Wow, what a salient subject.
So, time for me to go through another psychology listicle and apply it to myself.
Preamble : Speak for yourself, chickie, it’s totally about having someone to blame for me. I have all this untapped anger bouncing around inside my skull precisely because I was horribly mistreated as a child without even being able to recognize it, let alone find some way to express it.
So I am going to blame my family until all that anger is exposed and expressed.
A. Emotional numbness
Oh hell yeah. It’s one of the biggest symptoms of my depression. There are times when the emotional response I know I should be having is just plain not there. Or rather, it’s there but incredibly faint. Barely more than a faint tingle in the place where the emotion should be, like phantom limb pain.
And it’s because I am constantly swimming in an ice cold ocean of emotional numbness. The signals are there but they can’t get through. So I don’t feel them at all.
It’s especially painful when I know someone is trying to reach out to me. I want so badly to reach back at them and make that connection, but I just can’t.
It’s like two people trying to find each other in a busy airport. They are reaching out in earnest, and I am frantically trying to find them but I can’t even feel them and the neural circuitry I would use to reach them have been rusted shut for decades.
And hell yeah, it’s because of CEN. I was the baby left to cry. My mother just stopped responding to my crying, presumably merely annoyed by it, until I stopped crying at all because it didn’t work any more.
And that was long before I was raped.
I had what they used to call an “icebox mother” and it was particularly hurtful because she had been so warm and wonderful before she went back to work.
After that, it was a downward slide until she would not even react when I gave her a hug. She just looked back at me with dull trepidation, like she was just passively enduring this awful creature’s embrace out of numb apathy.
Oh, so that’s where I get it.
B. Low self-esteem
Bingo for this one, too. I was treated like I didn’t matter and wasn’t important and given the clear unspoken message that I shouldn’t even be alive and that my presence in the world only made things worse for everybody.
No wonder I lay down in a snowbank and willed myself to die.
To this day, I have to fight that feeling that the world would be better off without me. That if I died, people wouldn’t sad. They’d say, “Phew, I’m glad that’s over! If I had been forced to pretend to tolerate that guy for one more minute…. ”
I know that’s not true. But it still feels very true to me. I have an incredibly hard time believing that anyone actually wants me around or values my presence or indeed sees me as anything but a massive liability.
And even I can tell how incredibly sad that is. It’s downright brutal.
And I am working hard to change it.
C. Picking the wrong people
Nope. I’d have to pick people first.
More after the break.
D. Impulsivity
Never been a huge problem for me, but I have outbreaks sometimes. Generally speaking, it comes in the form of spending and it stems from some emotional need that has built up to the point of taking over from free will and forcing me to meet it.
Remember, we are only in control for as long as we meet our basic animal needs. If those go unmet, the animal brain can and will take over.
Take tonight. I set out with the intention of spending modestly by ordering Subway. That would have come to around $20 in total.
But then the Subway was closed and I said screw it and got Pokey Okey instead. That came to $30.33. And that means I “borrowed” $15 from next week’s budget.
Sigh. But what the hell, I really needed a treat.
Oh, and nobody was setting boundaries for me, obviously. Nobody gave me any kind of structure or discipline to internalize. Nobody did a goddamned thing for me.
I had to do all that shit on my own.
E. Trouble regulating emotions
Also not a thing with me. I regulate the fuck out of mine. To the point of smothering them and pretending they don’t exist.
And that’s healthy, right? After all, it keeps me from misbehaving. Society is satisfied.
Don’t worry, I know my place. I’ll stay out of the way and not bother anyone.
I’ll just quietly regulate myself into an early grave.
F. Perfectionism
I think it is clearly evident by the sloppy way I do this blog that I am not a perfectionist. 🙂
I recognized the perils of perfectionism at an early age.
If anything. I have the opposite problem. I am not emotionally capable of working on something until I can’t think of any other way to improve it.
The very idea of it makes my blood run cold.
But I have been getting high marks for first drafts all my life. Even at VFS.
So why try harder, says the lazy part of me?
There are oh so many reasons.
G. Trouble making decisions
Ding ding ding! We have a winner.
I was just talking about this in this space, in fact. I have a terrible time with decisions and it’s probably because I never had any help in making them.
So I dither and hang-wring and stress myself out over even trivial choices and then end up just making the decision impulsively anyhow just to relieve the tension.
I would be so better off if I could skip the indecision and go right to impulsive choice.
But my fundamentally intellectual way of life demands that I try to solve the problem logically even if that is a hopelessly doomed proposition.
Being smart is so dumb sometimes.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.