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.
