practice grounding out of it, and try to make them less efficient, rise your personality strength. You have some wolves battling in you, and the one that you feed the most will win :hug:
I´m trying to not engage with the imaginary guy, this is like day three. I´m having a hard time though. Everytime I feel alone or sad I have to remind myself that I can deal with this by myself because I have that kind of strength, but it is taking a lot. I don´t want to return to being a kid who needs an imaginary friend to survive but apparently I hate being an adult who has to carry themselves on their shoulders.
I've also deliberately associated songs and other reminders in the environment with people who I've obsessed over. I think I've de-fused them all now.
Yeah it´s like that too, when I am really focused on them instead of on me, I start to associate certain kinds of music, certain kinds of food, certain objects, certain moods, certain way of thinking - to them. So when I feel a specific way it´ll remind me of them and I think that´s a major problem with the thing where I feel I do not retain an individual identity. Because I associate myself with their identity instead of with my own. So it makes sense that if you do that systematically, you´d end up feeling like you had no identity and they had all the power.
I guess I need to continue trying to destract myself in the moments where I feel like I need a "patron" of sorts to help me feel safe, and remember that I am safe anyway because I can provide for myself. It´s so embedded in my system though, I have been employing this mechanism since like age two when I got my first teddybear who would be my friend.
@shimmerz I´m glad I could help you reflect on what´s been a challenge for you. Yes I do think that a lack of sense of self causes us to fight rather than "relax back" and "let go". I have thought of it as a mountain you run in to. If you run into a mountain, it doesn´t help to continue to stand in front of it and yell at it. Instead, you rely on your own resources and creativity, and you trust in your own ability that you can continue your journey on an easier path (around the mountain if necessary).
Even trying to think about this makes me space.
*blinking* *
ground control to Radise*. :O_o:
I think I have learned to dissociate from myself from a very young age because first, I was never any good according to them, and second because I learned it was safer not to be present. But what do you do when you cannot rely on yourself for support (because you have become completely absent), you rely on others for support. And when others aren´t available, you make up your own support. Which is good. But for me it´s enabling dissociation from myself and that´s not what I need. I need to come back.
I get really excited + freaked out if someone seems to care about me... I distance myself and in my distance I seem to create a better version of the relationship, where I can't f*ck it up, because I'm not really there.
I can relate to that a lot. I do the exact same thing, up to that point. I meet someone, I focus on "wow, they seem to be offering
Exactly What I Have Been Missing" (a caring paternal figure most often). In the case of the "negative" personalities (the ones who turn on me and become enemies), they tend to be authoritative in some way (even when trying to be benevolent), and posing as if they knew "what´s best for me".
So (just following my own train of thought here) I seem to be drawn to both the positive and the negative versions of paternalistic authority, on the one hand the ones who care and listen, and on the other hand, I tend to get overwhelmed by the ones who pretend to have by best interest at hand, but are really just trying to use this to make themselves feel like they are really important.
My dad used to have a complex authority issue in the sense of his authority was null (really null) when he was living with my mother, she walked all over him and I think he felt constantly emasculated, an emasculation which later reared it´s ugly head when my mother left and I tried to coexist with him. He was extremely controlling (extremely in the sense of countaing toilet paper leaves and watching how much peanut butter I put on my bread).
He was extremely mistrusting, I couldn´t do anything right ever, I was this huge rebelling teen that was probably on drugs and whose brain could not be trusted because it had clearly (in his opinion) been scrambled by his tyrant of an ex-wife, who had tried to screw him over and when she didn´t succeed, she screwed over his kid (so in a lot of ways, he was the real victim in all of this).
In a way I hate myself for seeking out these authoritative paternal figures, even if they are nothing like my dad and have absolutely good intentions. It´s some weird kind of dependency thing that I had going as a child, when my dad pretended to be The Savior who Saved Me From My Evil Mother. :banghead: But I hated that he did that. So why do I need some kind of Hero now? I just don´t get it.
