stMarkus Posted March 1, 2013 Posted March 1, 2013 Hello everyone! I am 21 years old, I live and study in Estonia and I haven’t really posted anything yet. I’ve been listening to FDR for about a year. Anyway lately I have been trying to get in touch with my real feelings and needs and it’s starting to feel hopeless again. All I feel is tremendous rage and fear that is preventing me from really experiencing or expressing that rage. Along with the rage and the fear comes very deep sadness and hopelessness. The sadness seems to be about my feeling that I can never be who I want to be and because of that I can never feel love or happiness or any real enjoyment. That makes me feel like I’m dead, completely empty, like everything is meaningless. On top of all that I’ve created a fake personality inside myself that tries to appear happy and satisfied despite all the rage and sadness and who pretends to like people who treat me like crap and don’t care about me at all. It seems that whenever I feel too scared and ashamed to express my real emotions, the fake personality assumes control over myself automatically. That makes me feel like I have no control over who I am and in those moments I become that shallow and fake person that I created long ago to protect myself. At the moment I am trying prevent the fake personality from taking over but I find it very hard to be the real me because in doing that all I feel is rage, fear and shame. I have tried being in that state for two days in my school and I found it impossible to talk to anyone or feel anything besides the aforementioned emotions. In this state I am too scared to talk to anyone because I don’t want to talk to them as my fake personality and yet I feel too scared to express my real self. That leaves me only one option which is to not talk to anyone and isolate myself from all people. My fear of expressing my real self seems to come from the feeling that I mustn’t let anyone notice my real self, my real emotions. In my desire to express my real self I feel very vulnerable and tremendously afraid about the fact that someone might notice me expressing myself. This fear seems to apply more to women but it is definitely very strong on most other people as well. This feeling of fear and shame in expressing my real self prevents me from establishing any kind of relationships that would give me satisfaction. In fact it pretty much cuts me off from all the rest of the people in the world. It seems that the only way I can socialize with others is by maintaining the fake personality that has been my façade for most of my life so far. Nevertheless I’d rather be cut off from all people and face the pain than try to hide the pain with that hideous personality. So essentially my experience in trying to take part in social life is me constantly scanning all the people around me in fear that they might catch me in expressing my real self and during this time I will have assumed this personality that has nothing to do with who I really am. In this case I would feel empty, unsatisfied and bored so I would just avoid people, because they seem unable to offer anything of value to me. In another case where I would actually try to express myself, I would feel overwhelmed by fear and stress; there would be physical symptoms of GAS syndrome like fast and shallow breathing and I would generally feel that I’m going to die if I actually express myself. In this case it would feel impossible and hopeless to try to get any enjoyment out of socializing with people and I would be, yet again, inclined to isolate myself. All this, of course, is a good indication of what my childhood was like. I have an older brother (4 years older than me), who tortured and dominated me until I was in my teens. When I wasn’t entirely a child anymore the physical abuse and domination from my brother ended but he seemed to compensate all that by humiliating me in other ways. I was always the weak and vulnerable one in my relationship with my brother, his domination over me was relentless and without mercy and over time I’m sure that I created a personality in myself that would invite less attack from him. That personality would be helpless, stupid, ignorant, incapable of anger, accepting of all unfair criticism and insults without proper emotional reaction and always scanning my brother’s emotional state. By scanning him constantly for emotional feedback I would know what kind of behavior to manifest in the coming moments to suit my brother’s needs and so to protect myself. This is exactly what I do in the midst of people right now. Of course I never got to be the real me with my brother, because that way I would be in his mercy without all those intricate protection mechanisms that were made to protect me from my brother in the first place. And whad’ya know, I can’t be myself with all the other people as well! There seeeeeeems to be a connection here. Maybe. Besides I notice myself all too often assuming this helpless, stupid and ignorant character that I’ve grown to hate and feel ashamed about. But the most disconcerting is definitely the feeling of being unworthy feelings like love, happiness, enjoyment, self-worth or the ability to take pride in my achievements and myself. As you can imagine my brother wasn’t a fucked up person just because he decided it would be great fun to be that way. Our father was violent, uncontrollable, full of rage and an extremely scary person in general. My brother happened to be the target of my father’s rage, humiliation and violence and it seems that my brother tried to pass all that pain onto me. I know that my brother was very scared of my father and he felt completely helpless in his power. It makes me cry when I think about situations, when we were children and I saw my brother’s face light up with fear and helplessness when my father started harassing him. This reminds me that my brother was once entirely good and could have loved me like I needed him to. Instead he became a bad and corrupted person and eventually resorted to drugs and alcohol and became a failure in life, at least in my eyes. It just breaks my heart to think about the potential for love and happiness he had as a child and how I saw him slowly destroyed by my father’s rage and how my mother completely neglected him by not making him or me feel safe from his father. The lack of love, the feeling of helplessness, fear, loneliness and isolation throughout my childhood just tears me to pieces. I can recall situations when my father was yelling at my mother and me and my brother ganged up on our father and told him to shut up and it actually worked, because it made him too ashamed to continue harassing our mother. So it seems that we tried to battle the corruption and hate coming from our parents but gradually it still managed to eat its way into our hearts and now my brother seems to be permanently corrupted and I have lost all capability to open myself to people. There was also my mother who seems to have become deeply ingrained in the deepest parts of my being, like the parasite that she was. I seem to have formed a deep attachment to her that started in my younger years, when I was too young to really remember anything. I feel that she completely ignored my need for her to reflect back my affection towards her, in fact she ignored my feelings entirely, because she was incapable of empathy towards me. But she did use my affection for her as a tool to get me hopelessly dependent on her. That way I would be entirely at her power, I would do anything she said, because she made me believe that my love for her was reciprocal. I was her little doll that she used to make her feel less miserable and lonely since her husband was a retard and treated her like shit. I still managed to be rather happy and sociable until my teen years where everything turned to shit and started feeling depressed and worthless. Then my parents broke up when I was about 13-14yo and I lived with my father for a little while, because I had grown too sick of my mother, but soon I grew sick of my father too and I started living with my mother. Now I was alone with her and she treated me like I was nothing so I always felt terribly alone and worthless with her. By that age I had no friends and I had isolated myself from people so the only person I had some kind of relationship with was my mother. I always felt I was dependent on her and I expected her to love me, understand me and cure me of my problems and unhappiness. She appears to be a huge factor in why I feel the need to conceal my real self from people. I never managed to let go of the attachment to her so I kept opening myself to her after my puberty despite the fact that he treated me like I was worthless and disposable. Somewhere along the way I assumed a fake personality to suit her needs and this personality has been with me ever since. The problem is that by conning me into believing that she loved me, I always tried to open myself to her completely, which means that it was practically impossible to create a fake personality that she wouldn’t notice was fake. This led to a kind of mind control over me- she needed me to be a person that suited her and every little thing or thought that wasn’t suitable for her was instantly noticed ridiculed. I feel that she had immense power over me, she could manipulate me with just a single look, her control over me was just so horrifyingly deep and it still is. I could hide nothing from her that she wouldn’t notice and either discard or use if it suited her needs. It feels like she raped my mind and I definitely still feel the effects of it very intensely. Part of it is a never-ending deep pain, like a part of me is missing, like I’m broken, incomplete and that makes me feel terribly alone and always needing something that is never there. I don’t completely understand it all yet but I know that she used me as completely as is humanly possible and threw me away when she felt she didn’t need me anymore. I know I feel totally worthless, I’m unable to love or open myself to anyone and I’m totally stuck in feelings of anger, shame, worthlessness and fear. I’ve also seen a dream about her where she rapes me. Other dreams where usually about my family members trying to kill me. Another woman in my family was my grandmother from my mother’s side of the family, who probably had some effect on me. She also used my trust, affection and vulnerability towards my mother and her to hurt and manipulate me and also to render all my attempts to stand up to her inert. She humiliated and belittled me and she was extremely skilled in doing that. I thought she loved me like my mother and so I opened myself to her as much as I could, which means that she also assumed unlimited control over me and eventually almost nothing that happened in my mind was left unnoticed by her. That way when living in my fake personality to suit her needs, I always felt like an all-seeing eye was on me constantly scanning me whether I indeed was that good little dog that I needed to be for her. Like I said this situation manifests in my life with women, where I am afraid to express my true emotions and I feel like nothing that happens in my mind is hidden from women. I feel like women would hate and humiliate my true self and since they seem to see everything that happens in my mind I can’t even look into their eyes without feeling like I’m going to die or something. I feel that they know everything I think and since I think mainly about how to express my true self, it feels like they automatically hate and despise me. This kind of situation creates enormous stress, fear and shame in me and it feels hopeless and impossible to try to establish a relationship with a worthwhile woman. As I am beginning to try to establish my real personality I seem to be stuck in anger that I was never allowed to feel towards my family members. I just don’t really know how to go forward from here, what to do with my anger and progress is starting to feel hopeless. The anger feels never-ending, because it seems as though I can never feel enough anger that would adequately express my emotions for what my family did to me. The hurt seems so big that I will be stuck in anger forever. Also I definitely haven’t really understood the meaning of everything they did to me and that could prevent me from properly experiencing the anger. It would be helpful if you told me about your examples of similar situations and your experience in dealing with being stuck in negative emotions.
LovePrevails Posted March 1, 2013 Posted March 1, 2013 Hi, would you like to speak on skype? I prefer connecting with people by voice if I can, my user ID is Amashaman
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