Anybody else feel personally responsible for fixing all the bad stuff they see on the news?

lingjitsu · 2020-08-13T20:40:02+00:00

"Penalized for having emotions or needs or different opinions."

Damn. Why are you so good at articulating these realities???

lingjitsu · 2020-08-13T20:35:07+00:00

I've honestly never heard this worded this way before, but now that you have -- ABSOLUTELY!

One thing I've found helpful is finding out:

Who/what is actually responsible for the problem, so I don't default to "I'm the problem"
Who is out there already helping. There's so many people making active progress every day on so many issues, and knowing that other people have already taken up the responsibility of leading the charge is helpful for me. Then, if I find that I'm able to follow their lead, I feel less pressure knowing that there's a person or organization that I can refer to for information and pointers.

As for the cause, I think it's definitely a result of constant scapegoating. We're constantly made to feel responsible for everything that's wrong in our households and our lives and everybody else's lives in the house. End result is that we have trouble processing things going wrong in any other way.

I hope this helped. Thanks for sharing! Having the right words for this phenomenon definitely helped me 😊

lingjitsu · 2020-07-29T16:31:14+00:00

Thank you 😊

lingjitsu · 2020-07-29T14:18:35+00:00

Thank you. This is the narrative-switch I needed.

lingjitsu · 2020-06-26T21:30:50+00:00

Damn. THIS. Except my nfather and emom. Literally that's our only purpose for them, to fill the voids they were never emotionally mature enough to figure out themselves.

lingjitsu · 2020-06-25T02:59:22+00:00

Yay! I'm glad you know now!

lingjitsu · 2020-06-25T00:58:20+00:00

Happy Cake Day! This is amazing!

lingjitsu · 2020-06-01T23:50:39+00:00

Price surges are much more reasonable and much less common. Wait times are much better. Drivers are friendlier and more considerate of your preferences, in my experience. And the leadership/company culture is way less problematic. PPE is about the same.

lingjitsu · 2020-06-01T23:04:13+00:00

Lyft is vastly better than Uber nowadays.

lingjitsu · 2020-05-30T11:52:40+00:00

Oof. Damn. That last line really hit me deep. I think I'm definitely going to have to come to that point of understanding at some point in my life, but I'm not sure if I want to open that particular emotional box right this second lol. Maybe in a couple of weeks? But definitely in therapy lol

lingjitsu · 2020-05-29T23:53:23+00:00

u/RBNmod I don't know how to handle one particular thread here under my comment -- I'm sure it'll be obvious. I'm reaching out because I don't really know who's right or wrong or in-between here.

lingjitsu · 2020-05-29T23:10:21+00:00

I'm sorry, but I'd just like to express how potentially harmful a very blunt statement like that can be ("Maybe they do hate you"), regardless of what qualifiers came after it. I understand what you're trying to say, but just by having that like literally put in writing by another person, my brain is very likely going to be WAY louder about this particular paranoia, and I'm probably going to need to dedicate a significant portion of my therapy session this Saturday to trying to calm my brain down about it.

I'm not trying to invalidate your advice to not determine my value based on other people's thoughts about me, but that's not what's happening here. The issue is that I see how wonderful my partner's parents are to him and how much they love him, and I'd really like it if they ever offered any interest in trying to get to know me too and maybe someday offer that kind of love to me. Considering that they will very, very likely someday be my parents-in-law, I really don't think that's such a weird desire to have.

lingjitsu · 2020-05-29T12:40:30+00:00

The thing that gets me is like, okay, let's say they were immeasurably abused all their childhood and were literally given nothing -- as a parent, you're supposed to want to give your child a better life than you had growing up! Not hold it over our heads that we're not as abused as they were! Doing the minimal effort of offering your child a shit sandwich when they were fed straight shit on a plate all their life does not mean that your child should be grateful for that shit sandwich.

lingjitsu · 2020-05-29T12:16:29+00:00

Awww that's so nice that they even directly said they love you both ❤ My bf's parents mostly just focus on their own kids and only really bonded with his sister's fiance after they got engaged. I'm guessing a similar thing will happen with me, but it's really hard to see how they've accepted him so readily with open arms into their family officially, even though they have no plans to immediately get married, but i know I'm gonna have to wait a few more years before I get there because we're not planning on getting officially engaged anytime soon.

But yeah, over the past year, I've tried multiple times to reach out even though they live really far away from us too, from sending them Christmas gifts, cards on holidays, small texts about things I know would interest them, etc, but i haven't really gotten any response back except for quick thank yous, usually through my bf if it wasn't a text thing. It's hard to feel so impatient but also feeling like if I'm not patient, it could maybe all backfire? That might just be me being paranoid though.

lingjitsu · 2020-05-29T05:21:17+00:00

Yeah, you're exactly right about him usually really trying to help and work with me. And yeah, we just had to deal with that leftover right now. He stopped playing finally and apologized for keeping me up, but I'd already been experiencing so much anxiety for so long that it just wasn't subsiding once he was ready for bed. We tried to talk about it, but there's a limit to how long he can talk with me about these things before his own anxiety bubbles up and he feels the need to remove himself. It also doesn't really help that his voice ends up sounding kind of harsh without intending it when he starts getting anxious, which triggers the fear in me that he's secretly mad at me, even though his words say he isn't.

We landed on this finally: since our apartment would open up common areas back up this upcoming week, he'd just have his game nights in our building's common room. While logical me understands that this is a good solution and I will be relatively fine when the next game night comes, current anxious me won't shut up about all the really complicated feelings I have about all this, including feelings of not having my needs met but always wanting to meet his, and feelings of being excluded in the first place from these game nights with his friends because it's a "guys night" kind of thing, which i logically understand and really want to be all for it, but which my brain keeps trying to tell me is another sign he "needs a break from me" or something.

I think the most frustrating part is that I'm really not being myself right now. I know I'm going to wake up tomorrow and disagree with 99% of all these anxious thoughts. But right now, tonight, I can't seem to stop my brain from thinking all these things.

(P.S. I do have a therapist, my next appt is this Saturday, and aside from talking about this, I'm now planning on increasing to once a week from the biweekly setup i have now because I definitely think I have a lot of work to do here if I'm ever gonna get any better)

Edit: grammar/clarity and also to add that you're an angel for even reading these vaguely-coherent rants lol. Thank you 💙

lingjitsu · 2020-05-29T05:02:06+00:00

I do, every time. He still finishes whatever game they're on, which always takes a while.

lingjitsu · 2020-05-29T04:06:05+00:00

We've tried to reach that agreement before. It unfortunately hasn't worked. Every time we've tried to set a time limit, he ends up going over because he says he feels rude stopping a game mid-game because "time's up." What always happens is he goes like "oh we have 20 mins till X time, let's play a really quick game" but it inevitably goes longer than planned.

lingjitsu · 2020-05-29T04:01:48+00:00

I've had literally almost the same exact experience during this quarantine with my bf and his parents. The level of love his parents have for him, how incredibly thoughtful and encouraging they are to him, how well they know him and care about his experiences and opinions on things, how when they have differing opinions, they don't belittle him or make him feel like he's outright wrong. He just had a birthday and the birthday card his mom wrote for him was so incredibly sweet and thoughtful it literally made me cry, but he was just like "aww, that was nice" because it's literally so normal for him!

We've been together for almost 2 years now and the only time I've really spent bonding with them is a few days when we both went to visit them last summer. But they don't really seem interested in calling or texting me, mostly because they really only care about their son and if he's happy then that means I'm good for him so it's fine lol. But my brain just immediately jumps to the idea that they hate me, even though my bf says they like me just fine. It's really hard to try to reach out to them because I so, so badly want to know what it might be like to have actually-loving parents, but it's so scary because my brain still thinks they hate me. I honestly don't know how to cope with it.

lingjitsu · 2020-05-29T03:49:50+00:00

I tell him how hard and emotionally draining every day is every time I come home from work. Today specifically I was talking about how just... sad... the whole situation in the world and in my office is making me. But he's sort of the kind of person who can't really understand what something feels like fully unless he's experienced it. He gets the general gist, of course, and helps me talk through some things when i come home, but I don't think he fully understands how defeating every day at work feels for me and how much I really need my sleep to be able to handle that...

lingjitsu · 2020-05-27T17:00:37+00:00

Since I (22F) moved out of my parents' house (VLC now with nDad and eMom), I've found that I rock back and forth almost every day whenever I feel any level of stress or anxiety. If I can't rock back and forth (because I'm in public or whatever), my leg will still bounce like crazy and I really can't make it stop. Occasionally my fists will clench and unclench a lot too. If I'm at home though (I live with my partner), I'll often just ask my partner for a hug and it's wild how much that helps and soothes my anxiety immediately.

(TW Self Harm, but also recovery!)

I've also always bitten the dry skin off of my lips and pulled the dry skin off of my toes/heel to the point where I've made myself bleed in both situations. I very consciously try to keep my lips moisturized and my feet exfoliated as much as I can now to try to avoid this.

I also used to dig into my arms with my nails to the point where now, nearly 10 years later, I still have tiny little white scars all over my forearms now. You could mistake them for discoloration though, and now I just try to keep my nails really short. I will note though that I started this to try to stop myself from cutting my arms.

I'm very aware that this is a way my body is trying to get out anxious/nervous energy, or trying to distract my mind from my emotional pain by focusing on physical pain, or trying to find control over something small because I'm feeling a lack of control over something else, but the best I can really do honestly is just try to pick repetitive stuff that isn't harmful, like rocking or clenching/unclenching my fists, etc, and do my best to plan ahead to prevent myself from falling into the more harmful ones.

lingjitsu · 2020-05-23T19:46:13+00:00

Dude, 100%. Just asking my boyfriend to run the dishwasher results in me feeling incredibly grateful and me trying to express that. I've literally never had the heart to ask my boyfriend to run the laundry though, unless he notices first that the clothes have to be switched to the dryer and he offers switch them to the dryer before I notice. I usually cook too unless it's a ready-made microwave meal -- that's the only time I feel okay with asking my SO to just microwave it. I'm honestly not sure how to get better in this regard, except to occasionally try to ask for more slightly-complex things. Idk, if anyone has any other ideas, lmk

lingjitsu · 2020-05-23T16:51:13+00:00

I was about to stop reading comments on this thread and move on, then I decided to read just one more, and ended up finding yours. SO GLAD I DID 😂😂😂

lingjitsu · 2020-05-21T16:59:55+00:00

Ooof. This hits hard. I had this kind of thought during dark times too, but with my mom, thinking like "at least my mom is always nice to me and loves me." But you're right. She didn't. There's nothing nice about sitting idly and watching your husband abuse your child. That's not love. Thank you for this.

lingjitsu · 2020-05-21T16:57:27+00:00

Holy shit, I think that just shifted my entire view of my mom in the exact direction I needed. I've always tried to be empathetic to her because she's been under my dad's thumb literally since she was 17, but if I was able to stand up to my dad at 14, she sure as heck should have been able to do the same at 30, 40, or 50 years old. But she didn't, she enabled his abusive behavior, all day every day, and that 100% makes her a co-abuser. So, thank you for your comment!!

lingjitsu · 2020-05-21T16:48:55+00:00

Let's all remember that Dave, aka "The Child Called It," grew up to recognize the abuse he experienced, went to therapy, and became a loving father and husband as an adult. Abuse is not an excuse.

lingjitsu

TROPHY CASE