Battle Kitten: Ascension

[fleaball]

7 minutes ago, Severine said:

Your father is such an alien. Was he screaming about how he's stupid and ruins everything like he sometimes does, or some new type of screaming? I have a hard time even imagining what a person would scream about in that situation because it's just such a bizarre alien thing to do. 

 

Also, like...don't leave dish soap on your bed? Or put the cap on? I can think of so many normal adult behaviors that would have averted the whole situation. He is a real puzzle.

 

In case we haven't reminded you recently, your competence/resilience/independence/initiative for self-improvement/emotional intelligence and basically your entire personality is a triumph of against-the-odds achievement, having been raised with/by those people in that house.

General curses mixed with variations of "fucking IDIOT!" Like my brother and I talk shit about him practically every day but he still manages to call himself an idiot/etc more often than the two of us combined. 

 

Yeah the dish soap basically never gets closed. Nothing with a lid or cap gets closed, generally, because pfft, why would we do that? (Food usually excepted, but not always.) Otoh, he's very... I don't want to say absent-minded. It's more like just 100% unaware of his surroundings? He leaves shit out all the time, forgets where he put shit, just doesn't think about things. I don't know how much of it is just him being a fucking idiot vs how much is the ADHD no one will convince me he doesn't have vs potential damage from a car accident 4 years ago wherein he broke 2 vertebrae but they somehow didn't do any brain imaging. I mean he's always been like this with all 3 of us cleaning up after him so it's hard to tell what's what. 

 

But anyway in the particular case of the dish soap, this is what he does in any kind of crisis. And a small blueberry stain is clearly a crisis. He gets so worked up about the problem, the fact that he's an idiot who's incapable of anything at all, and woe is me I'm never going to be able to do anything right because the world hates me and I am the biggest victim ever.* So he stomped up the stairs and changed and put the soap on his pants (after taking the time to eat dinner, of course) and then asked me what you're supposed to do when there's a stain. Yes, it makes perfect sense to let it sit and then put soap on it and then ask what you're supposed to do. But the dish soap was a reflex since it's usually grease he spills on himself so at least I've trained him to handle that one. But then we went right downstairs to handle the stain in the kitchen so he clearly like, put the soap on it and then abandoned the bottle to come ask me about it and at some point it fell over.

 

*fun story: he came home and started stomping around one day because he was like 45 minutes away somewhere and needed gas but he couldn't figure it out so he "coasted home on fumes" and started bitching to me about it and literally whined "why do other people get to pump their own gas and I don't?!"

 

True to form, I don't see my being a mostly-functional adult as an achievement. Although I do often wonder how the fuck I managed it given what I've had to deal with. I've pissed off my father repeatedly over the years by asking if I'm adopted.

[Severine]

7 minutes ago, fleaball said:

he was like 45 minutes away somewhere and needed gas but he couldn't figure it out so he "coasted home on fumes" and started bitching to me about it and literally whined "why do other people get to pump their own gas and I don't?!"

 

[fleaball]

1 minute ago, Severine said:

 

Jesus Christ this is the most perfect gif in the history of gifs. 

[Tanktimus the Encourager]

Your Dad is...

 

 

...

 

 

...

 

a mystery to me. I seriously cannot fathom how that man functions as a police officer.

[Jean]

8 hours ago, fleaball said:

Yeah the dish soap basically never gets closed. Nothing with a lid or cap gets closed, generally, because pfft, why would we do that? (Food usually excepted, but not always.) Otoh, he's very... I don't want to say absent-minded. It's more like just 100% unaware of his surroundings? He leaves shit out all the time, forgets where he put shit, just doesn't think about things. I don't know how much of it is just him being a fucking idiot vs how much is the ADHD no one will convince me he doesn't have vs potential damage from a car accident 4 years ago wherein he broke 2 vertebrae but they somehow didn't do any brain imaging. I mean he's always been like this with all 3 of us cleaning up after him so it's hard to tell what's what.

 

I had one of those at home (until I decided not to give a shit anymore and not seeing him more than 2 times a year), mine is due to alcohol, so, a brains related matter fueled by him not being able do handle life, which in turn makes him depressive, which leads to alcohol and so on. It's not that he doesn't care (for what I've seen of his sober moments and a few hints I've had, he does), it's that he can't (reasons for that could be because he's weak - I owe him much on that one because it gave me a lot of will not to be like him - because self-pity is easier than actually doing something or because he's always had a bunch of people around him to do anything he needed for him and never learned).

 

So, yeah, pretty much everything you've listed could be it.

 

Just... take care of yourself. Mine would have drowned all of us to try to stay afloat (and would have drowned himself in the process too) if we had let him. "Vampire" and "Black hole" are the images springing to my mind when I think of his relationship with us.

 

8 hours ago, fleaball said:

True to form, I don't see my being a mostly-functional adult as an achievement.

 

The way I see it, it's an achievement for most of us. Us seeing so many people who seem to be handling their life just fine comes mainly from the fact that we see them only temporarily, from the outside. We don't know their inner battles and their flaws but, yeah, most of us are less... I don't know, achieved?...  than we let appear...

 

Being on our feet and still fighting is an achievement in and by itself.

 

[RES]

10 hours ago, Tanktimus the Encourager said:

a mystery to me. I seriously cannot fathom how that man functions as a police officer

I completely forgot he was until this...

 

11 hours ago, fleaball said:

 "why do other people get to pump their own gas and I don't?!"

I cannot wrap my brain around what is so hard to figure out about pumping gas....most of us don't look at is a 'getting' to pump gas, more like 'have' to pump gas...

what car makes it 45 minutes on fumes? 

[fleaball]

I think I just made my father feel bad. Poor guy. I went downstairs to look for today's mail and started cleaning up old papers and junk mail and shit and did a ton of it in like 15 minutes while we were talking about something. And he looked at me and just sighed and started bitching about how he's gotta get his ass up out of his chair and start doing something. It's not like it's fucking hard, dude. 

 

The irony is that I meant to bring up a trash bag for my room while I was down there, and I totally forgot because I was distracted cleaning up his shit.

 

17 hours ago, Tanktimus the Encourager said:

Your Dad is...

 

 

...

 

 

...

 

a mystery to me. I seriously cannot fathom how that man functions as a police officer.

7 hours ago, RES said:

I completely forgot he was until this...

My brother and I have trouble wrapping our heads around it too. Like, people leave him in charge. On purpose. When I was first explaining it to my therapist she said something about how sometimes people have one part of their life where they're really "on" and competent and whatever, so maybe that's his one part and he's just a bumbling idiot in the other parts of his life. 

 

7 hours ago, RES said:

I cannot wrap my brain around what is so hard to figure out about pumping gas....most of us don't look at is a 'getting' to pump gas, more like 'have' to pump gas...

what car makes it 45 minutes on fumes? 

Mostly it's that he's impatient and if something doesn't work on the first try he gives up. I think the problem was that he continues to assume that it's all automatic so he's not waiting for the attendant to approve the sale or something? Which my brother has reminded him of repeatedly. So he picks his gas, puts the nozzle in the car, and then gets pissy that there's no gas flowing immediately so he hangs it back up and throws himself a pity party. And it's even worse because he keeps talking about how he's going to travel when he retires, like drive to and around DC and whatnot, and he has to be able to pump his own gas for that so if he can't figure it out he'll never be able to travel. I think the "getting" to pump gas is just another victim thing. Like the world is so against him that not only does every food product he likes get discontinued (!!) but also everyone else is in on some big secret or whatever and he'll just never know how to do it? idfk. But it's gotten to the point that whenever I need gas I drag him to different stations with me so he can practice, because I'm tired of listening to him bitching. And I didn't question the fumes comment because I just didn't want to deal with it lol. He came home bitching about it and I just put on shoes, didn't even bother with a bra, and was like "nope, get back in the car we're going across the street and you're pumping your damn gas."

 

13 hours ago, Jean said:

I had one of those at home (until I decided not to give a shit anymore and not seeing him more than 2 times a year), mine is due to alcohol, so, a brains related matter fueled by him not being able do handle life, which in turn makes him depressive, which leads to alcohol and so on. It's not that he doesn't care (for what I've seen of his sober moments and a few hints I've had, he does), it's that he can't (reasons for that could be because he's weak - I owe him much on that one because it gave me a lot of will not to be like him - because self-pity is easier than actually doing something or because he's always had a bunch of people around him to do anything he needed for him and never learned).

 

So, yeah, pretty much everything you've listed could be it.

 

Just... take care of yourself. Mine would have drowned all of us to try to stay afloat (and would have drowned himself in the process too) if we had let him. "Vampire" and "Black hole" are the images springing to my mind when I think of his relationship with us.

Yeah, my father always had my grandmother and then my mother to do everything for him and clean up all his messes so he never had to be an adult. Both he and my brother are letting me fill that void for them now and they will absolutely make me drown with them if it comes down to it. But believe it or not I'm doing a lot better with boundaries now than I did before. That's partly because I'm in therapy now and mostly because everybody here is great at yelling at me (nicely) not to put up with their shit. I'm still doing more than I should be for two grown men, but I've had some success in forcing them to act like adults too. 

 

13 hours ago, Jean said:

The way I see it, it's an achievement for most of us. Us seeing so many people who seem to be handling their life just fine comes mainly from the fact that we see them only temporarily, from the outside. We don't know their inner battles and their flaws but, yeah, most of us are less... I don't know, achieved?...  than we let appear...

 

Being on our feet and still fighting is an achievement in and by itself.

This is super true.

[fleaball]

On 9/27/2018 at 10:27 AM, Severine said:

 

This is probably a good thing to talk to your therapist about, because I'm not sure if that's a genius breakthrough idea, or just a way of setting yourself an extra difficult task for no reason, but it seems like either is plausible!

 

I do think that whatever progress you're able to make at home is progress gained in spite of a higher difficulty level, and definitely something you should be giving yourself extra credit for as a result. So make sure you're doing that for everything you've accomplished in the past year 

 

If you do decide to tackle the kitchen thing at some point...I wonder - have you ever sat and made a list of what would need to change about the current kitchen situation in order for it to feel okay to be in there? My therapist had me do this for something else - make a giant list of everything that'd improve the problem, including things totally out of my control (like in your case, your brother/dad stopping with their annoying questions) and it was a useful exercise. Not that you'll be able to address all the things on the list, but it's a good way of helping to understand all the little parts of what makes it suck now. Even though you know the problem already, obviously, it's amazing the insights that can come when you have to put it into detailed words. For me, having to make the list involved thinking about why particular things bothered me, which brought up certain memories etc. It was useful in a therapy way. And then if you do decide to tackle it, you'd have a concrete list of what to address?

Forgot to reply to this because of the blueberry disaster. 

 

Yeah I'm not about to try to force myself to do a 180 and love cooking while I'm here. I'm thinking more like reframing it, like "if I can do it here I can do it anywhere." Over the summer I made a list of quick and minimal effort meals with NTB and Sylvaa's help (I think I mentioned this before?) and I did well with it for like two weeks and then drifted from it. I need to get back to that. But I did manage to cook some pasta last week while they were both around and I made sure to congratulate myself for doing so and nicely say "see, that wasn't so bad! You can do this again!" Super small baby steps haha. 

 

That's a great suggestion and I will totally do that. I think one of the biggest obstacles beyond just their existence is that they don't clean up after themselves. We have like zero counter space in the kitchen so there's already very little room to prep stuff, but they just leave their shit everywhere. There are no fewer than 6 boxes of Cocoa Puffs on the counter right now, at least 5 of which should have been thrown away weeks ago. Plus actual trash. And dirty dishes get left in the sink (both) and/or quickly rinsed with hot water and no soap and then put up in the dish drainer thing to dry (father). So I literally have to clean and do dishes before I cook something, and then have to clean up after myself when I'm done. Ugh. Going out and buying my own pot and a large bowl and a plate has been on my to do list literally forever and I keep forgetting. I'll probably get a dish bin thing to toss my dirty dishes in in my room and bring down when I need to wash things too. You probably didn't expect this novella but I think by writing it out I'm trying to show myself more than anyone else that "look, I've been thinking about it and I kinda have a plan!"

[NeverThatBored]

3 hours ago, fleaball said:

Yeah I'm not about to try to force myself to do a 180 and love cooking while I'm here. I'm thinking more like reframing it, like "if I can do it here I can do it anywhere." Over the summer I made a list of quick and minimal effort meals with NTB and Sylvaa's help (I think I mentioned this before?) and I did well with it for like two weeks and then drifted from it. I need to get back to that. But I did manage to cook some pasta last week while they were both around and I made sure to congratulate myself for doing so and nicely say "see, that wasn't so bad! You can do this again!" Super small baby steps haha. 

 

 

This is great!!! Good job cooking and good job being nice to yourself.

[Tanktimus the Encourager]

3 hours ago, fleaball said:

Yeah, my father always had my grandmother and then my mother to do everything for him and clean up all his messes so he never had to be an adult. Both he and my brother are letting me fill that void for them now and they will absolutely make me drown with them if it comes down to it. But believe it or not I'm doing a lot better with boundaries now than I did before. That's partly because I'm in therapy now and mostly because everybody here is great at yelling at me (nicely) not to put up with their shit. I'm still doing more than I should be for two grown men, but I've had some success in forcing them to act like adults too. 

That is absolutely untrue. We yell at you to have boundaries  

 

Seriously though, good job on the boundaries you have set so far. Just keep making one step at a time.

3 hours ago, fleaball said:

Yeah I'm not about to try to force myself to do a 180 and love cooking while I'm here. I'm thinking more like reframing it, like "if I can do it here I can do it anywhere." Over the summer I made a list of quick and minimal effort meals with NTB and Sylvaa's help (I think I mentioned this before?) and I did well with it for like two weeks and then drifted from it. I need to get back to that. But I did manage to cook some pasta last week while they were both around and I made sure to congratulate myself for doing so and nicely say "see, that wasn't so bad! You can do this again!" Super small baby steps haha. 

 

That's a great suggestion and I will totally do that. I think one of the biggest obstacles beyond just their existence is that they don't clean up after themselves. We have like zero counter space in the kitchen so there's already very little room to prep stuff, but they just leave their shit everywhere. There are no fewer than 6 boxes of Cocoa Puffs on the counter right now, at least 5 of which should have been thrown away weeks ago. Plus actual trash. And dirty dishes get left in the sink (both) and/or quickly rinsed with hot water and no soap and then put up in the dish drainer thing to dry (father). So I literally have to clean and do dishes before I cook something, and then have to clean up after myself when I'm done. Ugh. Going out and buying my own pot and a large bowl and a plate has been on my to do list literally forever and I keep forgetting. I'll probably get a dish bin thing to toss my dirty dishes in in my room and bring down when I need to wash things too. You probably didn't expect this novella but I think by writing it out I'm trying to show myself more than anyone else that "look, I've been thinking about it and I kinda have a plan!"

This is incredibly good Flea. You have grown so much and come so far. I am so proud of you.

 

Flea is awesome.

[RES]

23 minutes ago, Tanktimus the Encourager said:

Flea is awesome.

Yes she is

 

3 hours ago, fleaball said:

"look, I've been thinking about it and I kinda have a plan!"

Plans are a good thing to have!  

[fleaball]

I have to go out driving today but all I want to do is curl up in bed and cry myself back to sleep. It’s gonna be a great day. 

[Severine]

9 hours ago, fleaball said:

I have to go out driving today but all I want to do is curl up in bed and cry myself back to sleep. It’s gonna be a great day. 

 

I hope things improved   

 

[fleaball]

18 minutes ago, Severine said:

 

I hope things improved   

 

Kitty! Yeah it got better. Actually one of my better driving days. Didn’t make a lot of money, but hit my quota pretty quickly and had zero assholes and zero people I had to report. The food I picked up on the way home is mediocre (boo) but I’m home and fed and the fat cat is keeping me company so I’ll live. 

[Severine]

Yay! A day with zero assholes is a magic day indeed. And fuzzy animals make everything better.

[fleaball]

Thought I posted this Saturday but I must have closed the tab before it went through:

 

On 9/29/2018 at 9:01 PM, NeverThatBored said:

 

This is great!!! Good job cooking and good job being nice to yourself.

=D

 

On 9/29/2018 at 9:08 PM, Tanktimus the Encourager said:

That is absolutely untrue. We yell at you to have boundaries  

 

Seriously though, good job on the boundaries you have set so far. Just keep making one step at a time.

This is incredibly good Flea. You have grown so much and come so far. I am so proud of you.

Pfft. Potato, tomato.

 

Quote

Flea is awesome.

On 9/29/2018 at 9:32 PM, RES said:

Yes she is

I'll allow it. Also fun fact, a few minutes after reading both these posts but before replying I went to grab water and do something else, and had a really fleeting thought of like "you screwed up a thing" or something (literally forgot the context almost immediately) and was like "no, stop that, Tank and RES literally just told you you're awesome."

 

Quote

Plans are a good thing to have!  

[fleaball]

Arrrrrgh. Was in a reasonably good mood before bed, was chatting with my brother about British quiz shows and having an actual decent conversation, and then mentioned that I would help him clean his room if he wanted and he got super icy and literally just kept repeating "go away" and not letting me say anything beyond that. It's now at least an hour later and I haven't gone to bed yet because I'm still upset about it. If I had to play "guess the emotion" I guess I'd say I feel like I've done something wrong. Which, logically, I know I haven't and that I've been essentially conditioned to feel like I'm the bad guy and/or that it's my fault when my family doesn't like what they're hearing. And honestly, "I will help you clean your room" isn't a bad thing to say and if he's offended by it or feels bad because of it, that's his problem. I know this.

 

Context: my father is suddenly adamant about getting work done on the roof that's been ignored for years, and the only way into the attic is through my brother's room but it's currently impossible to open the drop down door thing. (No active roof issue yet, but four years ago an antenna blew loose and has been hanging by a thread. I think the catalyst for wanting to do something about it now is that it's hanging over a small side porch he used to sit outside and read on but this summer was afraid it would come off and fall on him. So now it's a problem because it's impacting him.) Although fun fact, it's not the only way up. There's a thing in my father's closet that can be opened into the attic, which is how people got up there before my parents had the door in my brother's room put in. I assume you need a ladder or something. But my father can't clean out his closet until he can get up into the attic to put his out of season clothes up there. (??) Never mind that he currently has his own 5 foot high dresser with 4-5 drawers, a massive piece of furniture that has 6 drawers + some small shelves + lots of flat space that used to hold my mother's clothes but is now full of his shit (at least one drawer is full of more office supplies than he'll ever need... which could also live in his desk but don't), and 4 drawers built into his bed frame. ALL of them are apparently full. But he wears all the same stuff all the time. (I asked why he doesn't get rid of stuff and he said he feels guilty getting rid of his own clothes?) 

 

I don't like this feeling. I feel really small right now, and my chest is tight and there's a knot in my stomach. I don't know how to make it go away. No amount of reassuring myself that it's not my fault and I didn't to anything wrong etc etc is making me feel better. Probably because I just realized that I want someone else to tell me it's okay. And they never will. Aaaand now I'm crying. Awesome. Yeah, healing and mourning and whatever but it's 2:30 in the morning and I don't want the headache that comes with crying right before I try to go to sleep. I was just going to bitch about how the stupid cat can't read the room and doesn't cuddle when it would be acceptable but he did just get up and walk over to lie down on my foot so maybe I owe him an apology. 

 

But hey, yeah. Apparently I feel so shitty because not only did I not do anything wrong or to deserve this, but I guess I've been waiting 30 years for someone to tell me that and no one has. Nor will they ever. I mean, you guys will and have. But you're not the people I need to hear it from. You're not the people who ask expect me to help and then yell at me or dismiss me because the help you needed is not the help you wanted. You're not the people who will never thank me for making sure your lives don't fall down around you (while mine continues to), or who will never apologize to a little girl for making her parent you and your son instead of the other way around. 

 

Christ, and now I'm angry. I was thinking about how I can't even hope for a dramatic deathbed confession or anything because no one even realizes what assholes they are, and then I realized I'm 100% right. Because my mother had that chance and she fucking blew it and just stuck to her bullshit. When I was home for Christmas and she told me about her diagnosis, she said something along the lines of "we did our best for you [and your brother] and I think you turned out okay." Fucking what? And then the week in the hospital before she came home and was forced to accept she was dying, and I asked her if there was anything we needed to talk about or anything she'd wanted to say (after spending an hour talking with my brother a day or two before, who was only there because I had to drag him in), she said no, we'd talked about everything that needed to be said - which was a whole lot of nothing. And at another point, I forget if it was in the hospital or at home, she said she wished we'd spent more time together. But I was with her nearly every day for six weeks? "Yeah but you spent a lot of time with Dad too." What the fuck is that even supposed to mean?! I'm sorry when I came home from school - interrupting my schoolwork and taking time off work to do so - you were asleep all the time because you were too fucking stupid to take care of yourself during chemo so you could make better use of the time it gave you? So yeah, and actual literal death sentence didn't win me any reprieve or acknowledgment of the bullshit I went through. And given that my father and brother have their heads so far up their asses they still don't see anything wrong with what's happening plus are just acting like the biggest victims of her life but also her death? I'm literally never ever going to get any kind of apology. I'm not going to get any approximation of the forgiveness that I don't need, since I haven't done anything wrong, but that I desperately want to wash the imaginary sins away. 

 

I hate this. I hate it. I hate that these people have their claws so deep in me that I feel guilty when they are assholes to me. And that I want them to say it's okay. Seriously, fuck this. 

 

The cat has moved away from me.

 

And now I just feel stupid for the fact that I'm still living here. Like I'm an idiot for subjecting myself to all of this still. And it's my fault I'm still here because if I'd only been looking harder for a job, if I'd spent more time driving, if I weren't so useless or hadn't wasted time and money getting degrees I'm doing nothing with and pursued with zero plan for the future. I could use this for motivation to work harder and get out but I'm too dumb to even try and instead will get even more depressed and do nothing and stay here like an idiot until I let them destroy me completely. 

 

I fucking hate my brother for being such an absolute asshole. 

 

Also? That quote about how no one can make you feel inferior without your consent? It's such bullshit. They don't need your consent when they've spent your entire life training you that it's not yours to give.

[Jean]

I don't know what to say, so here's a cat passing his nerves on everything:

 

 

 

 

 

 

You're caught between two storms. Let the disappointment flow and ROARRRR the guilt away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[WhiteGhost]

I have no words

[Severine]

5 hours ago, fleaball said:

I'll allow it. Also fun fact, a few minutes after reading both these posts but before replying I went to grab water and do something else, and had a really fleeting thought of like "you screwed up a thing" or something (literally forgot the context almost immediately) and was like "no, stop that, Tank and RES literally just told you you're awesome."

 

@Tanktimus the Encourager @RES

 

[Bean Sidhe]

*slinks in* So I totally didn't realize you were posting in here. Sorry, I missed some stuff but I am caught up now.

Sadly, I don't have anything that will solve anything, but *hugs* and a silly cat thing because cat tax.

[Severine]

Quote

I fucking hate my brother for being such an absolute asshole. 

 

Your brother is not only an asshole, he is a small selfish man full of fear and self-loathing whose only moments of feeling powerful or strong come from rejecting or abusing the few people who care about him. He is completely incapable of equitable or genuine relationships in his current state because not only does he have nothing to give, emotionally, but even if he did he would never think to be good to anyone but himself. It is my opinion that even when he does things that look like kindness from the outside, like paying you to do an errand for him or engaging in a civil conversation, it's actually something he's doing FOR HIM - he wants to feel like he's not imposing upon you or leeching off you, so he gives you money so he can feel better about himself. He has conversations with you FOR HIM, right up until the moment you displease him and then BAM the ice wall goes down and he ceases to be a person and your feelings cease to matter except as a vehicle to punish you for displeasing him.

 

I don't know if I've ever said this outright but just in case I haven't: in my opinion you are completely justified, morally, from walking away from your brother, washing your hands of him completely, and letting his fate be what it may. He may flounder and he may die, but in no sane universe do you owe it to him to try anything more to prevent that. We've talked about this and I know you say you don't feel like he's your responsibility, but incidents like this make it clear that somewhere underneath you've got complex feelings about their bullshit. So I just want to say as an outside observer - you owe him nothing and the only attention you should pay to him is to make sure he doesn't drag you under with him.

 

11 hours ago, fleaball said:

If I had to play "guess the emotion" I guess I'd say I feel like I've done something wrong. Which, logically, I know I haven't and that I've been essentially conditioned to feel like I'm the bad guy and/or that it's my fault when my family doesn't like what they're hearing. And honestly, "I will help you clean your room" isn't a bad thing to say and if he's offended by it or feels bad because of it, that's his problem. I know this.

Quote

I don't like this feeling. I feel really small right now, and my chest is tight and there's a knot in my stomach. I don't know how to make it go away. No amount of reassuring myself that it's not my fault and I didn't to anything wrong etc etc is making me feel better. Probably because I just realized that I want someone else to tell me it's okay. And they never will. Aaaand now I'm crying. Awesome. Yeah, healing and mourning and whatever but it's 2:30 in the morning and I don't want the headache that comes with crying right before I try to go to sleep. I was just going to bitch about how the stupid cat can't read the room and doesn't cuddle when it would be acceptable but he did just get up and walk over to lie down on my foot so maybe I owe him an apology. 

Quote

But hey, yeah. Apparently I feel so shitty because not only did I not do anything wrong or to deserve this, but I guess I've been waiting 30 years for someone to tell me that and no one has. Nor will they ever. I mean, you guys will and have. But you're not the people I need to hear it from. You're not the people who ask expect me to help and then yell at me or dismiss me because the help you needed is not the help you wanted. You're not the people who will never thank me for making sure your lives don't fall down around you (while mine continues to), or who will never apologize to a little girl for making her parent you and your son instead of the other way around. 

 

I hate this. I hate it. I hate that these people have their claws so deep in me that I feel guilty when they are assholes to me. And that I want them to say it's okay. Seriously, fuck this.   

 

This is a completely normal trauma response to abuse. This is a thing that was done to you. You feel guilty and responsible because it was useful to your abusers for you to feel guilty and responsible. This is not you being foolish or weak or coping poorly. This is the trauma response. You feel this way because of what they did. They treated you like crap, alternatingly neglected and belittled you, made you responsible for all the work while giving you credit for none of it, and devalued everything you were good at and all your contributions while inflating any perceived transgression into a means to blame and chastise you. Everything you're feeling is shitty for you, and useful for them, and that's why it was done to you - to keep you compliant and trapped in their web. None of it is your fault. You have already gone miles toward escaping it, and you are stronger than them, and you WILL escape it. But don't blame yourself for not being free of it all yet.

 

I know you know you don't deserve it and it's bullshit and all of that. But I think we both know there's a difference between knowing something in your logical brain and knowing it and believing it deep down in the dark squishy parts of our emotional subconscious. There's a difference between knowing something in your logical brain and knowing it in your nervous system, which has stress reactions and gets tense in certain environments and certain situations because of years of conditioning. 

 

This is a thing my therapist keeps reinforcing with me - what we call "the mind" is actually in large part the body. It's the lower parts of the brain that are all about instinct, it's the sympathetic nervous system, it's hormones and the physiological stress response. Our thoughts and emotions don't just live in the brain. And you're not broken or weak because you can't just talk yourself out of the fears, responses, and emotions built up over thirty years of abuse. With trauma, it's 100% normal to "know" something and yet not be able to act on it or believe it or change your response, because if the only place change has occurred is in the logical brain, it's not powerful enough to overrule all the rest of that stuff. You can't out-think a knot in your stomach because the knot comes from a very different place than the thinking brain.

 

With trauma, sometimes the remedy cannot be had via thinking. Sometimes the only way to change your responses is by having new experiences, experiencing new feelings, that teach our nervous system and our other physical systems that input patterns can change. It helps to have experiences with people who are not like your family, experiences with mutual respect and boundaries and compassion. It helps to live in a safe, pleasant place where nobody goes insane when you clean something. It helps to have repeated interactions with people who value your feelings and care about their impact on you and have reasonable expectations of you. Thinking is useful in helping you know what experiences/coping mechanisms will aid recovery, of course, but those things take time.

 

There is no amount of telling yourself you should feel a certain way that can substitute for those experiences. Your body is not going to encode new responses based on written instructions. It just won't. That's not how emotional/physiological responses work. It's going to take more therapy, more non-family experiences, more of a lot of stuff. But you are on the road. That's part of why it chafes so much more than it used to, why it feels so much more infuriating - you can see the bars of the cage now.

 

This is progress, I swear.

 

Quote

And now I just feel stupid for the fact that I'm still living here. Like I'm an idiot for subjecting myself to all of this still. And it's my fault I'm still here because if I'd only been looking harder for a job, if I'd spent more time driving, if I weren't so useless or hadn't wasted time and money getting degrees I'm doing nothing with and pursued with zero plan for the future. I could use this for motivation to work harder and get out but I'm too dumb to even try and instead will get even more depressed and do nothing and stay here like an idiot until I let them destroy me completely. 

 

I can think of twenty reasons why this isn't the case, and I know that you know, logically, the counters to what you just typed. There's a long list of logistical and practical reasons (money, student loans, lease timing, lack of information about eventual job location, etc.) that have led you to postpone moving out and all of them are perfectly reasonable. There's a long list of social factors at play, too - there are literally hundreds of thousands of well-educated millennials in the exact same position as you because of forces that have nothing to do with your personal worth. Like, I'm pretty sure you're not to blame for the gig economy, the de-funding of refugee settlement programs, the corporate trend to rely on temps and contractors instead of making new full time hires, or degree inflation causing everyone to feel pressure to get a masters degree with predatory private lenders skulking about the edges making a profit on it.

 

Like, if you decide you want to move out, I think that decision makes sense. You have good reason. I will be there with my truck and I will help you move your shit. But if you decide you want to stay there until you figure out a way to make the smoothest and most stable transition to your next place possible, I think that decision makes sense too. There are hardships along either road and it's your choice which road you take, which hardships feel more tolerable right now. You are never, never responsible for abuse that other people heap upon you just because you're in the same building as them and that building happens to have a door.

 

Quote

Also? That quote about how no one can make you feel inferior without your consent? It's such bullshit. They don't need your consent when they've spent your entire life training you that it's not yours to give.

 

That quote is oversimplifying victim blaming apolegetics. It ignores the realities of mental health AND the realities of power imbalances in the world. Sure, personal responsibility can be an empowering perspective in many situations! But it makes a really shitty universal maxim in a world as cruel as ours.

[Tanktimus the Encourager]

Severine gave one hell of a good response. I want to reiterate that your statements DO reflect progress. You were aware of what you were feeling and articulated how it made you feel physically and emotionally. You cognitively know, recognize and acknowledge the reframing that will be helpful. Those are necessary baby steps to the emotions being easier to live with. Two years ago you would not have been able to do that.

 

All your feelings and emotions that you mentioned are valid. Every. Single. One.

 

I don't think you're an idiot, and I do acknowledge that you feel that way for still living at home. 

 

You're a good person in a very bad situation.

 

Flea is Awesome.

[RES]

6 hours ago, Tanktimus the Encourager said:

Flea is Awesome.

Flea IS Awesome!!

 

6 hours ago, Tanktimus the Encourager said:

I don't think you're an idiot, and I do acknowledge that you feel that way for still living at home. 

I won't go into how many times I have felt  like this...suffice it to say I get it, how you feel can make you think like you are (insert derogatory comment here) but trust me when I say you're not, no one knows your situation or your reasons better than you do. REGARDLESS of what anyone else thinks about it. 

 

[fleaball]

"Hey Dad, disregarding the fact that shithead's room needs to be cleaned anyway, why can't the roof guys just go through your closet into the attic?"

"Because I'd have to clean out my closet."

 

That tracks.

 

Thanks @Jean, @WhiteGhost, and @Bean Sidhe for the cat gifs! <3

 

10 hours ago, Severine said:

Your brother is not only an asshole, he is a small selfish man full of fear and self-loathing whose only moments of feeling powerful or strong come from rejecting or abusing the few people who care about him. He is completely incapable of equitable or genuine relationships in his current state because not only does he have nothing to give, emotionally, but even if he did he would never think to be good to anyone but himself. It is my opinion that even when he does things that look like kindness from the outside, like paying you to do an errand for him or engaging in a civil conversation, it's actually something he's doing FOR HIM - he wants to feel like he's not imposing upon you or leeching off you, so he gives you money so he can feel better about himself. He has conversations with you FOR HIM, right up until the moment you displease him and then BAM the ice wall goes down and he ceases to be a person and your feelings cease to matter except as a vehicle to punish you for displeasing him.

 

I don't know if I've ever said this outright but just in case I haven't: in my opinion you are completely justified, morally, from walking away from your brother, washing your hands of him completely, and letting his fate be what it may. He may flounder and he may die, but in no sane universe do you owe it to him to try anything more to prevent that. We've talked about this and I know you say you don't feel like he's your responsibility, but incidents like this make it clear that somewhere underneath you've got complex feelings about their bullshit. So I just want to say as an outside observer - you owe him nothing and the only attention you should pay to him is to make sure he doesn't drag you under with him.

Oh yeah, totally. Like when I say "he's learning that he's being annoying because he gives me money for doing things" I mean he recognizes that he's a fucking pain in the ass and if he wants me to keep doing shit for him he's got to give me an incentive. Realistically I have no hope that he'll magically morph into a good person and I'm basically at the point where I'm like "if you're so okay with vomiting yourself to death, can you just hurry up and do it?" I just wish the part of me that still hopes he'll stop being a dick would get the memo and redirect the optimism to something more likely to happen. 

 

I'm not sure you've said it before in so many words, but you and pretty much everyone here and my therapist have made it pretty clear anyway. And I totally agree with you. But that doesn't stop the super fun "but if I'm good enough then he'll love me!" thing. In all honestly that's the most frustrating part: my brother has always been a dick and always will be, and this behavior is not a new thing and not a surprise, but it still hurts when he's a dick even though I expect nothing else.

 

10 hours ago, Severine said:

This is a completely normal trauma response to abuse. This is a thing that was done to you. You feel guilty and responsible because it was useful to your abusers for you to feel guilty and responsible. This is not you being foolish or weak or coping poorly. This is the trauma response. You feel this way because of what they did. They treated you like crap, alternatingly neglected and belittled you, made you responsible for all the work while giving you credit for none of it, and devalued everything you were good at and all your contributions while inflating any perceived transgression into a means to blame and chastise you. Everything you're feeling is shitty for you, and useful for them, and that's why it was done to you - to keep you compliant and trapped in their web. None of it is your fault. You have already gone miles toward escaping it, and you are stronger than them, and you WILL escape it. But don't blame yourself for not being free of it all yet.

 

I know you know you don't deserve it and it's bullshit and all of that. But I think we both know there's a difference between knowing something in your logical brain and knowing it and believing it deep down in the dark squishy parts of our emotional subconscious. There's a difference between knowing something in your logical brain and knowing it in your nervous system, which has stress reactions and gets tense in certain environments and certain situations because of years of conditioning. 

 

This is a thing my therapist keeps reinforcing with me - what we call "the mind" is actually in large part the body. It's the lower parts of the brain that are all about instinct, it's the sympathetic nervous system, it's hormones and the physiological stress response. Our thoughts and emotions don't just live in the brain. And you're not broken or weak because you can't just talk yourself out of the fears, responses, and emotions built up over thirty years of abuse. With trauma, it's 100% normal to "know" something and yet not be able to act on it or believe it or change your response, because if the only place change has occurred is in the logical brain, it's not powerful enough to overrule all the rest of that stuff. You can't out-think a knot in your stomach because the knot comes from a very different place than the thinking brain.

 

With trauma, sometimes the remedy cannot be had via thinking. Sometimes the only way to change your responses is by having new experiences, experiencing new feelings, that teach our nervous system and our other physical systems that input patterns can change. It helps to have experiences with people who are not like your family, experiences with mutual respect and boundaries and compassion. It helps to live in a safe, pleasant place where nobody goes insane when you clean something. It helps to have repeated interactions with people who value your feelings and care about their impact on you and have reasonable expectations of you. Thinking is useful in helping you know what experiences/coping mechanisms will aid recovery, of course, but those things take time.

 

There is no amount of telling yourself you should feel a certain way that can substitute for those experiences. Your body is not going to encode new responses based on written instructions. It just won't. That's not how emotional/physiological responses work. It's going to take more therapy, more non-family experiences, more of a lot of stuff. But you are on the road. That's part of why it chafes so much more than it used to, why it feels so much more infuriating - you can see the bars of the cage now.

 

This is progress, I swear.

Bolded that line at the end because holy shit.

 

You made a whole bunch of good points but for some reason all I'm taking from it is "ugh, I need to try yoga again." Which is tangential at best to what you're saying, so I'm not sure why my brain has latched onto this of all things. I guess I'm asking my therapist this week about how to deal with the physical shit. But I totally get what you're saying and I know you're talking about essentially rewriting my learned responses to all of the bullshit. And yay, more things I need to do but can't til I'm in a better place. rawr. >> Mentally, at least, if not actually living somewhere else.

 

10 hours ago, Severine said:

I can think of twenty reasons why this isn't the case, and I know that you know, logically, the counters to what you just typed. There's a long list of logistical and practical reasons (money, student loans, lease timing, lack of information about eventual job location, etc.) that have led you to postpone moving out and all of them are perfectly reasonable. There's a long list of social factors at play, too - there are literally hundreds of thousands of well-educated millennials in the exact same position as you because of forces that have nothing to do with your personal worth. Like, I'm pretty sure you're not to blame for the gig economy, the de-funding of refugee settlement programs, the corporate trend to rely on temps and contractors instead of making new full time hires, or degree inflation causing everyone to feel pressure to get a masters degree with predatory private lenders skulking about the edges making a profit on it.

 

Like, if you decide you want to move out, I think that decision makes sense. You have good reason. I will be there with my truck and I will help you move your shit. But if you decide you want to stay there until you figure out a way to make the smoothest and most stable transition to your next place possible, I think that decision makes sense too. There are hardships along either road and it's your choice which road you take, which hardships feel more tolerable right now. You are never, never responsible for abuse that other people heap upon you just because you're in the same building as them and that building happens to have a door.

It feels absolutely ridiculous to say that despite all the bullshit I feel like I'm better off staying here until I get shit figured out. But I'm still 100% sure, thanks to having lived away from here in the past, that I will flounder even more than I am now if I were to move just for the sake of getting away. Le sigh. I know it's not my fault that shitty people are shitty. But when I'm super upset like I was last night the easier answer to "why am I so miserable" is "well here's a laundry list of ways you could've stopped being miserable but you didn't follow though." Boooo. Thanks for reinforcing that my brain is a dick though.

 

10 hours ago, Severine said:

That quote is oversimplifying victim blaming apolegetics. It ignores the realities of mental health AND the realities of power imbalances in the world. Sure, personal responsibility can be an empowering perspective in many situations! But it makes a really shitty universal maxim in a world as cruel as ours.

Yessss. Like it probably helps some people out there. But in general, fuck that.

 

15 hours ago, Tanktimus the Encourager said:

Severine gave one hell of a good response. I want to reiterate that your statements DO reflect progress. You were aware of what you were feeling and articulated how it made you feel physically and emotionally. You cognitively know, recognize and acknowledge the reframing that will be helpful. Those are necessary baby steps to the emotions being easier to live with. Two years ago you would not have been able to do that.

 

All your feelings and emotions that you mentioned are valid. Every. Single. One.

 

I don't think you're an idiot, and I do acknowledge that you feel that way for still living at home. 

 

You're a good person in a very bad situation.

 

Flea is Awesome.

What kind of sorcery do you practice to make me tear up over nearly all of your posts here? Not cool, man. 

 

jk I think it's because you're usually pointing out things I've done or said well and I still can't handle anything that remotely resembles acknowledgment or praise so my brain just short circuits. (Complicated by the fact that you're a GL and also Know Things about this stuff irl so my brain has deemed you An Authority Figure in addition to just cool internet friend.) Which is also why you're the most likely to get sarcasm or jokes or something in response because I literally don't know how to respond. -__-

 

9 hours ago, RES said:

Flea IS Awesome!!

 

I won't go into how many times I have felt  like this...suffice it to say I get it, how you feel can make you think like you are (insert derogatory comment here) but trust me when I say you're not, no one knows your situation or your reasons better than you do. REGARDLESS of what anyone else thinks about it. 

 

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