Ashamed of all my emotions...

It makes it difficult to get help.

In reality I think I have a lot of anxieties. Often, though, I can't remember what they are. There are too many to remember and I am just fine anyway.

I can't admit to anything and I never look scared.

Have you tried to write down somewhere your anxieties? Maybe that way it'd be easier to remember

I'm not sure I'd want to remember. I'd probably have a breakdown. I am scared of everything. And I can't face them anyway because they are stupid and shameful. The words get stuck in my throat.

An un worthwhile person has fears that are best ignored.

You deserve better than to feel this way for long periods of time. You are worthwhile. Could you open up to a therapist or try an anxiety med?

No, I cannot open up to anyone. There are surface explanations but when they are removed the base is ugly and horrific.

I don't want medicine. Your body becomes out of your control. You gain or lose weight. There are side effects.

This may sound odd, but I think you are doing just fine. Maybe you are just wishing you had anxiety so you can feel bad about yourself. Maybe you do not look scared because you are not scared. Fears can be a prison, so maybe it is best to ignore some of them. You are a Brave Warrior.

Your words are fortifying. This is what I normally tell myself anyway. Today, it will be better, because I am fortified. But there is an underlying wound.

I've been afraid my entire life, but there was no one to help me so I didn't realize I was afraid. But the fears are catching up to me now.

My fears and feelings have nowhere to go. I am a dead end. I wonder what would happen if I let them out. But I can't speak.

Some kind of magic trick, or the turn of the mind, which makes things disappear. I can only remember the blankness; I don't feel like a person. I just feel like I'm going on.

If disappearing my pains is fine, and if I'm not made of them anyway....

This occurred to me the other day. I let myself lie in bed like a dead body for a day or so while nursing my physical wounds. It helped a lot. I don't take care of myself normally. But, and finally, I can't build from this pain. I also can't erase everything.

So I don't know what to do about all my feelings. There are lots of things I've dismissed over the years. I dismissed my entire father. Maybe I can dismiss these too, but I don't like to dismiss out of shame.

Can you tell us more about the situation you are in? Were you physically abused?

I apologize if I gave you this impression. The wounds were self inflicted.

Pain often covers other feelings. Working with a Therapist on your family and your growing up, will help you. I think you have the courage to do that.

There was nothing really wrong with my family though.

I can't remember anything. I don't trust my recall or interpretations. After all, I was an isolated child with nothing to do except make up fairy tales and destroy myself.

So for example, I lied at my first appointment last week and said I have no experience with self injury, suicide, or domestic violence. What good would it do to say yes? I don't even know if yes is the correct answer. I also can't remember, I only remember that I felt horrible all the time and there was fighting which made me unhappy and then numb.

I don't remember anything. And I don't believe it when people say your feelings are valid. Because mine are foggy and just not remembered well. The small specific events that I can remember are inconsequential. So what if my mother yelled every morning and said I was fat and lifted my shirt up to look at my body and made me change about three times before school in the mornings? Not really significant.

Stick with therapy, it takes much time to open up to it. There is no quick fix.

I also encourage you to stick with therapy for a while. It takes time.

But: What did you think of the therapist?

Therapy makes me feel ashamed.

She pretty much convinced me to give up some things. Looking at the facts--I can't read, I can't speak to male professors, I can't do music--I'm probably going to fail anyway.

I should just give up now. I'm useless. Everything is overwhelming.

I felt like I was feeling bad so I told her everything was fine.... She's very smart and knows how to hurt me.

I wasn't sure if "ashamed" of all my emotions was the right title for this thread, but it's right, after all... I'm too ashamed of myself to do anything, even communicate about myself fully.

My pesky stutter came back when I was talking to her. It's not a real stutter--I didn't have it as a child. It started in my teens as a result of a lack of talking at home and at school. I just stopped talking and forgot how, I guess. And as I was describing something, the stutter mixed up all my words and my syntax sounded exactly like my mother was talking. It was really bad. So I stopped talking and I told her I sounded like my mother so I was going to stop.

She gave me a pitying look, like she had just stumbled upon a huge trauma that she needs to be delicate with me about.

And she started speaking very softly.

...........if I'm honest about everything, she will just pity me. I'm pathetic.

The fallout from your mother's emotional abuse of you and lack of nurture is going to be devastating in so many ways including how you view others and their opinion of you. Physical pain when we inflict it on ourselves is a way to redirect the emotional is something that seems much more bearable. Self Harm releases endorphins into our bodies and help us to feel better. You are not alone in this at all.

Might be a good idea to honest with your T about your feeling ashamed. If you don't let her know then she won't be able to do her job properly. People, even therapists can't read minds and we can't read theirs either. They would rather know how you're are not managing at the moment. Even if it is a case of writing things down about how you feel. I find that helps me to let my t/p'doc know what is happening.

If I am am unsure of what is said when he is talking to me (Even if it means waiting until my next visit) then I will ask my T what he meant. Most of the time it is the opposite of what I have assumed. Please persist with your T for the moment. Persist in your search for finding your own voice and emotional wellness. Stuttering and self harm issues are outward signs of inward distress, anxiety and pain. I used to self harm and I sometimes stutter even now when my angst gets the better of me.

A sense of shame is more linked to how we perceive ourselves it's nothing to do with we have done or who we really are. Keep posting. You are worthwhile.

I agree that it would be important for t to know how you feel after time with her. One possibility would be to let her read what you just posted here.

Hang in there emptynightmare!

(((((emptynightmare)))))

Thanks for your detailed reply (which I did not quote entirely). So you think it is emotional abuse? How can I decide for sure?

If your wounds are self inflicted than you are in a dangerous place.

You do deserve help. You can get help without medicine although it would probably help. It's not all or nothing...black or white.

What would it mean to you, what would your reaction be, if it was in fact emotional abuse?

I asked the question, "Is it emotional abuse?" because I thought it would help give me some answers about my childhood. But I'm not sure I'd have any reaction if it was in fact emotional abuse. This is because I would find some way to disbelieve it.

It would be relieving to define my childhood. It would offer me something to point at and say, "This had an impact on me, and therefore I've planned to move forward in X way." I think it would be more relieving than simply saying that my childhood has had a profound impact on my emotional responses to certain situations.

But if it did indeed cement some kind of understanding, I am not sure that it would do me any good. The idea of defining the parents' actions in a certain way is disturbing to me because it falls in line with the way I have harshly thought of them in the past. I am sure that they raised me to the best of their abilities. (No, I'm not.) However, my opinions of them were colored through a "westernized" viewpoint and my own self consciousness, which was rooted in perceived differences between I and my American classmates. I came to think that we were somehow barbaric, a notion gently fed to me by insensitive classmates, teachers, and homework assignments. To use a western definition (I am only aware of it existing in western societies), to call it abuse, worries me as I feel that it might be more complicated than that.

To be sure, there was some pain and unhappiness, but my parents provided enough for me so that I never felt the need to help ease their unique pain as immigrants. I was privileged enough to disdain them and therefore contribute to their pain. I was privileged enough to think of their struggles and their attitudes towards me as cruelty, and I was privileged enough to be lazy enough to hate them. I really have no idea what to think. To forgive them makes me feel as though I am erasing a lot of pain that has unfortunately formed my identity. To describe their actions towards me as "emotional abuse" also feels wrong.

In other words, I have no idea. I think the real problem is that I am kind of isolated from common sense. My reality is self made, and I don't believe it.

Today my therapist asked me a question (I can't remember what it was), and I had this nonsensical essay on the tip of my tongue. I didn't say it. I was sure, somehow, that this would be a performance for her. It is now, too.

There are web sites with (westernized) definitions of emotional abuse. A particularly detailed one, for example, uses the categories Rejecting, Ignoring, Terrorizing, Isolating, Corrupting, Exploiting:

Six Types of Emotional Abuse

Being consistently fed the idea that one's culture is barbaric would tend to make a person think that parenting practices done in that culture are barbaric as well.

It might well be more complicated than that. Perhaps by looking at the list linked above you could ask yourself whether any of those practices happened to you, and, if so, whether to your knowledge could they be a part your cultural background.

Here you sound as though you are blaming yourself for not being sufficiently attentive and responsive to the pain and difficulties and sacrifices that your parents went through. How much of their behavior towards you would you attribute to your own actions?

Your thinking can evolve and does not have to be all-or-nothing. A nuanced approach might be in order, one that would develop over time. For example, you can acknowledge that their backgrounds and circumstances contributed to how they behaved, while at the same time realizing that they have not done the best that they could.

In my view, though, one can acknowledge that parents caused harm even if they themselves were harmed in their own upbringing. For example, for me it is just a fact that my alcoholic, narcissistic mother caused my attachment disorder and anxiety. This is just a fact. How much of what happened was actually "her fault", and how much arose from her own background, is a different question. Maybe she was doing the best that she could--but even so she still was causing harm and the pain that she caused was still pain. Maybe that type of thought could help in thinking about your experience?

I think that it would be helpful to share your essay here, or an oral version of it, with your therapist.

Here's part of a fb post from Sam Ovens, who is worth 20 mil, and is a business consultant....

"1. The Self Illusion
In business there’s one enemy you will come up against again and again. This enemy will make you question yourself and doubt your every move. It’s like a dark force that has you by the heels. A monster that’s breathing down your neck.

This enemy is you.

When I got started in business I was shy, awkward, clueless, poor, horrible at managing money and had no idea how the world worked. I believed this was “me” and it paralyzed me from taking action. By far the biggest challenge I had to face was loosing myself, my character and my identity of who I was.

Society has phrases like “Be yourself”. “Stick to your roots”. “Don’t forget where you came from”. Have you ever stopped to think about who you really are? Where is this thing you call the self? The self doesn’t exist, it’s merely you clinging to an identity built up of stories about the past.

It’s been my observation that the only way to achieve success is to become the person who deserves it. When we become this new person we are no longer ourselves. You see, this is the issue with our understanding. We believe we are something when we aren’t anything.

To succeed in business you have to change who you are. You have to constantly evolve. This is impossible when you cling to your identity and believe you are the way you are. You have to slaughter your self image.

Instead of answering the question “Who am I?” Try answering the question “Who am I becoming”. Decide who you need to be to be successful and then grow into that new character. All the worlds a stage and we are merely actors."

-----

so...

Does it even make a difference if I suddenly recognize that I was raised in an isolated home with some physical arguments between parents, psychological warfare, emotional and verbal abuse, a father who self harmed in front of us, and sometimes, but seldomly and it didn't really hurt, my mother hit me?

should it?

I think Sam Ovens (a great name :P ) is right to a certain extent, but he has forgotten that deep down, he isn't nothing, he is something--he is a person who wants to do well in business.

A couple years ago, I cut myself off from the pain and started getting mostly A grades at school, and now I'd say I've caught up to an extent with the overachieving kids. But something is missing. I think I need to change again because I've hit a wall. Honestly I'm starting to regress. I think I'm scared of going higher because it contrasts so much from my background, which is of nothing.

I'm not sure if Sam Oven's advice is good for me because I can't change since I'm actually no one. I don't seem to have a base (Sam's is that he wants to be a consultant).

is this the corny and saccharine part where I say I have to understand myself before I can cut myself from the past? Maybe I don't know where I came from, so I can't truly cut myself off from it?

Or maybe I just need to wake up and stop being so self absorbed? Even the act of posting here on PC is performative. I'm creating an identity, probably one that I worry too much about, and that identity is of a person who is chronically depressed.

So, (at the moment) it doesn't matter to me if I was abused or not, I just want to quickly process it and get over it as quickly as possible so I can get rid of that part of me. I'm going to try to talk to my therapist about it. I hope it won't take too long. I hope she doesn't indulge me and make sad eyes at me (because I really want to have someone feel bad for me!) I'm already halfway addicted to people giving me pity attention because of sad things, but maybe this is because I don't give myself attention to the my sad self.

So I think Sam Ovens would say that on one day to the next, you can shift yourself, and all those selves are real. So some days, I will be a person who wasn't abused at all, and that's real, and on other days, I can also recognize the problems in the past, and that's real too. There's no such thing as making it up. Does that sound weird?

Anyway, the only reason I'm writing this is that I can't get out of bed this a.m. Oh wait, I can. I'm a person who can get out of bed. I drank some Lipton, "America's favorite tea" It is not a great tea.

Yes it makes a difference.

Quite often kids blame themselves for whatever problems are in their lives. When we realize that a background of abuse caused/explains these problems, we can come to learn that we ourselves are okay, we are not the source of the problems.

Fear of success is a known phenomenon. What would it say about you if you went higher?

Sam might say that if you are no one you don't have a preconceived image to cling to.

He might say that dwelling on where you came from interferes with being free. Just as you said above: I think I'm scared of going higher because it contrasts so much from my background

My guess is that he would want you to be free of a preconceived identity, including the depressed person identity.

This runs counter to what Sam was saying. Here I think there is recognition that the past matters and that a person cannot just will to be free of the past. The past, though, can be worked through, and integrated into the present, especially in therapy.

I don't think of it as weird, but I just wonder if it is possible to shift ourselves so readily away from abuse. For me, it took a lot of time, and is still taking time.

Good job getting out of bed!

I had Lipton ice tea with peach today. I never had that before. It was cold and I enjoyed it.