Hello
My daily life is a mini workshop
of trying to navigate the few ties I have left - I divorced a year and a half ago, that went okay, but after 28 years of doing the head against the wall begging/pleading/explaining/fuming/despairing routines of marriage with a man so like my father it was ridiculous. My ex's dx of antisocial personality disorder didn't soften the notion that I had chosen very poorly back at age 22. My children are the sole way I look at my life as a success even as much as I hurt inside.
Expectations get me every time. Even just in friendships - I think if I am having x motives for being around this person, that it's a give and take thing... . way too often I find that I am on the unbalanced end of it doing too much, caregiving basically.
All the red flags in the world can go up, and I will rationalize away what ends up being very very ugly behaviors.
Since the divorce, I attempted time with 2 men. Let's just leave it at... . both dismal horrible failures. Too much happened too soon, they are both raving narcissists (charming and interesting and smart and all that, then sliding into more and more hurtful selfish comments and demands) that whittled me down to how I felt so many years ago as a child.
I seek it out. I have to apparently as I am the common tie or hub it swirls around.
My codependent stuff from so many years ago designed my mental wiring that it is okay for me to suck up crap for a long long time before I say, My god, I'm outta here.
Weeks and months of it. Then on top of finally feeling anger about how I've allowed it and they DID it, I am ashamed and sickened at myself that a woman my age, with some level of intelligence, got duped again.
"Fool me once, shame on you - fool me twice, shame on me." Have you ever heard that? I would say it's the best little mantra of being codependent around. People don't come looking for us to abuse us. We stumble across them and then fire up the "here, let me help, let me show I care, let me be the person you've been looking for all your life as you call it... . "
Rescuing people has been my job since I was born. I got assigned that role in a very very dysfunctional sick awful environment as a little girl. So in my adult years, except where my children are or were concerned, and adults themselves now it's a different matter, I was wrong to rescue anybody.
And note how long it takes us codependents to RESCUE OURSELVES.
I have to get really really fuming angry, indignant angry, pissed off if the censor will let me type that... . hugely offended, to back away, walk away, communicate that someone has really crossed a line with me. And that I won't be back for more.
Expectations set us up for pain.
Because they are unrealistic. They are not taking into account the reality that as damaged people, we will gravitate towards other damaged people.
Damaged people do damaging things. That would mean us as well.
I picked classic "obvious" cases to rescue over the last year and a half - a man in a wheelchair (our doctor is a paraplegic and he deals with his paralysis like he does his whole life, with courage and strength, so it's not the paralysis) and a man who lost his son to suicide.
Both cases, both times, I saw a way I could help, a way I could make someone's life "better." Why? Who told me these men needed my help? they did of course over and over that I was their whole world (way too fast, but when your father only looked at you all your life with cold disdain, you eat it up), that I was going to change their lives for the better, that they LOVED me, that I was the only woman they'd ever met that made them feel this way... . you know the script, they were selling it and I was buying it.
Crazymaking quickly ensued.
Because my expectation was that I was going to change someone else's life for the better.
Let's be honest, the only way I can change someone's life for the better is to donate to good causes, spend my time doing charity work, greet someone in a minute's time and smile and ask how they are - those are REAL ways to create change... .
I have lost my train of thought
... . but you see what I'm getting at... . we cannot have healthy expectations until we get a healthy picture of ourselves. OUR needs, OUR desires, what WE deserve, WHY we do or do not deserve it.
That means re-writing the script that's been inside our heads for decades. The playwrights in most of our cases here were severely damaged abusive parents.
It took decades to make us this way, it might take decades to turn our lives around and think healthy.
I appreciate your questions so much.
I hope you can hear my echo of "been there, done that" support and encouragement.
At 51, I see so many ways I contributed to my own heartaches.
Especially these recent ones. That slap upside the head where you ask yourself, "You stupid bimbo, what were you possibly thinking?"
Blatant disregard in same pattern of abuse for my well-being and personhood should've sent me running so so fast.
I just don't listen to internal voice. Because it was drowned out so long ago by parents who orchestrated such collateral damage amongst their children. :'(
The re-write starts today. Again.
We can do this.
