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Like I said, I can be “all about me” sometimes and also codependently all about another person. When I’m codependently all about the other person, then if something hurts them, it hurts me. If they need a ride to get some medicine at the pharmacy, I feel the urgency for the medicine to be gotten as if it were me. But of course it’s not me, so that wasn’t very realistic.
I tried to fit into what other people wanted or else I was adamantly independent. What’s finally happened for me is like I can how hold both people’s needs in mind at the same time. It’s not either/or. And there are two friendships that I recently lost because I could not drop everything any more for the other person, and I couldn’t pretend to agree about some things when I didn’t, or listen to the other person complain, complain, complain. But I don’t yet have the social skill to talk to my friends about how I have changed. Realistically, though, they maybe aren’t in a place to understand or want any changes in the relationship.
It’s like I finally got a “boundary” or membrane around me, and my needs are different from what my friend’s needs are but I can still understand where my friend is coming from. I respect that is where she is coming from. I just don’t have to accommodate to what my friend wants any more.
Another example: My adult daughter is currently not speaking to me. I got very angry with her 3 years ago because I felt that she was being judgmental and contemptuous of me. I had no “membrane” then, just an on/off switch. I could continue to keep quiet and get squashed down more and more and more to a point that it was becoming intolerable and I couldn’t function well, was constantly anxious around her, etc. Or I could speak up. It’s just that when I spoke up all I had to talk about what how angry I was. My daughter, as a person, disappeared from my consciousness. She was physically there with me, I wasn’t confused about the physical reality of that. It’s just that if I was going to speak about my anger, then that was the only thing or feeling mattered. All about me. I was the only “person” there. I know that may sound confusing. But IMHO that’s a hallmark of PD’s. We aren’t confused about physical reality like people with psychosis. But we are confused about social reality.
My daughter and I had some email discussions about the incident. She wrote that she understood that I had had a hard time and experienced a lot of pain but that she hoped that I understood that my emotional outbursts caused pain as well. Unfortunately, I did NOT understand that at that time. I knew that getting mad was considered “bad” in some circles, but therapists had encouraged me to express my feelings. I knew that she didn’t like me getting mad at her but I didn’t understand that it caused pain. I had dissociated (disconnected or numbed out) from the pain my mother’s rages and abandonment had caused in me. So I could not really “put myself” in my daughter’s shoes. If/when people are disconnected from their own emotions then how can we have empathy for the same emotion in other people? Our “resonance circuit” is turned off, so to speak.
Did this help any?
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