Posted by Racer on May 26, 2004, at 11:19:26
I'm feeling pretty low today, and was thinking about things like internal critics, internal unreasonable ten year old children, and internal sabateurs. And I've been thinking about how they all work together to make trouble for me, and recreate the external world I've known. I don't know if this is more appropriate to a private journal (which is really hard for me -- somehow it has to feel as if I'm communicating to someone, rather than just trying to express it in a vacuum. I'm sorry it you feel imposed on by me writing it here instead of a journal. You guys are like my JournalPlus+) or if this might be helpful to anyone else, but I'm typing, so...
Anyway, I've got so many conflicts about the problems I've had with this agency. Some of it I can step back and look at clearly enough to see that someone else really did do something that was anti-helpful to me. But then, my Internal Critic (IC) starts up with how I should have solved the problem myself, that it doesn't matter what anyone else does, that no matter how bad what they did was I should have been able to handle it and solve it, etc. The Internal Ten Year Old (IT) starts screaming, "It's not fair! It's not my fault!" While the two of them are fighting it out, the Internal Sabateur (IS) gets free rein to do anything at all, usually with negative consequences. And somewhere in all this, I'm watching and knowing that it's a trainwreck about to happen, and feeling powerless to stop it. Today's notion about all this had to do with my mother.
Ah, yes -- Racer's Mother. If you've read what I've had to say over the years, you'll probably know that I love my mother. She gives me the sorts of presents that you never knew you wanted until after you have them, often little things you'd never think of, no significant monetary value ($10, $20), but they're somehow so *right* so *me* that I get that warm, loved feeling from knowing that someone cares enough about you to recognize you inside your skin. You know what I mean? But she never protected me. When I was a kid, and trying to deal with what her boyfriend was doing to me, I went to her for help, for protection. She told me that she couldn't protect me, that she couldn't even protect herself. She told me that I was stronger than she was, that she needed me to protect her. (This is the adult interpretation -- not her exact words. Nonetheless, that is a pretty accurate interpretation, and she'll tell you the same thing. She's eating herself alive with guilt over it, but I don't think she knew any other way to respond.) The only thing she offered was this advice: "He's only doing these things to get a reaction out of you. If you stop letting him see the reaction, he'll lose interest and find something else to do." (Guess what? Took a few years to get really good at hiding my reactions. When I did, he moved from emotional abuse to sexual abuse.) Other times, the same thing happened. I remember lying in bed one morning, with my aunt yelling at me and my mother in the doorway. Mother was silent, and scared, until after my aunt hit me and I think shocked everyone enough to create a little space for action. Then my mother said, "that's enough, sister." Just that, nothing more. My mother, in her own way, to the best of her abilities, tried to protect me -- but it was always too late, after the fact, and generally ineffective. And you know what? In my little internal band of rogues, my self-protection invariably comes a little too late, after the damage is done; it's generally ineffective, largely because by the time it comes the damage is overwhelming; and it's one of those tentative, "if you don't mind, I'd like to remove your knife from my flesh, but if it's too much trouble on your part..." varieties.
I guess I've internalized my mother pretty well, since the only protection I give myself reflects her protection of me as a child. (Hey, at least I was successful at something, right?)
Now for my disclaimer. I have been self-medicating with the left over stimulants that Dr EyeCandy prescribed as an augmenting agent for the anti-depressant. Without the anti-depressants, they're less intolerably overstimulating, and they are helping with my mood. They're also relieving a great deal of the agitation and anxiety somehow -- I think that's partly physical, since the physical symptom I took them to relieve is so much eased now. Right now, I may be a little ambivalent about the realistic hope for my future quality of life and whether it really justifies my desire to stick around through it, but I'm not actively suicidal. I'm seesawing between "I'm good at a number of things, very good at a few, and there are things I enjoy -- it's just that I haven't had an environment that could support me enough for me to do those things consistently," and "But it doesn't matter what I do, if no one will let me do it." Not a great place, but certainly nowhere near the worst place I've been -- not even the worst place I've been in the last few weeks. In a lot of ways, I suppose this is still a real improvement over most of the last year, since what I'm expressing feels internally consistent and honest, which really relieves the anxiety. (Uh-oh -- I think I just said something that sounds remarkably like "I feel centered" -- quick, someone bring a washcloth for my forehead while I lie down in a dark room.) It may be a low place, but it feels like a "real" place, if you know what I mean. And I'm not blaming my mother, because I've already gotten past that part. She did what she did based on her own basket of burdens, and her own IC is overactive about it now, which I wish were not the case. It's not my mother's "fault" -- it's just what happened, and it hurt us both.
You know, I'm going to submit this, after going to the trouble of typing it, but I'm not really sure why I'm posting it. I don't think there's any advice anyone can give, beyond "talk to a therapist about this" which goes without saying. Maybe I hope someone else can chime in and tell about something similar in their own life; maybe I'm hoping someone else will use it as a springboard to something else to muse over (this came from something a certain Babbler who knows who she is as she's reading this); maybe I just wanted to reach out for contact with someone in a safe place. I don't know. But I'm hitting the button.
Thank you for being a safe place for me.
poster:Racer
thread:350747
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/2000/20040501/msgs/350747.html