In my earlier post I mentioned that when I learned about "learned helplessness" it stirred up memories of my childhood and adolescent years. In one of this semester's classes, Developmental Psychopathology, I'm getting similar flash backs, especially when we study mood disorders such as major depressive disorder (MDD). I'm not sure when my depression first started but I can tell you it seems like I have been depressed my whole life. As I read the material in the texbook for this class I see clearly how I was displaying symptoms of MDD as an adolescent. I have also read that the medical or academic community once thought that children could not have depression or mood disorders. Depression was viewed as a result of hostility and anger towards oneself because of a loss, whether actual or perceived. This was a typically "psychoanalytic" theory, based on Sigmund Freud and others like him in that era. Because children were thought not to have enough development in their superego to be able to direct anger and hostility to themselves, depression was seen as something children had no capacity to experience. Also, the very symptoms of depression were considered a normal part of development (mood swings, irritability, etc). Indeed, I remember hearing that point of view as I grew up. To me, it was an invalidation of the very essence of myself. In fact, I remember my mother telling one of the many psychologists I have seen in my life, that "everyone gets depressed" so I just needed to get over it.
I heard so many times the words, "there is nothing wrong with you" alternatively with "what's the matter with you?" I was discouraged from projecting any kind of pain or discomfort because it would cause my mother trouble and stress. I was to sit quietly in a corner and deal with whatever pain I had and not bother anyone. What this effectively did to me was to teach me how to hide my feelings from the world. It's why I believe that I developed the chronic carpal tunnel syndrome that never seems to resolve or go away. I remember "pushing through" the pain in my arms while at work because for years I had been taught not to express the discomfort, to deal with it privately, and "put up with it." It's why whenever I cry out unexpectedly in pain I am immediately embarrassed. I think it is also why I get so angry when I accidentally hurt myself, like bumping my knee, running into a corner, or pinching myself on something. Like many people I cry out with some choice curse word or phrase.
So, as I read the chapter in my textbook on Mood Disorders, I find myself flashing back to different occasions where I felt particularly invalidated or unheard. It started with the very first page of the chapter and has caused me to put down the book and write this post. I think the only way I can effectively deal with my history and move on from it is to be heard, which is what this blog is about. I know that this blog has never really had a point and most of it is just my rambling psyche expressing itself, but I am now channeling all those memories, looking at them from a different perspective and beginning to finally heal from what can be accurately described as emotional abuse.
I was never really "heard" growing up. A common thing my mother would often say is "I don't want to talk about it" or "Just go to your room." Those phrases muted the very normal desire and need to express one's self but that was my reality when growing up. I grew up with a single mother who was very overwhelmed with her responsibilities but instead of turning to drugs or alcohol, she internalized her own anguish (like losing her beloved husband at 25 years of age and being left with three small children), basically taught her children to do the same. To this day, I believe she feels it is not only unnecessary to talk about sad and hurtful memories, she sees it as a kind of etiquette that must be followed. Put on a happy face and shut up. That was the big message I received.
So, I'm intentionally breaking out of that and writing this stuff in my blog as a type of therapy and healing. Bad memories, conflicted emotions must not be shoved down, pushed down or repressed because the result will be a very troubled psyche. The more I read and learn about psychology the more I understand myself and give myself the freedom to move on. This is why I chose psychology as my major. I may never actually get a job where I am a counselor, researcher or technician in the field of psychology, but I will be informed of the reality of what makes me tick and hopefully, I can break free from some very old bad habits of relating to people.
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Understanding My Psychology
One of the reasons why I decided to study psychology is to figure out what makes me tick and why. The more I learn about myself and understand the motives behind my behavior the more peace I have in my soul. I always just had the nagging feeling that I was weird and unlikeable. So, as I sit and hear lectures and watch videos I can identify similar feelings within myself. One thing that keeps popping up is social anxiety. I remember literally shaking - physically - when under a great deal of stress. Today I learned that early post traumatic stress, once present, follows you through your whole life.
When I was approximately one and half years old, my older brother fed me a whole bottle of baby aspirin. I remember being held down in the emergency room and vomiting up the contents of that bottle. Flash forward just a few years and the tip of my little finger got chopped by the leg of a folding card table. I remember being in the emergency room and trying to lean my head away from the nurses and probably screaming at the top of my lungs and they somehow figured out that I was afraid they were going to put a tube down my throat again. I think they gave me a lollipop while they sewed up my finger.
Those early traumatic experiences have altered the way I perceive my environment. I read in a paper "traumatic experiences may alter the growing child's ways of perceiving her world and learning to deal with it and herself effectively, so as to impede the natural maturation of coping."
While I have healed from both events physically, the trauma of those events I have felt since then has been pretty much present ever since. Hence the impeded coping maturation. I have known that my coping skills were off and that others seemed to cope more effectively during stressful events. One stressful event for me is hardly a blip on the radar of a person who has mature coping skills.
All this was pretty much repressed until I started learning about different disorders of the neural system of our brains. I had physical responses to the memories that first crept up when I took Learning and Behavior at Mesa College. It first came when I learned about "learned helplessness."
I believe it was Pavlov, experimenting with his dogs, put them in a metal cage with two compartments. The cage was wired with electrodes to deliver shocks through the floor on both sides. The researchers had the ability to turn the shocks off by one side or both so that when ever the dog stepped on that side of the cage he had the ability to escape the shocks by jumping to the other side of the cage. It took the dogs a while to catch on to the fact that they could jump across the short divider of one side of the cage to get to the other side.
This went on for a while and then Pavlov decided to test to see what would happen when they activated the whole floor so that both sides of the cage were electrified. After a while of jumping back and forth over the divider, the dogs just huddled in a corner and whined. He termed this behavior "learned helplessness." Psychologists have identified learned helplessness in domestic violence victims. Women often don't leave their abuser because of real or perceived threats and this phenomena of learned helplessness.
As I've taken more psychology classes like abnormal psychology, social psychology, and developmental psychology, I see a clear pattern when looking back over my life growing up. i always wondered why I shied away from competitions, or arguments, as my general behavior can be pretty aggressive and gregarious at times. It's paradoxical. But then I thought about all the teasing i got from certain individuals. I remember my mother laughing at me on a number of occasions for being upset that I was being teased. I usually was told that I did something to bring it on myself. So, I learned to suck it up and push it down, and more importantly, to try harder to be better.
Why the lesson on learned helplessness brought this up was because I always felt helpless and frustrated when I was teased, which was on a daily basis, either by kids at school or in my home with family members. I was always being told that stupid erroneous saying, "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me." ?? What the fuck is that?? Of course words harm. Harming words are at the core of bullying and emotional abuse. I had to remind my mother about this fact just a year or so ago when she told me to "don't pay attention to what someone else says about you." Really? Easy to say if you're a narcissist. To most people I know, harmful words hurt, demean and make us feel insecure, at least at the time it is happening. No wonder why I have so much anger inside. I have realized that there are a lot of times when I simply don't stand up for myself because I feel like it won't make a difference and could make the situation worse. It's learned helplessness. Of course I have swung the other way and became a raging bull and try to destroy anyone in my path. This served me well in that it kept people away from me and made them wary of me, probably questioning my sanity.
The problem is the isolation that it produced is hard to overcome. Because now I find I don't have many friends because at some point they have hurt me and I have either blown them off, they blow me off or there is a big confrontation that ends with permanent separation from the relationship. I just don't trust myself when it comes to making friends. When I look back at my life I see myself hanging with people who did little to encourage me, people who had very different morals and beliefs from my own. So, now I am wary of making new friends because I don't trust myself to make good choices with friends. I've had a number of friends basically "break-up with" me by flat out telling me not to call or contact them. What makes that so infuriating is that I have often swallowed my own misgivings at remaining in relationship with the person in question. So, it's like they did what I should have done long ago but I don't get the satisfaction.
I am letting God bring the right friends into my life now. I will not force friendships, I will not go against my initial, instinctive thoughts about any caution I might feel in relationships. I will listen to God about his promptings when it comes to striking up a friendship with someone or continuing a relationship when the person is critical or unsupportive of me. I will be ok alone until I can have friends in my life who will encourage me, support me, and generally make me feel accepted and loved. I will do this because I deserve to be happy and I deserve to have friends and people in my life who are supportive and not critical. I deserve to have friends who don't get their jollies from teasing me.
When I was approximately one and half years old, my older brother fed me a whole bottle of baby aspirin. I remember being held down in the emergency room and vomiting up the contents of that bottle. Flash forward just a few years and the tip of my little finger got chopped by the leg of a folding card table. I remember being in the emergency room and trying to lean my head away from the nurses and probably screaming at the top of my lungs and they somehow figured out that I was afraid they were going to put a tube down my throat again. I think they gave me a lollipop while they sewed up my finger.
Those early traumatic experiences have altered the way I perceive my environment. I read in a paper "traumatic experiences may alter the growing child's ways of perceiving her world and learning to deal with it and herself effectively, so as to impede the natural maturation of coping."
While I have healed from both events physically, the trauma of those events I have felt since then has been pretty much present ever since. Hence the impeded coping maturation. I have known that my coping skills were off and that others seemed to cope more effectively during stressful events. One stressful event for me is hardly a blip on the radar of a person who has mature coping skills.
All this was pretty much repressed until I started learning about different disorders of the neural system of our brains. I had physical responses to the memories that first crept up when I took Learning and Behavior at Mesa College. It first came when I learned about "learned helplessness."
I believe it was Pavlov, experimenting with his dogs, put them in a metal cage with two compartments. The cage was wired with electrodes to deliver shocks through the floor on both sides. The researchers had the ability to turn the shocks off by one side or both so that when ever the dog stepped on that side of the cage he had the ability to escape the shocks by jumping to the other side of the cage. It took the dogs a while to catch on to the fact that they could jump across the short divider of one side of the cage to get to the other side.
This went on for a while and then Pavlov decided to test to see what would happen when they activated the whole floor so that both sides of the cage were electrified. After a while of jumping back and forth over the divider, the dogs just huddled in a corner and whined. He termed this behavior "learned helplessness." Psychologists have identified learned helplessness in domestic violence victims. Women often don't leave their abuser because of real or perceived threats and this phenomena of learned helplessness.
As I've taken more psychology classes like abnormal psychology, social psychology, and developmental psychology, I see a clear pattern when looking back over my life growing up. i always wondered why I shied away from competitions, or arguments, as my general behavior can be pretty aggressive and gregarious at times. It's paradoxical. But then I thought about all the teasing i got from certain individuals. I remember my mother laughing at me on a number of occasions for being upset that I was being teased. I usually was told that I did something to bring it on myself. So, I learned to suck it up and push it down, and more importantly, to try harder to be better.
Why the lesson on learned helplessness brought this up was because I always felt helpless and frustrated when I was teased, which was on a daily basis, either by kids at school or in my home with family members. I was always being told that stupid erroneous saying, "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me." ?? What the fuck is that?? Of course words harm. Harming words are at the core of bullying and emotional abuse. I had to remind my mother about this fact just a year or so ago when she told me to "don't pay attention to what someone else says about you." Really? Easy to say if you're a narcissist. To most people I know, harmful words hurt, demean and make us feel insecure, at least at the time it is happening. No wonder why I have so much anger inside. I have realized that there are a lot of times when I simply don't stand up for myself because I feel like it won't make a difference and could make the situation worse. It's learned helplessness. Of course I have swung the other way and became a raging bull and try to destroy anyone in my path. This served me well in that it kept people away from me and made them wary of me, probably questioning my sanity.
The problem is the isolation that it produced is hard to overcome. Because now I find I don't have many friends because at some point they have hurt me and I have either blown them off, they blow me off or there is a big confrontation that ends with permanent separation from the relationship. I just don't trust myself when it comes to making friends. When I look back at my life I see myself hanging with people who did little to encourage me, people who had very different morals and beliefs from my own. So, now I am wary of making new friends because I don't trust myself to make good choices with friends. I've had a number of friends basically "break-up with" me by flat out telling me not to call or contact them. What makes that so infuriating is that I have often swallowed my own misgivings at remaining in relationship with the person in question. So, it's like they did what I should have done long ago but I don't get the satisfaction.
I am letting God bring the right friends into my life now. I will not force friendships, I will not go against my initial, instinctive thoughts about any caution I might feel in relationships. I will listen to God about his promptings when it comes to striking up a friendship with someone or continuing a relationship when the person is critical or unsupportive of me. I will be ok alone until I can have friends in my life who will encourage me, support me, and generally make me feel accepted and loved. I will do this because I deserve to be happy and I deserve to have friends and people in my life who are supportive and not critical. I deserve to have friends who don't get their jollies from teasing me.
Saturday, January 5, 2013
The Silence is Deafening
As the fifth day of the new year rounds the afternoon hour, the silence in my home is loud. I do not turn on the television in fear of being sucked into its time-wasting, motivation-killing abyss. I've spent time with God and tried to be productive in the new year by finishing the card I made for the nice staff at the animal hospital where my Jabez died. It's all done now and ready to accompany the remaining unopened cans of cat food I purchased before he died. The animal hospital will refund my money and buy back the cans of cat food and I wanted to give them a card with his picture on it and just a little note to say thank you for helping him, and me, in this phase of life.
My heart still feels the hole that he left, the hole that he had filled after my husband died fourteen years ago. I was a widow of two years and an empty-nester and sought some kind of bond and decided that it should be with a pet, and so, Jabez came into my life. He was with me twelve and a half years and had grown to be my best and ever present friend. But now he is gone and what I have left is this blaring silence.
Silence that was once filled my one-sided conversation with Jabez. Although there were times where he would seem to answer my prattle with his little mews and meows, it was a comfort to me to be able to talk to him even if he didn't understand a word I said and to watch him as he slept. Now, I just have my silent thoughts and the soft tapping of the keys on my laptop. Even the noise from my neighbors seems to be non-existant today.
The silence seems to scream, "you are all alone". I need to take down the Christmas decorations but feel reluctant to make the change from holiday to a new year. I've been beaten down by the circumstances and failures of my life to rebound from the economic disaster that struck in 2009, I've got a new semester to look forward to but one that will include a repeat of the statistics class that is required before I can enroll in the research methods class, which I'm so looking forward to taking. Unfortunately, a C- does not get me into that class. It must be a grade of C or higher. So, for the first time in my educational career I must retake a class to move forward. I've got many more credits to fulfill besides that class but it is ego bruising at best and disheartening at most. Another bump in the road.
But I cried out to my God and went up for prayer at the service last night. I know, even if I don't feel, that He is walking right beside me, holding my hand, and sometimes carrying me, in the silence. I press into Him because He is all that I have and from Him is where my healing and restoration come. I submit to His Holy Spirit and let tears fall when they come and lay face down pouring out my grief and heartache. In the clanging silence I get up and put one foot in front of the other and take one task at a time to attempt, and then complete. I unplug the Christmas tree lights so they will cool down as I begin the gut wrenching process of surrendering the holidays to the new year and moving on to the next phase of my life.
Will new friends come into my life this year? Will I finally let go of the hurts of the past and smile to the world? Smile. That is the word that resounded so loudly in my head when the guy was praying over me last night. I don't smile a lot. It's something I have heard all my life, from random strangers too. "Why don't you smile?" Because I don't feel like it. I pray that I will feel like smiling more in this new year of 2013.
So, I smile at the silence and put some music on the stereo and continue to be God Strong Patty.
My heart still feels the hole that he left, the hole that he had filled after my husband died fourteen years ago. I was a widow of two years and an empty-nester and sought some kind of bond and decided that it should be with a pet, and so, Jabez came into my life. He was with me twelve and a half years and had grown to be my best and ever present friend. But now he is gone and what I have left is this blaring silence.
Silence that was once filled my one-sided conversation with Jabez. Although there were times where he would seem to answer my prattle with his little mews and meows, it was a comfort to me to be able to talk to him even if he didn't understand a word I said and to watch him as he slept. Now, I just have my silent thoughts and the soft tapping of the keys on my laptop. Even the noise from my neighbors seems to be non-existant today.
The silence seems to scream, "you are all alone". I need to take down the Christmas decorations but feel reluctant to make the change from holiday to a new year. I've been beaten down by the circumstances and failures of my life to rebound from the economic disaster that struck in 2009, I've got a new semester to look forward to but one that will include a repeat of the statistics class that is required before I can enroll in the research methods class, which I'm so looking forward to taking. Unfortunately, a C- does not get me into that class. It must be a grade of C or higher. So, for the first time in my educational career I must retake a class to move forward. I've got many more credits to fulfill besides that class but it is ego bruising at best and disheartening at most. Another bump in the road.
But I cried out to my God and went up for prayer at the service last night. I know, even if I don't feel, that He is walking right beside me, holding my hand, and sometimes carrying me, in the silence. I press into Him because He is all that I have and from Him is where my healing and restoration come. I submit to His Holy Spirit and let tears fall when they come and lay face down pouring out my grief and heartache. In the clanging silence I get up and put one foot in front of the other and take one task at a time to attempt, and then complete. I unplug the Christmas tree lights so they will cool down as I begin the gut wrenching process of surrendering the holidays to the new year and moving on to the next phase of my life.
Will new friends come into my life this year? Will I finally let go of the hurts of the past and smile to the world? Smile. That is the word that resounded so loudly in my head when the guy was praying over me last night. I don't smile a lot. It's something I have heard all my life, from random strangers too. "Why don't you smile?" Because I don't feel like it. I pray that I will feel like smiling more in this new year of 2013.
So, I smile at the silence and put some music on the stereo and continue to be God Strong Patty.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)