My Support Forums - View Single Post

LonesomeTonight · Sep 30, 2018, 11:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ElectricManatee

Being "really good" as a child often means not being free to express (or even fully feel) all of your emotions, especially the tricky ones like anger and jealousy. That subtle prohibition on learning how to feel, express, and cope with intense "forbidden" emotions can cause a whole cascade of problems later in life.

Exactly. Like I was taught (partly because I never saw it expressed in my home) that anger wasn't OK. Such that, in adulthood, if anyone became angry at me, it felt like the end of the world, that surely I'd be abandoned. And it kept me from even really able to feel anger at others for a long time--I mostly just directed it inward.

And I also got the message that it wasn't OK to cry that much

Possible trigger:

I have a vague memory where I got spanked for something, then when I was crying, was told to stop crying, and because I couldn't, got spanked some more. Not that my parents used spanking that often. And this was in the 80s, so not the same as times now in terms of that kind of thing being acceptable or not

And this led me to be like, "Oh no, I cried for the first time in front of my boyfriend, now they're going to leave me." Or "I cried at work when I got a bad review, clearly I'm getting fired."

I've even apologized to ex-MC and current T for crying...which, I mean, I'm in a therapist's office. If I can't cry there, where can I cry? (I let the tears flow pretty freely with current T now...to the point that he's joked about getting me the industrial size box of tissues--like good-natured joking, not critical joking).