The land of no self-hate – Episode 12 ‘rock-bottom and becoming help-ready’

Life has been tough. Tougher than I can handle or maybe tougher than chocolate can handle :-). I have let myself slip to the bottom of the pit and stayed there too long. I have been lying to my friends and family about how I feel because I did not want to be confronted with myself. I kept on saying “I am ok” or “I don’t want to talk about it.” while inside I was dying. I lost faith in myself, my life, my future. Everything was very dark.

I don’t want to lose my friends. And I know about the untrue friends and the true friend, but the energy unload which happens when I really let go is BIG. I do not think it is not suitable for friendship relations.

A new truth I found is that I have lived with adjusting myself all of my life. Adjusting what I say, adjusting what I feel, what I think, to fit in. And then followed the hiding and drinking away what could not be transformed otherwise. 😦 Obviously that is a sick system and not sustainable. 😦 So there I was, another much-needed rock bottom again – the emotional one.

This Tuesday I had to visit the doctor who determines whether I need to look for a job or are entitled to further financial government support. She was rather persistent in finding out how bad things were. Her repeated questioning brought me to places I hope to never visit again, though that might be a wish that will not be granted. I was crying and shaking all over. I knew things were bad, I had no idea it was this bad. New memories of my early youth, teenage time and young adulthood have been popping up off late and it is tough; mostly, dark experiences which then feel so overwhelmingly real in the here and now that it is baffling. I assume it is a side effect of quitting drinking and not having tasks on hand which propel my thoughts into the future.

I tell so much lies about how I feel in daily life and adjust myself to the outside world that I have shut myself down totally. I deliberately place cheerful and silly Facebook post and comments with quick responses and smiling emojis to (try to) make sure nobody thinks I have changed.

I notice I build another me at quite an emotional distance from where I actually am. That is what addiction is to me and it is SO DESTRUCTIVE. It is like I am trying to build a several story house but in order to deal with technical issues and difficulties in the design, I shift the coordinates for everything to avoid having to solve stuff or think about what is going on. I do this for all the plumbing, electricity, for every room and for every layer of the building. Now the rooms do no stack onto each other or on the founding even, the plumbing does not connect from room to room or story to story, planks from the stairs are missing, the sewage system is dysfunctional because not placed at the tap or toilet points, the light shines in places where the floor does not exist and the roof lies on its back in the garden. It is how I feel energetically and it is NOT WORKING!!!

I guess telling others all is OK is not working either. The doctor was a good mirror. She indirectly ordered me to go into therapy; if I do not improve within a few months she was obliged to take action. In that she hinted at ordering me into therapy involuntarily because of danger to self – or shut down the funds. As threats go, these are quite effective.

Today I had a GP visit – for the record, this appointment was based on a talk I had with my administrative guy to whom I could not keep up appearances – the mask fell of and he stimulated me to make changes.

I found out I have the idea that nobody understands how I am wired. I have the idea that if I tell how I feel everybody thinks I am crazy. Maybe I am, to a lot. But not to everybody and not to myself although I fear to have experienced pre-psychotic episodes off late where I started to doubt the existence of the world. Yeah, funny, in a not funny way. Pressure in my mind went up so big that I could not deal anymore. In order to deal something had to give: it was me or the world, I decided the world was not real and I could walk through walls if I felt like it. Scary shit. And while my mind is telling me of this new order I KNOW it is not correct but shit the pressure is high. Not advisable.

But it is always darkest before dawn and a lot happened for the good in the last several days. I came home from the doctor’s and made myself an extremely healthy salad. Taking care of myself with a last resort of force, but I did it. The next 2 days I battled the darkness like I battled quitting drinking in the first days; actually using willpower to stop negative thinking and pull it out by its roots. Again and again I find that if I do that, I feel better. Yeah: “duh?!” but ah, difficult when depression has drawn its tracks into the mental state and thinking.

BUT I DID IT!!!! I’m not there yet obviously but I made a start to turn things around. The chocolate is still there but the vegetables are back on the menu big time, so is hope, love for myself and so are the Bach remedies (a type of ‘homeopathy’ / energetic ‘medicine’ to promote happiness and emotional health) I chose something to give me hope, settle the crazy, deal with shock.

In the last months I have sorted my problems into several categories and I found that these are big. The last two days I realised that, as with drinking, I just (?) need to work out what is the problem and where I can find help. My issues are big, but not insurmountable. Or so she said upfront ;-).

In the below paragraphs I write about what I think makes it difficult for me to exist in this world. Please note that I am aware there are billions of people who are worse off than I am. Many of them amongst readers of this blog. But that does not mean I can cope with what I am in this world. 😦 The toughening up I did led me into drinking so I guess there is something I did and do not understand. Please note this is my own analyses, I should be open to the possibility that things are not as I think they are in order not to close off any learning opportunities. But for now this is it.

What makes my issues, the PTSS, the VTS (vanishing twin syndrome), the high IQ, the hypersensitivity, I am clair-ish sentient 😉 difficult is the mix with the addiction; the not wanting to be here and experience what is. That makes it impossible for me to build on anything – that goes for anything: I can not hold on to anything, not to money, not to a job, not to a partner, not to a thought. Only to not drinking actually. 🙂

The Vanishing Twin Syndrome (losing my twin brother in the womb and actually remember that as a very traumatic experience) which leads to a lot but mostly caused my eternal ‘not wanting to be here on this earth’, a big part of my PTSS, the clear sentience and the hypersensitivity. I also believe this openness somehow set me on a path of finding difficulties in the field of sexual abuse. But that might ‘just’ be coincidental. It made me vulnerable to not feeling worthy of being alive: I had already caused somebodies’ death before I was born. No wonder I have no right to be happy and be me.

Because of the hole in my energy system where my brother used to be I am open to all kinds of energies. I feel I am not connected to this body, to this human shape, I am connected to everything non-material.

His death was so overwhelming that it broke my natural defenses and threw me out of my core. I have not been able to repair this. I need to learn to close myself off in order to make myself feel safe in this world and actually want to be here, to fully incarnate. Currently I am like a sender/receiver with no on and off button and no ability to distinguish between incoming and outgoing. I never know where I end and the other begins. Makes for great sex though, when all is well. Learning to deal with this will hopefully help me to close myself off instead going into hiding or being aggressive, tactless, nasty to others when I feel unsafe.

I am thinking my hypersensitivity is caused by the VTS but has been worsened by the abuse of alcohol, sugar and other addictions which stress out my system and make it vulnerable – not only energetically but also chemically. Over the years I have become hypersensitive to chemical smells and coffee for instance. When my neighbours drink coffee my bowels start doing their bowel thing and I need to go to the toilet.

Next there is PTSS from the VT experience and (sexual) abuse, mother with cancer, father with Aspergers and his religious fixation on the apocalypse. We had a stressful home situation with continuous fighting and passive aggressiveness dripping off the walls. My parents with their structural sexual abuse issues, their continuous financial issues (while they were never out of money! btw) were not able to do their parenting job because of their own mental and physical states; mom’s cancer and their addictions and their own traumas.

Finally there is me being intellectually gifted – which is difficult to say because it sounds arrogant and ha! it does not keep me from being stupid. Intelligence and being streetwise/smart are NOT related :-D. But I guess being best of class for many years of my life puts me in the gifted category. I followed an online course on the subject and I the teacher mentioned that being gifted comes with specific disadvantages as not feeling understood and having difficulty to connect with what is ‘normal’. Also: the inability to connect intelectually actually made and makes people (me!) feel stupid and incapable because others do/did not understand me. Through the years though I have learned to connect to people over the human factor. Which is good, and way more useful in life but it leaves me unsatisfied in working some stuff out and somehow people do not help me with stuff because they think I can manage myself. Not true.

One of the happenings which send me spinning a few weeks ago is finding out my gifted, primary school friend had killed herself, leaving 2 kids behind. We always competed over the best school results. She was very creative and very skilled in that area, she studied to be an architect.

Being gifted does combine badly with my anxiety. In work situations I use my giftedness to oversee processes and all the tiny details which make the business clock tick. In combination with my anxiety and perfection I focus on the things which go wrong. It is a useful trait for a Quality/Safety Manager but it causes continuous anxiety and it is a bad way of using gifts. Also: it freaks out colleagues to see bears on every spot of every road.

My GP does not call my breakdown a rock-bottom but uses the word T-junction. 🙂 Not taking action will lead to darkness, despair and death. Taking action can lead to light. I choose the light because in the darkness of where I was I realised that underneath all of it I like myself.

My GP gave me a few names of therapists, I am to investigate by myself and I come back next week to make a decision with her and sign up somewhere.

I am happy that I quit. Seeing how much I loathed myself when I drank I think I would not be able to bear being alive right now if I would be drinking. Not a positive choice, but a much-needed one. 🙂

The hug-buddy is back. We did not speak about what happened (NEW). After having been asked by the tax service to pay back 4500 euros (half of my savings). I was aware of their claim on my, and I do have the money, but the real thing was a bit more real than I had imagined. I only found out a few days later that they would also be GIVING me 5000 euros for another reason so I’m going 500 plus iso 4500 minus. Realising how extremely stressful these money issues are I suddenly felt ashamed about my harsh judgement of him. We hugged it back to ok. 🙂 I guess some day we will talk.

These days I will be sorting out my issues further and trying to find places and people whom I think can help me with these. For all those who have tried EMD or EFT: there seems to be no organisation without it anymore so I guess that will be on the menu. 🙂

Now is bedtime, tomorrow is another day. I look forward to sorting stuff out and cleaning up this emotional mess. 🙂 I have a lot to give and to live for, if I allow myself to be me.

I am grateful for the people and professionals I have been meeting this last week.

Thank you for hanging in there and reading this rather unedited, dark process of me unaddicting. I want to become clear, transparent and I want to become me. To feel safe to be me. To not be afraid of me. I also want to understand the energetic ways of life. I want to love and be loved.

Wishing you a nice sober experiences.

xx, Feeling

The land of no self-hate

A lot of time I wonder why I am at home, doing nothing for the so maniest time in my life. However, I do feel that it is needed for me to sink another level back into the truth, to peel another layer of the onion, to work through some reoccurring issues.

Currently I am trying to work out how self-hate works. Years ago I found out that I hate myself because ‘when I hate myself, at least I do something good’. The subject needs looking into because I have been in a very bad place on and off for the last months and I am not sure how to cope with this eternal darkness attacking me. I know it is me doing the attacking – but I did not know how. And somehow I need to intellectually and energetically understand the mechanics of something to be able to deal.

When it comes to self-hate, all I did know is that I have developed it as a ‘safe guard’ between me and my parents, mom in particular. Who, by the way, did her own lot of self-hating too. 😦 I am guessing, if you are in a situation where anxiety, addiction, self-harm and other destructive behaviour shows up, you might want to check out this vid from Teal Swan. Hope it brings you as much insight as it did me. 🙂

And this is the text from the video, if you prefer to read:

Self Hate, The Most Dangerous Coping Mechanism

Coping mechanisms are strategies and behaviors that are carried out to mitigate, manage or adapt to anything that causes distress.  If we cope with something, we do so because we feel we cannot change the stressor itself. We have to adapt to it so that the hurt we feel as a result of it is decreased or eliminated.  We would all hope for a world that did not have to be coped with. Alas, that is not the world we currently live in and so it must be said that even though all coping mechanisms hold the potential to be limiting and damaging to a person in the long run, certain coping mechanisms can be more detrimental than others.  And the most dangerous coping mechanism is self-hate.

At first glance it may be hard to see how self-hate could possibly be a coping mechanism.  After all, self-hate can’t possibly decrease a person’s distress can it? The answer is yes it can.  And to see how, we much journey back to the genesis of this coping mechanism.When we look at a dysfunctional home, what we find is that the root of each person’s self concept in the family system is shame.  This feeling of shame has been passed down from generation to generation. It is the primary stressor in the household. Everyone has to find a way to cope with that shame.  The ways they cope with that shame set up the dysfunctional family system and determine what role each person will play in it.

To understand how self hate develops, we must see that if one or more of the parents is dealing with a baseline self concept of shame, a child being different to that parent in any way or even asserting a boundary will trigger that feeling of shame.  It will invalidate their identity, which they already subconsciously think is bad. This is why the golden child in a family will learn to cope by throwing their identity out the window as a strategy to avoid being shamed and ostracized within the family.  They will become a ‘mini me’ as an adaptive strategy to the parent they feel they must please in order to stay safe with.

The child that cannot adapt by throwing their identity out the window and whom can’t find a way to please the adult consistently for a multitude of reasons will be so upsetting to the self concept of the parent that the parent will subconsciously turn against the child.  They may say, “I love you” to this child and try to do loving things for them, but the truth of how they really feel is not what they are presenting on the surface and the truth comes out in all kinds of ways. Their only way of avoiding the shame they feel and the shame this child triggers in them is to emotionally disown the child and deflect that shame onto the child and that child then becomes the family scapegoat.  It is to say, “I’m not bad, you’re bad and you are my problem and now I’m the victim to you, and so is everyone else in the household.” The family can then hide all of their dysfunction behind this “family problem” person and can see themselves as the good ones because all of their focus can be placed on trying to fix what is “wrong” with this person. What is wrong with them is that everyone in the family has turned against them for being different and for not being able to change that.  But the other people in the house can’t see this. This person has become the identified patient in the family.

The experience of being turned against by the very people who you need love and belonging from the very most is so painful it is beyond describing.  And it makes it so the child has no way to feel safe. They feel hated by their family, especially the parent who initiates this shame deflection. They are growing up with an antagonist, an antagonist upon whom their life depends.  And the way a person copes with this is genius in the short term but completely destructive in the long term.

A child put in this position, pushes themselves away.  But they can’t physically do that so what happens is the pushing away of themselves, splits their consciousness in half.  To understand more about this concept, watch my video called Fragmentation, The Worldwide Disease. When they split their consciousness in half, one half contains the parts within them that they perceive that their parent hates.  The other half becomes a mirror image of their parent… An internal antagonist. This internal antagonist takes over the job of hating them for the parent. It becomes the one that is constantly shaming and criticizing the parts within this person that are seen as wrong and bad by the parent and now as a result, by the person themselves.  This makes the hurt not only controllable, but predictable. And the child believes that by doing this, they might just be able to change the things that are so detestable about them. The person has become their own abuser and hater so that the antagonistic parent is never given the occasion or opportunity to do it. Imagine you were going to go up to someone to hit them and they just started hitting themselves.  What would you do? Chances are, the desire to hurt them would go away. You’d feel on an energetic level that your goal was already being carried out. You would feel like either something is really wrong with them so they must need your help or that they agree that they deserve it to such a degree that they are going to do it for you. This would make you feel validated. This is usually the point at which the parent gets an extra boost of self-esteem through turning themselves into the “false healer” and the child is turned into an identified patient.

As you can see, this self-hating aspect is actually trying to save their life and rescue them from the wrath of the parent.  This part holds the truths of what matters most to them. For example, perhaps what the parent hated about the child was that she was so sensitive.  The self-hating part will constantly criticize and shame her for being sensitive. Because the thought is that with enough disapproval of it, she will either stop being that way or be motivated to fix it.  And this will get her the sense of belonging and safety she wants. We can then tell that the truth this self-hating aspect holds is just how important belonging and safety are and how much she needs those things.  Ideally, we need to figure out these valued and needed things that the self hater is holding the truth of and try to get those things directly in the places that we can get them from.

Self hate is a coping mechanism that is so dangerous because it is a coping mechanism that may keep you safer from the external hater/antagonist, but it leads to constant anxiety because you are living with a part that behaves like an enemy in your own skin.  And it leads to all kinds of dangerous behaviors in the long term. Things like risk taking, abusive relationships, self-destructive behaviors, self-injury and even suicide.

When you find this part within you, see the benevolent reason for its existence.  See that its strategy, though genius while you were living in an abusive environment, is now destroying your ability to live a life that is worth living.  See that the parts of you that this part has turned against, need to be accepted and loved instead. Go directly for the things you were trying to indirectly get by trying to hate these parts of you away.   Give them to yourself and get them from others. The life you want to live is just on the other side of wanting to be you instead of agreeing with your antagonistic parent that you should be someone else.

I am happy that I quit. It has been difficult going but insights like this make me happy :-). I do not know how it works, it gives space, it frees me of darkness. It brings, I don’t know, light? 🙂

I watched the video twice, feeling and remembering my way through what has happened in my life and how self-hate is happening currently. I was able to let go of some parts. Always funny how ‘letting go’ immediately causes an internal clamping reaction and how letting go of that to led me to a land of no self-hate. That is strange. I am and feel totally different there. Realise that I have no clue who I am if I do not hate myself. Breathe, relax and drink water. Feeling my whole body, system, all my energy wanting to hang on to what was. It is time to let go. This also means that I must take responsibility for being here. Ha! That is a ‘ziektewinst’ thing. What did I gain from being the victim of (self)hate? Not having to be responsible.

A woman who loves herself would love herself, get dressed and go out now the sun is shining. Do something. Allow myself to enjoy myself instead of sitting here being stuck in self-hatred. Ok, now I know how it works, I need to change the energetic mechanics of it. Funny how all these behaviours look like addictions. So, ha! I should be able to do that if I set myself to it.

I can see, feel the woman who (forcibly) loves herself stretching out her hand to the woman who learns not to hate herself. One day soon they might meet in the land of living within Love & Peace. ❤

Wishing you a nice sober weekend.

xx, Feeling

First day new job

Gheghe, I have 4 draft posts on ‘first day new job’ since it was last week. Never finished them because too exited. I am process coördinator now in the same branch with the same product as I was in. Actually I have moved to the chique big brother of the former company. Last week was my first day and today my second. It is all pretty overwhelming because I came in at the beginning of the introduction of a new process and I am the one who needs to roll it out in the company supported by two external consultants.

Last Thursday was my first day, Friday was tax check day where the tax office was doing a semi standard check on my admin over 2014. Not sure what the outcome is yet. If it is bad I might have to pay back a money. We will see. I was so stressed out I could not move for several days. This total freeze is my go to mode. However I did manage to do some meditating as well and that helped a little. I could now see it happening in stead of being caught up in it 100%, so I guess there is some ‘space’ developing.

I think I should check out how I spent the first days of my former job because I have been freaking out ever so now and then. Yesterday night I was convinced that I would be fired today. I was totally out of control panicky. However again there was a little space for ‘reality’ (?) because I assumed that I was in panick mode and could take a tiny, tiny little distance. It took me 2 hours to fall asleep and I woke up several times. I remembered from when I worked as an employee, before I started my own business that in a lot of nights, specifically Sunday nights I would not sleep well, freak out of things I was sure  I could not do. I assign a lot of my serious drinking to that feeling, I would on weekdays, drink an average amount, not to get drunk but to be able to sleep.

Again, I guess what is in the way is The Way; so now it is time to learn about this insecurity and related panick. I am not joking when I say: that at those moments I would rather not be alive. Would be a bad joke anyway, but it is not a joke. No idea where it comes from apart from not being able to deal with insecurity, failure and ‘not being good enough’.

I remember I always had this reaction to having to do something I thought I could not. This immensely overwhelming fear of failure. It is a very unpleasant even to think of it. And in these modes it is very difficult to do what a woman who loves herself would do because the first thought is to assume that I do not have rights to loving myself. 😦

I am happy that I quit because yesterday I could realise that I was in a freeze instead of only being frozen and I have taken deliberate action to get me out of that freeze. Only worked for seconds but hey, Rome was not built in one day and learning to bike also took me several days, so continue. What is in the way is The Way.

Today I will take better care though and go to bed in time. 🙂

I wish you all a very nice sober day / evening.

xx, Feeling