Here’s a good, but not exhaustive, sampling:
1. Sharing your feelings or troubles with others will make them feel burdened.
2. Sharing your feelings or troubles with others will chase them away.
3. If you let other people see how you feel, they will use it against you.
4. Sharing your feelings with others will make you look weak.
5. Letting others see your weaknesses puts you at a disadvantage.
6. It’s best not to fight if you want to have a good relationship.
7. Talking about a problem isn’t helpful. Only action solves a problem.
Fortunately, not one of these beliefs is true. In fact, they are each and every one dead wrong. (The only exception is if you share your feelings with another emotionally neglected person, who may not have any idea how to respond). When you grow up receiving consistent direct or indirect messages that you should keep your feelings to yourself, it is natural to assume that those feelings are burdensome and undesirable to others.
Tag: oh
anyone else live under the assumption that they’re constantly doing something wrong
How about the assumption that everyone’s just being polite and any minute now they’re going to snap and let you know how awful you are
Everyone who reblogs this post, please read about the psychological phenomena of Childhood Emotional Neglect.
Oh, fuck.
Oh, fuck.
Yeah them’s the signs of deprivation or abuse. Be safe dear friends and get help. You deserve to be happy.
please note that your parents needn’t have been bad or cruel for you to have this problem. mine were ‘absent’ in that my dad was incredibly stressed out at all times (he worked in weapons technology during the cold war, and there was no such thing as a psychologist with a high enough security clearance to understand his troubles, even if he’d realized he needed help) and my mom was chronically ill. so even though they loved me very much, and validated and supported me as much as they could, i understood that i could end up facing down a sea of troubles solo at any time, because they simply were not capable of being there for me as much as i needed.
thanks to their love and good life lessons, i didn’t quite fully internalize the assumption that i was really doing something wrong at all times. but it was an axiom of my existence that i could be blamed for something, or run afoul of someone’s bad mood or bad behavior, or be misinformed, or in general something could be going wrong right now and i was not guaranteed to have any good options.
the illusion of a just world was shattered for me at a very young age. on the one hand, that’s good because the just world fallacy is the root of all evil. but on the other, the existential horror of knowing that justice is fake can be really fucking hard for a 9-year-old to deal with.
tl;dr: if this sounds like you, but your parents weren’t abusive, don’t dismiss it out of hand. if your parents tried their best but it wasn’t enough, the results can be the same.
does anyone else get really uncomfortable when having to do stuff in front of other people? like even normal things like writing or something? i’m just so used to screwing things up because of my inattention problems that i’d rather be by myself when it happens again u know
Ok but no joke this is literally part of what makes my daily life so hard, if someone else is in the room and it’s not someone I’m like ten thousand percent comfortable with then I’ll feel like they’re watching every little thing I do and thinking about what a screw up I am like to the point that even just cooking around my family is so stressful
This is pretty typical of people who’ve been criticized a lot as children, especially by relatives. It gives us a kind of ‘performance anxiety’ as soon as anyone watches us do anything.
Like, I share the reaction to being watched while I cook too, and that’s because I was always criticized while I cooked as a kid and teenager, and if my own mother is around while I cook , to this day, I get anxious and wish she would go away because I’m always anticipating criticism about how I do anything and everything in the kitchen.
When I was a kid, my father got so mad at me because of how I was passing the vacuum that he literally ripped it out of my hands and very aggressively swung it around while hissing at me :’‘No, not like that, like this! IN. STRAIGHT. LINES.’‘ And since I had always known that he has a volatile temper, this sort of thing was terrifying, because I had no idea if he would get even more aggressive…
Its a survival tactic to want to avoid being watched, because it triggers our instinctual fear of being seen or watched by predators in the wild that our ancestors learned the hard way. And our brains react to being watched by other people the same way it reacts to being watched by a dangerous animal.
[throws some ginger beard and neck into the void]
so I guess I’m gonna start posting more WIPs… this is one that I might not actually ever finish, though, because the angle of the reference shot is the actual worst, but. I really like the coarse quality of parts of it. (alas I’ve been working on it for such a long time on and off that I kinda start forgetting what I was doing with it anyway. :/)
(Please do not remove caption or repost. :))
What do you suggest?
That we remind them that they were right to be afraid.
It took several posts for me to realise that “[noun] don’t interact” was imperative “[Noun]: don’t interact!” and not a declarative “They do not interact.”
Things I Didn’t Know Were Symptoms of C-PTSD
- Getting overwhelmed in crowds
- Getting upset or angry at a loud alarm
- Ordinary nightmares (that have nothing to do with the circumstances, just stupid nightmares much more often than the average person)
- Getting sharp pains in your back/neck/collarbones that make it hard to breathe (due to hypervigilance/constant high anxiety)
- Learning that “high anxiety” does not mean “generalized anxiety” like other people have with panic attacks and not feeling that they can accomplish thing. PTSD anxiety just means this frenetic energy that makes you want to talk/think/do things (even as an introvert) to avoid stopping.
- Feeling constantly bored like you have to chase after something, even if you’re just at home: I spend hours on tumblr, pinterest, watching tv, reading books, making art, never just laying there alone…because if you stop…the darkness is there
- Thinking up stories before bed. This is a symptom of high anxiety because you’re trying to calm down and fall asleep in a “safe world” where people are looking out for you and caring for you.
- Trouble falling asleep (which is distinct from insomnia) because turning off electronics etc. doesn’t help since your heartrate/fight or flight response is engaged
- Periods of racing heart (mine has gotten to 120bpm for five hours) that make you feel like you’re waiting for something to happen
- Exaggerated startle response. When I was a kid I used to hide behind corners to surprise my sisters. Two years ago my friend hid under my desk to scare me. I literally screamed, fell out of the chair, and started crying. She was laughing because she thought the joke went well, and then got concerned because I kept crying.
- Purposefully “tanking” a bad day with sad music/tv/movies/books because it “was already ruined anyway”
fromthemindofatwentyorotherlycan:
anyone else get a fuzzy-restless feeling when you need to do something but your brain won’t focus on anything and you’re silently begging yourself to just do one thing but instead you’re scrolling tumblr even though you don’t even want to be … it’s like your head is filled with heavy electric cotton like you’re both uncomfy and unable to stop
This is the best damn description of executive dysfunction I have ever heard
Just realized I get executive dysfunction….
Meg's Mumbles 