All I need is love

[maybeiamabear]

8:14 AM


Notes from Therapy:


What helps me when I feel overwhelmed/ in a state of panic/ abandoned?


How does idealism affect my behaviour and emotional life?


______


After having panic attacks a couple of times every year, I have figured some of the triggers: it usually involves me going out of my way to be there for someone or changing of status quo or uncertainty of relationships which pushes me into the below feelings ->


I am unloved

I hate myself

They have left me too

Why couldn't they love me

Why am I so broken

I am going to die

The world is too cruel


And to repair and regulate these emotions, I have observed I usually ->


End up on the internet talking to strangers (funnily internet seems like a place which is more in my control than the real world), I usually vent or seek advice.


I can seek or vent with IRL friends too but the fear of rejection stops me, they might not be available when I become disregulated.


In the second stage after the heaviness of panic and the weight of being able to live passes, I find myself feeling very hypersexual, I would masturbate a lot, either with strangers online or with porn or with paid creators. The orgasms create serotonin & dopamine which really helps me. It takes sometime to create enough. A week of hypersexuality.


Then I start intellectualising and understanding what really happened with me, I become aware and drop my defences and let go of being in a constant state where my choices are triggering me.


In my last post, I talked about being a child in a relationship and I learnt how that's not a peer based relationship. How the role of a child is stuck in past, in abuse.


How do I move forward though? How do I learn to form peer based relationships? I feel my subconscious mind is trying to hold on to pleasant memories of P because I just don't want to let go. It feels like she was a potential right partner. At the same time, it is also true that I am not ready for a peer based relationship and perhaps it was difficult for her to offer me the headspace I expected / my inner child needed.


What do I do now? How do I grow into a confident adult (I am 27 already)?


I feel a lot of guilt for deciding not to support my parent's whims and fancies, and only support their basic necessities and same for my younger sibling. It breaks my heart to see them upset when they are not able to afford the luxuries they desire.


And I keep myself from finding better financial opportunities because it feels like anyway I will have little for myself because whatever I make I will need to share and even when I don't want to because otherwise I will feel responsible for their sadness.


And I cannot run away from family, I have tried. They are atleast constant. Even though dysfunctional. Others leave, they find my emotions arising from childhood trauma a lot to deal with.


What do I do? I dint choose to be in the childhood that happened to me. Yes as an adult I have the agency to make my own choices.


A lot of these choices means isolating myself from community or from current system of people who surround. Would not that just make me more lonely and triggered?


All I need is love.


And self love is not enough.

 

[Sideways]

It isn’t intimacy without vulnerability. That’s the problem with online relationships.

There’s no vulnerability required, even if you try to be vulnerable, you can also switch off at a second’s notice.

Vulnerability is scary. But if you can tackle that, the rewards are profound.

As for family? I haven’t run away from mine either.

But my boundaries are very different to what they used to be. And that’s been absolute essential for my relationship with myself.

 

[Brumbyinthesunshine]

8:14 AM


Notes from Therapy:


What helps me when I feel overwhelmed/ in a state of panic/ abandoned?


How does idealism affect my behaviour and emotional life?


______


After having panic attacks a couple of times every year, I have figured some of the triggers: it usually involves me going out of my way to be there for someone or changing of status quo or uncertainty of relationships which pushes me into the below feelings ->


I am unloved

I hate myself

They have left me too

Why couldn't they love me

Why am I so broken

I am going to die

The world is too cruel


And to repair and regulate these emotions, I have observed I usually ->


End up on the internet talking to strangers (funnily internet seems like a place which is more in my control than the real world), I usually vent or seek advice.


I can seek or vent with IRL friends too but the fear of rejection stops me, they might not be available when I become disregulated.


In the second stage after the heaviness of panic and the weight of being able to live passes, I find myself feeling very hypersexual, I would masturbate a lot, either with strangers online or with porn or with paid creators. The orgasms create serotonin & dopamine which really helps me. It takes sometime to create enough. A week of hypersexuality.


Then I start intellectualising and understanding what really happened with me, I become aware and drop my defences and let go of being in a constant state where my choices are triggering me.


In my last post, I talked about being a child in a relationship and I learnt how that's not a peer based relationship. How the role of a child is stuck in past, in abuse.


How do I move forward though? How do I learn to form peer based relationships? I feel my subconscious mind is trying to hold on to pleasant memories of P because I just don't want to let go. It feels like she was a potential right partner. At the same time, it is also true that I am not ready for a peer based relationship and perhaps it was difficult for her to offer me the headspace I expected / my inner child needed.


What do I do now? How do I grow into a confident adult (I am 27 already)?


I feel a lot of guilt for deciding not to support my parent's whims and fancies, and only support their basic necessities and same for my younger sibling. It breaks my heart to see them upset when they are not able to afford the luxuries they desire.


And I keep myself from finding better financial opportunities because it feels like anyway I will have little for myself because whatever I make I will need to share and even when I don't want to because otherwise I will feel responsible for their sadness.


And I cannot run away from family, I have tried. They are atleast constant. Even though dysfunctional. Others leave, they find my emotions arising from childhood trauma a lot to deal with.


What do I do? I dint choose to be in the childhood that happened to me. Yes as an adult I have the agency to make my own choices.


A lot of these choices means isolating myself from community or from current system of people who surround. Would not that just make me more lonely and triggered?


All I need is love.


And self love is not enough.

Hi maybeIamabear - are you okay ?
Have you had any hopeful moments or days?

 

[Friday]

I am unloved

I hate myself

They have left me too

Why couldn't they love me

Why am I so broken

I am going to die

The world is too cruel

Is this the person you were seeing looking for something casual & fun between friends? Because that has NOTHING to do with you. What they want in a relationship (fun & friendship), and what you want (love & lifelong commitment) are two entirely different things.

It’s like offering a prime corn finished bone-in ribeye steak to a vegan. It doesn’t matter how amaaaaaazing the steak is, that’s not food they eat. That doesn’t mean there is anything wrong/broken/unloveable about a steak a lot of people would kill for (or spend a month’s salary on, and consider it absolutely worth it, as they swoon, weak in the knees, about how spectacular this steak is). It just means the person is vegan.

All I need is love.

I remember, vividly, my first year out of DV… all I needed were arms.

That was my sum TOTAL requirements in/of others. Arms. Because I wanted in the entire world was to be held.

Headdesk.

Arms. FFS. Nope!!!

My standards -eventually- scraped themselves up off the bottom of the barrel… but it took a few years. With pretty equally horrifying “improvements”.

- Like the year I rose to “nots”. Like, “not abusive”, “not cruel”, not this, not that, not the other. (Honey Chile, these are not gold rings, these aren’t even brass. These are the sub basement, full of creepy crawlies & spiders.)

- Or the year I finally stopped explaining to people basic acts of life/living, as if a) I was in the wrong, & b) they had the right to tell me not to. Like justifying needing to use the loo, or catch my breath. Breathing. I need your forgiveness for… breathing?!? For taking a pee?!? These. Are. Not. Things. To. Expect. To. Be. Grilled. About. Much. Less. Chastised. For. >.< But I still expected both, and years of habit & expectation? Don’t vanish overnight.

You’ll get to a point where you need soooooo much more than love. I cannot tell you what those things are, as they’re highly individual, but just a few off of the top of my head?

Delight. Respect. Curiosity. Enthusiasm. Reverence. Humor. Ingenuity. Logic. Excitement. Challenge. Silliness. Warm understanding. Mischief. Companionship. Simpatico. Bravery. Empathy. Cunning. Honesty. Adventure. Simplicity. Flexibility. Ambition. …x10,000 other possibilities.

What do I do now? How do I grow into a confident adult (I am 27 already)?

What do I do? I dint choose to be in the childhood that happened to me. Yes as an adult I have the agency to make my own choices.

Practice. Lots, and lots, and lots of practice. Making different choices. Seeing where those choices lead. Experimenting. Building up new systems. Growing into new expectations. Making more new choices.

I tend to think of practice as exploring & perfecting an artform, rather than work, and rather than expecting to be creating master-pieces or performing at Carnegie Hall as “step one”. IE Practice, not perfection.