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cParticipantHello, I was struggling with what I was calling ‘maladaptive daydreaming’ when I started therapy. My therapist was skeptical of the term but suggested that it was a symptom that will lessen once I addressed my childhood trauma and learned to ground etc. I thought for a while after that it was a form of dissociating, probably true. I came to see though that in my super intense childhood (where I rarely was emotionally or physically safe in the moment) my main way of coping became to imagine a future safe world and mentally live there. I also imagined a future perfect male figure and future perfect family and future perfect body so forth (lol that’s caused me lots of fun struggles lol) – anyway I made a safe world and was able to live day to day and meet the extremely high expectations placed on me. I brought that into adulthood. The good news: it’s no longer my default setting. After a lot of trauma therapy, I could then learn to attend to the present moment, something I believe was impossible for me before and I’ve started to notice I only have these ‘daydreaming’ type of episodes when i’m trying to avoid the reality of something. Like for example if my gut / inner wisdom is screaming at me to walk away from something and my inner child or adult self (ego) wants to cling to it – I notice myself slipping into these escapist types of tendencies. If I attend to my inner wisdom and let all emotions flow freely even the scary ones and am making choices that make me feel safe in my body, I come back to center. I’m not sure if this makes total sense but I definitely have experienced this.
cParticipantThanks Anita, I identify with a lot of what you said. I will say in periods of my marriage where I just relaxed and didn’t suspect anything – it didn’t end well for me. Something huge would happen (well beyond just normal vices) and I agree i’d fall into a pattern of feeling like I needed to be on alert. This leads me to kind of seeking the balance of ok this is a problem for me BUT also I have really strong intuition and usually if I’m sensing something it’s not nothing. Surely the level I perceive it at is a red flag to me that it’s also not just totally the other person. It’s just the balance there that I find very difficult to achieve. Not gaslighting myself when I know something isn’t quite right and also being aware of what my triggers are and wounds and how that influences what I perceive as threatening.
In the scenario with my current BF it’s honestly just this one situation that triggers these intense feelings. He had one other long term relationship we’ve talked about it lots and it’s sweet how he still thinks of that person fondly and can reflect on them well. I have none of the same feelings at all about that person or discussing them. I don’t know why all my bells and whistles go off so differently in regard to this one thing. We both enjoy a ton of personal space and freedom in our relationship and I don’t see myself seeking out other ways he might break trust with me.
I will take some time to process all of this. Thanks!
cParticipantHello that’s so generous of you
Ex-husband – small stuff at first lies around things like how much he was drinking, smoking, porn issues, video game use etc. Showing me more who he thought he should be while privately fostering all these kind of ‘vices’ I guess. Things that would of maybe not even been a big deal if they weren’t things he was being constantly caught in. He would lie about things like drinking energy drinks too or just almost anything. The worst of it included other female relationships, legal troubles, problems at work, seemingly I rarely could ever get the whole story of virtually anything. I always was left sort of trying to sift through what was me being anxious from being lied to so much vs him gaslighting me vs what was the full story. I think I was kind of left with well there’s sort of many things I won’t ever know the full story of. I know he didn’t always have totally up and up things with other women BUT I couldn’t tell you for sure if way more happened than I ever found out about or if nothing happened outside of what I knew about and I was just so paranoid by the end. I lived in almost a never-ending sense of dread and mistrust of him and myself really. The other side of the coin is he really overall can be a pretty decent person sometimes, very hard working almost a bit of a Jekyll and hyde maybe.
My mom was really young and I never knew my dad and she has mental health issues. She wasn’t around much, we lived with my grandparents some, she has an explosive temper and exposed me to lots of unsafe situations as she dated through my childhood. Physical but mostly emotional abuse (lots of really hateful and awful things were said to me as a child and rarely did anyone really parent me or show up for me, I rarely even ate a meal with an adult). Similarly only my family members and one or two of my moms friends that have known her through her life really saw how much abuse we had. She is very good at putting on the right look and making things appear normal still today and was in my childhood.
I am not sure exactly why that seems relevant to say but it came up as a contrast for me here. They are both people that you would think you could trust if you met them but there’s another side to the coin. I do find myself worrying about that in many of my relationships like when will this person change or flip on me? What clues do I need to watch for etc…
Overall I feel like I have some of these things under control a bit / have processed them but in love relationship as intense as my current one I see the anxiety coming up.
cParticipantwow anita – I hope that all this amazing work really pays forward to you! this is really helpful. I want to take some time to digest this but to follow up on a few things.
I definitely did almost in some ways “survive” a marriage where I was constantly being lied to. Big or small things and I was always waiting for the shoe to drop. My ex feels enormous regret and voices it to me. We have older children and I usually do not respond to his reaching out with intense feelings anymore and refocus always on keeping things about our new relationship. But that’s how I have that information. He would say on this thread that ‘I am finally free of his anger, deception’ etc. He also has voiced the intense shame he carries many times and he grew up in a very religious home so it makes sense.
I also grew up in a very chaotic home with almost every type of childhood trauma that can be experienced present. I’ve done a lot of therapy around that.
It’s interesting to think about is the feeling about my current boyfriend’s ex the same as the feelings I felt ever-present in marriage. I need to think about that. I think it’s both maybe though. Maybe it’s both that I do have a hard time trusting and I do carry this kind of burden I don’t know how to release AND that there is some real kind of trauma there for my ex I can FEEL. It’s layered maybe? In any case i’d like to let both go 1. the worry that I can’t trust AND 2. the attachment to feeling his feelings.
Maybe I am projecting some of it onto him and they aren’t as intense as I imagine. Although he’s made some pretty specific comments as times that led me to believe the feelings were intense. We’ve also talked a good bit about it.
I am not sure I agree with – ” I wonder about shame and being your own, but hidden from your awareness” – but I want to sit with that. Maybe though… I am projecting how my ex felt and made me feel onto this new relationship. Like my brain thinks that my ex constantly hiding things from me is similar to this new thing…
I guess I meant in my other post that when I first realized my ex was hiding things from me he said he felt ashamed to tell me I reacted really judgementally and I really was a hard NO on things that now at almost 40 I have a more balanced view of. I see how everyone struggles with numbing of one kind or another – some of us just have socially acceptable methods. Like is being a workaholic worse than a stress smoker? Not in my mind now – but in my 20’s I couldn’t of even considered that smoking for a time was ok. That’s not to excuse my ex for constantly lying to me on many issues BUT I see there was a layer to the situation I can learn from. As I learn to see myself as more human and get curious instead of judge myself harshly for my thoughts/emotions I can do the same for others. I don’t see issues in relationship as black and white anymore and I try hard not to react out of ego or as a harsh parent version of myself. I think i’m doing a good job in my current relationship of noticing and struggling with and seeking advice when I suspect my reaction has more to do with ME than with the other person.
I can ‘see’ that this is triggering me and it isn’t all him although I suspect it’s ALSO true he has work to do in this area. Ultimately I am frustrated that these nagging thoughts just won’t go away for me and I want to do the work to discover what’s under them … this is really helpful and gives me lots of points to explore. Maybe more i’ve said will trigger more ideas from you.
Thanks Anita 🙂
cParticipantMy ex-husband actually did almost this same thing to me. When I found out I said absolutely no and he quit. Or so I thought, it then became a constant theme in our marriage that i’d catch him smoking over the years and just like the initial time he would always lie about it to me. It was a source of shame for him.
The problem was that the smoking wasn’t the only ‘bad habit’ he had that he his from me. He in general had a hard time showing me anything that he perceived as shameful. So we had a constant state of kind of mistrust…
That’s clearly not the only reason we ended up divorced but in retrospect is was a HUGE burden on our relationship. I think it woudl be hard for me to date someone that hid something like that from me. BUT if I did I would need to go in fully accepting that they might have other similar things they have trouble revealing to me and that the smoking might be part of their package. I don’t know if I now believe my ex could have given up those vices for me, he would of had to completely on his own decided he felt really passionately about his health and about being transparent and accountable about addictions that hurt his body.
On my end I probably wasn’t very accepting overall, I was really young. I wasn’t always the easiest person to be transparent with.
cParticipantMaybe there’s also a part of me that believes you can’t really choose someone new until you have healed and grieved something a little more fully. I don’t know if that’s actually true or not.
cParticipantThanks Peggy, that makes me feel better. I definitely see him intentionally trying to understand himself in relationship and reflect a lot on how to do things differently. I also hope he heals and continues to release his feelings and I learn not to take them on simultaneously lol.
I can see in a lot of ways how he couldn’t of dated someone like me if hadn’t of dated his ex and so I have kind of compassionate feelings about it all too. I just wish at this point it was kind of just gone for me and I didn’t almost experience the pain of it at times too. Those are really complicated feelings to take on and not really my burden.
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This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by
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cParticipantThanks Anita, this gave me something to think about. More than being concerned with how I can change his feelings etc. I want to be aware of what i’m feeling and why. That thought of why someone else might have an intense feeling that is related to a childhood wound makes a lot of sense to me. I try not to gaslight myself when I have a really strong sense about something but I at the same time am also trying to separate my feelings from other people’s feelings. Sometimes when I can’t do that I just feel overwhelmed by an emotion I picked up from them one or two times it is really helpful for me to seek to understand it a bit. I feel like it’s becoming less of a strong emotion the longer I am in relationship with him. But it bugs me I can’t ‘let it go’ I guess or release it as just something that is his to deal with in his own time… I don’t know lot of thoughts. Thanks for taking the time to connect with me. Looks like you do this for lots of people and bring a lot of comfort.
August 28, 2020 at 1:13 pm in reply to: BF is stuck in a rut. I’m literally in the opposite space. #365760cParticipantIn my last relationship, I spent a lot of time trying to bring things up and do a lot of talking, always taking the emotional lead, always trying to pull everyone back to center. It wasn’t my fault but it never made anything better. In my current relationship, I focus on being accepting and loving to people AS THEY ARE and then focus on myself and setting boundaries around how other people’s emotions impact me. So if my boyfriend is struggling with being really grumpy one day instead of trying to coax it out of him WHY I just let him know he is so loved and accepted and give him space. If though his grumpy mood is going to keep me from doing an activity I had planned etc I also might ask him to go home or do something without him etc. This kind of balance between acceptance and then gentle boundaries for myself has created SO MUCH trust. Like it is insane how just be creating space for him to have difficult emotions has allowed him to share them with me. I have a list of my own red flags now too when i’m feeling pushy and feeling like I need to over-focus on him etc I know I need to just freeze and go inward. Anyway, all that to say it took me about 4 decades to learn how to create space for a man like that. I don’t know if any of that will help but it’s my experience that feels somewhat related. I definitely have growing to do but i’m self observant at the level I can now ‘notice’ when i’m focusing on someone elses inner work and need to back off them and just love them and continue to set boundaries only around how it impacts me. Also big rumblings in relationship arent always bad but I would think he needs to lead the next emotional part and some people need a TON of time and space and support to step into that.
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This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by
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