LinBaba, your shares in the willingness post inspired me to post this. I really empathised with your inner struggle, the tiredness, the dogged negativity in the face of all your efforts. I identified with you in knowing how it feels to have this seemingly endless internal tussle. Our content may be different but the nature seems the same. I've recently been in the midst of a codependency spiral where resentment for my Mum & self-pity for me had been building. It reached a point of high demand & I became willing to go to any lengths for victory over my condition.
I took inventory again on this specific issue with someone with an amazing grasp of this process. She helped me reach in & touch the hard cold spot in me that had turned to stone & was blocking my spiritual sunshine. I love my Mum (& all her flaws) wholeheartedly again! lol I will share my experience, strength & hope regarding this in another thread when I've finished my written work.
In the meantime, in honour of your honesty, I thought I'd share myself here too. As we say in our CoDA welcome "Our sharing is our way of identification and helps us to free the emotional bonds of our past and the compulsive control of our present." Never alone again.
The Story & Struggle of Me..
Ever since I was a little child I never knew who I was. I felt special, connected, different, lost. I have been & so often felt confused. I thought something brilliant might happen with me as I grew & mastered this world. As it happened, this didn't happen & instead of fulfillment of some amazing purpose I grew evermore distant from reality & sanity & eventually came to consider myself mentally ill/damaged & unable to understand like some confounding learning difficulty that has continuously kept me separate & stuck.
This frustrates me to write now as I have always wanted to acheive, get well & make sense but as it is I have carried blocks, sadness, & feeling ****ed. Like something irrepairable that I can't reach like as if it's too late, too much has happened & I'm too complicated. This is my existential struggle. Feeling clever & stupid at the same time. Feeling self-defining & a victim just as the same. 34 years old & still puzzled.
I grew up with mental illness, domestic violence, abandonment, rejection, conditional love, bullying, abuse. Life telling me not to be a victim when I have been a victim & yet desperate to recover from something I don't fully understand. How can I grow & improve when I don't have the skills, brain ability & capacity to understand? On the deepest level I've wanted to & can't help to continue hating myself though at the same time trying to fight it.
I can't breath as I speak because I've never allowed myself to convey the complexity of my truth whilst at the same time letting go. My fear & self-loathing have burrowed underground & has wanted to defend itself with self-harm whenever challenged.
I've never fully understood rights & wrongs as I didn't know how to reconcile differences. In amongst all of this has been & is my deep underlying & somehow justified sense of shame. How could I escape it when everywhere I turn there is proof for the reason it should exist?
I can't fight my inadequacy. It's like I HAVE FLASHES OF ****ING GENIUS *Know All Knows Nothing (scribbled like a crazy epileptic fit writing that)*. [Mum's words]
Frustration of being alone & not understood. Being alone & insane (scribblescribblefrenzy all over the page again) That's why I'm jealous of success in others (scribbled another sentence I can't read).
I thought it was safe in my head but it isn't. It's like a trap/alone/Disconnection.
Is this my turning & facing myself? The worst of myself? Everything I've EVER STRUGGLED WITH LIKE THE TRUTH OF ME THAT IS ACTUALLY FALSE BUT WHAT I'VE LIVED BY FOR ALL THESE YEARS AND RUN FROM AT THE SAME TIME.
MY HONESTY, REALITY AND TRUTH IS NOW ALL ABOUT MY INTEGRITY (GOOD AND BAD NO MORE ****ING SHAME BUT SHARING IT ALL IN A BID FOR FREEDOM) AND TELLING MY EGO AND CONFUSION THAT IT IS WRONG. I CAN BE CONFUSED AND LEARNING. IT DOESN'T MEAN I'M MAD.
I don't know how to perceive reality, too much to think. Get lost by possibilities.
My innerchild still asks these questions & wants to know what she didn't know or learned wrong like "what other people think doesn't matter" yet at the same time as being bullied & annihilated. Tell her this doesn't matter. No wonder she was confused & couldn't marry up reality.
I don't care about music, politics, geography, fashion, even general opinions on worldly topics because my sense of the world doesn't stretch that far. Confused about what I like & what I don't like. I do like people reconciling with liking & enjoying themselves. I don't like yet can't help my self-centredness. How can I move out from this whilst being true for/to myself? Integrity.
I do feel like there's this outside culture going on without me which is why I enjoyed the intimacy, honesty & trust of recovery but how much do I need a bubble? There's so much I don't get in the world like the ability to follow conversations & understand things outside my own experience or invention.
Self-obsession resultant from familiarity. Alcohol eased all of my struggles. The pain & misunderstanding of being me. The dilemma of living. The tension between the pressure of my inner world & the outer world.
I've been hoping for an education to understand me. It's always been the first thing I didn't know. I struggled with HOW COULD I POSSIBLY have learned anything else on top of that. I knew I always struggled just with being a person, a human being like as if I haven't truly had the mental capacity for it. This has been the crux of my human condtion, let alone alcoholism. Whatever else could I be an expert in if not even this sense of self.
Evidence ~ Attention Deficit Disorder, Lack of Concentration/Imperfection, Inability to understand other languages, inability to make polite conversation or even ask questions of interest, inability to pay attention to stories, conversation, reading, news, movies or understand structures in society, needing constant repetition, not understanding numbers, measures, inability to imagine from what people are saying, I couldn't even do my times tables in juniors, couldn't understand or envision chronology of history, lack of imagination in certain areas & too much in others. Inability to describe vocally in good detail & articulation, difficulty following instructions.
Overwhelmed by the world & what I could give or be useful for. NEVER ****ING ENOUGH. Well enough to try but never able enough to truly succeed & here comes MY VICTIMHOOD... I can't ****ing breathe! VICTIM OF SEXUAL ABUSE, FEAR, DV, ABANDONMENT, SINGLE PARENT, STEP DAD, ALCOHOLISM, MENTAL ILLNESS, RELIGIONISM, CONDITIONAL LOVE, MUM'S NEEDS, EMOTIONAL INCEST, CHAOS, NO BOUNDARIES, LACK OF INTEREST IN US, BULLYING RIGHT THROUGH SCHOOL, LONELINESS, LOVE WAS NEVER ENOUGH FOR ITS OWN SAKE, loving to blame, too much sad history, Feeling like I was alone but not really, that no one else was telling the truth about being troubled. I wanted to get on in empathy but not everyone else was a victim or saw themselves as that or they did but were swamped in self-justification & confidence which I never seemed to have. NO SELF BELIEF AND A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS.
COMPLETE CONFLICT. Telling me I'm not to be a victim whilst at the same time acknowledging causes & effects but they're not supposed to apply to me.
What are my rules?
I come from a working class, underprivileged background, my experiences mean I am ****, deserved it & cannot/must not change, I'm not supposed to, I'm supposed to stay a victim, my inability to grow gives me this message, every time I try to grow I meet blocks as if this proves me wrong. I blame my Mum, "She is, therefore, I am."
My Ego is cunning, baffling & powerful. Without help it is too much for me. Living life by rules of fear & negativity, self-identity to try & stay small & so safe/trapped! What is my self-made prison?
All of it just based on this faulty thoughtscape in the first place.
True new thought cannot penetrate this construct.
What about when you find out you've been living a lie & what if some things don't change & your ego thinks it can find evidence again? Is there a way I can continue to defy all of this & move beyond to the real, honest to God truth?
Can I live with myself in a reality of confusion without shame? Can I adapt myself to the simplicity of who I am?
Can I be true to my own talents & gently let go of the rest without worry? Can I understand what I don't know & work with what is meant for me as it comes?
Through my authenticity. I am meeting myself coming back & I'm not getting away. One Inventory, two inventories, three inventories were never enough. I can keep on with a commentary of me & reconcile it with what I am trying to learn (or want to know).
This can & could be a beauty in me, The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, warts & all. Meeting myself truly where I am & growing from here without my ego's censoring, self-interested self-protection. Love & Let Go; Live & Let Live.
I'm exhausted & can breathe again No need to compete with God
Thank you if you got this far. This is a picture of my inner difficulties. Much of it is rhetorical & has been the blocks I'm talking about that get in the way of me simply being present in the moment & listening for new life experience with new meanings all the time. I'm so grateful to even be at a point where I can share of myself in this way with you all. (was terrified of showing you my struggle & conflict because my ego told me that if I showed you you would look at it & go 'Yes, Danielle, you're right, you're absolutely cracked, ****ed, broken, irrepairable, undesirable, mad, missing in action & beyond help, I'm surprised you got this far!'
I didn't know how to take all this power back from my ego. I've done so much with my steps in AA & CoDA but my ego knew how to hang on underneath..
Thank God I feel differently Just For Today.. "No matter how traumatic your past or despairing your present may seem, there is hope for a new day in the programme of Co-Dependents Anonymous. No longer do you need to rely on others as a power greater than yourself. May you instead find here a new strength within to be that which God intended - Precious and Free."
Thank you so much..I see so much of myself in your story..How scared I am of admitting that there is anything wrong with me. Now I'm scared not to. Thank you again..
Reading through your post really touched me Danielle. I know I do battle with myself every day, and what my thoughts tell me about myself that aren't true. It feels as if it has been that way for me ever since I was little when I felt marginalised and different from the people around me. I spent a lot of time thinking as a child, and had very bad nightmares, and was told a lot that I thought too much. I became frightened of my own thoughts because I couldn't stop them, and eventually kept my frightening thoughts secret as I felt confused that I thought more than other people and that my thoughts were frightening so there must be something really wrong with me. Looking back I can see really clearly how my judgements of myself were reflections of mis-judgements made by other people, and that if someone had been able to hear me and take the time to help me understand my fears, I could have seen there was nothing wrong with me for FEELING. Now as an adult, I have to be constantly vigilant of what's going on in my head as most of it is abusive to me. I spend a lot of time now listening to waht goes on in my head and feeling c**p because of it. For me this is progress. I used to feel c**p all the time and not be aware of my thoughts, then I numbed out so that I didn't feel anything. Now I'm feeling everything all overthe place and am very aware of my thought processes, and it's awful. I keep handing it over. I have spent the past four days observing, being aware of and listening to the internal stuff, and am really aware for the first time why I use other people to distance myself from myself. Listening to this cr*p without using anything to take me out of it has been really painful. But I've been working my programme, coming onto this board, and connecting with my sponsor instead of obsessing about and controlling my partner. I can relate to Linbaba's share too, I'm exhausted. I feel as if I want a massively long holiday from my own head mroe than anything else, and have finally realised that I am damaging myself far more than anyone else, and that I am at the top of my amends list. Your post really touched me deeply Danielle, as I can relate to the internal battle. For years I believed what my thoughts told me about myself and didn't question them as being anything other than the truth about me. Thank you for sharing your truth. Sending love and light. Freya
I have nothing to say except thank you so much for this, now I know why sometimes people don't reply to some of my longer posts, there is really nothing to say, makes me wish we had a "like" button here though
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it's not the change that's painful, it's the resistance to change that is painful
Thank you for that share. I can really identify. It moved me. And I'm with Linbaba, I dont know what else to say exept thank you.
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"Sometimes the lights are all shining on me - other times I can barely see - Lately its occurred to me - what a long strange trip its been." Robert Hunter
Thank you all. You touch me even more than words & I'm deeply grateful for your fellowship, our connection & ability to share with one another. You are each a gift to me in my own recovery. Thank you for being an example of the beauty in our human spirits & willingness to align to this power greater than. I'm proud to know & be a part of this with you, Danielle x
