Dear noname:

You wrote six days ago that you were thinking of “journaling daily at  least a few short sentences about evidence of my worth”, and yesterday, first paragraph: “the  belief that I’m worthless is not supported with evidence”. Notice how you know, and you don’t know that evidence is not the issue.

For a child, the evidence of his worth is what he sees in his parents’ faces. Our eyes then and now are located in such a way that we  don’t see our own faces unless we look at a mirror. The child’s mirror is his  parent’s face. Problem is most children are looking  at very distorted  mirrors.

I like your “compassion instead of consumption” principle, it even sounds right to say it out loud. I can see it as a title of a chapter  in a book you might put together one day. You wrote: “to feel  important to others & the planet”. I used  to believe that it  will take the whole world acknowledging my  worth so that I could  feel worthy. What  I learned is  that it only takes ONE PERSON to see my  worth, and  for me to  see my reflection in that  one  face. Problem is, a child does not question the face of his parent. If that face shows the child is worthy, the  child will automatically and unquestionably believe it. But when a  child sees unworthiness in the face  of his parent for years, as an adult coming across faces who  do show his worth, the adult child has the image of the parent’s face transposed over those faces, the same old, same old distorted mirror.

It takes seeing, really seeing that one face of one person who believes you are worthy.

Regarding non-duality and connectedness, it makes sense to me in context of one’s self worth this way: noname’s worth is not about what he does, disconnected from the world, proving to the world, showing to the world, convincing the world that he  is  worthy. His worth is something he was born with and will  die with. It is natural, a reality, something real and  undeniable. It was never a question except in the minds  of those disconnected.

anita

Dear noname:

For a few days I’ve been preparing a post for you based on all  your thread. At one point  I thought of it as my Christmas gift to you.  You wrote in your recent post, “I want to  be held but I think being heard and seen would be enough right now”. Maybe, maybe my following post to you (I have it ready, will be copying and pasting it to you next) will be that “being heard and seen” wish come true for you. I sure hope so. Here  it is:

The Loneliness/ Lack of love, Then and Now:

“Growing up my mom was very depressed and my dad had anger  issues, one of my strongest memories from childhood was my dad telling  me and my sister it was ‘our job to keep our mother happy’… trying to keep my mom happy and  my dad calm was a very exhausting task… The majority of my childhood was spent in isolation while my mom was depressed, and my dad worked way too much”. When you talked to your mother as an adult, last year, “she cried a little bit…  and regretted leaving  me alone so much as a kid and not hugging or showing affection towards me.. she said she  looks back at pictures from my childhood and it’s clear to her how sad I was”.

And sad you were and are, a whole lot of the time: “at the end of the day when it’s time to sleep I feel alone, and when I wake up I feel alone and struggle to get myself out of bed knowing I may not speak to another human being  the whole day”- as adults, we keep reliving our childhood experience.

The lack of love in your childhood gave birth to an immediate, and  overwhelming need for  love: “I still feel the overwhelming  need for love from other people… the  need is immediate, and overwhelming”. You lived, as a child, hoping and dreaming that tomorrow you might be loved, “I’m so sick of just living with hopes that tomorrow might be the day. I’m becoming impatient, and childish in that respect”.

Frustrated with this never satisfied need, you wrote: “Maybe I’m far  too attached the idea that companionship, intimacy, and closeness is a real possibility for me… I think my  need for love is possibly too tall an order to for my self or anyone else to fill”. So intense was your loneliness, your aloneness, being  disconnected, that  the  craving  for togetherness, for closeness became equally as intense.

It still is, this is why time alone, not being  busy, is so difficult for you, so depressing- when alone and not busy, you are not distracted from that same feeling  of childhood, that acute loneliness, of not being connected: “I am very lonely.. I was suppressing my loneliness with work, school… I just don’t feel  comfortable unless I’m stressed and busy to the limit… I absolutely cannot wait to return to  work, just to have something to help pass the time and have some social contact with people on a regular basis however superficial it may be”.

You wrote: “I can feel the rush similar to a drug when I authentically connect with someone, and that feeling gives me confidence and lasts for days depending on How vulnerable the experience was”- as social animals, like other social animals, when we connect, pleasurable chemicals are released in our brains/ bodies. When disconnected, other chemicals are released, such that bring about distress that motivates us to find the connection that our biology believes is necessary for our survival. This is why you tried so hard, and still, to connect.

The Disassociation, Then and Now:

You wrote: “lately I’ve been noticing the mannerisms of children… I noticed that it seems as if they  have a  natural curiosity and enchantment about life, the most trivial things are  amusing  to them and their emotional expressions are more genuine. I then take a look at myself at 25 I feel completely spent and forcing myself through life”.

The disassociation happened in childhood: “I always tell people when they ask about my childhood that i was the adult in the house, in the sense that i took care of everyone’s feelings and acted as a mediator on many occasions, I was very calculated in expressing my emotions which honestly i can barely remember doing”-

– you were “very calculated”, your emotions pushed down, locked in, but not perfectly. “The spark is still there”, you wrote, and you can still feel it sometimes.

Connection Now:

You adjusted best you could to the world of your childhood, the  home where you grew up. The adjustment was  about minimizing any  kind of excitation, be  it joy or anger, and settling into a manageable, no-excitation, calculated and depressed state of mind.  So now you see your mother and your father and you don’t feel much. So you may think: problem-solved/resolved, or problem-gone. But not so, the hurt and  the anger get activated in  the context  of your interactions with other people, people who are not your parents, in professional and personal contexts.

“Attempting to get close to a woman is seriously the scariest thing in my life, it brings up feelings of worthlessness, and quickly makes me feel hopeless with any amount of rejection”-

– because your valid hurt and anger in context of your home is not gone and  you are afraid of more of the same. The sexual element of dating women is an added desire to connect, but it doesn’t change the pre-existing dynamic I suggested here.

Here are the problems that I believe have been blocking your healing  from that very, very lonely childhood:

1. You expressed your belief that your mother/parents loved you when you were a child (“I know my parents loved me as a child”). Unfortunately, the great majority of your childhood, they did not: your father was  not there physically and your mother was severely  depressed. There is no love in absence, be it physical or emotional.

If your mother loved you, she would  have noticed that you were sad. “she said she  looks back at pictures from my childhood and it’s clear to her how sad I was”- she didn’t notice you were sad before looking at these photos, day after day, months… year after year when you were not a photograph, but a living, breathing child?

I am sure she felt affection for you at times, but seems like rarely. I suppose she  was severely depressed, and  when people are severely depressed, they  do not feel affection.

You wrote about your mother regarding last year: “she tends to start to tell me about her problems because my dad wont listen”- she doesn’t know yet (true to 2017) that your life should no longer be about her.

This belief that your mother and father loved you but you failed to receive it, or that your need for love was too much for anyone to fulfill it are incorrect beliefs, and are in the way of your healing. It led you to more incorrect beliefs: that your need for love is exaggerated, that you don’t deserve  love (“I still don’t feel deserving of love even though I always preach that all people are deserving of love”), that there is something  wrong with you, that it is your job to take care  of others (“I always felt as if its my job to care for others”) and so on.

Healing is about correcting  incorrect core beliefs. Correcting one belief leads to correcting more incorrect beliefs that were built on top of the first.

2. You feel “guilty blaming (your) parents sometimes, because they had their own issues, and I know they did their best… it makes me feel guilty to criticize my parents in the slightest because i know they came from nothing and tried the best they could.”- healing is not about you sitting in a position of a godly judgment and sending your parents in judgment and sending them to heaven or hell. Healing is about seeing how your troubles came about so that you can feel better long term and function better.

It is about no longer directing your anger against the victim of your childhood, you and directing your  anger instead at those who victimized you.

Whether they did their best or what their childhoods were  like is immaterial to the following undisputable fact: within the context of you and your parents, you were the victim.

Healing is about departing from convenient thinking such as: “I’m still grateful for them and  wouldn’t have  it any other way”- really? You mean, you would choose to have your painful  childhood all over again?

You don’t feel that you have a current problem with your mother: “My mom is not stressing me right now, and I’m not worried about it either, she’ll be okay”. This is because you adjusted to being with her, minimizing your negative (and any) excitation when in her presence. But she is stressing you, only the stress appears in a different context, the context of your life outside your interactions with your mother, or your thoughts about. I will italicize this context in the whole quote here: “My mom is not stressing me right now, and I’m not worried about it either, shell be okay she made it this long. What is stressing me is this empty lonely anxious feeling that doesn’t seem to let up. It rests in my stomach throughout the day. It’s the feeling right before I have a breakdown but it’s right at the surface.

4. You wrote that if you feel empathetic toward yourself,  you will  be giving yourself “permission to keep making the same mistakes”, and that this is when you “feel like giving up on trying the most”. You wrote: “I have pretty much always struggled with perfectionism, it was the reason I was/ am so   hard on myself, I was a very well mannered child, excellent student, overachiever etc. I did this because I always thought if I could discipline myself it would make my parents life easier… and it caused me to  be hypervigilant of any imperfection I had which led to me starting to self harm out of frustration of never being ‘good enough'”

You figured early on that you must discipline yourself and that self discipline meant holding a punishing whip over yourself and bringing  it down on yourself whenever you don’t operate  perfectly. In that kind of discipline there is  no place for empathy, it is the power of the whip that is supposed to motivate you to perform perfectly, no mistakes.

I think that a big part of you believes that this kind of discipline worked before: “I have always been the most composed rock solid person in my family, at work, or with friends”.

Here are examples of what that one holding the whip (that aggressive, no-empathy inner critic) is telling you in this current 2018  thread, June (words of the inner critic as I imagine them are in parentheses following some of the quoted examples):

“I think to myself ‘you’ve done all this therapy, read all these books, tried all these groups and shit ain’t working for you. You’ve even expanded your social circle from scratch, but you’re still lonely and unlovable obviously, that’s why you’ve slept alone 99.9% of your life”-  (You are a failure, nothing is working for you, all the things that are supposed to work for you,  nothing  works! Because you are a screw up! Something  is terribly wrong with you, whip! whip!)

“it made me feel growing up as if I was doing something wrong because i wasn’t happy but according to my parents growing up our home life was ‘fine’” (you are unhappy because there is something wrong with you! There was nothing wrong with your childhood, there is something  wrong with you! Whip! whip!)

“My number of partners is miserably low for someone my age”

“I struggle with being empathetic with myself out of fear of feeling sorry for myself” (so you are going to feel sorry for yourself? Whip! Whip!)

“At the same time it sounds like an excuse to me to be sad because I need human connection…I don’t know if my sadness is justified. It’s so hard for me to let myself cry for myself I was always told not to be a victim. I don’t know if I’m just being lazy or if I really have a reason to be sad.” (You are not a victim, you are a cry baby, full of excuses, unjustified, lazy! whip! whip!)

“I find myself unable to resist giving into the shame, and agreeing with the voice in my head telling me I’m worthless because I couldn’t accomplish something”. (You are worthless! You couldn’t do  it, could you, make your mother happy! It was your job and you screwed up! Whip! Whip!)

* Healing has to include the fundamental change of your self  discipline policy from aggressive (whipping yourself) to empathetic and assertive, guiding  yourself through life empathetically, kindly, gently.

It will be the effective way to go, the way for you to perform best,  to function most effectively, least mistakes.

anita

Dear noname:

What a precious first paragraph! If my printer worked, I would print it on a nice paper and put it in a  frame, on the  wall. So beautiful, makes me feel nice and warm.  Thank you for it!

Regarding blaming your mother, again, she was severely depressed for a long, long time. Maybe she still is. So she wasn’t available to see you, to notice you, to feel affection when she did notice you and to attend to your well being, to ask: how are you? (he most common question strangers ask, she didn’t ask, did she)

Problem for you as a child  is that you naturally concluded that you failed her, that you were “not being enough“, especially since your father told  you to make her happy, gave you that job, something you remember so clearly because it was so meaningful to you, it really was a job that  you took on most seriously.

“I struggle  with dating because I’m uncomfortable with knowing I may not be what the  other person is looking  for, so I blame myself for not being  enough“.

Not-being-enough is the  legacy your mother left  you with for being depressed on and on and on, not noticing you, and your father for giving you the impossible job to make her happy… neither one of them put you as a high priority in their lives.

So you keep feeling  and  believing that you are  not enough and there is no easy way to change this core belief. It really is a process of making  new brain connections, new pathways to infiltrate t he old and  it takes unbelievable  amount of persistence and  patience.

Keep stating  the truth to yourself every time you notice the untruth has been stated or suggested by the part of you that believes what is not true.

Regarding: “I sometimes compare myself to my clients who may have had ‘worse’ struggles than me”- not true. A child experiencing X, does not have another’s Y experience  to  compare. He only  has X and  it feels badly, no comparisons. Later one hears  of Y and retroactively compares, a useless, academic like comparison that really is unprofessional because again, the child has only X and doesn’t feel better (not!) knowing another’s Y experience.

If I understood correctly you are staying at your mother’s and sister’s place at the moment, for the holidays, another week  or so, or  for the rest  of this year? If so, it might be  an opportunity to practice something, don’t know yet what it would be.

anita

Dear noname:

Is your mother there too, with your father, sister, sister’s boyfriend and you?

I wonder why your father had a restraining order against your mother.

anita

Dear noname:

I mentioned that perhaps this is an opportunity for you. Maybe it is. You are staying  in a home that is closest to the home of  your childhood: your mother is there, your father and your sister- the most influential people in your life, the … makers of those  neuropathways.

Maybe the opportunity is for you to start a Word document, or take notes of thoughts and feelings that you notice as you see them, interact with them, pay attention and take notes. What  do you think?

anita

Dear noname:

Interesting observations! I wasn’t aware of the severity of your father’s rage/ your fear of his rage.I didn’t include this factor, a powerful one, in my  understanding of you. I know from personal experience, having grown up with my raging mother,how harmful it  is.

We lost power here since yesterday, a huge wind storm, unbelievably strong, still don’t have power and I was able to use  the internet only a little while ago thanks to a generator. I don’t  known how long the generator will function, have limited fuel for it. I normally get to the computer much earlier feeling fresh. I don’t  feel fresh  now.

I want to re-read your post and any you may add to it tomorrow  morning if I do  have electricity, be it via  the generator with enough fuel. I want to read more  attentively. If you can,before  I am back, can you tell me more about  how you believe your father’s rage affected  you?

anita