Before I start this blog entry, please note that the focus is on my offline relationships, not here. On my blog, I am able to connect and be caring without “taking on” anyone else’s pain. If only I could be that way in my offline life…
Last week, I felt like I was being bombarded daily with drama from all directions in my offline life. Every time the phone rang, someone was in crisis. Every email seemed to hold drama in it. It didn’t help that serious “drama” was going on at one of my part-time jobs, and I had to intervene with multiple students who were panicked about how the “drama” would affect their grades. Everywhere I turned, someone was in crisis and needed me to help them out.
Don’t get me wrong – I am a great friend and am very supportive of those in my life. Where it starts to overwhelm me is when the room for myself gets choked out as I become mired in everyone else’s stuff. There is no time for me and my own coping mechanisms as I get pulled into everyone else’s drama over and over again.
The worst part is those in my life who then “blame” me for their drama. That’s that part that gets me angry and gets me saying, “Enough!” I used to attract this kind of personality before therapy. I would imagine I was great to be around for those who don’t want to take responsibility for their own stuff. As an abused child, I was programmed to believe that everything was “my fault,” and I was comfortable in that role. If the problem is “my fault,” then I have the power to fix it. That’s why it helped me to survive the child abuse by believing that it was “my fault.” To accept the truth – that I had absolutely no power to make the child abuse stop – was to accept despair.
However, I am no longer an abused child, and my patience has run out on people in my day-to-day life who are miserable, won’t make the effort to change it, and want to dump all of their misery on me. Goodness knows, I have a ton of internal drama that I could be dumping on other people and using as a reason to stay perpetually miserable, but I don’t. I write the drama out here, and people can choose to read it or not. And, for the most part, I stay pretty positive in my life, even after weeks of little sleep and getting slammed with flashbacks.
I feel better after getting that off my chest.
Photo credit: Hekatekris
This was/is a biggie in m life and it is complicated.
Over the last few years I have learned that if I do not get drawn into it than they seem to solve it or maybe they get someone else to burden.
I have also found that if I solve things than people do some weird thing and it is somehow they solved it., I have found that in a group I will be used as the one to dump on and then if things are going well I am left out. Kinda a way for them to have it not have happened.
There seems to be something that is unspoken that works. Perhaps non-verbal messages. Logic seems to have little effect. In the last year people seem to understand I am not gong to be the one to dump on.
It seems people know when I am tired and take advantage of that,
The effort that family goes to keep me in this role is in incredible. I have found that the reality is there is only a lull. They to date have not changed.
My only solution is to hang around good people. Ones that can share both ways. They are out there, they are hard to find.
My pet peeve is wives and girlfriends. I really do not care what your husband or boyfriend does, it is not my relationship.
“won’t make the effort to change it,” Experiencing trauma did not make me the only one that does not get to judge. I can make the judgment that a person really does not want to make the effort,. I allow I may be wrong.
I did not come to my ability to solve problems and be strong by magic. I earned it. I do not think in terms of that I was abused and so therefore I … I frame it as I had more important things going on and it was not best that I learned these games that people played. I know what I had going on that was more important was caused by the abuse. Just a different way of looking at it.
This is a very timely post for me Faith.
Being part of any group is still very difficult for me, due to being brought up (at least part of my life) in a cult, where the normal rules of human relationships are totally distorted. I still struggle enormously to believe others’ problems are not always my fault, and, sadly, there seem to be lots of people who take advantage of my insecurity about my own guilt and will be all too happy to blame me for things they have done or to scapegoat me when we’re in a group that is failing in some way. This makes me very sad. It can also still lead me into a vicious cycle as there is part of me who feels very guilty still and will prefer to stay stuck in the ‘it’s my fault’ role, then others inside get very angry. I do feel I am beginning to heal this with firmer boundaries and alot of my strength has also come from acknowledging that nobody outside (or hardly anyone) is going to give me full credit for the drastic transformation in my life, the way I have changed and continue to focus on self-development actually feels threatening to them (even if I don’t talk about it, they sense it). Too many prefer to try to beat me back down to where I was, instead of to celebrate the human power of change and growth that is evident in me and that I honestly feel I recognise adequately in others. A big phase of my life right now is trying to weed out relationships where such change is not celebrated and look for new ones where it is – this is leading to all sorts of dramatic changes in my life.
Also, I wanted to add that quite a lot of change came about for me when I finally recognized in my mind and in my heart that I could never rescue, help or change my mother. As Elaine wrote somewhere on here, somehow that may have released my mother to change herself. I try to do this in all my relationships rather than solving problems for them but sometimes get stuck in my old ways due to that dynamic you mention of feeling powerless otherwise. Can only change myself and have to do it for myself or for good and not for someone else.
Yea, I think my thought at the time was about those invisible cords that connect us to each other (which can be good or bad), can aso serve as ropes that bind us. So that goes for us and the other person/people on the other end of those invisible cords. There is no guarantee that the other person will change, but they have a better chance of it if they are no longer entangled in the ropes that have bound us together. I guess a better example would be that if you and another person are entagled in the same rubber band, and you decide to step free of the rubber band, the other person suddenly finds themselves to be “free-er” without even understanding why. What they do with that new freedom is up to them, but it does open things up for new and better possibilities. I think it is really hard to do though when we are really invested in the relationship because becoming disentangled can feel too much like we are “giving up” on something we really want. I think instead it is just acknowledging what has always been true, and that is that we don’t have control over the other person and how they act. I think though that you have to have a world view that believes in the possibility for others to grow and change if given the opportunity. A friend of mine once told me that she reached a point in her life where she had to decide whether this was basically a friendly universe or a hostile universe. She chose to believe that this is essentially a friendly universe. Her decision was not based on any particular evidence. It was just a choice she made. That has been many years ago, and her life has gone much better since then because she doesn’t feel the need to try to control things because she believes in some kind of imminent goodness- not a goodness that is based in people, but the universe itself. I think it is much easier to free ourselves from those bonds of expectations from others if we believe there is an essential goodness and friendliness to the make up of the universe.
This is very hard for me at this point in my life. What I believe and what I act as though i believe are two different things right now. I have become cynical and somewhat “paranoid” about life these days, so I am really out of synch with myself. I’ve always had problems with trying to fix things that are out of my control, then I wonder why I end up so frustrated and depressed.
Ax,
I wish I could change for someone else and have it work. It is so dicey as when I take care of myself I can take care of others with out it draining me., Does not work if that is the goal. I have to come first.
Michael
I’ve found that my tolerance for other people’s drama has pretty much disappeared recently. I used to feel like if I cared about them I should be willing to help. But there’s a difference between someone asking for support and someone using me as a sounding board for problems they are not really interested in solving. I have a friend/co-worker doing this right now and it feels like my whole work environment is being poisoned. As difficult as it feels for me with all my habits of care-taking other people’s feelings, I think I’m ready to start being more brutal- as in “if you want my support or help moving past this problem I’m there, but if not I don’t want to hear about it”. I’m not going to keep sending my energy out into black holes. I don’t actually believe we can solve anyone’s problems for them anyway. And I kind of don’t like it when people try to solve mine.
I recently came across the following article:
http://www.lovefraud.com/blog/2009/01/04/sociopath-proof-in-2009/
It’s not about your situation, which sounds like it is about normal people who are just taking up too much of your time and energy. It is more about setting boundaries with unethical people who will take advantage. But for years upon years I had never learned to recognize boundary violations, let alone set any boundaries, so I was constantly mistaking the latter (unethical people who will take advantage) for the former (normal people with problems). All because I had been thoroughly trained to be ‘nice’ to everyone (aka a doormat).
Thought this might be of interest to some of your readers who may still be making the same mistakes I did.
I found this part of the article especially interesting, “For those of us who hear the denigrating voice of the sociopath in our thoughts, self-validating is a way to bypass it. To say, “Oh, shut up. You’re not me, you’re just a bad memory” while we move on to explore our thoughts and feelings.”
I can completely related to this, I searched almost the exact title of this without even knowing it existed. It feels like a couple times a year I’m just done with it and want to say “enough.”
How did you break through all that negativity and other people’s drama to find positivity in your own life? If you don’t mind me asking. I know you said with counselling but anything in particular that helped?