It starts here.
Lies
I read this posting today and I was floored by the fact that something I've been so crushingly ashamed of actually has a reasonable basis in logic and reason. If I look at it with some honesty (ironic?) I would say that my lying falls into two parts of the definition. First, I am over honest. I spill everything and anything about some of my more intimate details very easily. This blog is somewhat an evidence of that, if I consider it fully. It is certainly evidence of a lack of practice with boundaries and understanding what "normal" is. The other area that strikes me is the grandiosity lies. It strikes me very much as a need to prop myself up and be seen as more than I feel I am. Which if I take a breath for two seconds and look at what I've accomplished in life, in terms of professional and personal, there is no need for a prop. But I can't shake that sense of drowning in the juices of my own stew. I have nothing to be ashamed of for who I am on the inside, and that's something I need to grasp with both hands. Maybe I wasn't born this way, but I sure earned it.
I am very tired again. Emotionally worn out, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. I am working hard with muscles that I've frankly never to very rarely used. I want to keep going, to move forward, more and more, but I am tiring quickly. I am still doing my three things every day, and it feels good. Somewhere on my list of next baby steps is my physical fitness level, but I am only cautiously stepping towards that one.
Realizing that I am a normal product of the chaos I grew up in is a safe feeling. I like safe.
Showing posts with label shame. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shame. Show all posts
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Friday, February 25, 2011
Talk Among Yourselves, Here's a Topic...
This is probably my first post in 40 days where I truly feel like I've got nothing. It has been a tumultuous 24 hours of stress and relief and self-awareness and emotional over stimulation. The work thing that I had to do to serve the biggest cheeses was a raving success. It went past the point of self-affirmation and drifted into adulation. Not an exaggeration, it was a clear affirmation that I still have all the work related skills that I've always had in relation to building and creating. People are fighting over themselves to tell me how awesome I am. I am somewhat ambivalent but still very proud of what we've accomplished, my little team of skunks. I'll leave the dilemma I am faced with as an outcome of this success for another day.
I had my T app't today and it went very well, I didn't walk out with my emotional being oozing and bleeding from being rubbed raw. I am tired, and very emotionally drained from the last part of my day, but I am very pleased with how it went. Suffice to say that I have some real work to do in the lines of Sir Oedipus, and some concepts to grasp and internalize there. It rings very true, what we talked about there and I am grateful as hell for that. We also talked about forgiving myself a bit. Not a strength, and something I am also eager to learn more about and try to give myself a bit of a break on things, and see about healing.
Last part of the day, the SO and I went to an Open Al-Anon meeting where a friend of the SO was giving her first talk. It was emotionally wrenching. Her story has a lot of the elements of mine, but also a lot of her own unique horror. It hit me like a ton of bricks and I am feeling so over stimulated. Adding to it is that this friend was also very cold to me afterward, in light of what's happened. I am not upset at her, in fact I think it is pretty damn cool that she loves my SO so much as to take up for her, but it still stings me. It'll be ok, I know she'll be ok with me, but at the time I was feeling a real connection, like only the horrifically abused can, and that hit me a bit.
With that, I am souped out. Nothing left in the cauldron. Adieu.
I had my T app't today and it went very well, I didn't walk out with my emotional being oozing and bleeding from being rubbed raw. I am tired, and very emotionally drained from the last part of my day, but I am very pleased with how it went. Suffice to say that I have some real work to do in the lines of Sir Oedipus, and some concepts to grasp and internalize there. It rings very true, what we talked about there and I am grateful as hell for that. We also talked about forgiving myself a bit. Not a strength, and something I am also eager to learn more about and try to give myself a bit of a break on things, and see about healing.
Last part of the day, the SO and I went to an Open Al-Anon meeting where a friend of the SO was giving her first talk. It was emotionally wrenching. Her story has a lot of the elements of mine, but also a lot of her own unique horror. It hit me like a ton of bricks and I am feeling so over stimulated. Adding to it is that this friend was also very cold to me afterward, in light of what's happened. I am not upset at her, in fact I think it is pretty damn cool that she loves my SO so much as to take up for her, but it still stings me. It'll be ok, I know she'll be ok with me, but at the time I was feeling a real connection, like only the horrifically abused can, and that hit me a bit.
With that, I am souped out. Nothing left in the cauldron. Adieu.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Shame! I'm Gonna Live Forever!
If it isn't obvious, I love to take syntactical linguistic meme's and flip them into something cutesy with a subtle turn of the phrase. It makes me giggle, and is something that I actually like about myself. There isn't much these days, so I gotta take what I can get, wouldn't you say?
Shame. It is my guiding force, my constant friend and the greatest companion to my faithful black dog. It drives all of my emotional output, be that as limited as it may be, but it also is the loudest voice in my head. I seem to have had some sort of arrested development in my emotional state, so cliché in children who grew up in homes seeped in addiction and abuse. It doesn't give me much more than cold comfort, but I have a intellectual sense that that realization will become more crucial as we move further down this road.
I am deeply ashamed of my behavior, most acutely in the last 3 or so years. Somewhere between there and here, I ceased being a functional person, and have been somewhat of an abject failure as a father, husband, friend, employee and general person. I went off the rails. As I read in this blog and found some comfort, I too stopped drinking/drugs through sheer willpower many, many years ago. What I didn't do was address any of the core elements that made me so afraid and so ashamed. Four years ago, almost to this date, I developed a very serious illness. Out of that illness, I had a hard breakdown. Out of that breakdown, I entered counseling. Out of that counseling I developed a sense of misdirected entitlement to my own "happiness". Out of that entitlement, I fell into serial infidelity.
It was a yucky experience. I picked the most damaged and disturbed woman for my partners. I was very obviously trying to fix these women. To salve my oozing open sores (shame, absence of self-esteem, anger, rage), I picked women who'd see me as their Knight in Shining armor and tell me, over and over how freaking awesome I was. I would lie and manipulate to "appear" to be exactly that perfect. it was unconscious and uncontrolled, and I am deeply ashamed of that. It worked, this medication, until the subtle realization that I was getting validation from incredibly compromised sources. I feel gross for some of the things I've done, mostly in how freaking damaged, way beyond me, these women were.
In December, I made the decision, tacit as it was, to stop doing this shit. I'd had enough of the crazy shit I was doing and the fact that I couldn't take the baggage that I had to take to even come close to getting anything from it. I had subconsciously recreated the drama of my life and it was destroying me.
My heart is aching at the moment, so I will cut shorter than I intended this post, but suffice to say, it hasn't worked out for me very well in the corresponding month. My wife, as wonderful as she is, discovered my infidelities and it prompted the broken place I am currently in. This is my hell, one I created, one I am responsible for, one I need to be accountable for, but it can't be decoupled with the fact that I am deeply damaged from my childhood. The hopeful side, other than her courageous decision to try to move forward together, is that I have descended as far down the rabbit hole as I am wanting to go, and I am asking for help. But I am ashamed. Deeply.
Shame. It is my guiding force, my constant friend and the greatest companion to my faithful black dog. It drives all of my emotional output, be that as limited as it may be, but it also is the loudest voice in my head. I seem to have had some sort of arrested development in my emotional state, so cliché in children who grew up in homes seeped in addiction and abuse. It doesn't give me much more than cold comfort, but I have a intellectual sense that that realization will become more crucial as we move further down this road.
I am deeply ashamed of my behavior, most acutely in the last 3 or so years. Somewhere between there and here, I ceased being a functional person, and have been somewhat of an abject failure as a father, husband, friend, employee and general person. I went off the rails. As I read in this blog and found some comfort, I too stopped drinking/drugs through sheer willpower many, many years ago. What I didn't do was address any of the core elements that made me so afraid and so ashamed. Four years ago, almost to this date, I developed a very serious illness. Out of that illness, I had a hard breakdown. Out of that breakdown, I entered counseling. Out of that counseling I developed a sense of misdirected entitlement to my own "happiness". Out of that entitlement, I fell into serial infidelity.
It was a yucky experience. I picked the most damaged and disturbed woman for my partners. I was very obviously trying to fix these women. To salve my oozing open sores (shame, absence of self-esteem, anger, rage), I picked women who'd see me as their Knight in Shining armor and tell me, over and over how freaking awesome I was. I would lie and manipulate to "appear" to be exactly that perfect. it was unconscious and uncontrolled, and I am deeply ashamed of that. It worked, this medication, until the subtle realization that I was getting validation from incredibly compromised sources. I feel gross for some of the things I've done, mostly in how freaking damaged, way beyond me, these women were.
In December, I made the decision, tacit as it was, to stop doing this shit. I'd had enough of the crazy shit I was doing and the fact that I couldn't take the baggage that I had to take to even come close to getting anything from it. I had subconsciously recreated the drama of my life and it was destroying me.
My heart is aching at the moment, so I will cut shorter than I intended this post, but suffice to say, it hasn't worked out for me very well in the corresponding month. My wife, as wonderful as she is, discovered my infidelities and it prompted the broken place I am currently in. This is my hell, one I created, one I am responsible for, one I need to be accountable for, but it can't be decoupled with the fact that I am deeply damaged from my childhood. The hopeful side, other than her courageous decision to try to move forward together, is that I have descended as far down the rabbit hole as I am wanting to go, and I am asking for help. But I am ashamed. Deeply.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)