It might have been obvious by my last post that I've been struggling with sadness lately. I guess it's depression but it felt more like a vortex that I was being sucked into and that no matter what I did, I couldn't break free from it. These feelings were centered around my birthday, which was this past Saturday, and tied to stuff that happened for my birthday last year.
Last year one of my sisters set some boundaries and that set off some of my deeply-held beliefs about myself, namely that I'm not deserving of people's attention or time. Because all that happened around my birthday last year, when this birthday rolled around I experienced all of that perceived rejection all over again. Intellectually and rationally I know that everyone has a perfect right to set boundaries, that those boundaries have nothing to do with my personally and aren't a rejection of me, and that I am worthy and loved. My emotions didn't agree and there's no reasoning with emotions. Believe me, I tried.
I saw my psychologist yesterday and we worked through some of this during that appointment. It seems that there's part of me that is quick to say things like, "see? you don't even deserve attention on your birthday." Nevermind that the thing it was reacting to wasn't at all about me: it twisted the event to make it about me and to "show" me what it thought I needed to see and understand.
Yeah, I know all of this sounds kind of crazy because there's no rational reason for me to have those deep-seated thoughts and feelings about myself. Clearly it goes back to my childhood and the beliefs I formed about myself then based on the things my parents did. Both of my parents had their own issues and weren't exactly loving, caring, and supportive. I know that not everyone who had parents like mine end up forming such negative impressions about themselves so I don't know why I did... but I did.
At this point, I'm tired of the part of me that believes all those negative things. My psychologist is helping me identify, understand, and deal with that part of me. In time I hope that she'll be able to help me silence that part of me permanently so that I can fully enjoy my life (and my future birthdays!). It's going to take some time and I doubt it'll be easy to get to that point, but I have hopes that we'll get there because we have made so much progress already.
1 comment:
i understand the difficulty you are having. i sincerely hoped that when we saw a therapist we'd somehow be able to heal, but a lifetime of hurt precipitated and perpetuated by our parents would take more than a few therapy sessions for us to reverse... and in some ways it opened the wounds.
i am glad that you are doing some therapy to assist you now. i am on the same road.
what i thought was that we might want to have a joint birthday celebration for all 3 of us when you come up. even if it's just the 3 of us going out for lunch or something it would be nice.
love,
vicki
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