Post by leahb on Jun 24, 2015 13:19:38 GMT -8
Hi Fellow LAs out there I'm looking for some relief.
I was feeling pretty good today, but then for some reason I got into some negative thinking traps and now feel like a pathetic shell of a person. Why is it some days I feel great and amazing about my recovery and how far I've come and other days I feel like absolute garbage about myself? Argh! Frustrating. I do think some of it comes from comparison and feelings of isolation.
Is it just me, or is recovery and all the emotional stuff that comes up incredibly draining? I mean, there are times that I could sleep all day as I feel too fatigued to do anything but rest. Then I get to thinking, am I just being lazy or indulgent? Why aren't I working on x or y or z? And then the guilt kicks in and I have to "talk myself down" from feeling this way. Yikes. It's an uncomfortable kind of feeling.
I recently-in the last few days-figured out more things about my past and how those events and experiences contributed to the person I am today and where I'm at in life.
Anyhow, I recently identified that my mother is likely suffering from borderline personality disorder (undiagnosed of course-she'd never admit anything was off about herself) with a healthy dose of narcissism thrown in for good measure. My father is a classic enabler-with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder (diagnosed 30 years ago) who allows his wife to control everything. They have a dysfunctional co-dependent relationship. They both also drink alcohol daily and were not emotionally available and many times not even physically available when I was growing up and even today.
My mother's love was conditional on my behavior and if I didn't do as was asked, she would with hold love. My mother is also a smoker and has been one for 45 years. My father was capable of emotion, but was constantly under my mother's control and he was emotionally immature and unable to truly connect. He also used marijuana for most of his life to self-medicate.
There was a lot of chaos in my family growing up. People would come and go and my extended family lived a few provinces away and hardly visited. We also hardly visited them. My mother claims that when her and my father left their home province because there was no job opportunities there, the rest of their families "blacklisted" them. I have good cause now to think that this "blacklisting" was all in her head and excused a lot of her behavior towards them later in life. My parents were friends with people where drama followed them around constantly. People that had been to prison and later on, people who would commit horrible crimes. These people were allowed into the house, which didn't help matters.
When my younger brother was 2.5 years old he was diagnosed with cancer. My mother played it up saying that he "wasn't suppose to have lived" making his recovery appear more miraculous than it actually was. During this time (when I was approximately 5 years old) she was never around for me as she "lived" at the hospital with my brother. My father, being emotionally immature, was unable to handle the stress of it all and though he went to work my parents left me with friends of the family to be cared for when I was not at school. During this time, according to my mother, the extended family they had provinces away "had to be begged" to come to help us take care of me as there wasn't a lot of support available to them. Now I don't believe this to be true either. It is more likely that my Mom asked them to come-not begged-and they did come to help later on-likely because they cared. All the while, I felt so guilty from them having to "beg for help" to take care of me-the healthy child who was an inconvenience to her family.
As time soldiered on, my parents left me in charge of my brother. At the age of 9 I was in charge of taking care of my brother during lunch hour and after school. During his childhood years, my brother had asthma and struggled to breathe at times-and I was alone caring for him when these events would happen. I recall one event vividly of me calling my Dad at his work when I was 11 saying my brother "can't breathe"-though he was wheezing and getting air in my Dad hightailed it home from work and took him to the hospital where they gave him oxygen and bronchodialators to open his airways. That was scary.
I turned to books as a sanctuary. I loved reading stories about people in far off lands and going on adventures with them from the comfort of my bed was amazing. I also really enjoyed school-I thrived on the structure and predictability of it. I became a great student and currently hold a professional designation with a graduate degree. I now laugh at this as I realize that I'm not sure I even want to stay in this field, but I digress.
Also when I was growing up I was hungry to connect with my parents. Since my Mother was incapable of nurturing, I turned to my Dad many times to connect. Unfortunately the only way he knew to connect was through watching sports. So I would watch sports with him and cheer on the same team so I could feel closer to my Dad. This did not work and once I hit puberty I realized I didn't care for sports and became totally boy crazy-hello Love Addiction!
I now see why I turned out the way I did, and I understand looking at my grandparents that my parents didn't stand much of a chance of turning out any differently than they did. But still I have such anger towards them and as much as I understand intellectually that they really didn't stand much of a chance of being anyone other than who they are, I blame them for the way they behaved when I was a child. And I know based on BPD literature, my mother is not capable of true empathy or a relationship with someone when she doesn't feel superior in some way-so I will never have the kind of relationship with my mother I wanted. I will not have the emotional closeness, the trust (you never know when she's going to stab you in the heart or back with a scathing comment or behavior) or unconditional love that I wanted so badly from my mother. As such, I have had to put up boundaries and engage in LC with my entire family of origin. Sad, but true.
All of the relationships I've had with men were me trying to get this love that I've always wanted. The family I always wanted. The connection I always wanted. The fears of abandonment to subside. The fears of worthlessness to go away. I was just so very hungry for this and still am in many ways.
I feel better getting that all out. Thanks for reading.
How do I go forward?
I was feeling pretty good today, but then for some reason I got into some negative thinking traps and now feel like a pathetic shell of a person. Why is it some days I feel great and amazing about my recovery and how far I've come and other days I feel like absolute garbage about myself? Argh! Frustrating. I do think some of it comes from comparison and feelings of isolation.
Is it just me, or is recovery and all the emotional stuff that comes up incredibly draining? I mean, there are times that I could sleep all day as I feel too fatigued to do anything but rest. Then I get to thinking, am I just being lazy or indulgent? Why aren't I working on x or y or z? And then the guilt kicks in and I have to "talk myself down" from feeling this way. Yikes. It's an uncomfortable kind of feeling.
I recently-in the last few days-figured out more things about my past and how those events and experiences contributed to the person I am today and where I'm at in life.
Anyhow, I recently identified that my mother is likely suffering from borderline personality disorder (undiagnosed of course-she'd never admit anything was off about herself) with a healthy dose of narcissism thrown in for good measure. My father is a classic enabler-with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder (diagnosed 30 years ago) who allows his wife to control everything. They have a dysfunctional co-dependent relationship. They both also drink alcohol daily and were not emotionally available and many times not even physically available when I was growing up and even today.
My mother's love was conditional on my behavior and if I didn't do as was asked, she would with hold love. My mother is also a smoker and has been one for 45 years. My father was capable of emotion, but was constantly under my mother's control and he was emotionally immature and unable to truly connect. He also used marijuana for most of his life to self-medicate.
There was a lot of chaos in my family growing up. People would come and go and my extended family lived a few provinces away and hardly visited. We also hardly visited them. My mother claims that when her and my father left their home province because there was no job opportunities there, the rest of their families "blacklisted" them. I have good cause now to think that this "blacklisting" was all in her head and excused a lot of her behavior towards them later in life. My parents were friends with people where drama followed them around constantly. People that had been to prison and later on, people who would commit horrible crimes. These people were allowed into the house, which didn't help matters.
When my younger brother was 2.5 years old he was diagnosed with cancer. My mother played it up saying that he "wasn't suppose to have lived" making his recovery appear more miraculous than it actually was. During this time (when I was approximately 5 years old) she was never around for me as she "lived" at the hospital with my brother. My father, being emotionally immature, was unable to handle the stress of it all and though he went to work my parents left me with friends of the family to be cared for when I was not at school. During this time, according to my mother, the extended family they had provinces away "had to be begged" to come to help us take care of me as there wasn't a lot of support available to them. Now I don't believe this to be true either. It is more likely that my Mom asked them to come-not begged-and they did come to help later on-likely because they cared. All the while, I felt so guilty from them having to "beg for help" to take care of me-the healthy child who was an inconvenience to her family.
As time soldiered on, my parents left me in charge of my brother. At the age of 9 I was in charge of taking care of my brother during lunch hour and after school. During his childhood years, my brother had asthma and struggled to breathe at times-and I was alone caring for him when these events would happen. I recall one event vividly of me calling my Dad at his work when I was 11 saying my brother "can't breathe"-though he was wheezing and getting air in my Dad hightailed it home from work and took him to the hospital where they gave him oxygen and bronchodialators to open his airways. That was scary.
I turned to books as a sanctuary. I loved reading stories about people in far off lands and going on adventures with them from the comfort of my bed was amazing. I also really enjoyed school-I thrived on the structure and predictability of it. I became a great student and currently hold a professional designation with a graduate degree. I now laugh at this as I realize that I'm not sure I even want to stay in this field, but I digress.
Also when I was growing up I was hungry to connect with my parents. Since my Mother was incapable of nurturing, I turned to my Dad many times to connect. Unfortunately the only way he knew to connect was through watching sports. So I would watch sports with him and cheer on the same team so I could feel closer to my Dad. This did not work and once I hit puberty I realized I didn't care for sports and became totally boy crazy-hello Love Addiction!
I now see why I turned out the way I did, and I understand looking at my grandparents that my parents didn't stand much of a chance of turning out any differently than they did. But still I have such anger towards them and as much as I understand intellectually that they really didn't stand much of a chance of being anyone other than who they are, I blame them for the way they behaved when I was a child. And I know based on BPD literature, my mother is not capable of true empathy or a relationship with someone when she doesn't feel superior in some way-so I will never have the kind of relationship with my mother I wanted. I will not have the emotional closeness, the trust (you never know when she's going to stab you in the heart or back with a scathing comment or behavior) or unconditional love that I wanted so badly from my mother. As such, I have had to put up boundaries and engage in LC with my entire family of origin. Sad, but true.
All of the relationships I've had with men were me trying to get this love that I've always wanted. The family I always wanted. The connection I always wanted. The fears of abandonment to subside. The fears of worthlessness to go away. I was just so very hungry for this and still am in many ways.
I feel better getting that all out. Thanks for reading.
How do I go forward?
