Small Breakthroughs

[Please help]

Hello All,

   I have been posting here for years and occasionally have small but important breakthroughs.I want to thank all of you for you support  over the years and encourage everyone to keep posting and working with forum to heal. It does work but takes time and painful introspection.

  A few takeaways from my healing:

   1)My almost unhealthy obsession with my childhood friends is just that. They became my surrogate family and these friendships  should have had healthy boundaries. There was no spiritual connection. They had families and I did not.

  2)My obsession with a town I used to live in comes from it being my last point of reference to any resemblance of a family. When doing inner child healing, I feel my 5-6 year old self wandering the few streets in my neighborhood I would play on looking for my parents. I can see this little boy calling out for his parents and being unable to find them. This is because they are not there. I give the little boy a hug and help him. That is what I needed. Instead, I have to be honest with myself that I was left for dead. This traumatized me.

3) I reached out to a few people who I am related to and got mixed reactions. Most are very dysfunctional and I can tell there is no place for me. If siblings and their mother are financially struggling and use drugs, how can I expect them to have a healthy relationship with me? This affirms everything I felt as a kid. People (parents / grandparents) said they hated me as a kid as I was a bad person.  Fact of the matter is I did not fit into their dysfunctional life. I vividly recall being 13-14 and wanting to go to a nice private school and play soccer / track there. It was an image i was after. I remember  thinking if I could create the image of being a healthy and stable kid, my family would follow suit. I thought they would suddenly look and act clean cut and be normal people. I have seen parents do this with troubled kids. Put them in a situation that makes them act clean cut i.e school with uniforms trying to turn their kids around.  Instead, I could not even secure a place to live. I wanted us to be stable and healthy but I got rejected.

4) As we heal, you will see other little things "pop-up" that you never realized you were carrying. I had this childhood friend who basically collapsed as a person around the age of 22/23.  He was sponging off his sister and she was moving to get away from him. I told him he could stay with me for a while and he interpreted that as living on my couch in a small 1 bdrm indefinitely. I was urged by another friend to call his father and say he is only staying with me a few weeks to save money get his car on the road before he moves back to his parents. He hated me after that. His parents wanted him to move home, go back to college and be normal. I thought I was being a friend by letting him live on my couch and smoke weed all day. He pitted 2 other "so called friends" against me  saying I was an ass and one of these kids got married, invited all my friends except me. I am sure many of you with abandonment issues knows how this feels. I put so much work into my friendships. Fortunately, I am still friends with the stable ones from that group. The ones that turned on me I later found out both are unstable and still sponge off their parents into their 40's and the one who got married sponges off his wife.  Sometimes nature has a was of ending relationships that we try to maintain. I think nature took it's course as we probably would not be in touch today.

As always, thanks for reading !
 

[Naughty Nibbler]

Hey Please help:   

Thanks so much for giving us an update on your progress!  It's so encouraging to hear about the  successes!      

Did you do your work on your own, or did you have the guidance of a therapist? 

Best wishes for the days ahead.  May the healing continue and may life continue to get better for you.      

[Woolspinner2000]

Hi Pleasehelp!

Good to hear from you and catch up a bit on how you are doing.  Sounds like little by little you are able to go deeper into your understanding.

In my own life I've found that the more I listen and pay attention to my own inner children, they begin to grasp that someone cares for them and slowly, slowly they start to trust me, and the clamoring for attention gets less and less because they know I'm there. Of course there are triggers which cause them to become afraid and need comforting, but they've begun to integrate with me, and I find myself becoming more whole. It's as if we are becoming one person, integrating together. At first I didn't know they existed, then they were scattered all over. Much closer to center for all of us now.

Here's a thought I wanted to share with you. When you go off into these imaginations, have you ever pondered what needs you might be seeking to have met? Maybe you have already done this and, I apologize if you've already gone over this in another post someplace. I've recently discovered through my own moments that sometimes I have the same mind wanderings over and over. When I took time to stop and ask myself what needs I kept hoping to have met, I began having some incredible insights in to some of my deeper soul needs. For example, I often wished for someone to rescue me from the abusive childhood I had with my uBPDm. What did that say to me? I thought about it and realized I wanted someone who cared and loved me and who wouldn't abandon me. Through that I began to ask how was I to get these needs met in a healthy manner? That really has helped me discover some new insights myself, and I thought it might help you too.

Thanks for keeping in touch!
 
Wools

[Please help]

Thanks for the feedback.

Nibbler-
Most of the work has been with 1-2 old friends who grew up with me and went through their own hell and of course this board.

Woolspinner-

 When I delve into my fantasy world, I am looking for a place to belong. Oddly, there is usually a bizarre reason why I am living by myself as a teen. If pressed for an answer, it's probably to make it as real as possible.  There were times I was on my own (mother took off when F was in jail). She also left me home in the 7th grade to watch her other 2 kids. Each of us three kids had different fathers. We lived in a trailer while she cleaned houses , sold weed and I think did a little prostitution. I did not go to school much that year.

  The reason my fantasies always have me living alone could be either 1) because they were so crazy I knew at a young age if they died or simply went away for good, I would have been better off. Others have pointed this out to me as well so I believe there is validity to it. They were a nuisance in my life. Nothing more. 2) Having no parents in my fantasy allows me to be "absorbed" into a normal family.

The main themes in my fantasies are financial stability ( nothing extravagant just a simply house and a job) and normal people who care a great deal about me. I try to be as pragmatic as possible. A normal family simply looks after me i.e invites me over 1x every week or so for dinner and maybe send me home with some leftovers knowing I am by myself. I am actually beginning to cry while writing this. Things really must have been f***** up beyond belief for a teenager to pretend his parents died and some nice family with a cute daughter checked in on him regularly.

I knew everyone hated me and it wasn't until the past 2-3 years ( in my 40's now) that I understood why. PD people hate normal people. They have a sense about who can see through the BS. I could see through it and was despised for it. My M who took off on me as a kid became friends with my F's 2nd wife. Of course it was drug related but they really bonded and I was told how much they hated me.

I disappeared for 25 years and no one came looking. My F tracked me down when I suspect he was looking for help. There was a very primitive need I needed as a child that I did not get. Having my own beautiful children opens my eyes to what I did not have. Children want to explore the world while holing your hand for safety. They do not need to see fighting and violence and experience abandonment and hatred from people they are genetically predisposed to love