Marcine’s journaling forward

[zen_racer]

If by celebrating you mean taking a solo hike in the mountains and crying in the beautiful wilderness and recharging in nature— then yes!

I'd been veering towards stress and burn out. Good to ground out. It is a blessing to feel part of nature.

I did the same thing today, Marcine.  I had scheduled today off, and I had to renew my drivers license today first, but then I did go do the hike I wanted.  It was nice.  I hope your's was as well.

[sanmagic7]

Good to ground out. It is a blessing to feel part of nature.

i totally agree, marcine.  i loved solo walks, especially being surrounded by trees.  it was a vacation every time.  enjoy enjoy!  love and hugs

[NarcKiddo]

For sure, boundary keeping+connection is a set of skills that I'll be practicing for the rest of my life. And I agree with you, that's worthwhile. Even when it feels like a battlefield. A big difference is that now I'm standing for what is right and good, not fighting monsters on all sides just to survive anymore.

That resonates.

I'm glad you were able to take a hike and express your emotions out in nature.

[HannahOne]

Marcine I love how you describe standing for what's right and good, vs fighting off the bad. That's an important distinction in thriving, and not only surviving. Surviving is good, and, thriving has a different focus. We can choose what to focus on. I love that you are focused on standing for the things you believe in and value.

[Marcine]

I woke up with a stiff headache and a distinct feeling of intense guilt. Mucked in an old, polluted, toxic guilt bog.

I am guilty for ____
- everything and anything
- being born, being me, being less than, never enough
- for wanting closeness from the adults
- for saying no
- for having needs
- for not doing things right so the terrifying parents would be nice
- for wanting them to understand
- for needing love
- for not being able to fix things out of my control

I know it's commonly described that shame is "I am bad" and guilt is "I did a bad thing."

These feelings I'm having are guilt— "I should have had no needs."
"It was my fault that they didn't take care of me."
"It was bad that I didn't try harder."

I was literally supposed to fix the unfixable. And since I couldn't, I was guilty of failing at an impossible task.

A question from the CPTSD foundation is relevant: did I actually violate a moral boundary or am I experiencing false guilt from past conditioning?

False guilt being when a child is made to feel guilty when the child did nothing wrong, or made to feel responsible for things that were not the child's responsibility.

Tonight, on this deep, barely conscious level, I realize, squinting and uncomfortably, that I feel responsible for the abuse I endured. I feel guilty that I didn't do more to make it stop. That I should have done more.

I don't feel shame that I was bad and deserved the abuse. I feel guilty that I didn't do more to stop it— to fawn better, to fight fiercer, to run away, to freeze more solid. My fault.

These force-fed, internalized, distorted and wildly unreasonable expectations fed the false guilt. And I see that this false guilt (feeling guilty and at fault when I've done nothing wrong) permeates my adult life.

Long ago, this distorted faulty logic became an unconscious default setting and so, (false) guilt became normalized in me.

I see the guilt bog is blocking the natural flow of love. It's exhausting to slog through the guilt toxic bog.

I see that the (false) guilt setting runs constantly in my subconscious and explains a perverse insistence for me to find things to worry and criticize myself, chasing the mirage that if I did more of the right thing at right time, I would be absolved and proclaimed not-guilty.

When I've made meaningful steps towards self-compassion, there's a boomerang effect and I feel guilty for being kind to myself, like it's morally wrong action.

The guilt shows up as headache, gut tightening, tension at jaw/neck.

I feel anger that I was abused on this whole other unconscious level that established self-criticism, unreasonable responsibility, beating myself up, low self-worth and guilty-like-a-criminal as normal.

I know this is a perfect cult tactic for control— to instill self-abandonment, distrust, utter dependence, guilt, helplessness and brain fog.

In many ways, it didn't work. Here I am doggedly shining a light into the dark recesses of my self with the goal of clarity, despite the intense discomfort and fears.

But this is hard. It's difficult to witness the machinations and programming that was designed to make me devour/destroy myself. And that it's been churning away in the background since forever.