Pre-Note: Yahoo has been randomly eating my comment emails (and other newsletters etc that I've been receiving for years) again. So I'm just now getting to them. What a wonderful big present for me though to find them all in my spam folder!
On to the real post:
The biggest things I seem to be learning from therapy and my work experiences are that:
1. I am not as crazy as I think I am
and
2. I am my own worst enemy and critic
So far my friends, FavoriteOB and now my therapist have pretty much told me that I don't seem to be that badly off emotionally and that it doesn't show as much as I thought it did. While some of that is probably that I do hide the most awful feelings fairly well, at this point I also have to concede that maybe they're on to something... especially since the professionals are involved.
I am quite the perfectionist and always have been. I'm particularly hard on myself if I'm not meeting my own expectations behaviorally, and I'm not getting validation from other people. It's a big failing. I often grab self esteem from my relationships instead of from my own sense of self worth. So when I see myself as failing emotionally, that begins a vicious spiral where I become more and more visibly agitated, tired, stressed and solemn. That spiral leads to others noticing my distress and interpreting it in their own ways. They then start providing less of the validation I crave. As my therapist says, "You are allowing them to define who you are when you retreat, because you aren't defining it for yourself to them." That spiral then becomes a circle of crap that just gets worse and worse until sometimes the only way to get out of it is to run away.
I need to stop the madness (trite I know). And as much as I need Hub, I need to stop scaring him with those feelings because since he's so close to me, I think he thinks I'm crazier than I am too. Then we feed on each other again. Note though Hub that it's sooo much better when you are as wonderfully supportive as you've been! That doesn't mean you need to stop! hehe.
So that's where I am now - trying to take things less personally, trying to ease up on myself, trying to stop the vicious cycle. If any of you out there have done this and have some pointers, fire away. And baby is now awake from nap, so self reflection time is over. They do tend to make us take ourselves far less seriously eh?
