Hey, everyone. Been doing a lot of thinking since I started therapy a few months ago, and I thought I might share some of them here. Not quite sure why, but there’s this need to talk and hell, maybe some of you will see something I’m not.

The main things I went into therapy for were to deal with lingering grief and my difficulty keeping myself happy. I have struggled with this for a long time, though it has become worse over the last few years, even before the death of my mother in 2023. I had done some introspection into that, but therapy’s taken that further (which is good, because, you know, paying for expertise and I’d rather like to get that), and also encouraged me to have more insights of my own.

So, shortest possible way to put this.

Background: eldest child of three in a single-parent family, emotionally abusive bio-father, had to be the grown-up kid that suppressed all possible needs and wants. Got praised for being so ‘mature’ and ‘responsible,’ and colluded with that to become more helpful and less ‘complicated’ to keep getting praise, because if I didn’t, that love and appreciation stopped. Left the default-Christian faith around age 8-10, somewhere in there, after realizing some logical fallacies and getting no answers on that, and developed a deep depression around death because that was just the end. Did not have any family support on that because that would have been ‘needy’ and not ‘responsible.’ Oh, right, also fairly heavy poverty and mom working 3 jobs at a given time.

Fast forward. Depression about pointlessness of life is fought by need to be helpful, to be validated by being a good person, by being needed by others, by doing everything as good as possible to take stress off of other people. I over-indulge, connecting to many people, forgoing healthy relationships because they didn’t ‘need’ me and instead focusing on people that were hurting, or needy, or otherwise able to show me that I was helpful to them.

A few years later, my mom gets a terminal illness, in either 2012 or 2013. She is now on a ten-year descent toward death when the doctors told her that she had a year, maybe two, to live. I become more and more the caretaker at home, eventually contributing between one-third to one-half the finances of the house month to month. Stepdad helps, but he’s basically there as financial provider; household becomes increasingly more mine to manage in terms of cleaning, cooking, etc., as mom gets worse and worse.

Resentment for all of this is kept down, despite unconscious emotional blackmail to stay there because ‘things would get worse’ if I ever left, and that would be my fault as a result.

Zoom forward to present day. Mom’s dead. Grandmother’s dead. Bio-dad’s dead. Step-dad left and went back to the east coast. Sister and brother barely talk. Family’s basically scattered to the winds, and I live with friends.

…Fuck, that was a long background. For any that goes through the whole thing, my apologies, and thank you.

Anyway, stuff I’ve been able to glean from introspection, therapy, and other stuff. My problems include:

-The part of me that wants things is MASSIVELY stifled and even a little damaged; it’s been taught to shut up because wanting things hurts me around other people.
-The part of me that is so eager to offer help is part love/compassion, part desperation to be worth keeping around.
-I believe that I am worthy of love and help, but have two saboteurs in the way: the caretaker side that lets everyone else get help first, and the part of me that was praised for being so skilled and good needing to keep that by not needing help.
-Despite worthiness of love and help, a part of me resists being helped because of the rule of prior experience: those that need help cannot give, those that give help cannot get. And I struggle to get around that ‘rule’.
-I struggle to enjoy anything outside the moment, because the part of me starved of happiness (which happens because of the first problem) wants to hyper-optimize it, which takes me from ‘enjoying thing’ to ‘how to enjoy thing’, which has no happiness, which poisons the thing and keeps it from being happy.
-Stuff I used to enjoy that takes time has become poisoned by association, because ‘responsible’ people don’t waste time, and they have to be available for others (see losing most ability to write for myself, read for myself, do things without ‘fooling’ my brain by doing it for/with other people).

And there’s other, smaller things in there, too, but that’s the big stuff.

Now, does that mean I feel hopeless? No. Wincing a bit at realizing how much of that stuff is there, but, hey, at least now I can take some steps and try and be better with it, improve myself, find ways around or through the issues until they can be resolved.

What I’m doing now (besides taking a beating-stick to sabotaging thoughts when I find them):

-Practicing mindfulness/presence in the moment (removing expectations, accepting things as they are, maybe with lowered standards, and trying to not ‘pop’ the headspace bubble if it is a good one)
-Accepting treats when offered instead of immediately denying them or trying to shrug them off.
-Focusing on the loving-others reason to help rather than doing it because ‘good person does this’ (and I care for and love a lot of people, so that should be somewhat easy).
-Encouraging myself to go back to things I did do for myself in the past, going through familiar things that should be easier instead of trying new things in the same cluster (reading a book I already know, going back to something I wrote that I did like back then, etc.)

It’s not much, but they are steps. And there’s gonna be a lot more.

Not sure why I wrote this all out, but I felt the need to get the thoughts out, and maybe codify it a bit.

For those that read the whole thing, thank you for your time.