All around me are familiar faces
Feb. 10th, 2022 07:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cybermuleI had a good therapy session today. She's not my previous therapist, A, who holds all my secrets. But I've finally bonded with her. Bonding with people, deshielding from my quiet reserve, that can take a bit of time. It is something I'm getting better at though. I've deshielded with a healthy number of people. I find it hard around others, and that's with good reason generally. I need to trust my instinct. She made a good point that my last relationship was built with an active addict, and I have a well worn psychic groove for managing addicts. Don't rock the boat. ALways make excuses for them. Always gently fold up and fawn and let them have their way. It's really not healthy, and what usually seems to happen is that I eventually break under the strain of treating them with kid gloves and chaos ensues.
I think, like I said, not treating them with care is something that I have been trained to avoid. I worked fucking hard with G to have opinions and boundaries and not to compromise myself, but addicts wouldn't be addicts if they weren't immensely good at getting the world to treat them as snowflakes. That was definitely a characteristic for him. To expect special treatment because he's sensitive and you don't know what might happen. I think it's just how he'd always been treated. And it takes an awful lot of balls to unpack that Sick Role privilege and be treated like everyone else. And there was no incentive for me to do that.
I already parent one person.
We talked about forgiveness and what it actually means. I think it's overrated, and possibly peddled by a patriarchal church. Why would I forgive someone for consistently being a shit to me for 6 months when everything was there to make things work? The secret is to not let that happen to me again.
There are things I cannot change about myself, however much I want to. If the twin peaks of autism and trauma coincide then it will end badly. I'm in meltdown mode, so best to just not let myself get there in the first place. I refuse to write myself a user manual for other people to look me up in, as the point of human relationships is to communicate, but I can build myself a checklist and work on that. Steer myself between Scylla and Charybdis as much as possible.
And just stop dating arseholes. Nobody can fix themselves in a broken system.
So, what do I need to stay in calm waters? (I may keep adding to this)
SLEEP
STRUCTURE
SOLITUDE
SPACE
CREATIVITY
That'll do as a start, although I obviously wish they all started with "S".
I think, like I said, not treating them with care is something that I have been trained to avoid. I worked fucking hard with G to have opinions and boundaries and not to compromise myself, but addicts wouldn't be addicts if they weren't immensely good at getting the world to treat them as snowflakes. That was definitely a characteristic for him. To expect special treatment because he's sensitive and you don't know what might happen. I think it's just how he'd always been treated. And it takes an awful lot of balls to unpack that Sick Role privilege and be treated like everyone else. And there was no incentive for me to do that.
I already parent one person.
We talked about forgiveness and what it actually means. I think it's overrated, and possibly peddled by a patriarchal church. Why would I forgive someone for consistently being a shit to me for 6 months when everything was there to make things work? The secret is to not let that happen to me again.
There are things I cannot change about myself, however much I want to. If the twin peaks of autism and trauma coincide then it will end badly. I'm in meltdown mode, so best to just not let myself get there in the first place. I refuse to write myself a user manual for other people to look me up in, as the point of human relationships is to communicate, but I can build myself a checklist and work on that. Steer myself between Scylla and Charybdis as much as possible.
And just stop dating arseholes. Nobody can fix themselves in a broken system.
So, what do I need to stay in calm waters? (I may keep adding to this)
SLEEP
STRUCTURE
SOLITUDE
SPACE
CREATIVITY
That'll do as a start, although I obviously wish they all started with "S".
no subject
Date: 2022-02-12 12:48 pm (UTC)Forgiveness is a tough thing, especially when the one you're supposed to forgive isn't at all contrite. Maybe it is more to forgive yourself for allowing someone to treat you in terrible ways so it isn't like a hot rock that burns a hole in your hand as you hold onto it.
no subject
Date: 2022-02-12 01:53 pm (UTC)And thank you. All the signs were there and I just barged on through them. So you're right. There's a lot of mileage now in just looking out for me. I don't want to be that person that says "after all I did for you". Forgive myself for letting that happen.