Miswired Circuits/Things That Spark

[rainydiary]

I appreciate you sharing your reflections in this Bach.  I hope these reflections will bring some peace and ease.

[Mandox]

Thank you for bringing up this subject.  I also confused sex with love.  Sexuality was one of the few powers I felt I had and so I pretty much slept with anyone I could, looking for someone to save me, validate me and take care of me.  Now I realise being an intelligent female who respects herself and believes in herself, for who she is inside and her talents and dreams is what makes a strong women.  I'm really hoping to still get there one day, throwing off the mud that enabled me to know that.  Growing up in the 70-80-90's, there weren't many role models were there ?  I hope you find your way back to writing.

[dollyvee]

Hi Bach,

I'm reading your reflections now and it strikes me how much of a deeply personal (right word?) experience sex is and how deeply it is tied to our experiences of shame, boundaries, self worth etc. It is such a potent form of intimacy that no wonder you are feeling what happened so deeply and are distraught about it. It can feel like the strongest boundary violation I think against our sense of self.

Just some thoughts. Sending you support,
dolly

[Bach]

There's a continuous flow of thoughts in the back of my mind that come from my mother and from my twisted upbringing.  Some of them are sex thoughts, some are money thoughts, some are mean and petty, childish and selfish, jealous, spiteful, etc.  None of them are actually mine.  None of them are HOW I REALLY FEEL.  But they're so familiar, so everpresent, I recognise them from every single stage of my life and have cringeworthy memories of times I have acted on or expressed them.  I can see them all so clearly now and I know better than to take them seriously, but still they don't go away.  It's a good thing that I've had My Person all these years, because it is he who has helped me discover my true nature as a kinder, more generous, more compassionate and more level-headed person than I would have ever known how to be on my own, given the terrible example I spent my formative years with.  I hate myself thinking of times in my life that I have spoken or acted from the mother part of me.  I think I've always been a better person than she ever was (this, for some reason, is very important to me to believe), but not always by very much, and always run through with the ingrained bad values that I have had to ferret out over the years because I never even knew I had them until I noticed them.  I've spent my whole life transforming myself from a bad person into a good one.  That should be enough for me, should be enough for anyone, but I still can't help wishing that I had done more with my life. 

[sanmagic7]

my dear bach, we can only do what we've learned, how we learned to do it.  please don't beat yourself up for what you didn't know in the past.  i've made some mistakes from a place which i'm no longer at as well.  just want you to know you're not alone with this.  as i've learned more about my background, about me, about what perspective i want to have, i've changed into a better version of who i used to be.  it sounds like you've done the same.  even if there are wishes to have done more or differently, may i sit w/ you for a moment  and celebrate who we've become in spite of our backgrounds?  i'd like that.  love and hugs

[Not Alone]

I want to give you credit  for recognizing that many thoughts are not truly yours, but are really your mother's. That is a big step. The realization doesn't automatically make the thoughts/beliefs go away. Those are deep ruts, but you are forging new paths. Good for you. Please try to be kind to yourself as you do this hard work.

[Bach]

I don't know how to feel good about myself when I have all this ugliness in my nature.  I fear that I will never be able to feel good about myself because I know that underneath it all, I will never be free of all of her bad programming.  My heart, my brain, my gut, my very liver, all full of her transactional toxicity.  I've managed to establish a pretty good veneer of civility, and even something very vaguely resembling socialisation, but the inside of me is rotten.  No matter how many times people tell me I'm good, no matter what justifications I can come up with for my existence, I still can't figure out how not to feel that way.

[sanmagic7]

dear bach, personally, i don't believe that ugliness is part of your nature.  i don't think as a baby you were mean, thoughtless, or ugly in any way.  this is a tough one to get thru, for sure.  keep at it, ok?  and we'll be here with you while you do.  love and hugs 

[Bach]

san, you're right that I wasn't mean, thoughtless or ugly as a baby, so maybe I wasn't born bad.  But as soon as I was born, I became a vessel for her ugly thoughts, her amorality and her narcissism, and no matter how much I consciously reject them when I notice them, they are always there and never very far from the driver's seat.  It hurts having to constantly be on guard against them, and it's exhausting to keep my face on when they're churning away in there.  I also often wonder how I can possibly be good when I come from something so inhuman. 

[Blueberry]

I'm sitting with you Bach and I'm sending you kindness.

I just realised this evening I'm in a huge EF and I'm sorry if I'm stating the obvious, but it sounds as if that's where you might be too. Because that's a place where things seem hugely difficult and we/you/I feel particularly bad-as-a-person. Just because your M treated you badly and she was mean to you, doesn't mean that you are bad or mean or ugly.

[sanmagic7]

bach, i think the easy answer is that we're not our parents.  everyone here, including you, has made the decision that they do not want to be the same as their parents were.  however, that's just logic, and doesn't necessarily cut thru the emotional wounds that we have carried because of their damaging behaviors and words.  your concerns about yourself are proof that you are not your mother, nor do you want to be like her.  unfortunately, those wounds run deep and have defiled our own thought processes about ourselves.

keep going, ok?  it's difficult to muddle thru trying to heal wounds which have cut us so deeply as to make us question the beliefs about ourselves.  you are battling against them, and your determination and perseverance will win through eventually.  i'm just discovering how badly those wounds have hurt us, whether it be from parents, partners, family, or friends.  we have always been good people even when those around us have done their utmost to convince us we aren't.  with you all the way on this.  love and hugs

[Bach]

Why am I making such a big thing of non-physical sexual trauma anyway?  I was a kid in the 70s when everyone was talking about sex and how great it was, and came of age right when the AIDS epidemic started.  My entire generation was traumatised by sex!

[Armee]

Why are you making a big deal? Dear Bach...it's because it was massively damaging and as you noted before affected many aspects of your life. Whether it was normal for the 70s or not...it was not appropriate and it was damaging.

I was raised in the 80s so I personally can't speak to whether those were normal conversations to have. I suspect your family took it to the extreme of whatever was normal. On top of that, other things were not right too in your childhood and with your family. This was damage on top of damage. If you feel disturbed it's because there's good reason to be disturbed.

I do this to myself too, as a way to protect myself from the pain. Either I'm wrong to be upset. It's not big deal. Or nothing even happened and I'm just wrong. That doesn't lead to healing though. Looking at it, accepting that it's true, and then incorporating it into the fabric of your life narrative and putting it in its place in the past seems to help the most. But for me it's still a back and forth.

One day at a time. It's normal to feel upset it's normal to want to deny it and protect yourself from it. I'm trying to learn to see the bad and to take the good forward. Yes this happened, here are the bad parts. This is the positive part as tiny as it may be. I'm a work in progress though because I waffle and I have yet to feel much of anything. So this post is offered with a grain of salt or several hundred.

[Bach]

I wish I could write the way I used to when I fancied myself an aspiring novelist, abundantly and without reservation, but  about all the real stuff going on in me now in my head and especially in my body.  My body is still largely foreign to me, and most of what I know of it is tension and discomfort.  Being "in my body", as they say, always feels like something I want to escape from.  So I try sometimes to find and hold onto good feelings in my body, as the somatic therapist I was seeing briefly about a year and half ago suggested.  Sometimes I'm able to feel brief small relaxations in places like my shoulder or my neck or my abdomen and experience them for a moment, but the holding onto it part eludes me.  Sometimes I get the vaguest and most fleeting flashes on periphery of my senses of a deeper feeling of calm or comfort or peace, but that I can't get hold of at all.  Oh how I wish I could!

The whole process exhausts me.  It takes a lot of energy so I can't do it much, but it's interesting and strange when I succeed in connecting with my body.  Last weekend I got a massage from a highly skilled practitioner.  Usually when I get a massage, I focus on relaxing my mind and thinking pleasant thoughts, but this time I did my best to dismiss my thoughts and focus on my physical experience.  I must have tuned in well, because I was conscious of distinct emotions from different parts of my body being worked on.  I felt quite riled up emotionally when the therapist was working on my upper body and even though the massaging objectively felt good, it was difficult for me to enjoy.  On my lower body it was completely different.  There was calm with hints of happiness in my legs, and there was actual joy in my feet.  That was startling in the midst of the heavy depression I've been experiencing for the past several weeks.  Joy!  In my feet!  Who knew?  I don't know what any of this means or how/whether it's leading anywhere, but it IS interesting. 

[Bach]

Armee, I very much appreciate your response and your insights.  Thank you for the open and thoughtful reply.  I'm sure it would be very helpful if I could accept, as you say, but honestly, I can't get around feeling like I'm being a big whiny baby by making this a thing for me.