Epiphany! The basis of it all is SHAME {ShapeMe}
I hope you'll forgive me that this is going to be largely links, until I can explain this further. Those of you who've read a lot of my LJ will be well familiar with the elements and able to draw the connections easily.
This is about my own path to self-discovery. This is about me finding a missing element that I was certain was there but couldn't substantiate. This is about understanding how I am who I am from a more scientific standpoint, to see what is and isn't really making sense for me in this.
Here are the subjects I'm currently doing research on in an attempt to understand how I get in my own way and diffuse the problem:
Bullying & Mobbing
Post-traumatic Stress Disorder
Memory disorders relating to PTSD
Shame (also here) and related formative disorders and treatments
Stuffed Feelings and the Chronic Response Mechanism
.... And that's when the discovery happened. This description encapsulated my experience completely.... all the signs came from the extended bullying and grew out from there. I used stuffed feelings as a survival mechanism that sort of worked at the time to keep me safe from harm. Over the long term, it has been extremely maladaptive from a behavioural perspective.
As always, long ones go I experienced fear nearly every day of my life from the ages 6 to 12 (grades 1-6) on my way to and while in school and at summer camp, which had a great deal of crossover from my school peers. This was my experience through ALL of elementary/grade school. The physical aspects stopped the next year, when I transitioned to junior high and mixed with kids from other schools nearby. Beyond grade 12, I was still excluded, mocked, humiliated, singled out and exceedingly awkward with deep-seated paranoia about everyone and everything around me that seemed determined to make my life a fearful, miserable hell.
From grades 7 and 8 I began to feel physically safe, but paranoid of being talked about and put in humiliating situations, which continued. It didn't help that in grade 7 I acquired a full set of train-track metal braces, a retainer and glasses. The last significant event I can remember in relation to bullying, was that someone had bent the frame and wheels on my bike, which was my freedom. I'd only learned to ride the year before, and it took me back and forth to school on good days. The bike was destroyed and I knew we couldn't afford to fix it or get another one.
I believe that the last thing in high school that I felt was a distant echo of being bullied was that, even at the age of 17, a fellow student threw himself across the hall lest he somehow make contact with my "cootie" infested body. At the time, I remember thinking that I hadn't experienced something like it in a while. I don't recall it happening again after that. I was still ousted, but not as openly avoided. Also in high school, schoolmates in music class sometimes raised their music stands so it blocked their view of me.
I was the ultimate peer reject throughout my school life. Peers attempted to treat me like a friend often wanted to keep that friendship secret to avoid being treated the same as I had been. In front of their friends, they were nasty to me again. Some initial invitations to friendships ended in absolute betrayals of trust.
To avoid feelings of loneliness, as soon as I was old enough, I started babysitting. I became in demand enough that I was babysitting several nights per week. I made enough money to go to England for 7 weeks in 1982 (I was 17) but had no social life, and nobody at school cared to include me.
It wasn't bad enough that I had a mother who was a shallow princess who couldn't handle my childhood any better than she did, an alcoholic/drug addicted grandmother who chain smoked and never worked, and a really bitchy sister that everybody else doted on and thought was adorable. The addition of my parents' constant bickering or saying horrible things about each other and putting me and my sister in the middle, plus the bullying and mobbing, and the endless hours of having been singled out for detention to write math problems, all conspired to develop deep depression and PTSD associated with Shame.
Shame is the reason for so much of who I am, and I know I need to find a way past it somehow... but I'm still trying to figure out how that works.
Because of my experience of being bullied and mobbed throughout my childhood, which was my special kind of hell, there is the possibility that there isn't enough known about shame and its affects on PTSD, memory, social maladjustment and lack of self-worth that makes taking compliments or full credit for my achievements and accomplishments so difficult... and why it's hard sometimes to believe someone really loves the real me... the person hiding in the shame.
And yet, people do love me well. I am surrounded in love. I am gifted with it because of all the things that my experiences have taught me, that I've integrated into who I am. Some of that is damned hard to get through to become more content with myself over time, but I keep trying.
I think I finally have a fuller picture of my barriers. Now I have to figure out what breaks them down.
This is about my own path to self-discovery. This is about me finding a missing element that I was certain was there but couldn't substantiate. This is about understanding how I am who I am from a more scientific standpoint, to see what is and isn't really making sense for me in this.
Here are the subjects I'm currently doing research on in an attempt to understand how I get in my own way and diffuse the problem:
Bullying & Mobbing
Post-traumatic Stress Disorder
Memory disorders relating to PTSD
Shame (also here) and related formative disorders and treatments
Stuffed Feelings and the Chronic Response Mechanism
.... And that's when the discovery happened. This description encapsulated my experience completely.... all the signs came from the extended bullying and grew out from there. I used stuffed feelings as a survival mechanism that sort of worked at the time to keep me safe from harm. Over the long term, it has been extremely maladaptive from a behavioural perspective.
As always, long ones go I experienced fear nearly every day of my life from the ages 6 to 12 (grades 1-6) on my way to and while in school and at summer camp, which had a great deal of crossover from my school peers. This was my experience through ALL of elementary/grade school. The physical aspects stopped the next year, when I transitioned to junior high and mixed with kids from other schools nearby. Beyond grade 12, I was still excluded, mocked, humiliated, singled out and exceedingly awkward with deep-seated paranoia about everyone and everything around me that seemed determined to make my life a fearful, miserable hell.
From grades 7 and 8 I began to feel physically safe, but paranoid of being talked about and put in humiliating situations, which continued. It didn't help that in grade 7 I acquired a full set of train-track metal braces, a retainer and glasses. The last significant event I can remember in relation to bullying, was that someone had bent the frame and wheels on my bike, which was my freedom. I'd only learned to ride the year before, and it took me back and forth to school on good days. The bike was destroyed and I knew we couldn't afford to fix it or get another one.
I believe that the last thing in high school that I felt was a distant echo of being bullied was that, even at the age of 17, a fellow student threw himself across the hall lest he somehow make contact with my "cootie" infested body. At the time, I remember thinking that I hadn't experienced something like it in a while. I don't recall it happening again after that. I was still ousted, but not as openly avoided. Also in high school, schoolmates in music class sometimes raised their music stands so it blocked their view of me.
I was the ultimate peer reject throughout my school life. Peers attempted to treat me like a friend often wanted to keep that friendship secret to avoid being treated the same as I had been. In front of their friends, they were nasty to me again. Some initial invitations to friendships ended in absolute betrayals of trust.
To avoid feelings of loneliness, as soon as I was old enough, I started babysitting. I became in demand enough that I was babysitting several nights per week. I made enough money to go to England for 7 weeks in 1982 (I was 17) but had no social life, and nobody at school cared to include me.
It wasn't bad enough that I had a mother who was a shallow princess who couldn't handle my childhood any better than she did, an alcoholic/drug addicted grandmother who chain smoked and never worked, and a really bitchy sister that everybody else doted on and thought was adorable. The addition of my parents' constant bickering or saying horrible things about each other and putting me and my sister in the middle, plus the bullying and mobbing, and the endless hours of having been singled out for detention to write math problems, all conspired to develop deep depression and PTSD associated with Shame.
Shame is the reason for so much of who I am, and I know I need to find a way past it somehow... but I'm still trying to figure out how that works.
Because of my experience of being bullied and mobbed throughout my childhood, which was my special kind of hell, there is the possibility that there isn't enough known about shame and its affects on PTSD, memory, social maladjustment and lack of self-worth that makes taking compliments or full credit for my achievements and accomplishments so difficult... and why it's hard sometimes to believe someone really loves the real me... the person hiding in the shame.
And yet, people do love me well. I am surrounded in love. I am gifted with it because of all the things that my experiences have taught me, that I've integrated into who I am. Some of that is damned hard to get through to become more content with myself over time, but I keep trying.
I think I finally have a fuller picture of my barriers. Now I have to figure out what breaks them down.