Tag: bad self esteem

Hopeful

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I am starting to feel very hopeful, like my hope is more resilient now –  balanced between a new acceptance and a forceful will to get [the hell] out of this place where I’ve been stuck for some time. But even though it’s been frustrating, I’ve learned a lot about myself and how my body and mind reacts to feeling stuck, stressed and powerless. I know when and how I get into a vulnerable position where I lose my self-esteem and faith in myself – where I lose my faith when it comes to life in general. Therefore, I will be able to save myself from ever becoming this vulnerable again. It is a comforting thought. Dealing with economical, mental, physical and emotional vulnerabilities at the same has been the heaviest task I’ve ever had to take on. But at least I am doing it. I am working my way through it all. I am grateful to myself, for being strong enough to do all this without giving up or giving into the fear or the helplessness I’ve felt at times. I can’t believe I was so close to giving up, only a week ago. I didn’t know that finding closure in the most painful place was so important. Now, I regret that I didn’t do it sooner, but perhaps I wasn’t ready to do it then. Everything happens for a reason, every decision leads to a new place – and the lack of making one is one of the most dangerous traps in life. It makes you stuck. Miserable. It makes you stay when you should go. It makes you tolerate things you shouldn’t. It makes you scared of the light instead of the dark. It weakens your inner voice. It kills your hope.

I am out of all that now. I’m finally feeling hopeful. Now, it’s up to me to do something about this new hope. Otherwise it’s a waste of strength and positive energy.

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Someone helped me get unstuck!

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Life is funny. It has happened many times that I’ve received an email from a stranger who’s following my blog, at the exact time I’ve needed to hear whatever they have to tell me. I am not religious nor do I believe in fate, but this is something that has meant a great deal to me, spiritually. Today it happened again. A kind person helped me fill in a blank space in my inner journey and now I know exactly where I have to go next. Stuck, my ass, now I am on my way again!

My blank space held the question “What is the opposite of ‘expectations’ (both good and bad)? How can I go on without feeling the weight of them?” The answer was embarrassingly simple;

acceptance.

So, there it is. Such a little word but with the complexities of a whole lifetime of trying to get there.

But at least now I’ve found a new direction for the path I’m walking on. Sometimes getting stuck is just one step closer to getting unstuck. Getting lost is one step closer to defining what home really is and where it is to be found.

With the concept of acceptance follows many steps of self-discovery and self-compassion. I am ready to work hard to accept the things I haven’t been able to accept before. I have to accept myself and my nature (and my body), my limitations, shortcomings, strength, my superpower, my talents, I have to accept reality, situations and people I can’t change, hearts I won’t ever be able to reach, I have to accept the love I am offered, I have to accept that I will always carry a big sadness within my soul but also to allow happiness inside, I have to accept that my past will always be a part of me but that it can’t touch me anymore, the slow processes of trauma recovery and that I can never live up to what other people want me to be for their own comfort.

To accept all those things is also to let go of worries, fears, stress, frustration and the sense of being powerless.

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What this person did for me today with her email was not only to help me get unstuck, she also gave me hope that everything will be alright. As long as I am in a constant movement forward, everything will be alright – even if it means accepting being stuck for a little while and not being able to run wild but to take the smallest steps to be able to move forward.

I’m unstuck and hopeful.

What a beautiful twist to a bad day.

The season of pain

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It’s been one of the worst summers of my life. I’ve been dealing with so many different kinds of pains. First the pain of what’s going on in the world – there is so much pain and fear right now with terrorism, increasing of rape cases, especially in groups of men, demagogues and dangerous political drama. But I’ve also endured physical pain. Emotional pain, stirred up by my self therapy (but necessary in order for me to continue my inner journey). But then there’s the pain of knowing that my second trauma is in a way still on going. I don’t talk about this in public because it can hurt people close to me, but even if I don’t talk about it, it’s still there. I’ve learned how to live with it and the pain is mostly about not understanding why. I’ve let got of both shame and guilt, they don’t belong to me. They never did. But it’s this little word “why” that keeps haunting me. To not being able to understand something difficult is not easy to accept. The heart needs closure. And to give up looking for an answer is definitely the best way to heal. That is extremely hard to do. It’s so hard to accept that there aren’t any answers and looking for them is pointless. Trying to figure out why someone hates you, why you are not good enough for them, why they think you deserve to suffer like that, why you are stuck with all the pain while they can live their lives without being bothered by what they’ve done or the consequences of their actions and the lack of responsibility.

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But when I think about it, I don’t think they are happy and living their lives without any pain. I think people who hate other people hate themselves even more. I think these people know more pain than their victims, but in order to survive they project their pain and suffering onto other people. If they wouldn’t hate other people, who would they be? If they didn’t feel superior to other people – how would they feel about themselves?

The most toxic relationships are often between an empath who’s trying to rescue a wounded soul but being the object of projected self hatred and pain. The empath becomes a victim of a dangerous dance of wanting to rescue the wounded soul but end up with a wounded soul because of the dance itself. You can’t rescue other people if you are trying to rescue yourself through them – and you can’t hide from your own pain by inflicting pain in others. It’s that  simple.

Because once they stop hating you, they are faced with their shame, guilt, self loathing – and their unbearable pain. But there is a way out of it, and it’s by facing it. By wanting the dance to end. By surrendering to the reality of things instead of hiding. Instead of escaping into numbing and separating the mind from the soul. Daring to be vulnerable is the key. Daring to be naked in front of oneself – without judging, without feeling shame.

So I wouldn’t trade my pain for theirs. I wouldn’t even trade it for their lack of pain for hurting me. But I do want closure. Whatever it looks like. Accepting that they won’t ever be vulnerable enough to be held accountable for their actions. Accepting that they aren’t strong enough to do that, and I can’t do anything about it. Accepting the feeling of helplessness and powerlessness when it comes to resolving the situation. Accepting the waste of years being part of the toxic dance and allowing them to treat me like a door mat. Accepting that I deserve happiness, success, love, pleasure and freedom, in spite what they think I deserve (which is basically nothing). Accepting that I can’t change another person or make them see what they’ve done or who they are. Accepting that the pain they have caused has helped me become who I am today and feeling grateful for being strong enough to make something good out of it instead of becoming a slave to it. I will never be a slave to my own pain. I want to cut it off and let it go. Maybe one day I’ll be ready to do that or perhaps it’s a slow process and I’m already working on it, what do I know.

Feeling hated is difficult and painful but I imagine it’s nothing compared to what it must be like hating oneself. I am finally in a place in my life where I accept myself for who I really am – and I am able to love myself without feeling shame. It’s a big victory for me – and from here I’ll be able to deal with whatever life throws at me, because I know when something is happening because of me or because of other people’s weaknesses and shortcomings. I used to take on the responsibility for everything, even for things that had nothing to do with me. If someone would hit me, I would think it happened because I was being difficult, that I probably deserved it and that it was my fault, not theirs.

Now I know exactly what belongs to me and what doesn’t. And it makes it easier to live with the pain of being hated and punished for who I am. It’s not my fault. It’s not my responsibility. It’s not my problem. It’s not my choice. It’s not my place to ask why.

Even if this has been a crappy summer, I will make the following months the best autumn of my life. The season of pain is over.

Reclaiming my intelligence

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Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do   

–  Marianne Williamson

 

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An awakening is not only a pleasant experience. It can be brutal at times. I can see things so clearly now and it’s all painfully real. Suddenly I get these realizations – or like a spiritual ‘epiphany’ – and I start to look different to myself. It feels both liberating and scary at the same time – and can be very confusing at times. This week I made a strange realization.

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Throughout my whole life, I’ve heard that I’m different, special or an ‘odd bird’ – but I’ve never really defined what that means to me and what consequences those labels have had on me and my life.

I haven’t followed conventions and rules – so I am considered as ‘difficult’. I never understood superficial social interactions – so I was labeled ‘weird’. I have never wanted to belong to any group, any religion, political party or ideology – so I am a ‘misfit’. I have always expressed myself and who I am – so I have been considered to be ‘too much’ – and deserve to be punished. I have my own Universe inside me, I have a vivid imagination and a heightened emotionality – so I’ve been called  ‘crazy’ (mostly in a positive sense, whatever that means). I’m overcoming PTSD – so I must be ‘sick’. The right hemisphere of my brain is more dominant than the left therefore I use my imagination, empathy and creativity more than I use logic – so I must be ‘stupid’.

But that’s just it – I am none of those things. I just have a lot of integrity and won’t give up who I am in order to ‘fit the system’. I am not mentally ill because I have PTSD, I am simply fighting the traumas, caused by other people’s madness and manipulation. I am not crazy, just open-minded.

But, what I’ve discovered lately is how much and often I’ve belittled myself in order to make other people feel smarter and less insecure around me. So much so that I forgot about my own intelligence. I acted stupid, felt stupid and then believed in my own lie – I started to believe that I actually was stupid. It might be hard for you to understand why I would do this to myself – but it has an explanation, rooted in the PTSD (in psychology called “regression”). It’s a common survival strategy during a trauma; to endure unbearable long-term situations the victim takes on more childish mannerisms in order to escape the responsibility and emotions of an adult. There is often a bond between the abuser and the victim in which the victim is both terrified of the unreliable nature of the abuser and at the same time is seeking comfort and security in the same person (I call this destructive bond ” the dance of death “, this routine is why people stay in abusive or toxic relationships). To act oblivious, or more ” innocent ” can make the victim feel safer because the abuser (especially in domestic violence) is also the “caregiver” and authority figure as some sort of a parental substitute. It’s a complex phenomenon.

So I felt comforted in the way I acted stupid – and that allowed the abuser to seem smarter and more in control, so I wouldn’t question the situation. Sometimes abuse seem to make more sense than the thought of breaking free and having to deal with the aftermath – that’s what abuse does to your mind. After the trauma, this was just part of my twisted behavior and part of my PTSD. I didn’t even notice how I was belittling myself and acting stupid. It became part of my self image.

At one point I even thought about making a boyfriend my legal guardian. That’s how fucked up this self image was. I thought I was incompetent, talentless, worthless and such a victim of my own bad decisions that I couldn’t be trusted.

I can’t believe how I could ever think like that. It’s shocking. Gross. Bizarre. And embarrassing.

After my last break-up  in 2014 I started to change, drastically. I had overcome most of the PTSD symptoms through therapy and nothing made sense anymore – I was finally shedding skin and finding closure in all the destructive behavioral patterns.

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Now I am finally able to acknowledge my own intelligence, not only how smart I am but also HOW I am smart – in what way I am smart, what my resources are, my strength and my competencies. Basically it’s all about the qualities that I’ve been bullied for – the qualities that made people say I am difficult, weird, too much, a misfit and crazy. All that is what make me intelligent and amazing. I never want to act stupid again just to make other people feel better about themselves.

I know my intelligence is rare and beautiful – and when I combine it with my creativity and imagination I can be very powerful. I know it can make people uncomfortable but it’s just not my problem.

I’ve only just begun exploring my intelligence and where it can take me. I wish all people could experience this kind of enlightenment – even if it uncovers embarrassing and painful truths about who we have been forced to be while hiding our true selves. We all deserve to shine from within.

Boundaries

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[photo found on tumblr]

I’ve been faced with some setbacks lately. I’m disappointed in myself and it feels like I am failing. It’s one step forward, two steps back at times; the self-doubts are seeping into my mind again and I lose the connection to myself. It happens when I am around “power people” – people who wants to exert their power over me to feel better about themselves. Because of the PTSD – and the toxic relationships in my past, I am highly intolerant to this personality type.

I am a strong person, I am celebrating who I am and I never want to be something I’m not – and yet this is happening, over and over again. I lose myself in their vision of who I should be – submissive, quiet, a puppet for them to control, without a voice of my own – and who can’t stand up for myself even though I am so good at doing that in so many other areas of  my life.

It’s something with these power people,  the narcissistic personality type with no empathy or emotional intelligence, and me. Like a dangerous chemical reaction. I don’t know what happens. Why my boundaries all of the sudden are melting, bouncing or expanding so that they can do things to me that I don’t like without me responding to it. I hate this. I need to find a way to keep my boundaries intact around these power people, even if they are hungry to destroy them so they can control me or use me to fill whatever need they have in themselves, to feel superior or to feel in control – or both.

The worst thing is that this is totally distracting me from making art and enjoying my new relationship and the happiness it brings to my life. My PTSD symptoms are back.

But the good thing is that I’m aware of the dynamics between me and the power people, and  I am willing to work hard to keep my boundaries intact. At least I can see when it’s happening and I feel how wrong it feels – it’s unnatural for me to be submissive even though I am following a destructive behavioral pattern that happens when I am forced into that role.

I need to be more selfish – and to grow a tougher skin.

And I need to make art, I feel lost without it. I will start on a new project – tonight.