Hi Smiley,
I'm sorry for all the pain you're in right now, I've been in places very similar to what you're going through and I know how overwhelmingly painful, confusing and frustrating it can be. I'm really glad you came to talk about it. You have gotten a lot of really amazing input from people.
(Sidebar: Hey guys, it's immensely flattering that you use me as the measure, but seriously, I have NO corner on wisdom, nor are my responses any more valuable than anyone else's. I'm human and I have my blindspots and prejudices and weaknesses, and can mess up just as badly as the next guy, if not more. One of the things that amazes me about this community is how incredible a group of people this is, and how everyone brings wonderful strengths to the mix. The value is so often that we get different perspectives and insights. So I'd like to step down off that pedestal now, ok? Cause I don't deserve to be up on one. And STRMs, you are so close to me you often surpass me! And don't get me going about SG, I'll only make her blush.
)
OK, sorry Smiley for interrupting your thread, back to the subject at hand. As I said, you got a lot of wonderful input, I especially liked what STRM said about how to heal and change. But I just wanted to talk about the whole issue of blaming yourself, since it's something I struggled with for years and have experienced a great deal of shame about what I saw as my responsibility for the abuse.
quote:
Bottom line of all of it was I still blame myself for what happened in the past. T says I have to believe and change the message in my head.
Smiley, the reasons we blame ourselves can be very complicated and are often intertwined but are a result of both the abuse we endured and how we managed to survive it.
Blaming ourselves actually served some very important purposes when we were little.
First, we are biologically driven to stay close to our attachment figure in order to survive and the will to live is incredibly strong. Most of us will do whatever we need to do to survive, and most especially children. It is only later in life that we can develop a sophisticated enough understanding of life that we can decide in some circumstances to sacrifice our lives for others or that there are worse things then death. When we're children we're just driven by an immense will to live. And for many of us, that's the only thing that allowed us to survive.
So there you are, you have to stay close to this person to live. But they're hurting, abusing or neglecting you. To face and accept who they are and what they're doing would be facing that you have NO options, you can't get what you need which at that point feels equivalent to death. It's literally intolerable. So you reject it, you don't believe it, you do what you need to in order to keep the person whom your life depends on "good." I remember at one point, when discussing my disassociation, that I used it to keep my "good" father and my "bad" father separate. The only semblance of love and affection I got from my dad was when he moved closer in order to abuse me, so I stuck around for the good parts, but when the abuse became unmistakeable and overwhelming, I literally left so I didn't have to know my father as bad. But you're still left on some level knowing ther's badness, and it can't be left where it belongs, that's too threatening, so what do we do with it? We put it on ourselves. It's the only explanation that allows us to experience our caretakers as "safe" enough to move towards. These things happened to us not because our parents failed us or were bad but because we deserved them. And when I say we decided this, I mean we learned this as a truth on a VERY DEEP, almost cellular level.
Which leads to the second reason we blame ourselves. The truth is as a child, you're completely powerless in the hands of adults. You have no control and no way to stop the abuse that's happening to you. But acknowledgement of that powerlessness would lead to despair or insanity because it was just way too much to handle (I barely felt like I could bear it as an adult when I finally came face to face with it, with my T alongside me.) Blaming ourselves for the abuse actually provides us with some hope of control over the situation. After all, if the abuse is my fault, if it's because of something I did, if I can only figure out what it is, I can make the abuse stop. We clung to our own culpability as the only thing which offered us a glimmer of hope in a hopeless situation.
Like so many of the behaviors we learned as children, blaming ourselves can be honored. It was an important part of the strategies that allowed us to survive. But like so many of the behaviors, it's usefulness has been worn out and it has even become detrimental to our well-being.
Changing the belief is long difficult work but I would argue that it doesn't really so much come from within as it comes from allowing ourselves to listen and try to accept when other people, especially our Ts who come alongside of us, make it clear it wasn't our fault. Every time I would express my shame and have someone tell me it wasn't my fault helped. Everytime I confessed how I felt, expecting to be driven out in disgust, and instead was met with acceptance and compassion, it receded if only a little.
It is so difficult to express our shame. The whole point of shame is to get us to STOP. But that's what had to happen, we need to talk about it so that we can learn that we really didn't have anything to be ashamed of. I've included a link below to one of my posts about a time I dealt with a very deep sense of shame, hoping that the illustration helps.
Incredibly painful shame There's one last thing I want to say to you.
It wasn't your fault. I understand why you feel that way, I know how deep the belief runs and how true it feels to you, but that doesn't make it true. It's a lie. and we'll all keep saying that as many times as we need to until you can start to believe it along with us. You were an innocent child and the lack wasn't in your nor was the wrongness. Those things were in the people who failed you.
AG
