[person3]

no one is responsible for your brain but you.

the idea that anyone else, from anywhere (and at any angle!), has screwed YOU up is what makes you sick and what keeps you sick.

i find sometimes the people i most accuse of messing up my brain are the ones I somehow tried to manipulate in the first place.

i probably would have OD'd on pain pills by now if I kept deluding myself into thinking they hurt ME maliciously, in order to hide from my part of it.

I think that's why it's hard to forgive people...because when you really forgive someone (which i'm not even sure if I ever HAVE) then you must logically assume total responsibility for your actions and re-actions [reactions to any smashed expectations of someone you had, etc].

And...no one individual can save you.

[i have made some "messed up" people appear astonishingly sane in light of my near-insane quest to tear them down somehow]

 

[person3]

oh yeah btw this is a messageboard of people whose mental health is at a rough stage of development (ie: we're sick) so just remember what we perceive to be the reality of situations is going to be centered on false conceptions (NOT in an insane way but in a distorted-thinking way) and we also don't realize the impact of what we say to others, so just take all that jazz into account too.

 

[Scattered]

Not everyone sets out on a quest to destroy those they think have wronged them. And yet the actions of others can have profound effects on the way we feel think and act. Environment plays a role.

We may be responsible ultimately for the way we treat ourselves. But to deny outside influence in an argument of total and complete responsibility seems to be oversimplifying. To argue complete responsibility is to deny ANY outside influencing factors and there are always other factors in a persons life that leads them to their actions and habitual patterns.

 

[bright23]

I think what person3 is getting at is resentment.

Of course events and people have an affect on us. That's what the "world"
is.

But to blame our current mentally ill and maladapted state on some specific variant of "uncaring mother", or "verbally abusive father," or "death/suicide of fill-in-the-blank," does a huge disservice to us, and I agree with person3, keeps us sick.

Nobody's life is easy. Everyone has, is, or will experience tradgedy in one form or another. How we individually respond to tradgedy, what we make of our lives post-trauma, is what defines us.

Unfortunately for many of us on this forum, we're currently stuck, feeling as if we're cut off from the rest of the world, and totally depressed/anxious about the situation. Perhaps we look for a magic cure in the form of some new drug, dietary supplement, exercise regimen, or perhaps we escape with alcohol and illicit drugs, sex, food, television, or suicidal thoughts. I eat like a cow when I want to get out of my skin, but it ultimately never works.

Its too easy to blame my dad. Much too simplistic. I'm a grownup now and my thinking's a bit more sophisticated, right?

We'll see...

 

[Scattered]

If what you're saying is that we should not resent someone for how we ended up then I agree. If you're saying that any other persons actions do not play an important role in the formation of our personalities and problems then I strongly disagree.

If a person is abused as a child by a parent, then that parent is somewhat responsible for that childs later problems. When we start moving away from strong cases such as mental or physical abuse, suicide, etc then I think these outside factors play less of a role, but should still be recognized. Obviously if you had perfectly loving parents but they had a specific parenting style as opposed to some other parenting style and you blame then, then we are nitpicking. But there are factors that we grow up in that are outside of our control and may influence problems in later life.

 

[bright23]

Sure. Recognizing is necessary. I think specifically what Person3 is focusing on is how many of us end up staying STUCK in the recognizing phase, and stewing over the emotion, round and round, obsessing like an addict.

I have two friends that have both been raped and molested as children. One is stuck at some level ? a drug addict and carrying a lot of anger around. The other is unstuck, active in life and a tremendous support to me when I'm freaking out.

One's resentful and frequently blames his DAD for not protecting him from a molesting babysitter. The other one doesn't live in the past, doesn't constantly keep bringing up the source of pain habitually, constantly picking at the scab.

I think a lot of us here like picking scabs. I do.

There's a degree of choice. Sh*t happens, but what we do in response WE are responsible for. That is SANITY. Picking at scabs is at best, harmful to us.

 

[Monkeydust]

For once I find myself agreeing with Scattered. I don't really agree with this:

no one is responsible for your brain but you.

However I do agree with P3 on the issue of forgiving people.

 

[person3]

i'm not really saying (correct me if it sounded as such) that there was a complete lack of influence on us by others.

that influence is definitely important to examine. once we know where are false beliefs lie we can correct them.

but it is your complete responsibility to do things to help yourself discover and change those ways of thinking. no one else can make that choice for you.

your parents may have fuck ed you up, but now it is your job to take the actions that will correct any "damage" they have done.

 

[person3]

what i'm ultimately saying is that it doesn't mean shit where you came from. the ONLY meaning it has is to pinpoint what behaviors must be changed. that is absolutely it. i know people from loving households who STILL got messed up, and people from sick households that got better.

and bright23 is absolutely right. we spend a LOT of time focusing on our past when it is utterly useless in the light of what we can do.

 

[Guest]

Hola,
Well...I think most of this sounds pretty logical. When you think about ppl who have been successful in their lives (both professionally and privately), you will always have numbers of ppl who came from "bad" situations. It is these ppl who serve as examples to the world that prove that; we are not "slaves" to our past. That it is WE who make our lives what they are! We as humans have "free will" and choice. Sure we are influenced by others, however, it is up to us to either act or react on that influence. So in essense, "no one is responsible for our brains but us"!

Tony

 

[person3]

your reply was helpful to me this morning when i remembered it...thanks!

 

[Sojourner]

Sometimes, in order to clearly see the present, we have to look back, if only to observe things in ourselves that we need to work on or strengthen. Sometimes looking back has the added benefit of allowing us to interpret the past through the lens of who we are today. As children, we didn't know things that we know today, and many of those things can bring greater understanding to us when we look back. I also think looking back is important if we are not today very clear about how we felt -- whether we are thinking that we were okay with the situation back in the past and have repressed the actual feelings we had at the time.

If stuff is being driven out of our consciousness that is the source of problems for us NOW, I think we have know what it is. I know from personal experience in therapy that the first feelings we remember about past events that were traumatic or painful are not necessarily all that's there to be remembered or brought to our awareness.

Even today I have a hard time actually accepting the fact that I have negative feelings toward people, that somehow I feel that having those feelings is wrong. It took a long time for me to see that, and I don't know why it hurts so much, but it does. It's as if I am bad if I have negative feelings toward anyone and I punish myself unconsciously for it. But I say openly that I have good and bad feelings for people and that people are never all good or all bad, so consciously, I don't think I have a problem, but my therapist sometimes suggests something about my feeling it's wrong to have negative emotions toward people and I immediately respond with tears. What are those tears about? Why do I still get anxious and freak out at the prospect of seeing my older sisters and their families at Thanksgiving? Is it because I feel that my life is a failure? I think that's part of it. But why should that cause an anxiety attack today? I felt like I was not myself, and I didn't recognize my life, and I wanted only to feel like myself. I tried for a couple of hours to let it float away, but it didn't, and I took .5 mg Ativan. Now I'm feeling more like myself, but I am feeling the old "I don't want to go and have to feel like a failure because I am alone and cannot form relationships with people" when I am in their midst, and I know I will feel that. Maybe this ties into the negative feelings thing somehow, but I cannot clearly see it. I want to do something to protect myself from suffering -- I want to not go to the Thanksgiving reunion. Everybody will be so happy and I will not be because I am ashamed of my lousy life and how bad I look. But if the source of my anxiety is in my behavior in the past, certainly getting to the early expression of it might give me the ability to morph that old response into something more rational today. Isn't that a possibility? If I fear disapproval and lack of love from my own sisters, what kind of monster am I? I am probably punishing myself for feeling negative toward them. I think that's what my therapist would say, but what is the solution?

I am afraid of the disapproval I will get if I don't go, too. I could tell them that I am sick again and I would hate that, but I don't want to be around them really. I have very little relationship with them -- they don't like e-mail and don't call and it seems they are strangers to me.

I'm not sure if my BDD (problems with appearance) has anything to do with this, but it might, because I don't want them to see how ugly I am and to look at me with pity.

 

[person3]

yeah i can understand the failure part (i'll have to make this short for now), and it pains me that you have to go through BDD b/c I experience that too...as well as probably half the population ()

but part of the problem, i feel, is that your failure feelings are delusions, they are just as delusional as your grandiose feelings. your poisonous self conjures up thoughts of failure and comparison to pit against that perfect ideal you have of yourself.

having expectations about ANYTHING or ANYONE will lead to having expectations about yourself, which for us leads to incredible demands.

having expectations/"this should be"/"I should be" makes us feel unreal because the REALITY is never what "should be", it is "what is". instead of operating in reality we try to change it, we try to change us (hence the BDD...more about that later), we try to change others.

i learned something today in a psych class about "objective self awareness", that even incredibly attractive people can be made to feel ugly when put in front of the mirror and given questions...

therefore, ugliness and badness are delusions of too much STARING at the self (in the mirror, in self-consciousness, etc)...which is different than sitting in a therapists office talking about the past and analyzing it, btw...

do you still look in mirrors? that's something i have had to quit. i still have a hard time with it, but i know for a fact that looking in the mirror for ANYTHING right now will kill me (it has sent me to the suicide ward before)....i know what i look like if i stay clean and groomed...lol...so i can't use that as rationale to look in the mirror in the morning.

BDD has NOTHING to do with what YOU really are or what YOU really look like, YOU can't even really KNOW what you actually look like because with such an obsessive disorder you are unable to objectively perceive yourself, so there is a LOT of delusion involved in that, and it's the same kind of delusion that makes you perceive yourself as a failure. they are linked...

the real problem (i think, i'm not totally sure but i feel in my heart this is it) is trying to compare the self to ideals you have, and the DP is a metaphor for that, because with DP you're comparing your REALITY with what your reality SHOULD feel like and it's a result of you comparing yourself for ideals for so long that the brain is giving you a huge STOP IT signal.

but yeah...the BDD...I remember being at my thinnest, i could see all my ribs and vertabrae and was still obsessed with the fact that some girl's calves were smaller than mine and I needed to fix that...heh

edit: due to total grandiosity i am rereading my post and wow...i really suggest you try not looking at the mirror at ALL for a week. i swear, part of my loss of reality was getting "lost in the mirror", i feel more real just RECOGNIZING THAT!

 

[Sojourner]

Thanks, person3.

In my case, I really AM ugly; I'm not like these women who are really good-looking who only think they're unattractive. I really am.

I don't know what "grandiose" feelings you were referring to, though. If that was DP that I had today with the anxiety, and I'm supposing you thought that's what I was describing, then what you said makes sense. The anxiety was preceded by thinking about what a failure I was and how I didn't want them to see me. I know these people and they can look at me as if I'm not good enough and I can do that for myself now, so I don't need them to do it.

I've actually made progress with accepting that I'm ugly, and got to the point where I was liking my "brand" of it because it was me, and I do have my cute moments. But you? I've seen your picture, and you are quite strikingly beautiful, person3. I am not; I am mousy and misshapen, but I deluded myself into thinking it was not as bad as I had thought. But it's worse than I thought, I think.

Here's a post from bddcentral (private) to someone there:

Yes, I have reservations about its working for BDD, too. [We were talking about http://www.changethatsrightnow.com/prob ... =6557:1945.] I was struck, as I mentioned in the last part of my post, that it didn't talk about people "not being ugly" but implied they won't mind it, but I don't know how that could work if the person hasn't got a positive experience of how they looked (ever looking good) to neutralize the bad feelings. If I do it, I will definitely let you know.

As it happens, I went to the dentist today and had a massive BDD attack that was preceded by an anxiety attack when I got home. I wondered how I ever thought I was not as ugly as I see I am today. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw the same old same old, things that depressed me. I am so confused, because I thought I was making progress in accepting my appearance.

I can trace how it started, I think. I was thinking about how I don't want to go to the family reunion because they will all see how much of a failure I am -- at that time it wasn't because of how I looked, but it was because I am all alone and cannot form relationships with any but a very small group of people. Then it morphed into anxiety in the dentist's office, and then it was "I am ugly" when I got home. But I think I really *am* ugly and just need to accept it. That's the point where the irrational thinking ideas become relevant to me, too, when I've given up hope of being not ugly. I see my therapist tomorrow and will talk about this, but feel as if I have lost so much progress. For a while I believed that maybe I wasn't ugly. Now my therapist says I'm deluded, but I think they want you to think that just to feel better, so you'll think you aren't really ugly -- but they know you ARE. Now, Dr. Claiborn [he's a psychologist on the site] would say, "So what if you are ugly?" And I'd say, "That's a horrible fate. Look how I feel. How can you say that?" And he'd say, "There are plenty of uglier people in the world and many of them are having a fine life, have relationships, are happy." And I'd say, "I don't see how that's possible." and on and on. And by the time I'm done, I'm suddenly seeing myself as NOT ugly, which to me is the *real* delusion. So you see, I'm a mess. I also spiral down sometimes when people cannot look me in the eye and I think that they think I am too ugly to look at. Of course, I am "mind-reading," but how else do you explain the behavior, and if that's true and I'm right, what hope is there for me?

 

[bright23]

I think your specific focus on the word "ugly" says a lot. When I ride the subways and walk through the city I see thousands of people, all shapes, sizes, colors and smells. They are all perfectly themselves, unique. The word "ugly" is never in my vocabulary when I think of a physical description of a person. I'm being totally honest. If anything I think - tall, short, thin, heavy.

I use the word "ugly" in my mind only on very special occasions. When I see an alcoholic man verbally abusing his girlfriend on the subway, I label that behavior "UGLY." When I see a woman unnecessarily cutting down her own children in public, or a cop needlessly harrassing an elderly homeless man, I have one special word for it ? "UGLY."

Simply, I reserve that word for what people DO, know what they LOOK LIKE. Everyone's beautiful in this world, it's how we were intended to look, right?

 

[Sojourner]

I don't apply that term to other people.

 

[person3]

of course you don't. none of us with obsessive self hatred would EVER label other people, we don't expect the same suicidally rigid standards of others that we expect of our "flawed" selves. the delusion that we have to keep working on those types of flaws is what keeps us sick and it keeps our attention away from the TRUE problems.

check your boxy-box btw

 

[person3]

oh your link is broken soj

 

[Sojourner]

What link? I got it. Thanks.

 

[g-funk]

I am totally with you guys on this.
When reality starts to kick in about the way I REALLY look, compared to the way I 'SHOULD' look, this is when DP kicks in. It's a retreat into an inner world where you think you have control. But you don't. The obsessing gets worse and worse. Last night I spent a while in the mirror looking at myself all those parts of me that I don't like that 'aren't how I'm meant to be' and really thought about the concept that they are and there is nothing I can do about it. Like in so many other ways, I have denied these parts of me existed in my seeking of my ideal image.

Remember this, other people don't think in the same way we do. Normal, mentally sound people who have a secure sense of self do not define people by the way they look. They see people for who they are. Sure, they still 'see' your knobbly knees and fat bum, but this makes NO difference whatsoever to them. Only to us. It's not that we have to love every part of us. It's that we have such a strong sense of self that we no longer use these things to define ourselves, and they no longer matter.