So, I’m reading my anger book and it says that Sarcasm is a tell-tale sign of anger issues. I can see where it is true, and how when I get frustrated and pissed-off I get ‘peckish’, as in I want to peck the heads off of people who are irritating me. I try to accomplish this with serated sarcastic words. Sad, I’ve always thought sarcasm is my best quality as a conversationalist. Now how am I going to communicate?
Category: Books
Ring Around the Depression
I’m tired of the good days, then the angry days, then the sleepy days and then pray for the return of the good days. When I’m up, I’m hopeful that the bad days are gone, and dissappointed when they aren’t. If I over-do one day I pay for it the next. When will I build up the mental muscles to withstand the inevitable onslaught of exhaustion from day-to-day.
Getting upset yesterday that I wasn’t heard by my family was stupid. When Anger Hurts is correct when it says you can’t make anyone change with the anger and getting angry at something this trivial is my choice. I am the one that suffers from this choice, not them. They don’t even know how rude they can be, and it’s been that way for as long as I have memory. I think it’s Einstein that said to do something over and over again expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity. I guess I’m insane.
Anger Anger Everywhere, Yet Not A Face to Slap
Okay. here I am thinking that I’m getting my anger under control, reading my book, having safeguards in my mind in case I feel one coming on, and then BOOM knocked on my ass again. I’m explaining to Cyndi and Mom, mostly Cyndi that my diagnosis is Sever Depression, Severe Anxiety and just a touch of OCD. Mom cracks wise about how she’s never seen me be OCD about house cleaning, Cyndi calls me Mrs. Monk. I explained that I’m Mild in that category but I wanted to express to them what Severe Depression meant in todays standards…..Like normally in-hospital care has been prescribed for Severe depression. No, something else became more important….I don’t remember what, just the sting that they felt what I was going through was trivial compared to whatever it was they needed to talk about.
I know it’s who they are, I shouldn’t set my expectations so high with the two of them, but I keep hoping…….
The Separate Self
This is the first section in Viorst’s book of Necessary Losses. In essence it’s about cutting the umbilical cord from Mommy and Daddy and learning to stand on your own two feet. However, it debunks the idea that you cut the cord when you turn 18, move out, go to University and then forward in your life through self-propelled societal rites of passages. So not true.
Cutting the umbilici starts the day of birth and progresses throughout life. We are expelled from our mother’s womb, hopefully without incident and brought into a world of foreign sterility, naked and cold we scream for what we have lost.
From the womb we become attached and form a sort of nirvana with our mother who feeds us and gently ares for us in the harsh bright world we’ve been brought into. Until she leaves us, the first whack at the connection between mother and child. Papa was there eventually to fill in and to help us gain our footing, showing us that we can be one and together within the family structure. This is our first
experience with love; both giving and receiving love. Agape. Unconditional love.
As time moves forward the abandonment because more of an agreed upon eparation and a coming back together. Again, small gnawing strikes at the ties that bind until we are a single, self-loving, self-empowered human being capable of giving and receiving love without fear of loss of love or self. Like a butterfly who has to push itself away from the chrysalis on it’s own. If you stop to help the transformed to flight it will not have the necessary strength to survive.
How does this apply to me?
- I trip over the umbilici here at home, so we know that it hasn’t been
severed. But not severed by who (or isit whom? I never could get that right.)? I realized while reading this book about how children from narcissistic parents raise narcissistic kids, and it’s a repeated thing. I’ve somehow been put into the roll of my Mothers mother, and I am taking care of her the way she has never been taken care of before. She is completely unencumbered by the stresses of every-day living, she doesn’t have to worry about anything, in general. She has said several times that she’s the happiest she’s ever been. This conflicts with my lack of maternal instinct. Whatever desire I had to be a mother was sated by the nieces and the nephews, I don’t feel like I have it to give now. I’ve learned that love and hate are part of the same process, that thinking about the hate you have for someone you love/like doesn’t make you a bad person, acting on it does. One must make a conscious decision not to do bad things, our choices determined who/what we are. Like Newton’s theory of Motion…To all things there is an equal and opposite reaction. One cannot exist without the other.
- Despite my best efforts, I appear to be more narcissistic than I want to be. Though self-love is vital part of ones esteem, it shouldn’t be all ncompassing to the point of drowning. Therapy, in and of itself, is an indulgence into self, but a necessary one and I shouldn’t feel like I’m being a ‘bad’ person because of it.
- Being the person I want to be instead of the person I present to the world is going to take more work than just pretending I am who I say I am.
- I need to let go of my fearful and childish black-and-white simplifications for the difficult ambiguities of real life. This is going to hurt. Black and white means there is a wrong and a right (where I can be more right than wrong) and a world of ambiguities will never have that satisfaction.
- I’ve got a freakish amount of work to be ME again.
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