New things

I finally understand when they told me in therapy that, the past always will hurt but the goal is to get to a point where it doesn’t control you. And it’s starting to feel like it’s not controlling me anymore.

I wish I could look back and paint like this easy road of like, oh, it just clicks, like you just understand that like, it’s all just pain. And just because like, when you try to tell yourself that you don’t deserve it, you’re in a place where you’re alone. And you’re in a place where you try to remember a time where you felt comfortable again, but you can’t remember it because that memory doesn’t exist. And so you tell yourself that it’s not real. You don’t deserve safety. Safety doesn’t exist. And you keep telling yourself that. But stepping into a life where I’m in control, I’m actually in control and not my past means that I understand that when that happens, doesn’t mean I deserve it or not deserve it. It just means that every experience I’ve had up to that point wasn’t good enough. That I actually hadn’t felt safe up to this point. And it’s more about accepting that the possibility that maybe I just wasn’t safe my whole life. And maybe I’m learning something very extremely, extremely, extremely new. But you never know what’s out there or what the world is. A lot of people look at you and think, why don’t they believe they deserve protection? Or any good thing? Because it’s not as natural as people assume. The only natural thing is whatever you grew up with, that’s your whole life.

My dad told me the story of Plato’s cave. In the cave there were prisoners who had lived there their whole lives. They watched a shadow puppet show on the wall that the guards put on for them to entertain them. They were not allowed to turn around. They believed the shadows were the whole world. And one day they were let outside the cave and everything was incomprehensible. You just have to leave room for the incomprehensible. You just have to make room for the possibility that something was very wrong with your entire life up to a point. Not recklessly, but just as a logical option to solving a problem. And then you have to accept that when you’re in a very bad situation, you might be reaching for a comfortable solution that doesn’t work, and the only solution is to try something you haven’t done before. Trying to do something new when you’re already scared is really tricky and really really scary.

I find that for me what took so long is that it was very black and white. It was like there was only people who always believed that I deserved safety and unconditional love and they just grew up with healthy parents. they would just tell it to me you know and it’s like I felt ashamed that I didn’t actually believe I deserved safety. I genuinely just did not believe I deserved it and I just felt so ashamed about that. then there was like a whole different group of people that were like people I actually were friends with even though they were toxic friends or toxic boyfriends or people I helped but I actually felt emotionally connected with because those other people genuinely didn’t believe they deserved love and safety. And at least I got a break from feeling ashamed of how malfunctioning I was. I think what you really need is a community of, or just knowing that there’s people out there that exist, that are in the middle. that they’re trying to make a change and at the same time they’re struggling to believe they deserve something better, and yet they may not believe it all the time.

I mean one of the messiest things about therapy and group therapy that I’ve been in is like there are a lot of people that will turn that into a competition or they will even judge themselves based on how far they are. I mean it’s hard not to when so much is at stake but this is just one of the tricky things about actually healing or helping each other or this so-called safe space that is supposed to be you know therapy. it’s so messy. It actually can be so messy. and it’s so easy for shame to just sneak in and and make you feel like you’re not good enough one way or another. Like even when me saying this and writing this it almost sounds like, oh I completely have it under control. I learned everything and now I’m talking about it. but that’s not even really the case, it’s still paradoxical. I still get confused and I still need help. it’s just one of those things that I don’t have an answer to. there’s no intellectual answer to why we shouldn’t feel ashamed, that I can think of.

If someone says to you: I don’t feel like I deserve love. That’s so incredibly awkward and uncomfortable, nobody knows how to respond to that. The right thing to say is: it really makes sense that you believe that based on all your past experiences.