeper channels of all the thinking that kept you believing you were being loved. (and by this I'm not saying that your parents did not love you at all; the truth is their love did not equate with the love you believed you were ultimately getting) You absorbed the structure your parents were modelling for you. You were conditioned to be loyal and to accept disparities between the worth of your parents' well-being and your own. You accepted more responsibility than was appropriate for a young person in order to believe you had enough control to ensure your survival.
And now that you're pulling away, you're feeling the depth of those feelings of responsibility.
For how many years have you practiced loyalty now? Even up until recently...
Less than three weeks ago, she said to me, your brother's been talking about his childhood, it wasn't that bad, he's remembering it wrong, why can't he let the past stay in the past. I wanted to stand up and scream "Yes, it was that bad" but I didn't, I said something naff like everyone's perception is different.
I have been having fantasies where my mother and I have a rational discussion and she is calm and totally supportive of me and what I am trying to achieve. I imagine writing to my brother and explaining all my actions and him reading the letter going yes, I totally understand, I respect how hard it has been for her to do this.
Funny how we say around here that the only person you can control is yourself. That may be true to a certain extent since we can control our actions, but often not our emotions. Keep guiding yourself with your actions, and give your emotions time to catch up. Journal out all the stuff your subconscious is trying to air out. Give yourself permission to talk about the golden fantasies you don't accept. Sure the adult in you rejects these ideas, but the child in you that is still waiting to have their needs met doesn't understand yet why it has to let go of these hopes.
It may seem like self-sabatoge, but it's also a chance to confront, set the facts straight, and re-align your emotions. Hang in their, IWTH. I remember spending a full week crying in the evenings, replaying over and over in my head my AF and I having a conversation about learning to use computers, since he had just bought one. We were going to do it together. It never happened. I cried because I could still feel the hope that we were going to do it together. Such a silly trivial thing that only I remember, yet it was not so silly and trivial to the child who had pinned a high hope to that dream. FYI he still doesn't know how to turn one on.
Aside: I do believe that despite the unhappiness and suffering dysfunctional families endure, they work. They work to keep us alive long enough to reproduce. From a genetic and evolutionary standpoint, reproductive strategies that do not endure do not survive. They are outcompeted and "bred out", so to speak. Because survival is so important, sucessful strategies tend to be pretty hard-wired (consider the rate at which adult children from dysfunctional families find partners much like their opposite-sex parent - many of us perpetuate the survival strategy). That's why breaking out of your family's survival strategy requires SO MUCH self-awareness. In some cases you are literally fighting generations' worth of knowledge on how to survive.
AKA 'grewupinabarn'
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: New Hampshire
Posts: 471
Why is my subconscious working so hard to create golden fantasies that are totally unrealistic.
You have been well trained, from birth on, to react this way.
The guilt and hope feels like an honest emotion, tugging at your heart and pouring from the synapses of your brain, but it is mostly training.
Just as someone who grows up in another country and moves here has a lingering accent of their native language well into adulthood, or beyond, ACOA's carry the training of alcoholism with them.
Both my AM and AF passed on long ago (to a place where I assert addictions don't exist and acceptance, humility, and love rule the day) but I am still working through the process of making my brain match the real world.
Yeah, even death does not take the guilt and hope away.
I can't tell you how often I yearned, hoped, and obsessed for a different kind of mom and dad, as so well described by takincareome:
I once had a therapist who asked me to write up my idea of a perfect dad.
I think it is really important to ACCEPT our parents as they are, as flawed human beings worthy of love to the extent that it does NOT harm ourselves or prevent healing.
ACOA's have a twisted view of the Golden Rule: treat others in ways that they expect to be treated and that you really really really really really really really really really really hope they will treat you.
Awareness of what is going on is key. I don't journal, I 'twirl' (use twitter), but the goal is the same - to be aware of what our emotions are doing.
Member
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Stumbling toward happiness
Posts: 4,706
Iwanttoheal, just sending you strong, clear, loving thoughts this weekend. These feelings are very normal, as the wise ones above me have pointed out. Keep easing your way into this healing process.
I am in an NC period right now too with my stepmother, who I've discussed before. She continues to leave messages, and so each time I have to get out my toolbox and work through the guilt and fear and strange urges. I will never outgrow the need to parent mySELF, and nowhere is it stronger than in those moments. I do for myself what my dysfuctional family is unable to do for me:
I tell myself that it is going to be okay
I treat myself tenderly
I remind myself that I am loved
I revisit the reasons why it's important that I do this thing
And so on, out loud if necessary, until the feelings pass.
From past experiences with this, I know that No Contact is difficult at first, but really does get easier after the initial "withdrawal period" is over....when the break is not quite so fresh.
You are learning a completely different way to live and think -- building yourself a new path one brick at a time. Take heart
we are there with you.
Love,
GL
I am in an NC period right now too with my stepmother, who I've discussed before. She continues to leave messages, and so each time I have to get out my toolbox and work through the guilt and fear and strange urges. I will never outgrow the need to parent mySELF, and nowhere is it stronger than in those moments. I do for myself what my dysfuctional family is unable to do for me:
I tell myself that it is going to be okay
I treat myself tenderly
I remind myself that I am loved
I revisit the reasons why it's important that I do this thing
And so on, out loud if necessary, until the feelings pass.
From past experiences with this, I know that No Contact is difficult at first, but really does get easier after the initial "withdrawal period" is over....when the break is not quite so fresh.
You are learning a completely different way to live and think -- building yourself a new path one brick at a time. Take heart
we are there with you.Love,
GL
Member
Thread Starter
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: NJ
Posts: 197
Just wanted to say a very, big thankyou to everyone for all your posts and all your support.
It's absolutely exhausting, I feel like my brain / subconscious is throwing everything that it can at me in order to make me get a "fix". The urge is so powerful, it's like my brain is desperately trying to re-establish what it knows, to reestablish familiarity.
I don't want that familiarity though, it is destructive, dysfunctional and it hurts me.
I am very fortunate in that I've never been through a chemical dependency / chemical withdrawal and given what I'm going through now, I don't want to, thank you very much.
I'm just taking it slowly, breathe in breathe out, one teeny step at a time.
Take care all, IWTH xxx
It's absolutely exhausting, I feel like my brain / subconscious is throwing everything that it can at me in order to make me get a "fix". The urge is so powerful, it's like my brain is desperately trying to re-establish what it knows, to reestablish familiarity.
I don't want that familiarity though, it is destructive, dysfunctional and it hurts me.
I am very fortunate in that I've never been through a chemical dependency / chemical withdrawal and given what I'm going through now, I don't want to, thank you very much.
I'm just taking it slowly, breathe in breathe out, one teeny step at a time.
Take care all, IWTH xxx
RIP Sweet Suki
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: In my sanctuary, my home
Posts: 39,910
((((Iwanttoheal))))
Just keep in mind that boundaries are for you, not for anyone else. They aren't rules for others to follow. Boundaries help you realize that you do have power and control over what you will accept. What others do doesn't matter. It's all in how you react to those things that you have control over. Sounds to me like you are doing great in that area. Hang in there and keep those boundaries.
Just keep in mind that boundaries are for you, not for anyone else. They aren't rules for others to follow. Boundaries help you realize that you do have power and control over what you will accept. What others do doesn't matter. It's all in how you react to those things that you have control over. Sounds to me like you are doing great in that area. Hang in there and keep those boundaries.
Member
Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: Kansas
Posts: 10,182
Originally Posted by GiveLove 
I will never outgrow the need to parent mySELF, and nowhere is it stronger than in those moments. I do for myself what my dysfuctional family is unable to do for me:
I tell myself that it is going to be okay
I treat myself tenderly
I remind myself that I am loved
I revisit the reasons why it's important that I do this thing
And so on, out loud if necessary, until the feelings pass.
I tell myself that it is going to be okay
I treat myself tenderly
I remind myself that I am loved
I revisit the reasons why it's important that I do this thing
And so on, out loud if necessary, until the feelings pass.
I too will never outgrow the need to parent myself.
The last huge blowup with my parents was when Amber wrecked her first car, and I had to turn the Nissan over to her. It got so ugly, I went no contact. I also had to filter Dad's emails to the trash can. (thank God he only has internet access at work, and not at home
)It does take time to 'unlearn' what was so deeply ingrained in us, and to walk through the discomfort of doing something that is different, but healthy for us.
Currently Active Users Viewing this Thread: 1 (0 members and 1 guests)
