Where I went “wrong”

I think I figured it out today, where I went “wrong” (see the clip).  The one “wrong” thing I did.

I trusted.

I think I’m slowly learning to live with that. It feels so horribly slow though sometimes, I get so frustrated with my trust issues. It hurts and it’s scary but slowly I’m learning trust is ok to do.  Learning to trust is something we have to do.  I’m slowly learning to communicate with the emotional parts of my brain, slowly I’m learning to calm those parts.  Slowly I gain the trust of those emotional parts. Slowly those emotional parts are learning to hear the logic parts and understand those logic centers.

I wish I could just let go and trust when the situation shows that it’s more than likely safe to do so.  It’s not that easy though.  Lately I’m just so sick of the issues that come with my past and DID.  Lately I’ve been wishing that there was some way I could make it so none of those traumatic experiences ever happened, I’ve been wishing there was some way I could just be over it, “normal”…  Lately I’ve felt like pushing myself harder to change, to try and heal, to go faster than what I get done in therapy, to risk doing things that might re-traumatize or trigger memories I’m not ready for.  I’m NOT going to do that but it’s a struggle to deal with those thoughts and not give in.

Everything will happen in time.  Maybe someday I’ll have more manageable  trust issues.  I can start to see that trust can be a good thing though.  I think I can!  I know I can!  I am…slowly.

Relationships: Men vs. Women

I woke up thinking about this subject for some reason but can’t remember what started it.  I was just aware I was thinking about how I’m so much closer to men than I am to women.  I don’t freak out if a guy wants to give me a hug but I spend so much time worrying about if a female will try/want to give me a hug.  I have only I think told a handful of people about how I internally flip out if another woman wants/tries to hug me and I have gotten a few of the pushy types who tell me I should just get used to it.  I have way more male friends than I do female friends, though I’m working at it.  I thought about how my last therapist thought I was intimidated (meaning physical safety wise) by men because I was not afraid to confront a girl I was pissed off with but I was afraid to even walk on the same path where the guy (who was a part of the same argument) might be walking.

So what is my answer to all this?  I feel like I need to make a chart! Like on of those pro’s and con’s type deals because I feel like this is so complicated for me.  In a nut shell, so far as I have dug in my feelings anyway, here goes my explanation.

I would say that the things that were probably most traumatizing were done by women.  It’s hard to say that though because I don’t remember the who, what, when, where, or any of that detail I just have the feelings.  Ok, so there is some crap that I remember most of that is verbal abuse and boundary crossing.  Those types of abuse I would say though are pretty easy to label in the moment.  I mean even though a lot of it is technically covert, you know it feels really bad.  Plus the women that I hold most suspect are the ones that I “should” be closest to, the ones I’m supposed to trust the most.  The men in my life however have mostly been “unimportant” or for the most part people I wouldn’t immediately feel I was supposed to trust.  I would say probably all of the men used manipulation instead of overt forms abuse (minus me being held at gun point).  So, instead of having a feeling of this is bad and wrong they left me feeling very confused about myself and what had just happened.  How about this, here’s two examples of similar incidents:

My mom, I think I made a post about this awhile ago actually sorry if I repeat, starts cussing and calling me names after getting frustrated trying to teach me fractions as a kid.  She knows I have a severe learning disability in math but she loses her cool and lets me know just how stupid she thinks I must be, she even questions out loud whether I just might be retarded.   Can you say OUCH!  It doesn’t matter what you do to that memory, you can try to twist it any which way there is just no making it rosy.

Now take my dad, he’s not the type to do that at all.  What he will do is tell me how smart I am!  Your thinking “Ok, and…” me too! Then he will say that the whole learning disability label is stupid and that they just slapped that label on me for no reason.  He’ll tell me I’m paying way too much attention to that label and I just need to try harder.  He’ll go on and on about all the things he struggles with or doesn’t want do/doesn’t have interest in but that he succeeds because he works hard at it.  He says that’s what smart people do.  Are you trying to figure this whole spiel out? Cause I am and it’s been years since we had this conversation last.  He basically spins me in circles so I have no clue what he’s really trying to say.  He says I’m smart but yet I’m not smart enough apparently, not as smart as him anyway.  It’s so confusing and only after going through the whole conversation (years later) can I see it’s a spun out put down.

So I guess in my head I don’t feel like the experiences with men left me …I don’t want to say not traumatized or that it’s better trauma than that with the women…with the same traumatization as with the women in my life.  It’s a different level/type of trauma.  Then I think about men as allies in a way,  I think about the whole idea of ‘rescuers’.   I have had a number of men who were willing to step up to the ‘rescuer’ role so think I figure most of my male friends would too.  I don’t think I have ever seen a woman in my life in the ‘rescuer’ role.  It’s hard for me to think of another female as an ally.  Which makes some sense, it feels like most women in my life were blatantly ‘out to get me/hurt me’.  So I’m suspect.

As for that observation by my old therapist…totally off.  I was more afraid of losing an ally in the guy friend, I was afraid of giving everything away to that person, and finding out that person was not an ally at all.  I could confront the female because I knew exactly ‘what’ she was, I felt I stood to lose nothing because I invested nothing.

I know there is a lot more to this and I’ve barely sorted it out, probably why it pops up again and  again for me.  So I’ll probably return to it in a similar post down the line.