Self-Judgment and Self-Support - Day 173

This post ended up being the opposite of specific, but that is okay... I did use my new little notebook today and that was very cool. It fits right in my pocket so it's perfect.

Mainly what I started writing within was the realization that I often lose sight of the "golden rule" in terms of treating others how I would like to be treated, and how this is sort of the most basic thing that must be understood and applied, and if this is really lived then not much else is all that relevant. But then I also realized how I utterly fail at treating myself the way I want to be treated... I mean if I can actually see how I would like to be treated, why don't I treat myself that way? Why do I take the absolute most self-abusive relationship with myself that I can possibly have? So that is what I was trying to write about when I began this post, but it became something much different, and that is okay, perhaps I will write more specifically on that point some other time. There is a lot in this post that could be written about more specifically at another time.

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I'm coming to see recently that when and as I experience joy or laughter or a smile on my face, it's, like... surprising, or unexpected, or novel, and also sometimes judged as something I should not experience. For one thing this indicates to me how little I have allowed myself to enjoy myself and enjoy life lately, to see that these instances are note-worthy because of their scarcity. For another it suggests to me that I must have some underlying permeating belief about myself and what I deserve, and apparently I do not deserve to experience happiness or joy or enjoyment. I am not sure the root of this belief.

I also know that throughout my life I have experienced depression and often once I enter a depressed state it has been very difficult to emerge back out of it, so that I kind of get stuck in negativity, pessimism, and depression, also helplessness, hopelessness, and beliefs about my own incapability. So knowing that I have been very stressed and anxious lately, and also in moderate to severe pain most days with migraines, I can see how this might come into play.

I also know that I continue to judge myself for a decision that I made, believing that this decision indicates I am a bad person or I am a failure and also believing that other people are judging me for this decision even though I don't really have any evidence to support that other people are even aware of the specifics of the decision.

So I enter into a lot of self-doubt that prevents me from even really embracing the decision and moving forward in my new creation of myself and my experience, instead still stuck in the past and also stuck in the point of this decision, also stuck in anger, and still stuck in whatever may or may not happen on one of my two days off where I might be forced to encounter a trigger that I have not yet figured out how to handle the reactions within myself that are triggered by this person. So even though I made the decision to "release myself" from myself from the energy that I created in this situation, I am still living under that dark cloud of not knowing what is going to happen, if I am going to be triggered, and thus have not been able yet to move on. But, apparently it is asking too much to ask this person to give me space. So I have to figure it out on my own.

"Figure it out on my own" -- another thing that I struggle with repetitively, where I isolate myself in thinking that I am just supposed to figure things out on my own, figure myself out by myself, without any guidance whatsoever. Some of this is a lack of trust of others. Much of the problem with it however is a lack of trust in myself. Also the isolation breeds paranoia. I can practice self-trust, though, by seeking out perspectives and support from others, and then making my own decisions for myself based on my self-honest investigation of what is best, so that still I am my own self directive principle, but I am not completely alone and I am not isolating myself from walking beside other beings and interacting intimately with others by sharing myself. And that is something I practiced somewhat today, with some success I would say, where I took an opportunity to share myself in a vulnerable way.


It is frustrating to me to see who I am today, because it is not the person I once was; or at least not the person I lived as. It is frustrating to me to see how much of who I am I can link to experiences I have had only recently and especially with a specific person whereby in our interactions I was led to believe certain things because I allowed myself to use that person as the example they represented themselves to be. It's frustrating that I allowed myself to lose myself to these experiences and interactions with others / another, because I had things I embraced as true and self-honest and they were effective, and I abandoned them when I saw they did not fit with a person I trusted or a person who I wanted to have like me. It is also frustrating to see how time and again I have felt hurt by people that I trusted to not hurt me, and yet at the same time I have in the past known that it is pretty much impossible to never hurt another person, mistakes happen, we're all selfish, we cannot read each others' minds. And so why did I expect to not get hurt? Why do I continually trust others to not hurt me, and so abdicate my responsibility to protect myself? And why then am I so lost on what it really means to protect myself in self-responsibility, and instead turn to defenses and walls and barriers as protection instead? Turning now to isolation. A part of me feels like this was like the last brick in the ultimate wall of keeping others out.

But I see already quite clearly that if that is true, I most certainly do not like this little isolation room I have created, and I see that I created it, as much as I would like to blame all these other play-actors in my world, so to deconstruct it now instead.


In trying to live in the here and now, I have lost sight somewhat of the "big picture" in terms of longevity of a learning process. I have zeroed in on only my current present experience of myself (rather than the current present reality of the here and now), so that I have forgotten basically that this is not all there is, that the whole point of process is to grow from this and expand my understanding and my stability and my ability to direct myself in every moment. A coworker reminded me today, for example, to consider 5 years from now and what I would like to have learned at this job. I had lost sight of that kind of perspective, of realizing the impermanence of my present circumstances, and so being able to see the "light at the end of the tunnel," so to speak, in terms of the things I am presently facing and experiencing.

So from that perspective I actually have more control and more self directive ability because I can choose the direction that I want to be in, say, 5 years, rather than feeling like all I have is right now and then tumbling around in all the chaos of the circumstances of my life right now. Looking forward toward the solution of the present "problems" rather than just sitting in the problems that are here.

Now I cannot depend and rely on the future. It is not here and now. But somehow recently I have lost sight of this bigger timeline picture, where getting any project completed is a process which requires steps and sometimes it is important to have an idea of what future steps one wants to take or accomplish. Realizing that all I have is the here and now is useful in terms of enjoying the present moment and also finding ways to be as effective as possible. But it is not effective for me to become mired in my present circumstances without consideration of what I want to learn or where I'd like to come out "in the end."

I mean I've said before that I am the constant in all of my experiences, and so learning to support myself comes first in terms of what to face first. If my internal experience of myself is negative and detrimental to my ability to live effectively then this is going to be true across environments. So I have to look at myself first, at softening with myself and not being so hard on myself all the time. I have to look at how I can actually practically apply self support in a way that works.

And I have to really make this process mine, if I am going to walk it. I really have to reject and disregard all of my projections of judgment from others or what others want from me or how others think I should be directing myself.


Okay.


I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that it is "bad" for me to believe in myself, have confidence in myself, see that I have done a good job, see that I have done something well, see that I am smart, see that I am capable, see that I possess other positive qualities which support me in navigating this world effectively as I utilize these qualities as my tools and assets for getting shit done and living effectively and enjoying life.

I forgive myself for not accepting or allowing myself to see and appreciate my own strengths.

I forgive myself for not accepting or allowing myself to see myself in a "positive" light because I have identified "positive" as one side of a polarity and I have identified polarities as "bad" rather than seeing, realizing, and understanding that what matters most is effective living as what is best for all, and my strengths can be utilized in a way to express through my living choices and applications that are best for all.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to see getting support or validation from others as "bad" and as such taking this tool away from myself because I have seen it as mostly ineffective, but I have not yet replaced the tool by building enough trust and stability in myself for me to support and validate myself, so as a result I am left with nothing and no reason to believe that I am valid or worth anything because I am not allowing myself to hear this from others and I am not allowing myself to tell it to myself.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to only ever interact with myself in a negative way so that the most negative and abusive relationship I have is the one that I have with myself.

My mom recently tried to encourage me by saying that she admires how I lean into the painful aspects of my life (I don't really see it that way?) and that one day all of my hard work would pay off in a healthy relationship that I deserve.

But all that I really want is a healthy relationship with myself. How do I achieve that?

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to live each moment not in the "here and now" of whatever I am facing so that I am thinking about other stressful things in my life that I am not presently having to face in that moment.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to live each moment to the exclusion however of other future moments in terms of progression through process and learning and expanding myself so that I can support myself in directing / guiding myself in a way that will result in success and effectively utilizing present challenges in a way that will support me to learn and grow by looking toward the future in terms of what I would like to learn and what I would like for my life to be like and thus how to effectively get there, also giving me the opportunity to realize that my life will not always be the way it is right now and so it will not always be so stressful and so I do not really actually have to be in "triage mode" where I am just trying to "survive," but I can actually stop, take some deep breaths, and then look at what it is here and now as an opportunity and challenge to learn and grow and change so that whatever I face "tomorrow" I will be prepared for rather than getting stuck here treading water.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to consider others in terms of my projections of how others might be judging me in relation to my process and how I am walking process and what decisions I have made. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to continue to doubt my decision because I fear that it was the "wrong" decision because I do not give myself the gift of believing that I can trust myself and my own decisions. I realize that there really is no "wrong" or "right" decision, there is simply what is, and this is what is now, so to move forward within the circumstances I have created for myself in whatever way is most self supportive, which is most certainly not to continue to judge and doubt myself and also continue to think of myself and my process in relation to others.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that I have to do this whole process on my own because I have beliefs about what I should be capable of and also beliefs about how other people do not want to see me or talk to me or do not want me around / feel burdened by me, so within this I isolate myself and try to carry everything on my own even though I am not stable and even though there is much that I do not understand and even though conversation with others can be extremely supportive in gaining new perspectives from others or in seeing self through conversation.



Okay... That's enough for now.

I commit myself to continue to watch my self-talk and see how I can actually support myself and believe in myself and trust myself, none of which I can do if I am constantly tearing myself down and apart.

I commit myself to continue to focus on the present moment as the here and now in terms of where my mental energy needs to go, but to also now integrate the "big picture" timeline so that I can realize more of a "long-term plan" kind of support for myself to realize that this will not all happen overnight and I have to take steps and it will change, but it will take time.

I commit myself to find ways to enjoy and appreciate myself each day.

(I mean even in yoga for example, when so often teachers end class with saying "thank yourself for showing up on your mat today," I always dismiss this as irrelevant, as not useful, as not something I need to do, not something I deserve, like whatever, I'm here, but it's only because I would judge/hate myself if I didn't come... hmm...)

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.