Hi Davit,
Almost a month has gone by since you posted this and I didn't post back but have been continuing to work on things though "working on myself" looks far different than it did in the beginning of this process 2 years ago. Now "working on myself" truly means being a friend to myself, being a (reluctant) parent to myself and letting myself feel my emotions.
No, to answer your question in your last post, you were not one of the people who told me to suck it up. Those were people who are themselves not (in my opinion) experiencing very good emotional health. I don't consider them to be helpful anymore when they say such things and I have had to limit my exposure to people who refuse to acknowledge my emotions. That is a big step for me.
I wanted to post to say that although I found a few ok counselors, in the end, it has been my own wisdom about myself that has counted the most and I want other people here to hear from my story thus far that it is what you know about yourself that really counts. Someone you meet and pay for an hour session can say very helpful things but in the end they don't know you like you know yourself.
Maybe I just didn't run into the right person early on. I have been panicking when feeling fear and / or anger for so long that I was truly blind to it. Look back at my posts from 4-6 months ago and you see me struggling to figure out how the "exposure" aspect of this program fit with me. Its because I didn't even know what was causing me to panic.I thought it was the person who was making me angry in the moment. Yes there are people in my life who have been unhelpful and even scary and hurtful when i was in the middle of a panic attack. But trying to get htem to change didn't do anything for me because at the core it was me, scared of my feelings and that caused panic. Feelings can literally overwhelm you.
If someone had been caring and observant enough to see that this is what was happening to me, I could have gotten in touch with my true self a long time ago. And saved myself a lot of pain that comes from "making" relationships with people who are themselves out of touch with their emotions and core goodness. In the end, even when I trusted someone enough to be angry around them, it wasn't other people who helped me to see that it was my anger that was causing me to panic, it was me. I found a good book about emotions from a DBT perspective and that has made a huge difference. Every kind and loving gesture from every person I have ever met has helped me. I see each one as a block I was given to stand on even momentarily, because I grew up being pushed down so much, and not witnessing a lot of love, I didn't believe it existed, I didn't trust people who appeared to be expressing it towards me, and I didn't know how to distinguish between people saying "kind" things to manipulate me for their own gain vs people who really cared for me.
I have been through a lot. My emotions were neglected from the start of my life. Then once I got into relationships with non family members, my emotions were met with anger or indifference, I look back now incredulous that someone who said they "cared" about me turned a blind eye to my pain. An angry person is a person in pain . I truly truly believe that to the bottom of my being. And they can be helped. We are all scared of anger in this culture but that doesn't help people who struggle with how to process it. Like myself. We can help people who are angry but we have to understand our own anger first so we know how anger works, what it does and doesn't do and how to process it in a healthy way.
I really really want my words to help someone or comfort someone to see how much you can change your life and your happiness.
