lightbulb
I had an interesting support group session tonight. In talking about life in general, I stumbled across some pretty big emotional stuff. And it's going to take me a while to figure out just what I think about it all.
The biggest thing I saw was finally connecting the dots, in a sense. I've been feeling kind of hung up on richwillpowers for the last couple of days, about how much we have in common, particularly about how often in my life I have danced on the edge of ending it all. The thing that I stumbled across tonight, in talking about it (there really wasn't any HIV related stuff for me to talk about) relates to how feeling alone is the defining feature of that suicidal place I've periodically found myself in. And the biggest way that I isolate myself and create that feeling is to hide what's really bothering me and put a mask over it. I'm an expert at it. I'm really good at talking around what's bugging me, shifting everyone's focus and distracting, to explain my mood, without really getting at the core of what's bugging me. And so in a way, I protect my weak spots, but in another way I just feel more alone and isolated.
That's all kind of old news, for me anyway, even if I haven't expressed it quite like that in here. The new part was where that comes from. I never experienced being weak and feeling safe together when I was younger. It was never safe for me to fall apart, or to be angry, or upset. Everything centered on how my mom felt, and her needs were always treated as more important than anyone or anything else. She had two unspoken rules: never lie to her, and never tell her anything she doesn't want to hear. And obviously it's impossible to follow both rules, because in a lot of cases they are mutually exclusive. Like, for example, when she would ask "How are you?" and the truth is that I got beat up at school again for being faggy, so I'm feeling like killing myself. She doesn't want to know that. She wants to hear "fine", so that's what I would say, and put on a convincing enough act to where she could realistically buy it.
So I developed a real talent for acting, in a way. I learned at a relatively early age how to cover up what I was feeling, and the motivation was that total fear of appearing to break one of the two rules (usually the latter). I'm really good at talking about something peripheral that upsets me, but not The Real Issue, and injecting some of the feeling from the Real Issue so that it fools people, and they think that I am being really open and baring my soul, when all I am doing really is throwing them off the scent. It's an automatic defense mechanism I developed from growing up with my mom. At the same time, I developed a parallel aversion to showing what's really going on in my head, really expressing my emotions. It's terrifying for me to do so. The reason it's terrifying is that, on those rare occasions when my older sister or I would slip and let something out that was real, and (heaven forbid!) come to her for support, she would find a way to twist it into a weapon to use against us. When she was angry, it was totally acceptable to her to throw anything at all at you, with the specific intent to hurt you, and when she was done, that was that, end of discussion. (Yes, I know that sounds very much like borderline personality disorder. She's never been diagnosed with it officially, but I know she shows all the symptoms, and this is part of it.) So you never want to give her any real ammo. And that terror still hounds me. I manage to get past it sometimes anyway and talk about the real issues, but the truly deep dark stuff is still just too scary to look at most of the time, much less talk about.
And as silly as it sounds (well, seeing it written out, it looks so damned obvious) I really hadn't put it together before tonight. And it's timely, because I've been thinking a lot about Rich this week, and feeling like it's a slippery slope I could find myself sliding down, being where he was when he decided to end it all.
I've definitely got stuff roaming around in me that could put me there.
So, I guess yet another gift that Rich gave me was to provide a cautionary tale for me: talk about it, or you could walk in my footsteps. And I am not even necessarily thinking about any definite, concrete "this is what it is!" kind of thing; it's more a tendency that I know I have, that I use to keep the subconscious stuff buried, and the stuff I don't want to think about enough in the periphery that nobody really has a clue about it, or the depth of it. I might be writing more about it tonight, or this week, but tonight's support group gave me a bit of an epiphany.
I guess another thing that came up, that I am just now reflecting on: demanding to know what's going on with me is not the way to get at the truth, if you really want to know it. It's too much like the way my mom interacted with me. When she angrily demanded to know what was going on, the real message that got transmitted was more like "Tell me what I want to hear, dammit! You aren't following the rules! I don't really want to know the truth; I want to know that you [fill in the blank]. I want to know that everything is fine, and now you really need to convince me that it's all okay, or there will be dire consequences." And it sends me into a pretty automatic reaction: I very convincingly bury whatever it is, and pretend everything is fine, and if I can't bury it then I figure out some red herring pretty quickly that I can transfer the emotional content to, at least the emotional content that won't be buried, and I talk about that, until you back off. Sometimes I don't even realize that I am doing it. Sometimes I do such a good job that I convince myself that there's nothing else to it. It gets confusing in my head sometimes, figuring out what's real and what's not, and the more that people try to force the truth out, the more it hides, and the more terrifying it is for me. And of course, the terror gets hidden and not acknowledged, and it becomes a vicious cycle.
Anyway, it can't be forced out of me. I've got to feel really safe before I can even start figuring out that there is something there to look at, much less talk about it. So, I guess I need to put a lot of energy into creating a space where I feel that safety.
Part of me is a little excited about figuring out how I fake myself out and keep myself trapped. And part of me is, well, scared at what might come popping up when I really start to look at what's under the rug.
The biggest thing I saw was finally connecting the dots, in a sense. I've been feeling kind of hung up on richwillpowers for the last couple of days, about how much we have in common, particularly about how often in my life I have danced on the edge of ending it all. The thing that I stumbled across tonight, in talking about it (there really wasn't any HIV related stuff for me to talk about) relates to how feeling alone is the defining feature of that suicidal place I've periodically found myself in. And the biggest way that I isolate myself and create that feeling is to hide what's really bothering me and put a mask over it. I'm an expert at it. I'm really good at talking around what's bugging me, shifting everyone's focus and distracting, to explain my mood, without really getting at the core of what's bugging me. And so in a way, I protect my weak spots, but in another way I just feel more alone and isolated.
That's all kind of old news, for me anyway, even if I haven't expressed it quite like that in here. The new part was where that comes from. I never experienced being weak and feeling safe together when I was younger. It was never safe for me to fall apart, or to be angry, or upset. Everything centered on how my mom felt, and her needs were always treated as more important than anyone or anything else. She had two unspoken rules: never lie to her, and never tell her anything she doesn't want to hear. And obviously it's impossible to follow both rules, because in a lot of cases they are mutually exclusive. Like, for example, when she would ask "How are you?" and the truth is that I got beat up at school again for being faggy, so I'm feeling like killing myself. She doesn't want to know that. She wants to hear "fine", so that's what I would say, and put on a convincing enough act to where she could realistically buy it.
So I developed a real talent for acting, in a way. I learned at a relatively early age how to cover up what I was feeling, and the motivation was that total fear of appearing to break one of the two rules (usually the latter). I'm really good at talking about something peripheral that upsets me, but not The Real Issue, and injecting some of the feeling from the Real Issue so that it fools people, and they think that I am being really open and baring my soul, when all I am doing really is throwing them off the scent. It's an automatic defense mechanism I developed from growing up with my mom. At the same time, I developed a parallel aversion to showing what's really going on in my head, really expressing my emotions. It's terrifying for me to do so. The reason it's terrifying is that, on those rare occasions when my older sister or I would slip and let something out that was real, and (heaven forbid!) come to her for support, she would find a way to twist it into a weapon to use against us. When she was angry, it was totally acceptable to her to throw anything at all at you, with the specific intent to hurt you, and when she was done, that was that, end of discussion. (Yes, I know that sounds very much like borderline personality disorder. She's never been diagnosed with it officially, but I know she shows all the symptoms, and this is part of it.) So you never want to give her any real ammo. And that terror still hounds me. I manage to get past it sometimes anyway and talk about the real issues, but the truly deep dark stuff is still just too scary to look at most of the time, much less talk about.
And as silly as it sounds (well, seeing it written out, it looks so damned obvious) I really hadn't put it together before tonight. And it's timely, because I've been thinking a lot about Rich this week, and feeling like it's a slippery slope I could find myself sliding down, being where he was when he decided to end it all.
I've definitely got stuff roaming around in me that could put me there.
So, I guess yet another gift that Rich gave me was to provide a cautionary tale for me: talk about it, or you could walk in my footsteps. And I am not even necessarily thinking about any definite, concrete "this is what it is!" kind of thing; it's more a tendency that I know I have, that I use to keep the subconscious stuff buried, and the stuff I don't want to think about enough in the periphery that nobody really has a clue about it, or the depth of it. I might be writing more about it tonight, or this week, but tonight's support group gave me a bit of an epiphany.
I guess another thing that came up, that I am just now reflecting on: demanding to know what's going on with me is not the way to get at the truth, if you really want to know it. It's too much like the way my mom interacted with me. When she angrily demanded to know what was going on, the real message that got transmitted was more like "Tell me what I want to hear, dammit! You aren't following the rules! I don't really want to know the truth; I want to know that you [fill in the blank]. I want to know that everything is fine, and now you really need to convince me that it's all okay, or there will be dire consequences." And it sends me into a pretty automatic reaction: I very convincingly bury whatever it is, and pretend everything is fine, and if I can't bury it then I figure out some red herring pretty quickly that I can transfer the emotional content to, at least the emotional content that won't be buried, and I talk about that, until you back off. Sometimes I don't even realize that I am doing it. Sometimes I do such a good job that I convince myself that there's nothing else to it. It gets confusing in my head sometimes, figuring out what's real and what's not, and the more that people try to force the truth out, the more it hides, and the more terrifying it is for me. And of course, the terror gets hidden and not acknowledged, and it becomes a vicious cycle.
Anyway, it can't be forced out of me. I've got to feel really safe before I can even start figuring out that there is something there to look at, much less talk about it. So, I guess I need to put a lot of energy into creating a space where I feel that safety.
Part of me is a little excited about figuring out how I fake myself out and keep myself trapped. And part of me is, well, scared at what might come popping up when I really start to look at what's under the rug.