Tuesday 11 December 2012

Past Hurts

Today's post, "Do You Deserve Happiness?" by Debbie at Healing From BPD really brought up some big, unexpected realisations for me.

She has written about how many of us with BPD respond to positive experiences in our life with hesitancy, trepidation and suspicion. We have often experienced traumatic events in our past that colour how we see our present and future. We struggle with trusting people and ourselves, and do not believe that we are worthy of good things.

Reading this post really surprised me. I already knew that when good things happen to me, I spend most of the time telling myself that it's only temporary, and miss out on enjoying positive feelings. I just thought of this as being overly protective of myself, and on guard.

But when I stopped to really think about it - I realised there is a lot more going on beneath the surface for me. I am actually telling myself things like:

  • "This is going to end or turn out to have been false, like everything."
  • "You will ruin this, like you always do, because you are an incompetent failure."
  • "Someone you love will ruin this because they hate you and never really loved you back and want to see you suffer."

Whoa. Turns out there's a bit more going on in my head than just mild suspicion.

I am actually telling myself some really toxic things. A lot of it stems from some very traumatic times I had in a past romantic relationship. There might be some of it that comes from another place, but I'm not sure.

Clearly I have some issues to think about for myself. I might need to start by turning my mind to enjoying positive experiences.


This is especially important because it doesn't make sense for me to stop myself from enjoying things like friends, family and personal time because of past trauma in a relationship. It is not even relevant to the present experiences I'm having.

There are also some self-esteem issues that I'll look at, in terms of expecting myself to fail.

Once again, I am deeply grateful for Debbie's blog. And once again, I have lots of work to do!

5 comments:

  1. You are so insightful, honest, and articulate. It's wonderful to watch you blossom through this blog!

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    1. I am very lucky to have found my inspiration in you. Hope you enjoy hearing that as I imagine I'll be saying it for some time to come! ;)

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  2. I'm always grateful to Debbie as well. I'm honestly not sure where I'd be in my BPD journey without her. And yes, I completely agree with this post. I always think I don't deserve help, and I haven't figured out yet why. There's a lot of missing memories from my past (I think some from blocking it out, and others are from a bad head injury resulting in brain surgery) before I can know for sure. Best of luck to us both. :)

    hugs,
    Mel
    http://so1aced.wordpress.com

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    1. I'm so glad our blogs have found each other as well as Debbie's! And I know what you mean about not feeling deserving of help, sometimes I find myself thinking "yes but I'm the one with the problems why would anyone help me fix them?" and I have to remind myself this is kind of nonsensical because one of the strongest and most responsible things we can do is accept help. In any case our memories don't own us so we can take our time figuring them out :) Love, Jess xox

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  3. I am glad it's not only me :) one of the most useful things I am reminded of when I go through my DBT worksheets are the spots where it asks you to consider the purpose behind a thought or emotion. Even though we sometimes feel bad things or say bad things to ourselves, it all has a purpose, and it is our mind trying to look after us in its own way. I am trying to bear this in mind as I work through this stuff! Thanks for your thoughts as always! xox

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