I have been working my ass off in Albany. The first two night shifts were really hard to get through but with coffee and the pleasant dispositions of my coworkers it was not all that bad. I got used to 12 hour shifts pretty quickly, I think. I had three of them last weekend, in a row!! I am scared of being 100% independent at work. I am always afraid I would forget something, like a medication administration, or that I would mess something up. I have never learned to trust myself, and even more dysfunctional that that, I actively search for reasons to justify why I shouldn’t.
I went to a therapist on March 17th to talk everything out… all the shit that’s in my head.
My therapist is familiar with the frame of mind that I have (I think most psychotherapists are). He is familiar with Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOA), which is what I am. Here are traits which most ACOAs have (this was copied and pasted from the ACOA worldwide website:
“Many of us found that we had several characteristics in common as a result of being brought up in an alcoholic or other dysfunctional households.
We had come to feel isolated, and uneasy with other people, especially authority figures. To protect ourselves, we became people pleasers, even though we lost our own identities in the process. All the same we would mistake any personal criticism as a threat.
We either became alcoholics ourselves, married them, or both. Failing that, we found other compulsive personalities, such as a workaholic, to fulfill our sick need for abandonment.
We lived live from the standpoint of victims. Having an over developed sense of responsibility, we preferred to be concerned with others rather than ourselves. We got guilt feelings when we trusted ourselves, giving in to others. We became reactors rather than actors, letting others take the initiative.
We were dependent personalities, terrified of abandonment, willing to do almost anything to hold on to a relationship in order not to be abandoned emotionally. We keep choosing insecure relationships because they matched our childhood relationship with alcoholic or dysfunctional parents.
These symptoms of the family disease of alcoholism or other dysfunction made us 'co-victims', those who take on the characteristics of the disease without necessarily ever taking a drink. We learned to keep our feelings down as children and keep them buried as adults. As a result of this conditioning, we often confused love with pity, tending to love those we could rescue.
Even more self-defeating, we became addicted to excitement in all our affairs, preferring constant upset to workable solutions.
This is a description, not an indictment.”
The bolded statement above? Yeah, that’s me. Once I told Dioliver that this relationship I had with Manish was reminding me of another person in my life who I was inexplicably attached to despite the fact that he was an asshole, a waste of matter. Thankfully, I don’t even see or talk to him anymore because he had gotten a new girlfriend (a relationship I found out had since failed) and stopped talking to me. But why did I have to wait for HIM to be the one to find someone else before I could sweep up the pieces of myself and be able to move on? Because in the end, I still had a trace of hope that something would formulate between the two of us and we would forever be happy together. The same delusion I am having now.
Manish reminds me of that person, who in retrospect was tremendously abusive. These days, ironically, in the wake of this bullshit, I find myself looking through that person’s facebook page, not in a wistful way but rather in an “I can’t believe you have managed to find a way to deserve to still be alive” way. I know now how bad for me he was. Will the same happen this time?
Here’s another one from a less reputable site, though which still rings true:
“You don't have to have all the traits to be an ACOA.
But this is the general "laundry list."
1. Guess at what normal is.
2. Have difficulty in following a project through from beginning to end.
3. Lie when it would be just as easy to tell the truth.
4. Judge themselves without mercy.
5. Have difficulty having fun.
6. Take themselves very seriously.
7. Have difficulty with intimate relationships.
8. Overreact to changes over which they have no control.
9. Constantly seek approval and affirmation.
10. Feel that they are different from other people.
11. Are either super responsible or super irresponsible.
12. Are extremely loyal, even in the face of evidence that loyalty is undeserved.”
When I read this sentence from the list above, I was compelled immediately to reread it 3 or 4 times to really let it sink in:
12. Are extremely loyal, even in the face of evidence that loyalty is undeserved.
12. Are extremely loyal, even in the face of evidence that loyalty is undeserved.
12. Are extremely loyal, even in the face of evidence that loyalty is undeserved.
This is just heartbreaking.
I am a scientist dissecting myself and marveling appalled at all the fucked up things inside, scrambling for a reason to call them beautiful.
I remember last year I showed Manish the above excerpts in an effort to reveal more about myself, to try to explain to him why I was so fucked up emotionally. Also, I guess since it was at the beginning stages of our love, it was also an effort to show him WHY he shouldn’t hurt me, and that I was too fragile to be able to handle another emotional catastrophe. At the time he was so understanding, so sympathetic, so receptive to what I was presenting to him.
Then shortly thereafter he took a sledgehammer and pounded the life out of my heart.
My therapist said that I continue to waste time with him because I am in essence used to being in a relationship that renders me emotionally unstable, like the one I had with my mom. I always thought of myself as being way too self-aware to let something like this happen. I guess with the multiple stressors in life (ending school, taking my boards, finding employment, moving away from home) I just latched on to him. In addition to all this, I was totally in love with him. I know that I was in love with him before I latched on; I remember telling him the weekend after I first met him that although it was way too soon for me to know 100% of him, I felt like an idiot not asking him to spend the rest of his life with me right then and there. And his response was something to the effect of “let’s give it time”.
I had a nightmare tonight that I was talking to Venkat (Manish’s former roommate) and Venkat revealed to me that Manish had been in a “serious” committed relationship for 1.5 years, and that relationship is still ongoing, and that her name is Bethany. In my nightmare I typed her name in orkut and found out that she was distantly related to Dioliver (WTF!). I asked Venkat personal details about Manish and Bethany, and Venkat dispensed all the information I needed to know, and by the “end” of the nightmare I was exhausted from grief and shock from everything he had told me. The nightmare was enough to wake me up and now I am really sitting here shocked and grieving, but over what? I can’t quite place my finger on it. I still can’t believe that if I were to sit and think about what happened for more than 5 or 10 minutes, I know I would be crying. I told Dioliver that today and he was surprised. I guess I am too. I know what is good and what is bad for me; why can’t I live logically instead of always just thinking logically?
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