Trusting Others Still Very Hard

[bethanny]

I wish that understanding would "cure" the emotional hard-wiring we endured growing up in dysfunctional households, in my case an alcoholic and borderline one.

I remember when I joined the 12 step rooms years ago people talked about how recovery was tough because it helped us inventory and recognize our character defects and at frequent times we felt we were getting worse not better as human beings.  The truth was we were breaking through our ego-denial and before recovery it was too brittle for us to seriously handle the reality of ourselves.

We were raised walking on egg shells with the perfectionism mandate and just as our significant others were conditional with their love, our acceptance of ourselves became self-sabotagingly conditional, making us hide from ourselves our symptoms and character defects, their frequency and degrees.  

I also remember hearing the helpful expression that our character defects were our defense mechanisms that helped us survive growing up but in our adult world they were toxic baggage that needed shedding.  We needed to become reasonable with ourselves and to monitor our conditioned toxic tendencies.

My point is there was a flipping growing up between grandiosity and self-hate with me from all the over-reaction of two very disordered parents and throw in one-shame-inducing sibling. When I disappoint others I over-react. When others disappoint me I over-react.

I have had a number of dramatic moments in my history when I became irrationally frightened or angry or confused with people who have bumped into and challenged my boundaries. When people prove untrustworthy I can still freak, and question them seriously and my commitment and trust in them.  

Conflict resolution had not been role modeled for me. More all or nothing terms on relationships.  

And I also am still so conditioned to be codependent -- over-accommodating especially early on with new friends -- I am not honest and self-respectful often enough in building a balanced kind of social contract with them.

Throw in that I often still am attracted to people who can be more willing to "take" more than they are willing to "give", though I am better at figuring it out sooner rather than later nowadays.  But I can still harbor a naivete that my giving guarantees the other person will feel honor bound to provide the same commitment back when and if I ask for help.  Assumptions that eventually get tested and with my history and conditioning at times they have not been pretty.

My last "best friend" and with whom I am no longer in contact triggered a PTSD moment with me.  We had had some heavy bumps in the relationship where she was seeming more and more waifish and I began over-promising to her and then being scolded for not coming through with impossible promises which I had a big part in setting myself up for, but I saw she seemed to have a knack for not only me putting myself out for her in extraordinary ways but others in her life, though I became first string.

I am a recovering codependent of an alcoholic father and borderline mother, she a recovering alcoholic. I emphasize that since at the end of our friendship it felt like there was that kind of an enmeshment that had taken place. The enabler/addict lock.

I once asked her when she was scolding me for not having done enough in the circumstances I tried to help that if the tables were turned, would she be willing to have tried to do what she had asked me to do for her. She paused for a minute and then this look of amazement came over her face and she actually had a big laugh and said, "Not in a million years!" She later sent me an apology and a small gift. I felt like there was hope, Helen Keller had folded her napkin so to speak.  

But despite such progress I saw I had to really work to stay awake to my codependency and her growing dependency on me.

Then there was a crisis with her husband who became ill.  I became enmeshed out of pity for both of them and became less vigilant about my own friendship rights because of that.  I also felt like I was caught up in a scenario that harkened back to my entrapment with my own parents.

My friend was stressed.  I appreciated that and saw that stress can make us narcissistic. I cut her a lot of slack. One day when we were together she said something cruel and unwarranted to me. I was stung but I didn't call her on it enough. I had been about to leave.  I didn't get very far when I called her up and left a message on her phone that we needed to talk about what she had said because it had hurt my feelings. The sooner the better. I felt really impressed with myself that I was willing to be proactive and not gunnysack my hurt with her.

I felt like I had been walking on egg shells to an unhealthy degree with her and I cherished the friendship but because of her strain and my codependency it was no longer a balanced one by a long shot and I needed her to be there for me more often.  Before I had struggled to assert my needs unevenly, but now with her stress, I had given up too many rights to having a friend who was not deaf to my needs for respect and attention.

When I got home I had an enraged message from her.  She spilled out her challenges in her life and was angry that I had dared expect her to deal with whatever it was I was complaining about. I was astonished at the degree of her anger with me.  But what sent me into a PTSD-triggering reaction was what she said at the end of the message, "We will pretend this has never happened.  We will not talk about this again."  

She was mouthing the same words and assumptions as my borderline mother.

My "waifish" friend was not so waifish. As my borderline mother who had manipulated my pity for so much of my life.

My mother had excused herself anything and felt entitled for me to serve her and honor her needs over my own.  That her having to deal with my father's chronic alcoholism commanded pity and over-accommodation on my part.  Her needs automatically trumped mine since there was often such colossal high drama going on.  And she enabled my father in so many ways.  She demanded I play shock absorber to her stress but the status quo continued and of course worsened.

I gave up on the friendship with this friend soon enough.  Unhealthily prematurely?  I could have had another round with her re that phone message seriously, but I let go.  The whammy it gave me made me begin to detach from her and soon I was completely detached.  

I'll also say that my friend didn't exert much effort to explore what was happening with us or save our friendship on her part.  I was awed how easily I was replaced in my codependency with others standing by.  That too was a lesson I learned hard when I asserted to my mother trying to build a more honest adult relationship and instead I got all or nothing. My way or the highway. And had a decade of NC. Seemingly instituted by me, but when you are dealing with an all or nothing person, the responsibility is with them.

I think the ending of that friendship I am writing about whammied me and made me seriously avoidant at engaging with acquaintances and building new friendships since then even more than usual.  It was a hard lesson for me.  It resonated so loudly of the past and sadly, again, it has altered my willingness to engage optimistically with potential new friends.  Trusting them or my own judgment. The intensity of the PTSD whammy was so alarming and sobering.

It is good for me to talk about this.

I want to be awakened to toxic scenarios but i don't want to throw the friendship baby out with the bath water, so to speak.  

Avoidance is not growth, it is retreat I know. But I seem to be choosing it too often now.

[Kwamina]

Hi bethanny

I wish that understanding would "cure" the emotional hard-wiring we endured growing up in dysfunctional households, in my case an alcoholic and borderline one.

I remember when I joined the 12 step rooms years ago people talked about how recovery was tough because it helped us inventory and recognize our character defects and at frequent times we felt we were getting worse not better as human beings.  The truth was we were breaking through our ego-denial and before recovery it was too brittle for us to seriously handle the reality of ourselves.

... .

Avoidance is not growth, it is retreat I know. But I seem to be choosing it too often now.

You've talked in several of your posts about BPD. We recently had a discussion on here about emotional flashbacks related to (complex) PTSD. Pete Walker describes several steps we can take to manage those emotional flashbacks. One thing he says is particularly relevant considering what you say here about growth and the process of healing/recovery:

Be patient with a slow recovery process: it takes time in the present to become un-adrenalized, and considerable time in the future to gradually decrease the intensity, duration and frequency of flashbacks. Real recovery is a gradually progressive process (often two steps forward, one step back), not an attained salvation fantasy. Don't beat yourself up for having a flashback.

[bethanny]

Kwamina,

Thanks for wading through such a lengthy sharing.  The flashback moment with my friend I don't see as negative in the bigger scheme of things though I felt like I was being "tasered" emotionally listening to it, since it was an epiphany for the degree of futility of my codependent enthrallment to my mother and a repeating pattern of mine struggling desperately to be heard by people who time and again cannot hear and respect my needs and communications and yet I keep assuming it will happen. It helped me to surrender to reality. To begin to mourn it after the horror subsided that this friend was both it seemed unwilling and incapable to respect me seriously as a close friend. I detached from her in self-protection.

I stood up to some disrespectful feedback from a therapist and challenged her about it on the phone after a session years ago. I had bounced a check and apologized but felt she overly-shamed by her and reacted by asking that she hear me out about my take. I had shared with her what an economic challenge it was paying for therapy when my work opportunities were limited then. When I got home the therapist had left a very hostile message on my phone machine denying my interpretation of her attitude. Her defensive denial and anger at me frustrated and threatened me.

I remember feeling so sad and frustrated with her and realizing that if she had been more resilient in terms of her own ego-defensiveness in my reaction to her, after 4-5 years of me discussing my over-sensitivity to my mother and especially female authority figures which she was one, it would have been an opportunity for us to have and practice some healthy conflict resolution. I decided to separate from her since it felt like she could talk the talk of conflict resolution but couldn't begin to walk the walk herself. I wanted her to be more mature about the sudden conflict since she was the "expert" whom I needed help for just this kind of thing from.

I don't know where she is today. But if I could I would write her and tell her about what I have learned about growing up with a borderline mother and what was going on then. 

I did write to one of my early therapists whom I am grateful for and shared with her via letter.  She did an amends to me and said she wished she had been more knowledgeable back then.  I appreciated that.  Her sensitivity and capacity to really listen and heed my situation helped me a great deal during that time though she had not applied the BPD diagnosis to my mother.

Best, Bethanny