Messages

i am brand new here and so it might be premature to post on this topic. But there are some steps I've taken that have helped me to get here to where I can seek out support and post on this forum. One is reading books by Albert Ellis and Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. Especially the core preciple of self acceptance. It is different from self esteem in that you don't have to worry about if you are good or bad. Accept that you have a capacity for enjoyment then think of what your are thinking or telling yourself that is keeping you from enjoying your life. Then you dispute those thoughts repeatedly until you learn to catch them sooner and sooner and root them out. Mindfulness is another thing that has helped me. I've realized that there is a state of mind where at least for a few moments and sometimes more I can just enjoy the simple fact of being awake and wherever I am, If i remember and catch myself I can remember and insert that feeling into times when I am having flashbacks and kind of step out of it and start thinking and choosing. You know, I have a long way to go with it, but it's given me some hope where before I felt helpless.

tink,
I do believe that there is hope and not just hope but strong hope for the wise adult part to pull all of those other parts together. It seemed hopeless to me until recently I started learn that I could separate myself from the spiral of guilt. I was so afraid of the pain of knowing I've messed up, and that I've hurt people that whenever a certain person in my would hit one of those guilt buttons, I would collapse and do almost whatever they wanted. I've learned recently to step outside of the pain and let other people own their disappointment in me and stick with my decision. That's not such a big step for a healthy person, but it's a big step for me that lets me know that it is possible for me to take control. Your struggles, I'm sure, are different. But there is real hope.

Hello Spot, I'm glad that you have found a good place. You aught to wrap your loving arms around yourself and love yourself for making it through all of that. You would give that compassion to someone else it think. One reason I struggle giving compassion to myself is that I feel like I am giving myself excuses, that if I don't berate myself I will do all kinds of bad things. I think the research is showing the opposite. When we give compassion to ourselves our willpower improves.

I do have similar experiences. It sucks to feel so helpless against an enemy that seems to live inside you. I am new here too. I hope each of us can find the tools we need to get healthy and feel like our own value is threatened.

I am still trying to come to grips with what my story is and why I feel the loathing for myself that I do. It starts before I can remember with a dad who felt like his value, his quality as a human being, or his right to feel worthwhile depended on his righteousness. In that sense I think his wife and family were an extension of him. Faults and failures were evidences of his failings and so they were threats to his right to feel good about himself. I grew up with a mom who was at least episodically depressed. I remember when I had a room across from them and I remember him complaining loudly and angrily to her for what may have been hours. I don't remember him directly putting her down, accusing or calling her names but I am sure by the tone she felt like he was blaming her. One of the themes of this emotional dumping was about how could he be an example to the struggling members of our church if his own family was lazy and messy and disobedient. So I think the trauma started maybe with being afraid of my dad, but also with seeing my mother traumatized, sad, depressed.

At the same time that I felt a lot of joy in my parents love for me, and found a lot of joy in thinking of a perfect loving God, I also felt great guilt and anxiety that I wasn't good enough to deserve that love.

Things got the worst with puberty and feelings of guilt and unworthiness over sexual thoughts and private behaviors.  I would torment myself nightly in hopes of stopping myself. There was always a lot of fear in my house about the influence of Satan, and that we might be doing things that would put us in his power. Sometimes I was very afraid that I was possessed by a satanic spirit. It's a strange kind of trauma that you create and impose on yourself with your imagination, but it's real.

I put those things behind me for a few years, and started to like myself, and found some close friends for really the first time.

Then I spent 2 years as a missionary for my church and struggled under the weight of mind numbing rules, restrictions and busyness.

It seem like I came back a broken person. I spent a couple of years living depressed in my parents house. Then got married to a controlling and verbally abusive woman, she has lived a life that I can't blame her for how she is but after 15 years, and at the age of 41, I have never lived as an autonomous and independent adult.

I want to change that. So I study and work to get better because I want to express my ideas and my creativity in the world before I die. And I have a daughter struggling a lot like I did. I want to do everything I can for her.