schrödinger's journal

[schrödinger's cat]

Here's something I did last Saturday that helped immensely, so I thought I'd share it. Background information: I was a rather typical "Lost Child", and I was socially isolated, so I spent most of the time in my room so I'd be out of the way. Summer holidays were a bit of a challenge - we didn't travel, I didn't have any friends, my family hardly ever went on outings (and if we did, it was rather stressful), the only things I had to occupy myself with were pen, paper, books I'd already read several times, and the TV. Boredom was a bit of an issue, as you can imagine. Not "boredom" as in "oh, what will I do this afternoon", but the kind where you have six weeks to fill and nothing to fill them with.

------------- Might be triggering, especially if you were socially isolated. -------------
Boredom makes me have the following Negative Automatic Thoughts:
1) This is insupportable. I won't be able to endure it.
2) Boredom means that I've been excluded and rejected by the others.
3) Boredom is a character fault. If I were strong and independent, I wouldn't need social contacts or novelty. If I were fun to be with, I wouldn't be so bored.
4) Boredom is a weakness. If I were strong and hard-working, I'd never feel bored because I'd be fulfilled by working and doing chores.

Mental image I get when I'm thinking all this: "the stupid girl has been rightfully left behind by her peers and family and is now too weak and inept to find her joy where she ought to find it".  (Toxic y/n? Yes.)

Reframing the Present:
1) Boredom is transitory. It's the place before the ideas come. I'm now able to endure it as simply just another part of being human.
2) "The others" aren't a cohesive group anymore. Grown-ups are a lot more individualistic. There are thousands of groups to choose from, not just the one.
3 and 4) Are you kidding? Even most religions say that work is work and fun is fun. NEVER believe ANYTHING a workoholic tells you about work. Seriously.

New mental imagine for the Present: "the woman battling CPTSD has a limited ability to tackle her work (because of EFs, demand resistance, Inner Critic cognitions attaching themselves strongly to work, lack of energy,...), so she deserves some fun and relaxation that is NOT writing or CPTSD recovery. All work and no play... remember that poster of Jack Nicholson from The Shining? That's where that would get you."

Reframing the Past:

1 and 2) Boredom was insupportable. A child isn't equipped to occupy herself for a full six weeks, especially in a small village where she's discouraged from leaving the house. I rationed out my books. I rationed out the few activities I could do. I watched TV with my father, who never acknowledged my presence (unless I wanted the remote). I wasn't able to do anything that had value for the community; all I did was simply kill time. It made me feel sidelined and useless.
My mother was constantly busy and had little time and attention to spare for me, and my brother was busy with his friends. I knew I was doing them a favour by keeping to myself. I still do that: if I like someone, I take care not to inflict myself upon them, because my FOO and my "friends" always gave me to understand that a little of me goes a long way. (Or as my husband puts it: "you grew up surrounded by jerks.") The few times I was in groups other than my FOO and my school class, I did just fine, so it was simply just them. I know that. But my default feeling is still that I'm alienated and superfluous. That feeling was always an integral part of boredom.
I often felt unsafe even in my room, because my mother had very definite ideas of what it ought to look like (tidy) and sound like (quiet), so anything that was loud or messy (like painting) felt unsafe. Also, she might walk in at any time, and she'd comment on anything she saw. It's why I still do a lot of my creative writing in English - it's a language she doesn't speak. My classmates, too, would comment on and mock anything I did that was different from things other kids did. I learned to fit in at all cost. I ceased being me. Doing activities that would fully express my creativity was out of the question from the start.
And I was isolated. Every day, I saw my parents suffer, which meant I was depressed and sad and too serious and "not fun to be with". Kids that age think nothing of excluding someone if they're not fun; they even purposely take pains to make someone feel excluded and unwelcome. At that time, I lived in two communities: my FOO and my class, and in both, I was the odd one out and felt like it. I was left alone with my PTSD, my depression, my food intolerance symptoms. There was no one there to even see how bad things were. No grown-up ever cared enough to find out. That kind of loneliness is terrifying. It was suffocating. I felt that this abandonment was actively doing something to me that I had no way of stopping. It made me heart-sick, even physically sick. It was slowly eating me up alive, hollowing out the true me, until I was only a wraith, a weakened, thinned-out ghost - until I had no resistance left and every last little thing my FOO or my peers shamed me for was of vast importance. That's how brainwashing works - there is NO reason to minimize the impact of this.
So the overall athmosphere was chillingt. Whenever I'm bored, the whole package of this all comes back up. If it feels like it's unbearable, it's because back then, it was.

3 and 4) Work is rewarding, yes. But working makes you need relaxation-type fun as well as active / self-expressive fun. This is what's normal. My mother was a workoholic and busyholic. She was hard to please - accusing us of "never lifting a finger", but if we offered to help, she let us do tiny chores that made little difference, and/or she'd shoo us away because "I'd rather do it myself, it's quicker", and/or she'd be visibly tense and uneasy, watching us like a hawk to make sure we did every last little detail "properly", and visibly feeling annoyed that NOT ONLY did she have to do all the chores, now she ALSO had to supervise our attempts to help. Sometimes things worked and we could really make a difference for her, but it wasn't predictable when she'd be pleased and when she'd be annoyed. She always warned me of doing things improperly, saying the precise same warning every single time for decades.
Wanting to have friends is normal. It's not a weakness. NEVER believe ANYTHING a very introverted introvert tells you about socializing (if you're not an extremely introverted introvert yourself).
Wanting novelty is a sign of creativity and intelligence. My mother sees it as a risk; she sees tradition as safety, and prefers being stuck in a rut because it's a safe rut. She's welcome to that, and I can see where she's coming from, but she shouldn't have shamed me for being different.
Therefore: wanting fun, friends, and novelty was an age-appropriate, normal need.

New mental image for the past: "the abandoned girl had no way of assuaging her loneliness, no one to help her work through her grief at seeing her parents suffer, and no way to have fun, find herself some non-jerk friends and productively contribute to the group in a way that was of worth. The only way left open was a Freeze Response. Given those circumstances, she found some rather amazing coping strategies - writing novels before she knew this was something people did as a hobby, rationing out activities, composing songs, vivid daydreaming. She has no reason at all of being ashamed of who she is and how she reacted. Throughout, she showed a normal level of distress, confusion, depression, and anxiety. No more victim-blaming. I mean it."

.................sooo, this was kind of long. Sorry about that. But I'm working under the assumption that I might not be the only one in this situation, so maybe this is of interest to someone other than myself?

[schrödinger's cat]

Yiiieees... I know our culture was spectacularly screwed up when it comes to work ethics, but we're not all like that, I swear! I know a lot of warm-hearted, lovely German mothers with excellent social skills and a grand ability to kick up their heels and have fun. Just, mine wasn't one of them, and neither was yours, from the sound of it. The culture back then encouraged people to define themselves via their work and their duties, so it was easy for people to slip into that particular trap and think that this is what life is about, period.

Thanks for the hug. Here's one right back: 

[zazu]

Cat, the way you're reframing your experiences is great. I hope it brings you peace at last.
Your story resonates with me, too.

Yes, the German work ethic! My grandparents (on both sides) were German immigrant farmers. Always we were lectured about working in the fields. Just last week, my brother said my family had no "character" because we weren't working in the fields. (My brother doesn't work in the fields either - he's in computers.  )

Yes, these old habits of child-rearing just keep going until we make the effort to change them.

[schrödinger's cat]

   ...working in the fields? How long ago did they emigrate? All my extended family come from farming stock, and they hate working in the fields. ... Sorry, I do realize that people saying "Germans do this" or "that is typically German", they don't mean me personally, but it still makes me want to hide under the sofa until the shouting has stopped.

[zazu]

  ...working in the fields? How long ago did they emigrate? All my extended family come from farming stock, and they hate working in the fields. ... Sorry, I do realize that people saying "Germans do this" or "that is typically German", they don't mean me personally, but it still makes me want to hide under the sofa until the shouting has stopped.

Sorry, Cat. I don't mean to paint Germans (or any nationality or enthnicity) with the same brush. I suppose that because many of us here in the U.S. retain only tenuous links with our ancestry, we tend to note traits that might link us with our "original" people.  For good or ill.

My relatives came at different times in the early to mid-20th century, but they all moved to rural farming communities where everyone else was just the same. Any old-fashioned beliefs were just reinforced. And because they were more isolated way out in the middle of nowhere, these qualities just became more intensified with time. So this probably says far more about rural German immigrant farming communities in the US than it does about modern Germans of any type.

One of my aunts came over much later, from a sophisticated city, and she wouldn't have been caught dead working in a field! 
 

[schrödinger's cat]

Oh, okay. Phew. Thanks for saying that, I'm really relieved.

Germany has changed a LOT since the mid-20th century. But before? Yikes. If your family's "German" traits are stuck in a little pre-70s timeloop, you have my sympathies. Here's something by a German comedian called Loriot (real name Vico von Bülow) who poked relentless fun at the stuffiness and self-importance of it all. Here's something with subtitles that you might enjoy.

Do you think your family might have clung to their "German" traits so stubbornly because they missed home? If you're living in Germany, you don't really have to be pointedly German at people all the time, there's no good reason for it. If you emigrate, you think of the home you left - but of course, even after ten or twenty years, that home doesn't exist anymore. Things keep on evolving. It's a bit sad. Emigrants can never truly go back home.

[Kizzie]

Hi Cat - One thing that kept coming up for me as I read your post about boredom is that you had to spend so much of your childhood "not being"  and I was struck by just how much energy it would take to contain the normal exurberance or lifeforce children possess. 

[schrödinger's cat]

Thanks for saying that, Kizzie. It's a weird feeling, being understood, but I think I can jiiiust about get used to it. (Kidding. It feels brilliant.)

That might explain why I got PTSD in the first place - all that energy sloshing about with nowhere to go. Maybe I'd have been able to metabolize my trauma if I'd had some kind of outlet, something to do that wasn't merely "killing time". Pretty useless to think of this now - our lives aren't made up of "if only"s - but this could be an interesting point to explore: whether isolation and inaction make it harder to digest trauma. I know I often feel better when I do something, it almost doesn't matter what: even just baking a cake makes me feel like I'm active, I'm doing something, I'm changing the world, I'm not helpless, I'm not prey. If I do nothing, it feels like being tangled in a spider web.

[schrödinger's cat]

Haven't been feeling too well since Sunday before last. I'm tired and woozy all the time and a lot less able to concentrate. Simply just being weak is unsettling. I'm having to remind myself that it's okay to be exhausted. It didn't use to be - there was always a high likelihood that there'd be more abuse, because no target is more tempting to kids than one that already looks defeated.

[zazu]

Get well soon, Schrodinger's Cat. 

Yes, it is okay to be exhausted, to rest, to listen to your body and give it what it needs. I know it might be contrary to the messages we were given growing up, but from a survival standpoint? It's basic good sense! 

[Rain]

Yes, get well soon, Cat!   Isn't that the truth with feeling unsettled about feeling under the weather.   It is okay to be exhausted.   Be safe, be well.   

[schrödinger's cat]

Thanks, you two. 

[schrödinger's cat]

Looks like my tiredness responds to EFs. I had that for almost a decade, and I was so happy to be rid of it: EFs kind of hit my dimmer switch and I was so physically exhausted I could barely stand. At least I have more tools now that could maybe fix this.

I'm editing a book, which was supposed to be done by now but I haven't worked on it since we came back from our summer holidays. Realizing I've got CPTSD changed too many things. But it's high time I continued work on it. I'm scared. So, baby steps. Opening the manuscript today to see where I left off, that's the only thing I'm going to do today. I can do that. I hope.

EDITED TO ADD: I did it. Feeling woozy (see first paragraph), but when I gave myself permission to feel woozy instead of feeling guilty, things got better. This is so bizarre.

[Kizzie]

Feel better Cat! You've been using a lot of energy dealing with CPTSD so a little rest wouldn't be a bad thing.       The book has waited this long, a couple more days won't make a big difference in the scheme of things.

[schrödinger's cat]

A friend of mine is dying of cancer. It's making me think about quite a few things, as such deaths do. How precious life is. How sad that so much is lost, that so many suffer and disappear. How we almost owe it to those who are gone to really seize our day and make the most of enjoying it.

So how about we institute an extra holiday? A day that's just about celebrating the fact that our adolescence didn't kill us. That goes double for anyone who's survived physical abuse. Even just simple emotional abuse and neglect can kill you. But we're still here. That cost us. We've all of us expended a ton of energy into simply just surviving. So hey, it worked. We're still here. So why not mark the occasion? Give it all the fanfare it deserves. Have a second birthday. Or a still-alive day.

I'm glad that you all made it this far. This loss that my friend's family is about to experience made me think of all of you - that so many of you could have been quietly lost. I'm so, so, so glad that you weren't.