Your right I am serious, it is a coping mechanism but I also appear more serious on here because I feel comfortable on here so I can open up in a way that I can't in real life. Most of my friends say I am the most laid back and relaxed guy they know. Even keeled, never expressing anything, under control and just goes with the flow. I forgot how to be a child a long time ago and it is a little more difficult to just let go when you have forgotten how. There is reason I want to be alone. For the longest time as my whole world collapsed and negative after negative thing happened in all the chaos the only thing I could control was myself. For most of my life I have just been the one fixing problems, picking up pieces and fixing the disasters others leave behind. So I am not very comfortable being the one who causes it. I am fine with decisions with every respect except romantic relationships. I may have made the wrong choice when I was ten to protect myself by being serious but it felt safe and comfortable which is what I needed to keep my sanity. After years of doing it, it becomes natural and I haven't learned to shut it off yet.
Relationship Problem
- Thread starter jimtaylor
- Start date
this is only temporary
Community Member
- MBTI
- INFJ
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- 1
:grouphug::grouphug::grouphug::grouphug:
Staying in a relationship for pity is never a good idea, for any of the people involved. It would have caused problems down the road. I am so sorry you're going through this.
Nixie
Resurrected
- MBTI
- ENTP
It isn't your job to fix the world and it isn't your fault when things go wrong. Repeat, rinse, repeat.
You will get there. Worrying about other people's crap is just a way to avoid worrying about your own. Be responsible for yourself and your actions and you will get there.
Don't expect no freaking hugs from me tho.....
You will get there. Worrying about other people's crap is just a way to avoid worrying about your own. Be responsible for yourself and your actions and you will get there.
Don't expect no freaking hugs from me tho.....
1) This is something I am working on and being alone helps. I have been looking into this issue and my therapist points to the cause possibly being the fact that everything was always my fault. Let me explain. My mom is a narcissist and a pathological liar, so anything that went wrong in her life was everybody's fault except hers. Like a dog that is beaten all the time, eventually you begin to believe that you did something to deserve it. It has taken being removed from all of that to finally realize that I never did anything wrong. Just being born made me guilty in her eyes but when you’re ten and your mom is telling you that all men are evil, it doesn’t make you feel so good about yourself.
I’m not saying these things to dismiss responsibility, it is still up to me to fix it and make it better. But sometimes to fix an issue you have to first understand the cause and admit it. From the time I was born, I received no form of validation to my value as an individual so I took solace in my own imagination. That doesn’t really help one develop the social skills necessary to have healthy romantic relationships. Expressing any type of emotion or need in my family was not reciprocated in a friendly way at all. It was expected that we be born adults and that our needs where selfish and that my parents didn’t have time for them.
To express these needs was addressed sometimes with hostility and guilt trips about, “How dare we be so selfish to not see how much she was already doing for us and how could we ask for more? How could we be so selfish to burden her with our problems when she is already dealing with enough of them?” When that is all you hear as you are growing up, eventually you start to think that it is your responsibility to know what is going on with everybody else and that you are responsible for everything. It is only once you get to your adult years that you can understand that none of it was your fault but it would be denial to claim that no damage was done during all those years.
So from an outside perspective I understand what you are saying, what you are explaining and I’m not bitter or angry, I am just trying to figure out the next step. It is difficult because I never learned how to just take care of myself, how not to blame myself for everything that goes wrong and just be responsible for my actions because all I have ever known is that my very existence is a burden to those that should love me. It has taken me years to get over that and decide what my value is, separate of the opinion of others but it is a constant struggle everyday to fight everything. To tell myself every morning they were wrong and that I have more value than they will ever understand. I have nothing to prove to them and everything I achieve is because I made it happen.
When I find someone though that is struggling, I feel that need to help them because I was there and I remember how hard it was without help. How alone I felt all the time. There is a point that pain is no longer a teacher and it just becomes torture. That is when it is no longer teaching a lesson or making someone stronger but is instead breaking them. You can recover from that torture but you’re not yourself anymore, you don’t feel whole anymore. Then being responsibile for that pain is like reliving that torture all over again and if you think it is hard going through it once, it is even harder the second time.
Well I have no such hesitations...
