A shell within a shell

I need to write. I was reading the other day about INFP’s (my results for the Myerrs Briggs Test). This stands for introverted, intuition based, feeling, and perceiving. Basically, the way that I am is *very* internal. I’m feeling this more and more as of lately. It’s isolating yet at the same time I feel such a deep need for solitude. I hate being around people that aren’t like me because they usually make a lot of noise and have superficial interactions and whatnot. They are not sensitive like I am. They do not need deep intellectual and emotional conversations like I do. They do not feel deprived if they don’t get this. In fact they could probably do without it. I wish I could be the type of person that could be carefree, but I’m not. I never truly have been. I’m a worrier. A constant analyzer. I’m an observer. I realized most of my social interactions/experiences are based in me empathizing with other people and listening to them. I’m the type of person that people come to to vent, to look for emotional support, and a listening ear. I’ve come to realize that despite the fact that I believe I generally have a strong sense of self, I don’t assert that self within my relationships. Even though my boundaries have become much stronger and healthier, I still put myself on the back burner most of the time. I find that within my relationships I am constantly asking how they are or I inquire about their current emotional state. Once they reply to me I listen completely and then I respond with mostly emotional support. At the same time, when I provide this type of thing, I also automatically am very straightforward and to the point with them. I essentially leave myself out of it. This is a good thing for them and a good trait to have as a person. However it is not so good for me. It makes it so that my needs and concerns are essentially in the background. On top of that I have an unassertive personality. So, basically I have a really hard time telling people how I truly feel in person. I think I even alter what I say in order to make it easier or less heavy for them. I used to do this with my therapist even. I didn’t want to show him all of me because then I thought he’d have a lower opinion of me and I really admired him. I definitely have a pattern of idealizing people and then devaluing them. Switching back and forth between the two. All the while I continue to put them first.

I feel like I have a pretty strong idea of who I am and why I’m here. I have had so much time and experiences already in the 25 years that I’ve been alive to figure this out. I’ve been through so much and I’ve empathized with others who have been through a lot to the point where it feels like I went through the same thing they did TOO. So, I have my own baggage and then I also have other people’s baggage. I feel I’ve gotten pretty good at not letting my baggage define me. But I still have a hard time not empathizing so strongly with people that I care for. I have created higher standards for myself in regards to what I will put up with and not put up with. I have made it clear that I will not keep a flaky, wishy washy person in my life. I also will not keep an overly aggressive, demanding, violent person in my life either. I used to put up with this shit so much before.

With the latter, most of that was not by my choice. I grew up in a house where my father believed and even said that he was the patriarch. My oldest brother grew up to be a shit ton like him. They both have severe cases of Bi-polar. But beyond that, they have very egocentric and aggressive personalities. They are the type to lash out at any and all people that are around them whether or not they’ve even done anything to warrant this. It is impossible to have a healthy relationship with either of them, so I no longer do. I tried really hard with them. But they took advantage of my sensitive & empathetic nature. They criticized me frequently and I never amounted to what they expected of me. Me being the way that I am (the exact opposite of their personalities), I of course internalized all of this emotional and psychological abuse.

I am the type of person that cares deeply for humanity and all living things. If you’re close to me I care about you even more and I let you know on a regular basis that I care and want to know how you’re doing. Basically after years and years of this shit I became increasingly depressed and eventually went pretty close to mute. My tendency to internalize my true emotions and needs only got stronger and then my inner voice also became a mirror of the way my father treated me. I beat myself up emotionally on a regular basis. I believed I was inadequate and incapable of becoming a fully functional adult. I believed I was weak and eventually I simply wanted to kill myself. In my mind I literally thought that I was now going to get revenge on the people in my family who hurt me so much. I had planned to do this is a discreet way, and I planned to take them down with me as far as how they were doing emotionally. I decided to give up on having hope of improvement and I decided that I was going to kill myself. I never thought out plans in detail as far as how I was going to do it goes, but I felt very strongly on a regular basis that I would rather not even be alive.

The only feelings that I could still feel consistently were negatives ones like sadness, anxiety, and anger. At the time I had absolutely horrible insomnia for over a year as well. I felt like a shell of myself and the person inside was just wasting away and useless. I physically found myself unable to read. Before this point in my life I was excellent with reading comprehension and words. I could no longer verbalize anything except occasionally talking about my anguish. No one took it seriously though. As usual the people in my family did not validate the fact that I needed to be hospitalized. I was never truly allowed to express my negative emotions and needs to them without it being disregarded, criticized, or cast away. Their emotions, their needs, and their demands were always expected to be the absolute priority. They manipulated the fuck out of me and I wanted to give that back to them. I wanted them to know how it felt to be me after being subjected to their treatment. I wanted to debilitate them like they did to me. Then again, of course, being the person that I am, I internalized this decision as well. I began to thoroughly hate myself and I honestly believed I was possessed. I believed demons lived in my bedroom. I believed that I had become evil. So, in reality, I was still destroying myself more than I was anyone else. In my family the only way a mental breakdown would be acknowledged and treated would be if the person had this break down in an extremely loud, outward way. My brother would have manic breakdowns and was hospitalized several times. My dad had gone through the same thing many times over.

The length and detail within this post itself just goes to show how internally I process and react to things. All of these stories and feelings have been building up in my psyche for so long, and I never feel I can truly share them with anyone else. Maybe I need a therapist again. I’ve never felt like I got true empathy from anyone else about what I went through. The only person who did that even minimally was my older half sister. But she was and is way more emotionally fucked up than I am. A lot of this empathy was through online messaging, so it doesn’t have the same affect either. I supposed I should start another post to complete the rest of what I feel I need to write about because this is already insanely long.