lol, you know I actually would love to have the money for a psychologist though! I've been reading loads about attachment theory and I peg myself as an avoidant-dismissive attachment type. Apparently it's one of the things that's typical, not being able to construct a coherent childhood and general life narrative. I always thought I had quite a coherent narrative of the idyllic middle-class childhood growing up in the wilds of the northwest of Ireland with twee parents exuding wholesome family values, but when you start to take a closer look you realise that it starts to fall apart and generally end up on its head. The happy family discourse that I swallowed for so many years was really a forced hollow façade masking what was an inherently dysfunctional emotionally bereft psychological war-zone overseen by at least one narcissist (covert introvert) who disguised as the perfect gentle soul. Maybe we're all just best just staying asleep and let those sleeping dogs lie!! (like the rest of my siblings do!).
Cheers for the complement - look forward to seeing more posts and swapping more comments - Steem oooot!
@kate-m
I wish I had the ability to pen down all of my overflowing emotions & chaotic thoughts like you.
It was a bit difficult for me to fully grasp your words since English isn't my first language; But what I understood from your narrative is that you had a rough childhood and dysfunctional family. I feel sorry for you Kate... I too have a dysfunctional family.
On average, more than eighty percent of the families in the world are dysfunctional so you're not alone.
And if you're kidding it's okay but If you're not, I don't think you need to visit any psychologist or psychiatrist because you're awesome just the way you are.
To quote something from my favourite show here...
" I don't think going to a rented office in a strip mall to listen to some agent of averageness explain which words mean which feelings has ever helped anyone do anything.
I think it's helped a lot of people get comfortable and stop panicking, which is a state of mind we value in the animals we eat, but not something I want for myself."
Some wounds are better when allowed to self-heal itself.
No I wasn't joking. My parents have intimacy issues so there weren't quite enough cuddles and words of validation to go around in my family, love was a finite resource and each new kid that came along stole the focus of attention of the Mother. My dad has always been emotionally absent and fed out complements and words of validation as though there was a need for strict rationing. It fostered an atmosphere of resentment, rancour, anger, paranoia and suspicion amongst my siblings. I think because I was the baby of the family I got off lightly as I didn't go through the trauma of another baby coming along and stealing the lime light. I don't harbour any resentment, whereas it seems to be the fuel that drives my older siblings.
A psychiatrist is a privilege and a luxury, but for those who can afford it I thnk it can serve a role and I wouldn't resent them it. It allows the healing power of the word to flow. I have been guiding my own healing through using words with friends, and consecrating with sacred plants, and practicing meditation. For me, if I were to have a psychiatrist, it wouldn't be to make me calm, it would be like a training ground to practice forming intimacy and the ability to be vulnerable in a safe place. Someone who's willing to sit and listen to me talk and so help me figure things out.
Somebody recently told me that nobody is 100% awesome. It's true. :) We were talking about magical mythical unicorn people at the time.
@kate-m ... I don't think we should be blaming our parents for scarring our memories.
When I was a few steps lower from where I'm now, I used to blame and curse them every day for damaging me psychologically and making me feel like a depressed soul lost in a purgatory.
But now when I think about it, it's pretty unintelligent to do so.
Because a bigger game's going on in here and collectively as a species, we're playing it very badly because the rules are blurry and incomprehensible and nobody owns a guidebook on how to live your life. Our ancestors tried hard to form order and contain the chaos by forming religions but now as I see it, it's a failed experiment (although a good one though)... the consequences of our little actions go a long way and we're never fully aware of what we're doing or saying.
If you just remove the individual perspective and think as a whole species, you'll find that the problems are within ourselves. We're triggering destructive chain reactions knowingly or unknowingly and like the 'Butterfly effect,' it's creating a whole different timeline than what it's supposed to be every second.
Bizarre events happen every day and some good too... and it links to other events and affects them. The outcomes of those events affect other outcomes and you never know when just a small action whether good or bad will create a huge impact and change the preceding timeline drastically.
When 7 billion people equipped with equally chaotic mindsets is crammed into a small planet, chaos is bound to happen. That doesn't mean the world is doomed. There's a good share of order too.
Although I feel sorry for both of us in landing on the wrong side of probability fraction, we should not let those destructive thoughts overcome us and unknowingly damage the upcoming versions of ourselves too.
Hope I made some sense, if not I'll come up with a blog post about this...
What I've found from my observation is that mostly a damaged person distorts the psychological state of others. And if you think your parents scarred you, just think about it for a second and ponder upon this question... Who scarred them and made them so insensitive?
This is a very good response and I wholeheartedly agree with what you are getting at. I actually don’t blame my parents, and for what I do blame them for I forgive them. But I see how they slot into the jig-saw puzzle of explaining the complexities of my family dynamics. I’m actively going through this investigative process at the moment and trying to see with clear eyes the true nature of so many past actions and words, and up to today really. They were simply continuing the chain, the domino effect of how their parents treated them and their parents before them and so on and so forth. I’ve done a fair amount of work with ayahuasca and during one of my sessions I travelled back to heal previous generations on my mum’s side, my mum, her parents, and back generations and generations, weeping for the pain and heart-ache that seeps the very soil in Northern Ireland. So much difficulty, poverty, resentment and grief. I don’t want to carry those parts forward any more, it’s a very bitter heritage many aspects of it.
It’s up to each individual whether or not they will continue their family chain of pathologies. It’s their own responsibility to be self-aware and decide what route they will take. If someone is a son of an abuser, are they destined to be abusive? Obviously not, some will make a point of not replicating their parent’s behaviour, others will slip into the perpetuating cycle, deluding themselves that they are different from their parent when all the while they become more and more like them. But sometimes to get to that point of conscious decision-making we need to rip the scab away to analyse and prod where we came from.
'''They were simply continuing the chain, the domino effect of how their parents treated them and their parents before them and so on and so forth.''' >>> Exactly. Disorder doesn't come out of nothing. It also follows the 'cause and effect' principle!
But like you said, there's a small window of timeframe where we have the free will to decide who we want to be and what traits we want to carry on...
The way you phrase it, Kate, your words replicate all of your feelings in someone else's heart too.
"'But sometimes to get to that point of conscious decision-making we need to rip the scab away to analyse and prod where we came from."'
Maybe. I do frequently suspect that I over-intellectualise things! Of course my entire personal challenge is to de-attach from the intellectualising mind and to allow feelings to canalise through my feeling centres. Open my heart to feelings unfiltered and undefended by the brain.
The thing is that I do feel a certain empowerment from being able to intellectually label things. I guess it brings it into my sphere of control (the opposite of surrendering to the flood of feelings I know!). I guess because I lost confidence in my own instinctive judgement that I felt I required some guiding lights in the dark, and all the psychology theory somewhat serves that purpose to return some confidence in my own decisions.
I'm very emotionally entangled with my family, even though it is so fragmented. Whilst I feel that I have some role in this life to go towards curing my family situation, I also intuit that I need to de-attach from that responsibility. For whilst we heal together, ultimately each one must take responsibility for their own healing, at least the first conscious decision to step in that direction, for if they don't want to heal, no-one will ever be able to force them.
"For whilst we heal together, ultimately each one must take responsibility for their own healing, at least the first conscious decision to step in that direction, for if they don't want to heal, no-one will ever be able to force them."
Glad to connect with you @kate-m I do not have anything else to say but I do want to tell you that you're one of the most open-minded and transparent individual I've met in my life. There are rarely any people on my friendlist with whom I can hold deep conversations. Everyone is so isolated and unreachable.