Archive for the ‘Misery’ tag
Explain to him?
I've come to understand/realize that the misery in my 2-year marriage was not because of his alcoholism (which he's been in recovery and not had a drink in over 5 months), but because of his abuse. He was never the type to scream or call me horrible names, nor to hit me. He was subtle, manipulative. My entire life has been run with guilt and manipulation. First by my mom, now by my stbXRAH.
I started to see something was seriously wrong back in November (about 3 months after he'd started AA). He was using everything and everyone in my life against me. I moved out, and about a week later I filed for divorce. Despite multiple times telling him that we both have issues we need to work through on our own before we could even consider reconsiling our marital issues, and telling him we need a break from each other (I've clearly said NO CONTACT until x date multiple times), he ALWAYS crosses that boundary. Always steps over the line.
He insists that we should not be getting a divorce. His excuse for crossing the line is he wants reasons, answers, goals. I've tried to explain, but everything falls out of my head when he and I talk (argue) - he's so good at making me crazy. I get off the phone feeling completely exhausted, confused, and most of the time don't remember what we even talked about. More than once he's told me I am chemically imbalanced and need mental help. But I know that's not true. My doctor sees me and knows I am not crazy.
However, I'm still in love with him. I still want him to want to change. He keeps saying, "I'm a changed man, but you haven't been around to see it" (accusing me that my moving out and filing is what's ruining our chance at a good marriage). He's always been all talk. I have no reason to start trusting his words now when his actions have never proven anything - with the exception that he stopped drinking.
He wants to meet with me tonight. He wants to talk. I'm scared because I don't know if I'll be able to hold my own. But I'm not sure I want to lose him. And I'm not sure I really want this divorce. Some days it seems so clear, then other days I just want to go home and believe it will all be ok.
I've tried to explain that his controlling measures and the way he acts like he "owns" me is abuse. And the way he talks to me is abuse. And he gets upset and says I'm crazy and that someone is filling my head full of ridiculous ideas. Is there a clear, healthy way to share the abuse concept with someone who is so clearly a verbal abuser (via guilt/ manipulation/ coersion/ etc) so they understand what they are really doing and how very wrong it is? Is there any hope that he can see the light? How can I explain this to him???
I feel like if I just divorce him to get away, it wouldn't be "fair" because I was not clear enough with how he is abusive, since that would be my reason for divorce (and these feelings may be more imposed upon me by him and by my parents than myself, but I still feel them). He says he wants marriage counseling. He says he wants to know why I filed for divorce. And why I want time apart. And how it's supposed to help. But deep down I feel like he's just asking those questions so he can build up excuses to undermine those things and break me down further and make me come back without him really changing anything.
I started to see something was seriously wrong back in November (about 3 months after he'd started AA). He was using everything and everyone in my life against me. I moved out, and about a week later I filed for divorce. Despite multiple times telling him that we both have issues we need to work through on our own before we could even consider reconsiling our marital issues, and telling him we need a break from each other (I've clearly said NO CONTACT until x date multiple times), he ALWAYS crosses that boundary. Always steps over the line.
He insists that we should not be getting a divorce. His excuse for crossing the line is he wants reasons, answers, goals. I've tried to explain, but everything falls out of my head when he and I talk (argue) - he's so good at making me crazy. I get off the phone feeling completely exhausted, confused, and most of the time don't remember what we even talked about. More than once he's told me I am chemically imbalanced and need mental help. But I know that's not true. My doctor sees me and knows I am not crazy.
However, I'm still in love with him. I still want him to want to change. He keeps saying, "I'm a changed man, but you haven't been around to see it" (accusing me that my moving out and filing is what's ruining our chance at a good marriage). He's always been all talk. I have no reason to start trusting his words now when his actions have never proven anything - with the exception that he stopped drinking.
He wants to meet with me tonight. He wants to talk. I'm scared because I don't know if I'll be able to hold my own. But I'm not sure I want to lose him. And I'm not sure I really want this divorce. Some days it seems so clear, then other days I just want to go home and believe it will all be ok.
I've tried to explain that his controlling measures and the way he acts like he "owns" me is abuse. And the way he talks to me is abuse. And he gets upset and says I'm crazy and that someone is filling my head full of ridiculous ideas. Is there a clear, healthy way to share the abuse concept with someone who is so clearly a verbal abuser (via guilt/ manipulation/ coersion/ etc) so they understand what they are really doing and how very wrong it is? Is there any hope that he can see the light? How can I explain this to him???
I feel like if I just divorce him to get away, it wouldn't be "fair" because I was not clear enough with how he is abusive, since that would be my reason for divorce (and these feelings may be more imposed upon me by him and by my parents than myself, but I still feel them). He says he wants marriage counseling. He says he wants to know why I filed for divorce. And why I want time apart. And how it's supposed to help. But deep down I feel like he's just asking those questions so he can build up excuses to undermine those things and break me down further and make me come back without him really changing anything.
So now my daughter is moving out
Of course it seems I spend way too much time on this site! It is now my home away from home. haha My daughter told me she is moving out and can't live like this anymore. She is 10 weeks pregnant and is 20yrs old. My ah is so mean to her. I am not happy about her situation and last thing I wanted was for her to move out. But for her sanity and the health of she and the baby, maybe it is the best move. I will miss her so much. She has been not only my daughter, but a wonderful friend. She makes me laugh when I want to cry and I will miss her so much. I hope to follow her out that door very soon.. Why does he have to tear us apart this way? I guess misery does love company!
Well …………………..
........... that was different and pretty good.
Christmas Day spent sober, probably the first time I've done that as an adult.
Not that I really count myself as a proper adult but you know what I mean.
Kids had a great time, reckon I had them lots more presents this year, probably had more to spend what with me not wasting money on drink.
Spent the day eating and playing with the kids, lit some fireworks, played family games, played with the Wii we got for Xmas before watching the late repeat of Coronation St and more chocolate.
No sneaking about for extra drinks, no drunkenly spilling things and making an arse of myself.
Wake up this morning fresh, can drive the car no problems, another hurdle out of the way.
Wasn't really a hurdle when it came to it, offered and poured wine for others, just didn't drink any myself.
New Year to come now, we're away in Ireland for the week, I'd be lying if I said I'm not a little bit worried about being tempted to drink, I'm fairly confident I can do this though, I like the way things are going just now too much to go back to all the misery drinking was giving me.
Happy New Year Everyone
Christmas Day spent sober, probably the first time I've done that as an adult.
Not that I really count myself as a proper adult but you know what I mean.
Kids had a great time, reckon I had them lots more presents this year, probably had more to spend what with me not wasting money on drink.
Spent the day eating and playing with the kids, lit some fireworks, played family games, played with the Wii we got for Xmas before watching the late repeat of Coronation St and more chocolate.
No sneaking about for extra drinks, no drunkenly spilling things and making an arse of myself.
Wake up this morning fresh, can drive the car no problems, another hurdle out of the way.
Wasn't really a hurdle when it came to it, offered and poured wine for others, just didn't drink any myself.
New Year to come now, we're away in Ireland for the week, I'd be lying if I said I'm not a little bit worried about being tempted to drink, I'm fairly confident I can do this though, I like the way things are going just now too much to go back to all the misery drinking was giving me.
Happy New Year Everyone
Thoughts on motives and self-will
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The first requirement was that we be convinced that any life run on self-will could hardly be a success. On that basis we are almost always in collision with something or somebody, even though our motives are good. |
When we hear that "there are no musts in AA", many of us are relieved and think that this means we will not have to do anything to recover. But when we hear that "there is not right or wrong way to work this program," we who have admitted powerlessness over alcohol are fearful that there is nothing we can do to recover. This is a suggested program; we do not have to follow it if we not want to. But if we do wish to follow this path there are things we must do and requirements we must meet. Should we decide to do the things that the authors did, we can expect the same results----recovery from alcoholism.
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Most people try to live by self-propulsion. Each person is like an actor who wants to run the whole show: is forever trying to arrange the lights, the ballet, the scenery and the rest of the players in his own way. If his arrangements would only stay put, if only people would do as he wishes, the show would be great. Everybody, including himself would be pleased. Life would be wonderful. In trying to make these arrangements our actor may sometimes be quite virtuous. He may be kind, considerate, patient, generous; even modest and self-sacrificing. On the other hand, he may be mean, egotistical, selfish and dishonet. But, as with most humans, he is more likely to varied traits. |
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What usually happens? The show doesn't come off very well. He begins to think life doesn't treat him right. He decides to exhert himself some more. He becomes, on the next occasion, still more demanding or gracious, as the case may be. Still the play does not suit him. Admitting he may be somewhat at fault, he is sure that other people are more to blame. He becomes angry, indignant, self-pitying. What is his basic trouble? Is he not really a self-seeker even when trying to be kind? Is he not a victim of the delusion that he can wrest satisfaction and happiness out of this world if he only manages well? Is it not evident to all the rest of the players that these are the things he wants? And do not his actions make each of them wish to retaliate, snatching all they can get out of the show? Is he not, even in his best moments, a producer of confusion rather than harmony? |
The foundation from which we currently base our ideas, attitudes, decisions, and actions is that the satisfaction of our instinctual desires for sex, security and society will lead to happiness and fulfillment. Once we recognize that because we have constructed our lives on this faulty foundation we can never be truly successful, we can begin to structure our lives upon a new stable foundation. Our admission of powerlessness is the solid bedrock upon which we set a foundation of complete willingness and begin to build our new lives.
:Xmasca
A miracle in the early stages.
At my home group we have had a lady coming for about 6 weeks now.... she seemed miserable, scared, and beaten, she only spoke one time and that was simply to say "Hi my name is ABCXYZ.", she always came with a lady with 12 years.
Well Wednesday night when the chair asked for a topic she immediately piped up and said "Hi my name is ABCXYZ and I am an alcoholic!", she then shared that the prior evening she had picked up her first 24 hour chip, that she had finally surrendered to the fact that she was indeed an alcoholic. She shared more on what had happened the prior week to bring her to that conclusion and wanted to here about the first step!!!
The meeting was awesome, to see the change in her was awesome!!!! One could tell just by looking at her and hearing her that she was already changing, the misery and fear seemed far less and I swear there was a true sparkle of hope in her eyes!!!!
The one thing that struck me as odd was her usual companion had not brought her, she had come on her on!
Well Wednesday night when the chair asked for a topic she immediately piped up and said "Hi my name is ABCXYZ and I am an alcoholic!", she then shared that the prior evening she had picked up her first 24 hour chip, that she had finally surrendered to the fact that she was indeed an alcoholic. She shared more on what had happened the prior week to bring her to that conclusion and wanted to here about the first step!!!
The meeting was awesome, to see the change in her was awesome!!!! One could tell just by looking at her and hearing her that she was already changing, the misery and fear seemed far less and I swear there was a true sparkle of hope in her eyes!!!!
The one thing that struck me as odd was her usual companion had not brought her, she had come on her on!
~In Honour Of Indigo~ from Nix (LONG POST- prewarned!):Xmaspstar
The promises come to mind...
"we will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it"
Just returned from a meeting at a women's recovery center. I am so very grateful that others held me up and encouraged me to keep on trudging on this path.
I remember the fear, misery, and self loathing and all those other yukky feelings of early recovery as I look at and listen to the women there.
I recognize the rebel I was.
I recognize the old friends of justification, rationalization, and denial.
Those things I see in the women there are familiar
..and while I see them I get to another level of willingness, acceptance and gratitude;
but also a strong sence of hope that all those still suffering will see in each of us there is a way out...
there is a solution and there is a life worth living in recovery.
We share our ESH willingly and freely.
The willingness is something we can not give the newbies.
The willingness must come from the deep recesses of our being. I hope and I pray they each find that willingness within themselves
I was sleepily browsing & reading as i often will when i have trouble easing into to sleep & my mind is unable to be quietened,
in a thread that i cannot now place at this moment ,
i found the above post by Indigo
As i read through what she quietly & lovingly put down in spiritual light, i could not help but to admire an be amazingly inspired by the humbleness of this fellow member.
I know, from recieving awesome support & encouragement here @ SRthat it does wonderfull things to my inner being when that encouragement & recognition comes forth...
As addict/Alcoholics whichever your vice may have been, we tend to steer clear of the spotlight or be dramatically in the spotlight & i have noticed that you, Indigo seem to be a soul who journeys away from that, humbly, lovingly, peacefully posting the precious words that you do & from deep within you.
I do not know excactly how clean & sober you are, nor how long you have been a member of what im seeing clearly now to be "The SR Family", I do know this though...
when i first came across posts by you, i instantly was intrigued to read them because of the precious picture associated to your name.
represented to me a shy, quiet, gracious woman with offerings that may be meaningfull an deep.
The woman pictured, stripped of all, though the real inner light remained.
I just wish to say to you...Thankyou
You do so much for me inside, i feel like i glow when i read the pieces you post, you are a constant in my learning & you are a fine example of women supporting women.
w supporting w has always been a hard one on my recovery journey over 14years,
i seem to be judging of women, i know this is due to my mothering issue & my sibling issues with my sister, yet when i read & take in the things you feel & express, i do not feel that judgment rise up inside me, blocking me, stunting me.
very few females have this affect upon me i can assure you, there are 2 or 3 here on SR,1 or 2 in NA& my beautifull sponsor that im finding im moving beyond that fear with, in reading, hearing & listening to what they are saying.
Im not sure why im posting this, except for i feel that it is invaluable to express what im truly feeling to the people that aid me in feeling such a freeing feeling & the support the women give to each other is simply awesome & i wish to recognise it.
"we will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it"
Just returned from a meeting at a women's recovery center. I am so very grateful that others held me up and encouraged me to keep on trudging on this path.
I remember the fear, misery, and self loathing and all those other yukky feelings of early recovery as I look at and listen to the women there.
I recognize the rebel I was.
I recognize the old friends of justification, rationalization, and denial.
Those things I see in the women there are familiar
..and while I see them I get to another level of willingness, acceptance and gratitude;
but also a strong sence of hope that all those still suffering will see in each of us there is a way out...
there is a solution and there is a life worth living in recovery.
We share our ESH willingly and freely.
The willingness is something we can not give the newbies.
The willingness must come from the deep recesses of our being. I hope and I pray they each find that willingness within themselves
I was sleepily browsing & reading as i often will when i have trouble easing into to sleep & my mind is unable to be quietened,
in a thread that i cannot now place at this moment ,
i found the above post by Indigo
As i read through what she quietly & lovingly put down in spiritual light, i could not help but to admire an be amazingly inspired by the humbleness of this fellow member.
I know, from recieving awesome support & encouragement here @ SRthat it does wonderfull things to my inner being when that encouragement & recognition comes forth...
As addict/Alcoholics whichever your vice may have been, we tend to steer clear of the spotlight or be dramatically in the spotlight & i have noticed that you, Indigo seem to be a soul who journeys away from that, humbly, lovingly, peacefully posting the precious words that you do & from deep within you.
I do not know excactly how clean & sober you are, nor how long you have been a member of what im seeing clearly now to be "The SR Family", I do know this though...
when i first came across posts by you, i instantly was intrigued to read them because of the precious picture associated to your name.
represented to me a shy, quiet, gracious woman with offerings that may be meaningfull an deep.
The woman pictured, stripped of all, though the real inner light remained.
I just wish to say to you...Thankyou
You do so much for me inside, i feel like i glow when i read the pieces you post, you are a constant in my learning & you are a fine example of women supporting women.
w supporting w has always been a hard one on my recovery journey over 14years,
i seem to be judging of women, i know this is due to my mothering issue & my sibling issues with my sister, yet when i read & take in the things you feel & express, i do not feel that judgment rise up inside me, blocking me, stunting me.
very few females have this affect upon me i can assure you, there are 2 or 3 here on SR,1 or 2 in NA& my beautifull sponsor that im finding im moving beyond that fear with, in reading, hearing & listening to what they are saying.
Im not sure why im posting this, except for i feel that it is invaluable to express what im truly feeling to the people that aid me in feeling such a freeing feeling & the support the women give to each other is simply awesome & i wish to recognise it.
It’s not getting better
He's not getting better--my alcoholic father--in fact, he is getting worse. Because he used to be a happy drunk, and now he's miserable all the time. I used to be able to talk to him but every conversation turns into a fight either out of his misery or my anger feelings to him. He cut out his coffee in the morning to save money, but he continues to drink a 48 pack unassisted at night. Before, it was easy to say he's not that bad, but he is, and he has no intention of stopping. It was easy to lie to myself, but I'm sick and tired of lying to myself to somehow make myself believe that life isn't what it is. I lie to enough people around me, to send me to hell, just to cover him.
And my mom, I feel so bad for her, because all she's ever done is work hard, she's like an angel, and she won't leave him because my sister's getting married soon, and she doesn't want to ruin her wedding. And she only gets to break away every now and then from him for a night partially to make sure he doesn't do himself in one of these days and to keep me from babysitting. You're supposed to look up to your parents, and I look up to my mom someone who puts others first often but still manages to be solid and not all broken like I've become.
I just pray that God or whoever the higher being is, will take me out of this mess. A teacher once told me to say thank you foreverything that is thrown your way. And it's easier some days than others to do so, but no matter how hard I try I can't say thank you for this. I can't say "Thanks, God, that alocholic father, he was a real bessing in desguise!" I don't see the blessing, I'm not finding the good in it. I keep looking for a little glimmer of something, and I can't find it. I guess I'm not looking hard enough. But I don't know how much harder I can look.
All I feel around him is anger and resentment.
And my mom, I feel so bad for her, because all she's ever done is work hard, she's like an angel, and she won't leave him because my sister's getting married soon, and she doesn't want to ruin her wedding. And she only gets to break away every now and then from him for a night partially to make sure he doesn't do himself in one of these days and to keep me from babysitting. You're supposed to look up to your parents, and I look up to my mom someone who puts others first often but still manages to be solid and not all broken like I've become.
I just pray that God or whoever the higher being is, will take me out of this mess. A teacher once told me to say thank you foreverything that is thrown your way. And it's easier some days than others to do so, but no matter how hard I try I can't say thank you for this. I can't say "Thanks, God, that alocholic father, he was a real bessing in desguise!" I don't see the blessing, I'm not finding the good in it. I keep looking for a little glimmer of something, and I can't find it. I guess I'm not looking hard enough. But I don't know how much harder I can look.
All I feel around him is anger and resentment.
I passed a tinny test!
In all me misery today on Turkey day "alone" and sick, depressed and longing for some male companion(sad but true)!
I was crying on my front stoop after a phone call that shattered any false shred of naive hope that a unrepairable relationship could be repaired. AN older lady happened to be outside as well. She was smoking.. I haven't had one since before Halloween!! (smoked for 17ish yrs) I probably should have but i didn't !!! Bum a ciggaret!! No i'm not a bum anymore and proud of it. Maybe I shouldn't be though?
I was crying on my front stoop after a phone call that shattered any false shred of naive hope that a unrepairable relationship could be repaired. AN older lady happened to be outside as well. She was smoking.. I haven't had one since before Halloween!! (smoked for 17ish yrs) I probably should have but i didn't !!! Bum a ciggaret!! No i'm not a bum anymore and proud of it. Maybe I shouldn't be though?
Addicted To Misery
I realize, looking back that I subjected myself to, painful relationships most of my life, and truly believed it was my (addicted/alcoholic) partners causing my "misery".
I see a lot of people obsessing over hurtful partners and I would like to share something...
I read a book called, "Addicted To Misery", by Robert Becker. It scared the crap out of me at first, but the truth of it helped me REALLY change my life. Heres an excerpt I found particularly eye-opening (and helpful).:
"Getting Familiar With Misery:
Co-dependency teaches us many ways of dealing with life. Unfortunately, these ways often create prolonged unhappiness, making us so familiar with misery that we come to feel it is normal. We learn that being unhappy and having things go wrong is to be expected. Whether our codependency expectations come from the families we grew up in or from living with someone who is dependent, we are prepared for a life with many disappointments, frustrations and misery. Getting used to the traumas and unpredictable situations is hard at first, but we do learn, in order to survive. These experiences shape our thinking such that we imagine and experience situation after situation that is never what we want, never the way it should be, never right. This is where our familiarity with misery begins as a co-dependent.
Pre-existing Developmental Impairments
Children growing up in dysfunctional (another new word) families where things are out of control, develop emotional impairments which stay with them for life. These may take the form of not trusting themselves or others, inability to talk about their feelings, and the most hurtful, the inability to feel their feelings. Imagine the frustration of having something that hurts inside your body, yet not being able to point to where the pain is. Additionally, we become rigid and inflexible, we only like things that are either black or white, right or wrong, and we hate situations that leave unclear results. When that happens, we have feelings of nervousness and anxiety that we can't explain but we suffer with them patiently. As adults we see the world this way and cope with it by seeking ways to deal with our distrust, repression of feelings and rigidity. Avoiding boredom, finding excitement and looking for approval and acceptance become our daily tasks.
These conditions set the emotional stage for us to develop co-dependency. They also dictate the direction that many of our adult interpersonal relationships will take. Tragically, we choose persons to have relationships with for all the wrong reasons like:
"He needs me. I can make him better. Who will take care of him if I don't? I know I can make him happier than he has ever been. I don't think I can get anybody else." These reasons show how we feel about ourselves. Woody Allen had a line in his movie, Annie Hall, that fits co-dependents so well. "I would never want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member."
Who would really take us seriously? Our only real value lies in what we can do for others and that is never appreciated. Our self-image is so poor, our way of addressing feelings so inadequate, that we remain hopelessly stuck. We need to understand the origins of these conditions if any meaningful change is to occur in our lives.
Internalizing Feelings And Our Self-Image
Probably the earliest behavior we learn in getting familiar with misery is to internalize or stuff our feelings. Simply put, this means we don't talk about what feels bad, what feels good, what feels sad or what we feel. Instead, we keep the feelings inside and try to make them go away.
Having to push our emotions inside makes us feel that no one cares. For a child, this is devastating. Unresponsive parents, caught up in their own problems, give children inaccurate messages. The distressed mother, struggling with her alcoholic husband, is oftentimes too preoccupied to deal with the emotional needs of her child. I've seen this over and over with many adult children of alcoholics. They say, "I never talked about how I felt. I was too busy trying to help keep the peace. I never felt anyone cared."
Familiar Versus Unfamiliar Experiences
Power and Control
The experiences of a child living in a dysfunctional home, be it alcoholic, abusive, divorced or emotionally dead, certainly teach two things, first, how important it is to gain as much control in life as possible, and second, never to be powerless over anything because being powerless means to lack control and having no control results in misery.
Dysfunctional families give us the terrible feeling of being out of control and the knowledge of how powerless we are. You make a pact with yourself early in life that, as soon as possible, you will gain control and have power over the events of your life. You can see this happen in young children when they begin withdrawing from people. They shy away from others, especially grownups, and want to be left alone. This is the root of shyness or self-centered fear of what others might think about us. Yet we do this as a way to use our power to stop others from controlling us.
Dependent on Feeling Miserable
As the emotional trauma of our dysfunctional family unfolds, teaching us so many wrong realities, our codependency is spawned. Seeing the world as chaotic, out of control and not meaningful, forces us to learn to cope in poor ways. Yet, living with constant stress causes us to use defenses to deal with the real world. We become defended rather than defensive. The psychic numbing, or repression of memory and feelings, starts the misery which begins the dependency. It is what we come to expect. It is what feels normal. It is what we miss when it is absent. We depend on feeling miserable and we find the uncertainty, when that misery subsides, to be frustrating, worrisome and downright uncomfortable.
Attachment and Detachment
Getting familiar with misery teaches us many painful things. The relationships we form become places of great misery, making loneliness and disassociation the only sanctuary for an absence of misery.
Attachment is a process whereby you become emotionally and physically dependent on someone to take care of you. Children attach to parents as a means of survival. The process is appropriate in that case but when adults attach themselves to other adults, relationships are threatened, power and control issues are great and sick dependencies are spawned.
Even though closeness is avoided, misery addicts and co-dependents often become attached to people and relationships that are destructive, uncaring and unsupportive. The attachment provides a false sense of security and belonging. For most ATMs and co-dependents, fear of abandonment is so great that they will do anything to avoid it. This comes from living in families where people were never really there for them emotionally.
The main problem with attachment is the pain and restriction of freedom experienced by being so emotionally connected to someone. The dependency on this attachment makes it impossible to be independent and secure. Until the co-dependent learns to detach, recovery is threatened.
Detachment is a process of letting go of that "I can't live without this person" feeling. To detach, self-confidence must emerge and the person's self-reliance must take over. When I explain this to my clients, sometimes they think I am suggesting that they stop loving or caring about their spouses or partners. As I discussed earlier, taking care of is a very unhealthy process, though caring for is certainly desirable. Detaching is learning to care for, not take care of. It is a process of becoming un-dependent on the effects of others. This prevents us from being controlled by the emotional needs of others, or worse, trying to change them, as a way to feel better.
Anhedonia
Most of the discussion in this chapter has been to explain the process of how we get familiar with misery. It is important to understand this and see what getting familiar with misery does to us emotionally.
Anhedonia is a psychological condition, defined as the inability to be happy, have fun, or experience common sensual pleasures. Becoming familiar with misery results in just these things. We don't consider ourselves emotionally ill but we find it difficult to balance unpleasant experiences with pleasant ones. As experiences accumulate and we are chronically unhappy and scared, we become anhedonic. Another way to view anhedonia is as a state of numbness. So often, as people seek help, they discover how difficult it is to identify any feelings, after such prolonged exposure to these conditions.
This inability to be happy is not symptomatic only of depression. Certainly, a symptom of depression is the loss of interest in common activities, but that disappears after successful intervention with medication or psychotherapy. This symptom, loss of pleasure, remains only until the biochemical elements kick in, in an endogenous depression caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. In a reactive depression there is a direct causal connection to a situation, e.g. in a divorce, once the person has therapeutically worked through the trauma or crisis, he is able to revert to normal functioning and experience pleasure once again.
Not so with ATMs! ATMs who have left the reactive situations which caused loss of pleasure may continue to have the symptom for up to two years. Their anhedonia is connected to their long familiar history of misery and even when life improves, things just don't feel good.
This condition must be identified and worked with as a treatment issue if the addiction to misery is to be dismantled. Due to chronic unhappy experiences, it will take time for the emotional system to respond to things as they really are. During the recovery period, we will have to work very hard at identifying and processing these good feelings until they are familiar.
Laboratory Experiments
1. Try to remember what the rules were in your home when you were growing up. Identify what your family taught you about your feelings, about trusting and talking. Be specific.
2. If stuffing feelings is what you generally do, think back to when this began. Ask yourself why? Work hard at remembering how feelings were dealt with while you were growing up. List specific situations when you remember not being able to express feelings.
3. Explore what you think was familiar for you as a child about trusting others, risking, caring for yourself.
4. Think about how long you have felt miserable and how many times, when things were going well, you somehow found a way to mess them up and get back to the misery.
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I see a lot of people obsessing over hurtful partners and I would like to share something...
I read a book called, "Addicted To Misery", by Robert Becker. It scared the crap out of me at first, but the truth of it helped me REALLY change my life. Heres an excerpt I found particularly eye-opening (and helpful).:
"Getting Familiar With Misery:
Co-dependency teaches us many ways of dealing with life. Unfortunately, these ways often create prolonged unhappiness, making us so familiar with misery that we come to feel it is normal. We learn that being unhappy and having things go wrong is to be expected. Whether our codependency expectations come from the families we grew up in or from living with someone who is dependent, we are prepared for a life with many disappointments, frustrations and misery. Getting used to the traumas and unpredictable situations is hard at first, but we do learn, in order to survive. These experiences shape our thinking such that we imagine and experience situation after situation that is never what we want, never the way it should be, never right. This is where our familiarity with misery begins as a co-dependent.
Pre-existing Developmental Impairments
Children growing up in dysfunctional (another new word) families where things are out of control, develop emotional impairments which stay with them for life. These may take the form of not trusting themselves or others, inability to talk about their feelings, and the most hurtful, the inability to feel their feelings. Imagine the frustration of having something that hurts inside your body, yet not being able to point to where the pain is. Additionally, we become rigid and inflexible, we only like things that are either black or white, right or wrong, and we hate situations that leave unclear results. When that happens, we have feelings of nervousness and anxiety that we can't explain but we suffer with them patiently. As adults we see the world this way and cope with it by seeking ways to deal with our distrust, repression of feelings and rigidity. Avoiding boredom, finding excitement and looking for approval and acceptance become our daily tasks.
These conditions set the emotional stage for us to develop co-dependency. They also dictate the direction that many of our adult interpersonal relationships will take. Tragically, we choose persons to have relationships with for all the wrong reasons like:
"He needs me. I can make him better. Who will take care of him if I don't? I know I can make him happier than he has ever been. I don't think I can get anybody else." These reasons show how we feel about ourselves. Woody Allen had a line in his movie, Annie Hall, that fits co-dependents so well. "I would never want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member."
Who would really take us seriously? Our only real value lies in what we can do for others and that is never appreciated. Our self-image is so poor, our way of addressing feelings so inadequate, that we remain hopelessly stuck. We need to understand the origins of these conditions if any meaningful change is to occur in our lives.
Internalizing Feelings And Our Self-Image
Probably the earliest behavior we learn in getting familiar with misery is to internalize or stuff our feelings. Simply put, this means we don't talk about what feels bad, what feels good, what feels sad or what we feel. Instead, we keep the feelings inside and try to make them go away.
Having to push our emotions inside makes us feel that no one cares. For a child, this is devastating. Unresponsive parents, caught up in their own problems, give children inaccurate messages. The distressed mother, struggling with her alcoholic husband, is oftentimes too preoccupied to deal with the emotional needs of her child. I've seen this over and over with many adult children of alcoholics. They say, "I never talked about how I felt. I was too busy trying to help keep the peace. I never felt anyone cared."
Familiar Versus Unfamiliar Experiences
Power and Control
The experiences of a child living in a dysfunctional home, be it alcoholic, abusive, divorced or emotionally dead, certainly teach two things, first, how important it is to gain as much control in life as possible, and second, never to be powerless over anything because being powerless means to lack control and having no control results in misery.
Dysfunctional families give us the terrible feeling of being out of control and the knowledge of how powerless we are. You make a pact with yourself early in life that, as soon as possible, you will gain control and have power over the events of your life. You can see this happen in young children when they begin withdrawing from people. They shy away from others, especially grownups, and want to be left alone. This is the root of shyness or self-centered fear of what others might think about us. Yet we do this as a way to use our power to stop others from controlling us.
Dependent on Feeling Miserable
As the emotional trauma of our dysfunctional family unfolds, teaching us so many wrong realities, our codependency is spawned. Seeing the world as chaotic, out of control and not meaningful, forces us to learn to cope in poor ways. Yet, living with constant stress causes us to use defenses to deal with the real world. We become defended rather than defensive. The psychic numbing, or repression of memory and feelings, starts the misery which begins the dependency. It is what we come to expect. It is what feels normal. It is what we miss when it is absent. We depend on feeling miserable and we find the uncertainty, when that misery subsides, to be frustrating, worrisome and downright uncomfortable.
Attachment and Detachment
Getting familiar with misery teaches us many painful things. The relationships we form become places of great misery, making loneliness and disassociation the only sanctuary for an absence of misery.
Attachment is a process whereby you become emotionally and physically dependent on someone to take care of you. Children attach to parents as a means of survival. The process is appropriate in that case but when adults attach themselves to other adults, relationships are threatened, power and control issues are great and sick dependencies are spawned.
Even though closeness is avoided, misery addicts and co-dependents often become attached to people and relationships that are destructive, uncaring and unsupportive. The attachment provides a false sense of security and belonging. For most ATMs and co-dependents, fear of abandonment is so great that they will do anything to avoid it. This comes from living in families where people were never really there for them emotionally.
The main problem with attachment is the pain and restriction of freedom experienced by being so emotionally connected to someone. The dependency on this attachment makes it impossible to be independent and secure. Until the co-dependent learns to detach, recovery is threatened.
Detachment is a process of letting go of that "I can't live without this person" feeling. To detach, self-confidence must emerge and the person's self-reliance must take over. When I explain this to my clients, sometimes they think I am suggesting that they stop loving or caring about their spouses or partners. As I discussed earlier, taking care of is a very unhealthy process, though caring for is certainly desirable. Detaching is learning to care for, not take care of. It is a process of becoming un-dependent on the effects of others. This prevents us from being controlled by the emotional needs of others, or worse, trying to change them, as a way to feel better.
Anhedonia
Most of the discussion in this chapter has been to explain the process of how we get familiar with misery. It is important to understand this and see what getting familiar with misery does to us emotionally.
Anhedonia is a psychological condition, defined as the inability to be happy, have fun, or experience common sensual pleasures. Becoming familiar with misery results in just these things. We don't consider ourselves emotionally ill but we find it difficult to balance unpleasant experiences with pleasant ones. As experiences accumulate and we are chronically unhappy and scared, we become anhedonic. Another way to view anhedonia is as a state of numbness. So often, as people seek help, they discover how difficult it is to identify any feelings, after such prolonged exposure to these conditions.
This inability to be happy is not symptomatic only of depression. Certainly, a symptom of depression is the loss of interest in common activities, but that disappears after successful intervention with medication or psychotherapy. This symptom, loss of pleasure, remains only until the biochemical elements kick in, in an endogenous depression caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. In a reactive depression there is a direct causal connection to a situation, e.g. in a divorce, once the person has therapeutically worked through the trauma or crisis, he is able to revert to normal functioning and experience pleasure once again.
Not so with ATMs! ATMs who have left the reactive situations which caused loss of pleasure may continue to have the symptom for up to two years. Their anhedonia is connected to their long familiar history of misery and even when life improves, things just don't feel good.
This condition must be identified and worked with as a treatment issue if the addiction to misery is to be dismantled. Due to chronic unhappy experiences, it will take time for the emotional system to respond to things as they really are. During the recovery period, we will have to work very hard at identifying and processing these good feelings until they are familiar.
Laboratory Experiments
1. Try to remember what the rules were in your home when you were growing up. Identify what your family taught you about your feelings, about trusting and talking. Be specific.
2. If stuffing feelings is what you generally do, think back to when this began. Ask yourself why? Work hard at remembering how feelings were dealt with while you were growing up. List specific situations when you remember not being able to express feelings.
3. Explore what you think was familiar for you as a child about trusting others, risking, caring for yourself.
4. Think about how long you have felt miserable and how many times, when things were going well, you somehow found a way to mess them up and get back to the misery.
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Addicted To Misery…
I realize, looking back that I have been subjected myself to, painful situations most of my life, and truly believed it was my (addicted/alcoholic) partners causing my "misery".
I see a lot of people obsessing over hurtful partners and I would like to share something...
I read a book called, "Addicted To Misery", by Robert Becker. It scared the crap out of me at first, but the truth of it helped me REALLY change my life. Heres an excerpt I found particularly eye-opening (and helpful).:
"Getting Familiar With Misery:
Co-dependency teaches us many ways of dealing with life. Unfortunately, these ways often create prolonged unhappiness, making us so familiar with misery that we come to feel it is normal. We learn that being unhappy and having things go wrong is to be expected. Whether our codependency expectations come from the families we grew up in or from living with someone who is dependent, we are prepared for a life with many disappointments, frustrations and misery. Getting used to the traumas and unpredictable situations is hard at first, but we do learn, in order to survive. These experiences shape our thinking such that we imagine and experience situation after situation that is never what we want, never the way it should be, never right. This is where our familiarity with misery begins as a co-dependent.
Pre-existing Developmental Impairments
Children growing up in dysfunctional (another new word) families where things are out of control, develop emotional impairments which stay with them for life. These may take the form of not trusting themselves or others, inability to talk about their feelings, and the most hurtful, the inability to feel their feelings. Imagine the frustration of having something that hurts inside your body, yet not being able to point to where the pain is. Additionally, we become rigid and inflexible, we only like things that are either black or white, right or wrong, and we hate situations that leave unclear results. When that happens, we have feelings of nervousness and anxiety that we can't explain but we suffer with them patiently. As adults we see the world this way and cope with it by seeking ways to deal with our distrust, repression of feelings and rigidity. Avoiding boredom, finding excitement and looking for approval and acceptance become our daily tasks.
These conditions set the emotional stage for us to develop co-dependency. They also dictate the direction that many of our adult interpersonal relationships will take. Tragically, we choose persons to have relationships with for all the wrong reasons like:
"He needs me. I can make him better. Who will take care of him if I don't? I know I can make him happier than he has ever been. I don't think I can get anybody else." These reasons show how we feel about ourselves. Woody Allen had a line in his movie, Annie Hall, that fits co-dependents so well. "I would never want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member."
Who would really take us seriously? Our only real value lies in what we can do for others and that is never appreciated. Our self-image is so poor, our way of addressing feelings so inadequate, that we remain hopelessly stuck. We need to understand the origins of these conditions if any meaningful change is to occur in our lives.
Internalizing Feelings And Our Self-Image
Probably the earliest behavior we learn in getting familiar with misery is to internalize or stuff our feelings. Simply put, this means we don't talk about what feels bad, what feels good, what feels sad or what we feel. Instead, we keep the feelings inside and try to make them go away.
Having to push our emotions inside makes us feel that no one cares. For a child, this is devastating. Unresponsive parents, caught up in their own problems, give children inaccurate messages. The distressed mother, struggling with her alcoholic husband, is oftentimes too preoccupied to deal with the emotional needs of her child. I've seen this over and over with many adult children of alcoholics. They say, "I never talked about how I felt. I was too busy trying to help keep the peace. I never felt anyone cared."
Familiar Versus Unfamiliar Experiences
Power and Control
The experiences of a child living in a dysfunctional home, be it alcoholic, abusive, divorced or emotionally dead, certainly teach two things, first, how important it is to gain as much control in life as possible, and second, never to be powerless over anything because being powerless means to lack control and having no control results in misery.
Dysfunctional families give us the terrible feeling of being out of control and the knowledge of how powerless we are. You make a pact with yourself early in life that, as soon as possible, you will gain control and have power over the events of your life. You can see this happen in young children when they begin withdrawing from people. They shy away from others, especially grownups, and want to be left alone. This is the root of shyness or self-centered fear of what others might think about us. Yet we do this as a way to use our power to stop others from controlling us.
Dependent on Feeling Miserable
As the emotional trauma of our dysfunctional family unfolds, teaching us so many wrong realities, our codependency is spawned. Seeing the world as chaotic, out of control and not meaningful, forces us to learn to cope in poor ways. Yet, living with constant stress causes us to use defenses to deal with the real world. We become defended rather than defensive. The psychic numbing, or repression of memory and feelings, starts the misery which begins the dependency. It is what we come to expect. It is what feels normal. It is what we miss when it is absent. We depend on feeling miserable and we find the uncertainty, when that misery subsides, to be frustrating, worrisome and downright uncomfortable.
Attachment and Detachment
Getting familiar with misery teaches us many painful things. The relationships we form become places of great misery, making loneliness and disassociation the only sanctuary for an absence of misery.
Attachment is a process whereby you become emotionally and physically dependent on someone to take care of you. Children attach to parents as a means of survival. The process is appropriate in that case but when adults attach themselves to other adults, relationships are threatened, power and control issues are great and sick dependencies are spawned.
Even though closeness is avoided, misery addicts and co-dependents often become attached to people and relationships that are destructive, uncaring and unsupportive. The attachment provides a false sense of security and belonging. For most ATMs and co-dependents, fear of abandonment is so great that they will do anything to avoid it. This comes from living in families where people were never really there for them emotionally.
The main problem with attachment is the pain and restriction of freedom experienced by being so emotionally connected to someone. The dependency on this attachment makes it impossible to be independent and secure. Until the co-dependent learns to detach, recovery is threatened.
Detachment is a process of letting go of that "I can't live without this person" feeling. To detach, self-confidence must emerge and the person's self-reliance must take over. When I explain this to my clients, sometimes they think I am suggesting that they stop loving or caring about their spouses or partners. As I discussed earlier, taking care of is a very unhealthy process, though caring for is certainly desirable. Detaching is learning to care for, not take care of. It is a process of becoming un-dependent on the effects of others. This prevents us from being controlled by the emotional needs of others, or worse, trying to change them, as a way to feel better.
Anhedonia
Most of the discussion in this chapter has been to explain the process of how we get familiar with misery. It is important to understand this and see what getting familiar with misery does to us emotionally.
Anhedonia is a psychological condition, defined as the inability to be happy, have fun, or experience common sensual pleasures. Becoming familiar with misery results in just these things. We don't consider ourselves emotionally ill but we find it difficult to balance unpleasant experiences with pleasant ones. As experiences accumulate and we are chronically unhappy and scared, we become anhedonic. Another way to view anhedonia is as a state of numbness. So often, as people seek help, they discover how difficult it is to identify any feelings, after such prolonged exposure to these conditions.
This inability to be happy is not symptomatic only of depression. Certainly, a symptom of depression is the loss of interest in common activities, but that disappears after successful intervention with medication or psychotherapy. This symptom, loss of pleasure, remains only until the biochemical elements kick in, in an endogenous depression caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. In a reactive depression there is a direct causal connection to a situation, e.g. in a divorce, once the person has therapeutically worked through the trauma or crisis, he is able to revert to normal functioning and experience pleasure once again.
Not so with ATMs! ATMs who have left the reactive situations which caused loss of pleasure may continue to have the symptom for up to two years. Their anhedonia is connected to their long familiar history of misery and even when life improves, things just don't feel good.
This condition must be identified and worked with as a treatment issue if the addiction to misery is to be dismantled. Due to chronic unhappy experiences, it will take time for the emotional system to respond to things as they really are. During the recovery period, we will have to work very hard at identifying and processing these good feelings until they are familiar.
Laboratory Experiments
1. Try to remember what the rules were in your home when you were growing up. Identify what your family taught you about your feelings, about trusting and talking. Be specific.
2. If stuffing feelings is what you generally do, think back to when this began. Ask yourself why? Work hard at remembering how feelings were dealt with while you were growing up. List specific situations when you remember not being able to express feelings.
3. Explore what you think was familiar for you as a child about trusting others, risking, caring for yourself.
4. Think about how long you have felt miserable and how many times, when things were going well, you somehow found a way to mess them up and get back to the misery.
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Digg this Post!Add Post to del.icio.usBookmark Post in TechnoratiFurl this Post!
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I see a lot of people obsessing over hurtful partners and I would like to share something...
I read a book called, "Addicted To Misery", by Robert Becker. It scared the crap out of me at first, but the truth of it helped me REALLY change my life. Heres an excerpt I found particularly eye-opening (and helpful).:
"Getting Familiar With Misery:
Co-dependency teaches us many ways of dealing with life. Unfortunately, these ways often create prolonged unhappiness, making us so familiar with misery that we come to feel it is normal. We learn that being unhappy and having things go wrong is to be expected. Whether our codependency expectations come from the families we grew up in or from living with someone who is dependent, we are prepared for a life with many disappointments, frustrations and misery. Getting used to the traumas and unpredictable situations is hard at first, but we do learn, in order to survive. These experiences shape our thinking such that we imagine and experience situation after situation that is never what we want, never the way it should be, never right. This is where our familiarity with misery begins as a co-dependent.
Pre-existing Developmental Impairments
Children growing up in dysfunctional (another new word) families where things are out of control, develop emotional impairments which stay with them for life. These may take the form of not trusting themselves or others, inability to talk about their feelings, and the most hurtful, the inability to feel their feelings. Imagine the frustration of having something that hurts inside your body, yet not being able to point to where the pain is. Additionally, we become rigid and inflexible, we only like things that are either black or white, right or wrong, and we hate situations that leave unclear results. When that happens, we have feelings of nervousness and anxiety that we can't explain but we suffer with them patiently. As adults we see the world this way and cope with it by seeking ways to deal with our distrust, repression of feelings and rigidity. Avoiding boredom, finding excitement and looking for approval and acceptance become our daily tasks.
These conditions set the emotional stage for us to develop co-dependency. They also dictate the direction that many of our adult interpersonal relationships will take. Tragically, we choose persons to have relationships with for all the wrong reasons like:
"He needs me. I can make him better. Who will take care of him if I don't? I know I can make him happier than he has ever been. I don't think I can get anybody else." These reasons show how we feel about ourselves. Woody Allen had a line in his movie, Annie Hall, that fits co-dependents so well. "I would never want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member."
Who would really take us seriously? Our only real value lies in what we can do for others and that is never appreciated. Our self-image is so poor, our way of addressing feelings so inadequate, that we remain hopelessly stuck. We need to understand the origins of these conditions if any meaningful change is to occur in our lives.
Internalizing Feelings And Our Self-Image
Probably the earliest behavior we learn in getting familiar with misery is to internalize or stuff our feelings. Simply put, this means we don't talk about what feels bad, what feels good, what feels sad or what we feel. Instead, we keep the feelings inside and try to make them go away.
Having to push our emotions inside makes us feel that no one cares. For a child, this is devastating. Unresponsive parents, caught up in their own problems, give children inaccurate messages. The distressed mother, struggling with her alcoholic husband, is oftentimes too preoccupied to deal with the emotional needs of her child. I've seen this over and over with many adult children of alcoholics. They say, "I never talked about how I felt. I was too busy trying to help keep the peace. I never felt anyone cared."
Familiar Versus Unfamiliar Experiences
Power and Control
The experiences of a child living in a dysfunctional home, be it alcoholic, abusive, divorced or emotionally dead, certainly teach two things, first, how important it is to gain as much control in life as possible, and second, never to be powerless over anything because being powerless means to lack control and having no control results in misery.
Dysfunctional families give us the terrible feeling of being out of control and the knowledge of how powerless we are. You make a pact with yourself early in life that, as soon as possible, you will gain control and have power over the events of your life. You can see this happen in young children when they begin withdrawing from people. They shy away from others, especially grownups, and want to be left alone. This is the root of shyness or self-centered fear of what others might think about us. Yet we do this as a way to use our power to stop others from controlling us.
Dependent on Feeling Miserable
As the emotional trauma of our dysfunctional family unfolds, teaching us so many wrong realities, our codependency is spawned. Seeing the world as chaotic, out of control and not meaningful, forces us to learn to cope in poor ways. Yet, living with constant stress causes us to use defenses to deal with the real world. We become defended rather than defensive. The psychic numbing, or repression of memory and feelings, starts the misery which begins the dependency. It is what we come to expect. It is what feels normal. It is what we miss when it is absent. We depend on feeling miserable and we find the uncertainty, when that misery subsides, to be frustrating, worrisome and downright uncomfortable.
Attachment and Detachment
Getting familiar with misery teaches us many painful things. The relationships we form become places of great misery, making loneliness and disassociation the only sanctuary for an absence of misery.
Attachment is a process whereby you become emotionally and physically dependent on someone to take care of you. Children attach to parents as a means of survival. The process is appropriate in that case but when adults attach themselves to other adults, relationships are threatened, power and control issues are great and sick dependencies are spawned.
Even though closeness is avoided, misery addicts and co-dependents often become attached to people and relationships that are destructive, uncaring and unsupportive. The attachment provides a false sense of security and belonging. For most ATMs and co-dependents, fear of abandonment is so great that they will do anything to avoid it. This comes from living in families where people were never really there for them emotionally.
The main problem with attachment is the pain and restriction of freedom experienced by being so emotionally connected to someone. The dependency on this attachment makes it impossible to be independent and secure. Until the co-dependent learns to detach, recovery is threatened.
Detachment is a process of letting go of that "I can't live without this person" feeling. To detach, self-confidence must emerge and the person's self-reliance must take over. When I explain this to my clients, sometimes they think I am suggesting that they stop loving or caring about their spouses or partners. As I discussed earlier, taking care of is a very unhealthy process, though caring for is certainly desirable. Detaching is learning to care for, not take care of. It is a process of becoming un-dependent on the effects of others. This prevents us from being controlled by the emotional needs of others, or worse, trying to change them, as a way to feel better.
Anhedonia
Most of the discussion in this chapter has been to explain the process of how we get familiar with misery. It is important to understand this and see what getting familiar with misery does to us emotionally.
Anhedonia is a psychological condition, defined as the inability to be happy, have fun, or experience common sensual pleasures. Becoming familiar with misery results in just these things. We don't consider ourselves emotionally ill but we find it difficult to balance unpleasant experiences with pleasant ones. As experiences accumulate and we are chronically unhappy and scared, we become anhedonic. Another way to view anhedonia is as a state of numbness. So often, as people seek help, they discover how difficult it is to identify any feelings, after such prolonged exposure to these conditions.
This inability to be happy is not symptomatic only of depression. Certainly, a symptom of depression is the loss of interest in common activities, but that disappears after successful intervention with medication or psychotherapy. This symptom, loss of pleasure, remains only until the biochemical elements kick in, in an endogenous depression caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. In a reactive depression there is a direct causal connection to a situation, e.g. in a divorce, once the person has therapeutically worked through the trauma or crisis, he is able to revert to normal functioning and experience pleasure once again.
Not so with ATMs! ATMs who have left the reactive situations which caused loss of pleasure may continue to have the symptom for up to two years. Their anhedonia is connected to their long familiar history of misery and even when life improves, things just don't feel good.
This condition must be identified and worked with as a treatment issue if the addiction to misery is to be dismantled. Due to chronic unhappy experiences, it will take time for the emotional system to respond to things as they really are. During the recovery period, we will have to work very hard at identifying and processing these good feelings until they are familiar.
Laboratory Experiments
1. Try to remember what the rules were in your home when you were growing up. Identify what your family taught you about your feelings, about trusting and talking. Be specific.
2. If stuffing feelings is what you generally do, think back to when this began. Ask yourself why? Work hard at remembering how feelings were dealt with while you were growing up. List specific situations when you remember not being able to express feelings.
3. Explore what you think was familiar for you as a child about trusting others, risking, caring for yourself.
4. Think about how long you have felt miserable and how many times, when things were going well, you somehow found a way to mess them up and get back to the misery.
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