I constantly have to put tons of effort into being more positive and into getting closer to staying with those emotions once they do come around. It’s not enough that I’m on anti-depressant, the only one that has ever worked for me. I haven’t been in therapy for a few years now, also partially because of the issues I have. I have a phone phobia and trust issues, so it’s insanely hard for me to even pick up the phone and call different therapists. I like to think that I don’t need a therapist anymore, that I have shit until control now, but I don’t. I need to admit to myself that I am still a damaged person, and that no matter what I do I will never fully be “healed” from the emotionally abusive and controlling childhood I grew up in. I can work on it, I can try to get help in various ways and try to help myself in various ways, but it’s never going to just disappear. It’s something I have to live with. When I started to have panic attacks in my early college years, I was driven towards meditation/spirituality. I sought out books on meditation, and I started to do these meditations fairly often. I started to eat healthier. I did get a lot of help from doing this. I was able to significantly reduce my panic attacks from this. It wasn’t until years later that I finally got on the anti-depressant that got rid of my panic attacks, and significantly improved the other psychological issues I had that lead to me functioning very poorly.

I haven’t lived with my whole dysfunctional family for years. My dad did the most damage on me psychologically by far. My mom did too, but in a pretty different way. After years and years of constant and frightening verbal arguments between my two parents, and years and years of being controlled in every way by my drill-sergeant-esq father, I got pretty fucked up. I also had to watch my oldest brother go through a few different mental breakdowns, as a result of our crazy upbringing. When I was 12 years old I went downstairs in the basement to find my dad holding my brother up against a wall by his throat. My brother had his face all painted up in Mudvayne-esq style. He hadn’t slept in days. My brother was having his first Bi-polar mental breakdown and my insane father thought he could fix him. The problem was that my dad was the one who needed fixing, and no amount of therapy and medications ever really did fix him, or get him anywhere near normal functioning.

I remember seeing my brother taken away by an ambulance. I remember visiting him in the hospital and my dad crying when he told me how my brother said “I’m sorry” to him when he got his first Haldol injection, to take him out of his psychotic episode. I remember feeling such intense sadness and sympathy for the both of them. They were both and still are such damaged people. I tried for so many years to make things better for them, to be there for them, to try to psychologically support and care for them in a way that most people couldn’t. What I did and what they fostered was mostly just a really unhealthy and psychologically dependent relationship with the two of them. I’d like to try to “re-frame” my upbringing but it’s really no use. The damage was done and all I can do now is try to heal. All I feel I can really do is try to learn how to cope in a healthy way. But at 25 years old I have still yet to learn how to do that.

I’m not the same exact person I was as a moody 13 year old. I don’t spend my time feeling sorry for myself or being depressed all the time. I don’t feel hopeless about everything like I used to. I’m free from the bonds of my family that lead to fuck me up so badly. But like I said before the damage was done, and it will last me a lifetime.

I believe I was born a Highly Sensitive Person and an Empath. Then I grew up in a household that was terrible for someone like me. My upbringing would fuck up people who are minimally sensitive, never mind someone as sensitive as I was/am. My parents were/are both really sensitive people as well. But something tells me they aren’t as sensitive as I am. I felt everything that happened between the two of them, between me and each of them separately, between my two brothers, between my brothers and my parents, all so strongly. I felt the impact of all of it. I’d rather view myself as a survivor than a victim but at the same time I don’t think I’ve loved myself enough to validate the fact that I was a victim. I

feel like no one truly understands me. I have felt like that for most of my life. Every time I get anywhere near close to feeling like someone understands me, I find out in one way or another that they don’t. They have no idea what my mind is like, they have no idea just how emotional I am. I know I can’t use this as an excuse for me to treat anyone any particular way, but I feel like I put so much fucking effort into treating everyone really well. I feel like I’m generally super caring towards most people, and I generally love people. I see the best in everyone, much more than most people I know. Because I have such a deep understanding of psychology though and of emotional sickness though as well, I can clearly see other people’s issues too. Because I am so empathetic and highly aware of how people can be emotionally affected by others’ words though, I refrain from criticizing people as much as I can. It’s really hard for me to be open and honest with people when it comes to their faults, even though I try so hard to be.

I hold so much in. Since I have taken the Myers’ Briggs Personality Test, and got the result of INFP, things make even more sense. I’m mostly introverted and also very much driven by my emotions, I internalize my emotions. I have *so* many emotions too, and I know the whole spectrum of them very well. There’s so much that I don’t verbalize to other people, for the sake of not bringing them down. I also don’t open up about these things either, because the last thing I want to do is be the way I used to be. I used to be so unraveled that I couldn’t help but talk in depth and way too often about my problems and what I’ve been through. I lost many friends and boyfriends for this reason. I had a close friend tell me that I needed professional help, and then he stopped being my friend. I’ve had many people abandon me. I understand why. Now I shut down more than ever when I’m emotionally upset or stressed. It’s been so rare that people would actually be empathetic when I did open about these things, and it’s also been so rare that I have not been judged or criticized for being as sensitive as I am. I learned not to trust people. I learned to put their needs and their emotions ahead of my own.

I am so tired of having to explain myself, and then that not even helping matters. I’m so tired of trying so hard not to hurt other people, and chose to hurt myself instead by bottling things up and being hard on myself. I have one close friend now who is the person I have felt the most similar to in my entire life. I don’t get to spend time with her very often though. She has yet to be confused by my reactions to things. She has understood where I was coming from every time, and has been more than empathetic and supportive. We’re so much alike. I think she has been through more trauma that I have though, and as of right now her life is much worse than mine. She tells me to contact her whenever I feel I need to, but I find myself refraining from this because I don’t want to bring her down any farther than she already is. I know she has so much stress and negativity around her as is, the last thing I want to do is add to this. I only want to help her. She’s the only other person in the world that I have actually felt is enough like me to understand why I am the way I am. She’s the only person who has ever actually completely validated the level of trauma I’ve been through. She doesn’t judge me. She just understands and listens. She knows what to say and when to say it. God I wish I could see her more often. But more than that I wish I could learn how to provide myself with that same level of care. I wish I could comfort myself when I get in a dark place. I wish I could make myself feel better, or regulate my emotions. I’ve come along way from where I’ve started but, I still have so far to go.

When things get extra stressful, chaotic, or just overwhelming, I retreat. This is what I’ve learned to do. I withdraw and shut down. Sometimes I will vent to people but that only helps momentarily, and even when I do vent I feel bad about it. I wish I could turn my emotional sensitivity down a few notches. I wish I could also become more assertive. I wish I could fully learn some of the Chakra rights. I need to learn that I have the right to speak and feel without fear of punishment or judgment. I need to learn that I have the right to be and to have. That I have the right to my own personal space and that I welcome and wanted in the places that I live or am. I was never really allowed that when I was growing up. I’m glad that I got into spirituality at that time when I really needed it, but I have lost touch with it again for years. I have been sucked into the responsibilities and realities of adult life. Everything is so serious and stark now and it’s hard because this is a new reality to me. My previous realities were terrible and I never did believe things would get better. They have gotten better but now I have a whole new set of harsh realities to face and I feel like I’m suffocating. I try so hard to remain positive. I somewhat succeed but a lot more so when it comes to other people. I can have generally positive viewpoints on people and I’m good at emotionally supporting other people. But I’m pretty terrible at emotionally supporting myself. I never did learn how to do that. I was never taught how because I was never given consistent and healthy emotional support. In fact most of the time I was just never good enough and whenever I did express emotion in the form of sadness it was invalidated and denied. I was told to stop being a baby, to get over it. I don’t know if I will ever will get over being told to get over it. It’s like the coldest thing you could say to someone in pain, other than worse things like telling them they are worthless (which I have was told many times over as well).

I just want to move into the new chapter of my life and get away from all that is negative or makes me feel hopeless.

I just had a major fight with my boyfriend, which probably stemmed from how I was feeling earlier today. My sleep schedule has been so fucked lately. I pulled pretty much an all-nighter earlier in the week to do that Art History paper I was mentioning in my previous post. I slept not even one hour that night, and then I didn’t even nap. I didn’t get enough sleep any of the other nights that week either, and I had an exam on Friday as well. On both Friday and Saturday night, I passed out at my boyfriend’s place again at night, got up at about 4:30 am both nights, then drove home.   The first night I did that, after I got home I went to bed at like 5:30 or so, and then slept until noon. I felt sooo tired all day, and extremely depressed and moody as well. I once again had a lot of work I should have been doing, considering this coming week is absolute insanity at school, since spring break is coming after this Friday.

I didn’t do ANY work that day, ended up going back over my boyfriend’s but not until the nighttime, and then I passed out at like midnight or something there, only to wake up at like 5:30 or so (which apparently was actually 4:30 now because of daylight savings time). So yeah I drove home and such, but then I was sooo confused because two clocks in non-technological devices had an earlier time than my phone and computer did. I was soo mind-fucked by this and tried adjusting these clocks but it wasn’t making sense. Didn’t end up going to bed until like 7:30 or something (which was probably 6:30 actually, again because of the time change), and then I slept until fuckin 6:30 at night!! I only woke up because my mom came in to wake me up. I was so deeply asleep that I had no idea how late it was. I didn’t set an alarm that night for the next morning because I knew I so badly needed to catch up on sleep, but I had no idea I would’ve slept until the nighttime without one set. Anyways I woke up all freaked out because sleeping until 6:30 at night is horrible & my schedule had already been so fucked up lately. My mom’s reaction to me sleeping late also made it worse, because right when she came in she said “Are you alright?” And that set me up to feel like I really wasn’t alright. I honestly hate when people ask that shit at the wrong time. It’s obviously not helpful to ask that in a situation such as me sleeping late, because it’s not like I was actually in a real coma or something. OBVIOUSLY I was just very fucking tired. Anyways I really didn’t need to write this much to explain what I just did.

Because of the fucked up sleep schedule and sleeping at weird hours like that, I felt dissociated for hours after I woke up. This freaked me the fuck out on top of me already freaking out about sleeping that late and about the fact that I was supposed to do work all that day to make up for not doing it the previous day. I texted my boyfriend for reassurance, basically in asking for him to tell me something grounding, and he was in such a not-serious mood that his responses were flat out stupid. First of all he was saying he didn’t even know what I meant by grounding and second of all he just kept saying like little kid, meaningless things. It really irritated me, primarily because he’s usually the person that makes me feel very grounded. At this point I didn’t know what to do because I still felt pretty much outside of myself/like I was in an alternate universe and I just felt like I wasn’t really in reality. It made me realize that it’s so easy to dissociate from reality, especially for me, because it’s so easy for me to revert to my fantasy world/imagination. I’ve spent so much time there as a way to deal with the horrid reality I’ve been in in many different parts of my life, so much that I now have to battle losing myself in my thoughts/imagination. Of course this couldn’t work all the way and make me unconcerned with reality, or totally nonchalant, so on top of this I’m still an incredible worrier, and I stress out all the time about the real pressures of the world. This doesn’t mean I do to the extent of actually working as hard as I should, it just means that I think about it so much that I make myself go nuts over it. I decided to text a friend of mine who is a Psych major too, and she gave me concrete examples of what to do when feeling dissociated. This helped a lot.

The fight I got in with my boyfriend later was over other, sort of unrelated bullshit, and I guess I kind of started the argument. I wasn’t trying to instigate a fight, I just wanted him to remind me why he loved me, or what it was about me that has affected him or made an influence on him. I wanted to be validated. I feel like I always bend over backwards to point out his strengths, good traits, etc. I thank him every single time he does something nice for me, and I constantly remind him how much I love him, as well as compliment him on the things that make me attracted to him. I don’t feel like he does the same for me. He’s a great boyfriend to me, i’m not saying he isn’t, it’s just that as a person that needs constant reassurance, I don’t feel I get enough of it from him. He does tell me he loves me a lot and he’s very sweet and affectionate, but I want to hear in words too that I make an impact on him. I want to know that he loves me for more than just what I can provide. I know I shouldn’t need him to remind me all the time since we have a pretty good relationship, but I have a really hard time fending off these insecure thoughts and feelings. They only get worse when I practically dig for reassurances and then I get nothing or a bad response in return. This whole fight was online too, but I felt it was only getting worse and convincing me of what I already thought. I ended up being in tears for what seemed like hours, in a practically breaking-down manner. I felt like my existence had no impact on others or the outside world, and that I was essentially useless. Just now I had the thought that maybe I think this unconsciously because my father ingrained this thought into my head for a lot of my teenager years. He told me all the time that I was useless, lazy, a baby. I could never measure up to his expectations, and I never had the extremely high work ethic he expected of me. I never had the extremely high athletic ethic either, despite his non-stop pressures and forcing. I ran through many a cross-country seasons, through multiple injuries, all because he forced me to and because he reminded me how disappointed he was in me all of the time.

Anyways I feel a lot better now, but now it’s 2:20 in the morning and i’m supposed to be up in 7 hours for classes. And then I have shit tons of studying to do after classes, and I know i’m going to be really tired again. I’m not even sure i’ll be able to fall asleep before like 5 in the morning. I feel bad now for saying the things I did to my boyfriend, and for probably also making him feel inadequate for not being able to help me or for making me feel worse. I have very high expectations for him too, and this is another reason why I get so fucking annoyed when my brother tells me   I can do better than him. What the fuck does he know anyway. I just can’t get those kinds of comments out of my head, because first of all, this is a reiteration of shit my Dad has said to me for so much of my life, about every guy i’ve dated, and second of all, he has no idea what he’s talking about!! He barely even knows my boyfriend. He’s basing these comments off of the fact that he knows he’s not in college right now, and doesn’t have a job. I’m sorry but that’s not enough to go off of and there is so much more to the story/to my boyfriend as a whole to go and decide that because he isn’t doing these typical things that he’s a loser or something. I’m just so fucking tired of having my family’s elitist comments stuck in my head, and then being re-drilled in my head by them saying them STILL. Basically the reason why Associations is in my post title too is because I have way too many associations in my head with previous traumas and previous verbal abusers in my life, so much that even YEARS later I still can’t get this shit out of my head. I can’t stop associating the actions/words of current people with the previous ones. If they even SLIGHTLY remind me  of something from the past, which doesn’t take much considering how much fucking material there is in that department, I react in pretty much the same way I did before. And even now, now that I’m not hysterical and fighting with my boyfriend, now that I cried it all out, I’m still feeling like distancing myself from him tomorrow via not really talking to him. I’m hurt still & to a degree I still feel like he was insensitive. I want him to try to right the wrongs and to try hard to regain my trust and such. I want him to care enough to do what is necessary. This may be irrational or unfair, but I do feel like I need to test people to see if they are worth trusting, even after I’ve established trust with them. I’ve had so many people gain my trust and then shit all over it, only to keep coming in and out of being trustable, for so much of my life. As a result I’m very paranoid and untrusting of the world and the people in it.