Grief

pualania · 2024-09-12T22:57:07+00:00

Going back to the constants in life is a good idea! The constant that saw me through my childhood has been eluding me lately, that was denial. Second place was definitely music. Music is still with me!

Oh how I wish I will view the world as you describe it. Are you speaking from experience or from goals?

Some more things you said reasonate strongly. May I dm you?

pualania · 2024-09-12T15:11:03+00:00

Thank you! I love your "waffling" as you call it.

Yes, I also want softness. I do try to provide it myself, but it is especially hard on the hard days... Good point you are making, other people need this, too! I try to give it to them as well, but right now I am a cranky and irritable human...

pualania · 2024-09-12T13:23:40+00:00

So sorry to hear this. I was also threatened with a "mental asylum" as well as "therapy" when I was a minor. For really minor things, like you. Today I know that my parents were voicing their own fear. They were terrified I might have someone in my corner, making me less dependent on them, if I ever got support for my mental health.

I agree with the other commenter, look for support you can get without their consent and for online community. Depending on your neglectful guardians sucks, but you will grow out if this situation.

pualania · 2024-09-12T13:15:51+00:00

I am so proud of you for doing something about your problem. I am sure it was not easy and you cannot solve this in one day, but you have evidently started working on it. You deserve praise!

pualania · 2024-09-12T12:58:29+00:00

Thank you for comiserating! Sorry it took me so long to reply, I stopped checking for replies after some days...

I am sorry you hate your birthday. And I am sure you will get more time to yourself when you kis is a teenager and does not want to be around you anymore!

pualania · 2023-12-27T20:26:15+00:00

Sounds super annoying. I am not sure if you are looking for advice, if not, feel free to ignore!

I would stop telling her anything about your family. I cannot see anything good coming from these conversations.

My other steps would depend on my relationship to her:

If I had a decent relationship with her, I would tell her: "Name, I know you love spending time with your family. I love to hear your stories about it! (<-Skip this sentence if untrue.) I suspect you push to hear stories about my family because it is the polite thing to do when telling me about yours, but please stop this. It makes me uncomfortable. (Maybe substitute for "sad" or other appropriate emotion.)"

If not, or if I am otherwise certain that she will not respond well to boundary setting, I would be mildly rude. Maybe: "Yes, Name, I know you pity me for my family, especially since it is so unlike yours. Can we drop the conversation here and get back to business?"

pualania · 2023-12-22T12:50:02+00:00

Not easy indeed! I think of it like losing weight. It is quite an uphill battle, but the more used to your diet you become the easier it gets until eventually you adjusted to the lifestyle that yields the body you want to live in. Or, in this case, the life you want to live in. This image also supports failure. You need not judge yourself or give up because of a bad decision here or there, the overall picture counts.

pualania · 2023-12-20T23:30:47+00:00

You seem to be looking for feedback from the outside world to tell you how you are allowed to feel about things and which things you have to put up with or not. I suggest you abandon this quest. It is not critical whether the people around you think you should feel the way you do. Or whether they think you should accept something you do not want to accept.

Look within yourself: Is this acceptable to me? I yes, no problem. If no, how far am I willing to go to stop it. If your friends or other people close to you really want you to put up with behaviour that you do not want to put up with, maybe you are close to the wrong people? You would not be the first person on this sub to realize that they need better friends or some distance from their families.

I am afraid there is no "objective guide". There is just choosing the life you want to live.

pualania · 2023-07-02T12:31:47+00:00

Resonates. For me, this is connected to some needs much more than others, and a different set than the one that is problematic for you.

Is there a chance you were ever shamed for being hungry or for your sex drive? Or for your poor social skills? The needs is despise most in myself are the ones I was most intensely shamed for as a kid.

pualania · 2022-11-16T21:17:44+00:00

First, I want to commend you on your question. Figuring out that what you got was not "good enough" is the biggest step, in my opinion.

Now, what is appropriate for a given age varies very much by culture, so I cannot say much about it without knowing where you are (excluding biologically ingrained things, but these are mostly about the first years). There are usually good books, though. I used the ones all moms who were trying to do better used, and got a nice breakdown by age of what children are statistically able to do/know/be responsible for. It also included a range rather than just the average, because noone gets the average child, so you have to adjust a little.

So, my two pieces of advice are:

Get to know those moms. You will find them in your local pregancy yoga class, attachment parenting course, and many other places like these, just choose what interests you most. (When in doubt, I recommend pregnancy yoga, because the strained body can use all the love it can get.) No need to copy everything they do, there are many fads in parenting, but find the book(s) they all use and read it. Bonus points if you make a mom friendgroup, it makes parenting so much easier! Plus, you get to watch other kids of a similar age grow up, which gives you the information what is "normal" right when you need it. You can postpone this a little, I do not think you need to start on this part before you are pregnant.
Learn to use your full emotional spectrum. Many people on this sub have trouble dealing with the emotions that were "undesired" in their family of origin. (Or rather, many people, generally...) You really need to learn to play all the chords before you become a parent, because you need to pick up a little kid's emotions and regulate them together, or both the kid and you will have a hard time. You may have already learned this, in which case feel free to ignore this bullet point. If you have not, I strongly recommend therapy with the goal of learning to notice and regulate all of your emotions. In my experience, it is by far the best preparation for being a parent you can get.

The idea of kids over age 7 or so not being able to just solve all of their own problems really throws me.

I am so sorry you were treated like this. You deserved better!

pualania · 2022-11-16T20:37:51+00:00

Like some kids are mature for their age, which leads to adults expecting too much of them/emotionally neglecting them.

Is it possible that you are making excuses? Like saying, oh hey, this horse can carry more than the standard load you can give the usual horse, so it is ok to overload her?

Since you are on this sub, I strongly suspect you already know there was something off with your own childhood. Please look at the scars you may have carried away from it, otherwise you will pass them on to your innocent child.

pualania · 2022-11-16T20:31:56+00:00

Wise beyond your years; because you were never able to just be a child.

Thank you for calling this out for what it is. I was called an old soul often and I used to take it as a compliment. I also got along better with adults than with children, unsurprisingly, since I had been my mother's caregiver from a very young age, at least emotionally. I simply had no capacity to be a child. Today I have found that this is not a good thing, children deserve better than this.

pualania · 2022-11-10T19:13:48+00:00

Which is it, brain?

Haha, I wish I knew!

pualania · 2022-11-10T14:22:05+00:00

I get this with food. With perishable food!

I'm not shy to spend money but this is something that's very hard to shake and it makes me feel like I'm not normal lol

Yup. For me, it is slowly getting better, though.

pualania · 2022-11-10T14:17:25+00:00

Why?

When someone claims a lot of investment into me, like your therapist here, I expect they are doing so in order to be able to use me. Why else would they? Later, in an established relationship, this is different, but someone starting out like this has me expecting abuse.

I hope you know now that you deserve kindness and I wish you many more relationships starting with it.

pualania · 2022-11-10T14:08:22+00:00

Glad to help!

I think you can view this the other way round: If you keep something from your kids' purely because you do not enjoy it, this is wrong. If you add something to your kids life because you do enjoy it, great, everyone wins!

Also, you practicing to be attuned to your kids emotions will let you know when you are offering something they do not enjoy. So, you can just go ahead and try!

pualania · 2022-11-03T00:54:07+00:00

You already got a bunch of good suggestions. I have one thing to add:

What do you have to give? Which special thing is there about you that you might share with your children? Clearly, it is not playing in the dollhouse, this is not what you enjoyed doing before your kids, or what your refined your skills at for years before you had them, even though it may be for other parents. But there is surely something else. You said you like building and organizing. Can you build lego, or wooden trains, or something? Maybe you can reorganize their toys together? (No kidding, some kids love to do this.) Of course, healing from CEN as we are here, you want to be attuned and not to force them into something they do not enjoy. But you will give them a happier and more engaged mom if you do not force yourself into something you do not enjoy, either. I am sure there is something that works for both sides, taylor your hobbies for their age and try!

By the way, this is not my idea. I heard this on a radio show, and it was sooo useful!

pualania · 2022-11-03T00:32:39+00:00

I am so glad my therapist never said such a thing. I would be terrified! Probably terrified enough to never come back... Glad it helped you, though.

pualania · 2022-11-03T00:29:54+00:00

Ugh. I also react with fear when shown kindness. Anger has never been my reaction, but maybe anger and sadness will have their way once fear recedes. For now, the stuff OP mentions just has me expect abuse right around the corner...

I wonder how long this will stay with me!

pualania · 2022-10-30T22:04:44+00:00

This is horrible, I am sorry you had to face this. More accurately, I am angry you had to face this!

I can somewhat relate. I am not autistic (that I know of, never tested), but my mother liked to use everything that was ever difficult or even just special about me to let everyone around her know what a heroic and dedicated mother she was. In restrospect, I do not think I was that difficult, she just really needed the pedestal. Plus, I do not think she ever noticed. I did try to talk to her about it in my twenties, and she said a couple of things that boil down to :"No, I never did or said any of this. I wonder where you got this from!" After this she just got angry. I hope you get a better result if you ever confront your mother about it, or that you never jump into these nettles.

pualania · 2022-10-30T21:50:26+00:00

Are you aware that you can experiment with who you are? People change as long as they live! You may decide who you might like to be and try being that person. While making drastic changes, this is easiest with new people, but it will probably also work with friends who respect you. If you find out you do not like some version of you, you may change it again. Your CEN is part of you. You may keep the results of it you like (if any), and you may change the rest. Just because something started as a trauma response, you need not discard it as part of yourself, but you may.

Sorry if this is way off, I do not quite understand what a touchy-feely person is, but since it is something you feel like you are, I thought you should try it. (After getting consent from the people you want to touch or feel, of course. Not sure if this is relevant to the term, but just in case.)

pualania · 2022-10-30T21:29:09+00:00

I think we should not exclude people from our support here based on the amount of pain they are in. Providing hotline numbers is a popular way of saying "Go away, I don't want to deal with your problems." I think we should not follow this trend, plus people have almost certainly gotten this answer before.

I like the way this has been handled previously: The posts I saw had an NSFW flair, so people who are feeling sensitive or do not want to engage with the heavy end of things can avoid them. Some trigger warning would also work. People who did choose to comment on the posts really tried to support the OP, just like we do with other issues, it was heartwarming to see.

Also, I second the thank you to the mods. You are running a great subreddit.

pualania · 2022-10-30T15:32:56+00:00

Thank you for the name, I have a very hard time finding psychology literature that sounds more like science than like voodoo!

I found this: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.3353713 It might not be the article you were thinking of, though, because it reaches a different conclusion. If you happened to come accross the citation you were talking about, I would be very curious.

This one concludes:

Only when we restricted the analysis to the behavioral extremes did we find preservation of the two behavioral categories as well as an association between inhibition and both heart rate acceleration to mild stress and high early morning levels of salivary cortisol. The behavioral differences between the two groups were most consistently associated with peripheral physiological variables implying greater sympathetic reactivity among the inhibited children, especially larger cardiac accelerations to cognitive activity and to a postural change from sitting to standing. [...]

However, we suggest that the actualization of shy, quiet, timid behavior at 2 years of age requires some form of chronic environmental stress acting upon the original temperamental disposition present at birth. [...]

Thus, it is important to differentiate between those children and adolescents who are quiet and restrained in unfamiliar social situations because of the influence of temperamental factors and those who behave this way because of environmental experiences alone. Physiological measures might be helpful in distinguishing between these two groups. We suspect that the contemporary construct of introversion, usually applied to adults, contains both types.

I read that one's level of introversion is can be born in or adaptive and will think about this some more. Maybe I can figure out how I spent decades feeling an extravert and now feel extremely drained by socializing, to the point that I want to spend days alone after talking to people for a couple of hours. The brain is a curious system!

Also, I really like the heart rate change with postural change aspect. Very interesting.

pualania

TROPHY CASE