That’s Not My Job

This morning I woke up from a dream wherein I was begging people for oatmeal cookie recipes. I have no idea why that was so important to me but I also had an epiphany right before I sat up in bed. Maybe my old recipe doesn’t work anymore because we used to melt the butter. MELT the butter. That was the key to my chocolate chip cookies’ texture being fixed. Our recipe was so memorized that perhaps some of the instructions have been lost over time and my memory has faded. I have now resolved to embark upon this experiment post haste. You have no idea how long I’ve been trying to get the recipe I used back in the tribe to turn out the same here. No other recipes I’ve tried work either. Something is just…off.

Just like cookie recipes…my memory daily fades in reference to my current reality.  I have had another light bulb ‘ding’ that is far more illuminating as far as my daily life and struggles goes. It’s not the first time I’ve remembered this..and it won’t be the last. But it always is such a relief to recognize why my past 2 weeks have been so foggy for me.

We all know that we tend to have a different set of rules for ‘company’ than we do for ‘you live here’. The transition between those two states always takes me a while to realize. Because while company is here, I tend to set aside my own schedules, cater to them, do my best to be with them constantly, etc. As soon as they stop ‘just visiting’, I eventually realize I’ve lost myself and my priorities, schedule and LIFE…again. I have always sacrificed my priorities for others’. That just doesn’t work for me anymore. It doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy their company or spend time with them. It just means I have to start living again and we have to stop eating special suppers and having drinks every night. My ideal daily life is not weekend life…not anymore. There was a time not 6 months ago that this WOULD have been ideal..but I’ve grown, evolved..changed…settled more comfortably into my identity. I no longer so desperately seek to survive every day.

It’s interesting for me to have to face the facts over and over that it is not my job to keep everyone happy. It is not my responsibility to be the buffer always. It’s not my purpose to ensure that my schedule matches everyone else’s. If I want to get up early and go to bed early, I will. Perhaps these seem like mundane things to most people, but for someone whose entire life was spent based on the early understanding that she existed solely for the purpose of helping, enabling and supporting other people, at her own expense, it is still a curious and exotic thing to realize that she does NOT. Yes, I love to help, listen, support…but I can’t do it at the expense of my own sanity, time, sleep or schedule (what there is of it, I still have one).

Once I remember the above again, all is smooth sailing for a few days. Then I forget again. To forget is to repeat the past. How true that has always and will always be. As long as I do remember who I am, what I do and where I live, I will not accidentally relapse into the past reality and universe I spent so many years in. Knowing I do not have to live in that plane of existence or according to those rules any longer; remembering that as horrible as it was, it no longer is my physical reality…that gives me the hope to move forward into the future and to live my days in the present.

We cannot move past that which we have forgotten or not faced. May we all be able to live today and look forward to tomorrow…by remembering and facing our pasts.

Many virtual hugs to all of you out there for listening and understanding!

 

Decisions

It seems that my life will always be made up of a series of decisions, large and small. I actually  used to still hope that someday I will have made every choice required and can live out the remainder (hopefully substantial) of my life without every belaboring the idea of red vs blue or car vs bus again. Bacon or sausage. Chicken or beef. Coffee or tea. Sober or not. Religion vs spirituality. The endless parade of items requiring my attention and choice-making are usually simple, but that doesn’t mean the the choice itself is not fraught with anxiety and fear. What if I choose cheese instead of turkey today? What if that choice is not actually what hubby wanted, even though he said anything was fine. What if he refuses to eat it? I will then feel guilty and stupid for not anticipating his unspoken desire for turkey and berate myself for days. Eventually I will sink into depression again and begin to await the inevitable (in my mind) divorce papers.

My husband is actually the kindest and most understanding of individuals. I once explained my jump from beef for dinner (he wanted fish, but didn’t say so) to the outcome of him divorcing me, having to find a new place to live, a job, what would happen to the puppies…?! He was flabbergasted. How does one so quickly spiral down into such dire consequences from such a simple choice? I’ll tell you.

When one lives their entire childhood with unreasonable expectations of perfection in an untenable and neglected situation, they learn to cope in several different ways, one of which is to never make the ‘wrong choice’. For fear of abandonment, for fear of verbal and emotional abuse, for fear of ‘unseen’, mysterious and hinted at horrors that await. The most terrible of all consequences was disapproval from parents, which lurked constantly. Living in such an isolated position as I did, my only real mirroring of acceptable behaviour was from my parents. I strove for perfection, acceptance, praise. Even when I did excellently, approval rarely voiced or showed itself. I think in some ways it was assumed that I would ‘know’ when I was doing well, hence the words need not be spoken. I didn’t know. None of us knew when we did well. We always knew when we’d failed either in reality or in our parent’s eyes.

Failure becomes the worst sin. Sin is everywhere, you cannot escape it. Soon Fear rules you and you trip even more from the pressure you put yourself under to be perfect. Children, however, are not generally driven to perfection unless it is intimated by their first human contacts that it is important above all. The small girl learns quickly to protect herself from anguish by always agreeing to be helpful whether she should or not, to never say no to adults, to never have a thought or idea that is not sanctioned, to never be herself, because it is dangerous. She learns it is not safe to express emotion, to ever make a mistake, to always know how to divert quarrels between the parents if she and her brothers are to have any sort of a peaceful or normal life.

Perfectionism for some is a personality trait, perhaps. For me, it was a learned behaviour required for my survival.

I always supposed before that my inability to choose was based on my logic and willingness to look at all possible outcomes beforehand. Truthfully, it was my absolutely paralyzing fear of making the wrong choice and living with the disapproval of those around me. Most people didn’t give a crap what I did, but even at 30, my parents’ disapproval either spoken or otherwise still weighs so heavily on me that I have to simply not ask or tell them what I’m planning until I’m cemented and strong in my decision outside of their response. I hate this, but one day I hope to be able to be strong enough to make decisions and share my choices with them without the overwhelming dread and panic at what they will say and how I will feel small and stupid for choosing something they might not like. I’m still a child in this area. I’m still the 11 year old girl washing the forks 5 times over before Mom comes to inspect again just in case because I’d rather go overboard rather than hear that I’ve failed again.

Someday, this little girl too will grow up because she is feeling safer each day and stronger in her choices. One day.

Until then, here we are. 🙂 One day at a time, one struggle, one panic, one fear at a time.

 

Why So Angry?

I’ll tell ya why! Because…um..this..DAMN MOWER. I mean, because I’m so tired. I’ve been out here for hours and I’ll never finish this job? Honestly, I’ve no clue why I’m screaming at this thing. BUT IT NEEDS TO EFFING KEEP GOING! BECAUSE IIIIII AM.

As I stalked into the house in a rage last night half way through mowing down the jungle  that lives in our backyard, I found myself wondering for the first time if maybe I wasn’t just mad at the mower but at something else. I came inside and screamed that I hated that mower and that yard and that “I can’t ever win!” A year of practice now has me listening to myself in these moments and suddenly I realized what I had just said. AH. You’re in a flashback, dear. That’s what this is. No wonder you feel out of control, stupid, tired, incapable of finishing a simple job. Of course you’re screaming at an inanimate object again.

This is yet another situation where you are doing your best, driving slowly, unclogging the machine patiently, being the BEST mower operator in the goddamn world and it insists on sabotaging you still! How could it be so cruel?! How could it insist on dying even though you took such good care of it? How could it hate you so much?! How could it want you to keep mowing forever and never finish?! How could it never want you to have any free time this evening to relax?! Hell, in this flashback world, even mowers have mean, sentient minds.

For years I would become frustrated at people or inanimate objects..ok, boiling lava mad…and instead of allowing myself to ‘be angry’, I would squash it down and bottle it up since being angry was a sin. 30 years of my life, I was never angry, always wrong, always a horrible, selfish, ungrateful person in my eyes. I honestly began to believe I wasn’t angry because now I just didn’t feel anything. I had officially, finally, crammed so many emotions into my internal storage space that there was blessedly no room for more, so now I was numb. Wonderful peace. Also guilt because I didn’t feel happy to see loved ones anymore. I didn’t care what happened to anyone or to myself. I was just ‘blah’. After a few months, ‘blah’ didn’t seem like such a blessing anymore.

Suffice it to say, a year later, I’m no longer blah. But I also no longer squash my emotions. Well, most of the time I don’t. Which means that for a few months after the ‘blah’ I was just insanely angry at everything. Rage personified. I didn’t like that person either. Mostly because while I thought letting out the rage was important, it never helped fix anything, so I was obviously still not angry at the right thing. I was still raging at symptoms, not the cause. One day, the cause of this particular rage, ‘dinged’ in my head. Lightbulb. For 2 days after that I was angry at that situation from my past. I streamed it, I recorded it, I talked to myself in the back yard. The next week, I was, for the first time in a year, not numb and not angry. For a few days at least, until the next trigger happened and I had to sort out which thing I was actually angry about now, since it seemed unlikely that my pen running out of ink was deserving of such blind rage.

Fast forward to yesterday. Occurrence 372 of sudden blinding, boiling hatred..of the lawn mower. The remembrance that I’m not really a person who blames lawn mowers for unnecessary cruelty. So why was I angry this time? After I seethed for a moment, I started crying. This used to surprise me, but now it’s just normal – part of the processing of flashbacks. As the tears streamed down my face I realized what it was that I was saying out loud when I was still angry and it was “I work so hard but it’s never enough! I keep going when I’M tired and it seems endless, I just keep going. But no one else does. How is that fair?!”

Ah. Those years and decades of pushing through, getting up at dawn and being up til midnight just trying to get the dishes done, keep my brothers fed, do all my own schoolwork, help my brothers with theirs, mediate 5 arguments between my parents, take Dad his lunch, put on a friendly face when the neighbors came to visit, clean the house, keep my brothers from getting in trouble for stupid things like the fact that they didn’t sweep every corner perfectly, keep my brothers safe, keep the family going, keep the neighbors from knowing how broken we all were, keep going, keep going, keep going. Never be upset, just be a good enduring missionary kid who is always kind and loving and helpful and generous. No time to read or play outside with the other kids tonight. Get up and do it again tomorrow.

This lawn mower was trying to take me back to that time in my life. Stupid lawn mower. Poor not-the-real-cause of my rage. It’s ok, mower. I understand now. The good news is, next time I’m about to scream at the mower, I will remember this time, and why I wanted to scream at it. And instead of being angry at the mower, I’ll be angry again at the years of my life that were so endless and inescapable and depressingly exhausting. I’ll be angry at the people who should have seen and helped me. The people who should never have put me in such an impossible situation. Then, I will be angry at the cause, and eventually that will be another infected wound which begins to heal now that it’s been lanced, cleaned and bandaged lovingly.

Every time a flashback like this happens, I used to be frustrated that I was ‘still broken’. Now I’m grateful that one more instance has bubbled up to be addressed. One less anger unexpressed. One more happiness reclaimed. One more step to being the me I always was but was never free to be until now.

I will be free-er every day and so can you.

You Are Not Alone

A good friend of mine has just experienced yet another in a long line of betrayals that left them feeling sick, ashamed, filled with rage and ready to give up on their dreams…again. Some of you are inwardly snickering at the melodrama. The majority of you are here because you know me, you know my channel on Twitch and you know what we do there and what matters to us. You are not laughing.

So many of us deal every day with a horror we have yet to define or understand. The pain of betrayal. The disbelief in humanity that is seemingly confirmed every time we dare to hope and love again. The absolutely endless parade of shaming situations and burdens of guilt we shift sadly onto our own shoulders once again because we never realize it is not ours to carry. Of course it is. Everyone has always told us it was.

If you live in this world with us, there is no explanation needed. As I am not writing this to the ‘rest of you’ but only to ‘us’, let me say this. You WERE alone. You are not alone now. You never will be again. 

You may think I’m way off track with my own belief in the reason we are here. Before you write me off, google it. Just look it up. See if it’s you, too. I was where you are not 1 year ago. My stream is a living testament to how far I’ve come and how much things have changed for me once I realized one simple thing. It was not my fault. 

These are recurring statements I hear from several people in my life who I believe are suffering just as I was because of the same essential reasons.

“There is always someone out to get you.”

“I have been a real failure and let down the people who are closest to me.”

“I will never be good enough.”

“I’m a terrible person and I hate myself.”

These are beliefs we all have. Where do we get these wretched ideas? Why are they so ingrained in our psyches? Because someone else, by narcissistic purpose or sheer neglect put them there year after year. Children don’t sit on their own for hours telling themselves what horrible people they are and how much they hate themselves unless it was instigated.

Through many months of research, self discovery, reading; daily steps toward a life where I’m not always raging at inanimate objects, crying because a cup fell on the floor and it’s my fault and I’m a terrible person, deleting social media accounts just to avoid the condemnation and guilt I feel from everyone around me; I am becoming free of this virus in my mind bit by bit.

Complex PTSD is a thing. Millions are afflicted with it and there is still very little awareness of it. PTSD is not just something that affects military personnel or victims of violent crime. The complex version is arguably longer lasting and more intensely affects the lives of it’s afflictees in silent, deadly ways. Anyone interned in a long term POW situation or kidnappees held in captivity for 20 years exhibits much the same symptoms as a child who spent the first 20 years of their lives in a family situation which was just as neglectful, violent, verbally/mentally abusive and inescapable. The complex part of the acronym refers to it’s inescapable nature. This is what causes the twisted defensive postures and self-blame to perpetuate beyond endurance. It affects every area of our lives, including relationships, naturally.

There are many blogs, sites and YouTube channels which have been helpful to me, but I would find it difficult to name them all. Instead, here are the 3 key books which I found to be essential-each in a very different way.

cPTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

The Tao of Fully Feeling

Healing the Shame that Binds You

There are so many more, but as a start, they are my favorites. For a detailed look at CPTSD and it’s symptoms, the first book is amazing. For those of us who have never expressed emotion because it was dangerous, and hence feel somewhat dead and cold when it comes to feeling anything, the second is key. The third was the most instrumental in helping me deprogram the worst part of my childhood trauma-my inescapable feelings of shame, guilt and unworthiness.

So. I have learned to be angry…at the cause, not the symptom. I have realized I needed to cry over losses I never allowed myself to see. I have found that I am not the only one, which is why I created a stream built around a community of us.

We are not alone, and sometimes that’s all we need to begin the journey towards freedom.