Evolution of My Relationship Dynamics from Childhood to Young Adulthood - Day 3

Re-reading my last post, I am recognizing how my young adult relationships are continuations of relationships, patterns, and dynamics which first occurred in my childhood and teen years within and through my family. 

"I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to prefer viewing myself as inferior over viewing a real situation as not good for me, wherein if a dynamic seems unhealthy, I must be the one who is wrong. Big family history on this one, I'll have to get into that."

What I see here is a person (me!) who sees one thing but is told and expected to believe something else. This is a very concise way of describing a prolific pattern for my experience within my family. Abuse, dysfunction, arguments, financial strain: all witnessed, not talked about. Hidden. Denied. Covered with prestige and success. And so as a child I learned that no matter how much I cried, no matter, even, how much I spoke rationally about my experiences, and then no matter how much I hurt myself and no matter how much I starved myself, it made no difference in the reality of what was happening. Is this why I turned in and hurt myself? Maybe partly. If I wasn't right in my perception of these problems, then I must have been wrong. I never consciously thought of myself as the problem or the source of my family's problems. I knew I wasn't even really involved in most of the conflict: I was mostly the silent, young, confused observer. But apparently it was a problem that I saw a problem. In all my observations I saw a problem quite clearly, and I was told time and again that it wasn't there. 

So I have a habit and pattern now of assuming by default that when I see something as problematic, I am wrong. In being wrong, I am inferior. In being inferior, I must do everything I can to prove myself as worthy. In my young adulthood, this has meant compromising myself countless times, primarily in pursuit of male attention, simply because I know my body is a valuable trading point for that attention. With friendships, the tendency is more to just... be really upset and outraged when shit inevitably hits the fan. And it is precisely my inferiority etc. which contributes to that shit, among other parts of my mind and my reactions and my personalities that I have accepted and allowed. 

So:

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to turn outward problems inward simply because in the past my voice has not been heard. New ears are everywhere. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to punish and abuse myself for perceiving reality simply because reality was apparently not a desired frame of reference for my family. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to abuse myself as a substitution for the abuse that I did not directly experience but only witnessed within my family. What's there? More exploring. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to use my body as a commodity for gaining the attention of males. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be so caught up in the stories of my past that I don't see my present responsibility within my present friendships so that eventually they fail because I am living out and through the stories in my mind. 

"I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to, when presented with evidence of one thing, believe and hope and imagine something else."

Here again I have a manufactured illusion, only this time I am lying to and manipulating myself. I see the problem, and I deliberately ignore it. Why? I have learned and accepted and allowed that this is what one does in the face of a problem. In this case it is not so much a problem within which I have little or no agency, as was the case in my childhood. In this case it is more that I see a problem that I don't want to see, just like my family didn't want to see our problems. So in becoming an adult I accept and allow myself to adopt the habits of the adults who raised me. This is pretty much exclusive to problems in which I actually have direct agency and responsibility, wherein I have already decided I want a certain outcome and therefore I ignore the growing evidence suggesting an alternative outcome is actually what's best. I identify that outcome as being bad, as meaning that I am bad, and so I maintain hope in my original preferred outcome, which only exacerbates the whole problem and dynamic. Vicious cycle. 

So:

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to lie to and manipulate myself into living out a happy, good-feeling imagined reality within my mind and neglecting real-life evidence of problematic dynamics within relationships that will eventually lead to failure within those relationships. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to irresponsibly adopt habits and patterns that I witnessed as a child, when in reality I have complete and total directive agency over my own life, my own habits and patterns, and my own choices within each breath. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to reject or ignore evidence for what is real and therefore is indicative of what is best simply because it is not what I want and I am too afraid to look at it directly and see how it is best. It would have been best, for example, to not continue any number of detrimental sexual relationships in which I have engaged in the hopes that they would result in "true love" and "happiness" upon really actually seeing the evidence that the relationships were detrimental and dysfunctional. 

"I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to hold onto resentment and anger and confusion as a way of playing the role of the victim, abdicating responsibilities left and right because I feel too depressed or upset over some past event to properly deal with today, here, now. For a while, this specific past interaction was practically all I accepted and allowed myself to focus on. Before that, there were other specific past interactions that I would hyper-focus on."

And before those, I hyper-focused on my family. I hyper-focused on my self-injury and I briefly hyper-focused on every single calorie I put in my body, both of which were direct reactions to my family. I have, for almost as long as I can remember, used my family as an excuse for irresponsibility for myself and my life. 

So:

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself focus on issues of abuse and self-abuse as excuses for abdicating responsibility and my self-directive agency over my life. 

"In this I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to COLLECT these memories, memories from years and years of various failed friendships and relationships, holding onto them as central points of my identity and why I am the way I am and why it's okay that I am the way I am, not realizing it is not who I have to be.

"I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to, in the past, utilize the sharing of these memories as a way to gain sympathy and pity from potential new friendships and relationships and as a way to inspire a savior of me in another person, hoping they will pity me enough to want to swoop me up and take care of me and I will finally get some respite and relief from all the pain I have been accepting and allowing myself to carry around. Drop it! I don't need it. I will take care of me. Relief is here."

 My memory collection began in my childhood, when I held resentment and anger against family members for ways I thought they had wronged me or let me down. Me being a child, and the youngest child, and the girl child, all three carrying definitions of inferiority within my mind, it was easy for me to blame my parents or other family members for what problems I developed as a result of the problems within the family, and to see myself as helpless and powerless in the face of these problems, needing someone else to fix them for me. I accepted and allowed myself to BE these problems, to have them define me, to have them direct my actions into self-injury and into an eating disorder and into problematic friendships and relationships. But these experiences and memories do not define me. I accepted and allowed myself to use these problems as offerings for the needs I did not know or refused to see that I could meet myself, for myself. I carried these problems around in my pocket to trade in as proof that I am deserving of care when I have been deserving of care all along.

So:
I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to hold any kind of emotional charge in reaction to any kind of disappointment or injustice ever, but especially beyond the point that the emotional charge is a direct effect of that disappointment or injustice. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing these emotional charges to move into longstanding resentment and grudges closely tied to the memories, words, and pictures of specific disappointment or injustice.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to make excuses for why I should view myself as inferior within my family and incapable of seeing accurately or speaking soundly. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to doubt my ability to see clearly or speak my truth because of what others told me about the things I saw or said.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that because I am a girl/female, I have less chance of being correct in my observations, and I should just follow the lead of the males around me.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to blame my family for the patterns, habits, and problematic behaviors and thoughts that I developed within myself by myself as a reaction to my family dynamic and dysfunction.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to see myself as helpless, naive, young, weak, and incapable of appropriately coping with the problems I saw or incapable of assisting myself out of and away from the problems I was creating within myself. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that I need someone else to fix my problems for me, preferably a knight in shining armor to love me unconditionally and see me as beautiful because of my pain and because of how strong I am for carrying it.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to BE these problems and to manufacture and develop new problems, believing the new problems to be some kind of solution or coping skill for the original problems. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to let these problems bleed into and stain and tarnish my friendships, creating new breeding grounds for more problems and memories.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to use these problems as a currency for buying care and getting my emotional insecurity-based needs met by external influences. I forgive myself for NOT accepting and allowing myself to meet my own needs and take care of myself.


Thank you.