[AndyJo2176]

I have a great relationship. I have a beautiful home, 2 amazing dogs that I love and really a happy home...
THEN WHY DO I DO REALLY DUMB THINGS TO EFFFF IT UP?
After being emotionally abused by my mother for years, I tended to gravitate to relationships like that.
I got out of that habit in my personal life- my partner is incredible. So I got a job with a woman that treated me the same as my mother. Emotionally abusive. I couldn't get out of it (so i felt) and the result is a dumb decision that could cost me my freedom, my home, and all the things I value. And I still don't understand WHY.
This has to change. this cycle is KILLING ME

[Skeezyks]

[hermitbydestiny]

I recently found a clinical psychologist and university professor (Jordan Peterson) on You Tube who helps me a lot. He talks of the Big 5 personality traits in development--finally I see for myself how early attachment disorders bent my brain wiring a certain way in making me who I am today. I don't know how to play, have no memory of doing pretend play EVER in my upbringing, and according to Peterson, those who don't know how to play are not socially adapted well as adults. Accepting myself as an introvert is where I am now. The world loves extroverts, according to my perspective, so now what? Accept myself and move on, which has made me far happier.

Peterson explains power structures, which has made me better understand the meanness of people in the workplace. Without a foundational belief otherwise, people have been greatly influenced by the cynicism of postmodernism, namely the individual voice is not important unless it agrees with the voting block of influence--or pay hell. Finding a boss like your mother seems easy in today's troubled world.

Your job is to apply self-empathy everyday to yourself. Feel your feelings, let them guide you to your needs, respectfully voice and act those needs into your present existence and mature in this new and exciting and liberating understanding. NO ONE CAN DO THIS FOR YOU. This is your work to do everyday; otherwise, you have become the abuser just like the others. Once there, however, even that level of self-awareness is a turning point. Peterson explains the malevolence we all have in us when it comes to revenge vs. justice. Finding the courage within is our daily act of bravery and takes maturity.

Easy-peasy, right? I've found it to be surprisingly so. I feel grateful in finding Peterson's presentations on this position, which has helped me a lot because he reviews history and its various power philosophies and hierarchies and shows suffering under each when they try to eliminate the individual's voice and turn it into a voting block of power, which breaks down trust within society and breeds more cyncism.

I've learned that the trust I want OUT (blame) there is withIN (owning) me. So today I am grateful to be willing and able to 1) feel my feelings, 2) find my unmet need, 3) grapple with respectfully speaking that need into existence without resorting to my old disrespecful ways, 4) celebrating the bravery and trust in myself (reparenting) that this new action took, 5) passing the same tenets of self-empathy onto others (compassioncourse.org).

Not being mean in a mean world is true freedom! To ourselves or otherwise. That's the abusee's journey work, beginning with self.