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silveradept[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#4: "It's always my fault."
This one is pretty straightforward to explain. The most consistent thing in my life when things go wrong is me. The thing that I can control in these situations is me. It's not that much of a stretch from there to assign responsibility and blame for what happened to myself. It provides an explanation and the seductive possibility of being able to avoid further misfortunes through increased self-control, increased knowledge, or achieving perfection in some manner. Unfortunately for pattern- and meaning-making beings, like humans are, the most difficult part of living in our universe is that most things in the universe and our own bodies and minds are sufficiently poorly understood as to be random.
Which often means that what meaning or pattern we match on is determined by which meanings and patterns are reinforced by our environment on us. "Normal" people generally have fewer encounters with people and systems that are looking to fling responsibility away from themselves or to entrench narratives where the Other, the Weird, are responsible for all the bad things that happen to them, through the future of their existence, and those kinds of people often have that narrative said about them behind their backs and also to their faces. It's not especially difficult for a "normal" person to find themselves in the ranks of the Other through those random events or through the deliberate action of other people. ("Trading Places," the movie, does get right how easily fortunes can be reversed, but what it also really gets right is when it reveals that the wager between the millionaires that resulted in all of the "trading places" was for one single dollar, which is their "usual wager." All that kind of fuckery for a single dollar shows is they were much more interested in messing with people's lives, rather than trying to make any money on it.) For people who have always been Other, having to not only contend with the randomness of life and the fuckery of others (whether from ignorance or massive), but with systems and people set up to blame you for your own problems and to steal away your successes if you happen to have any, it's exhausting and relentless and it tries very hard to instill in you the feeling that you are the problem and that things would work so much better if you weren't trying to do something as inconvenient as live a full life with happiness and that you should stop insisting the world around you change so that you can.
And, at least for me, it worked. Even though I have several bits of privilege working in my favor, for those spots where I was Other, but I didn't have the framework to help me with knowing that (and knowing that the world needed changing so I could be myself in it), it wasn't hard to act as though everything was my fault. I was the one forgetting simple things. I was the one who was having string emotional outbursts over "nothing," I was the one who couldn't be perfect, who couldn't recreate the life that someone else had become accustomed to, who couldn't stop falling asleep in situations where it wasn't appropriate. The one who had to win to be having fun. Me, me, me. And, as a measure of self-protection, I tried to find ways of making myself smaller and not expressing preferences and trying to manage other people in ways that would make them happy and therefore never have to consider admitting other than what they wanted, because I was pretty well able to go along with whatever was happening, even if it wasn't necessarily what I would have ideally wanted. It was safer to behave as though all the things that were happening around me, including the things that other people were feeling, or that were much more random, had an ultimate cause, and that cause was something I did. Physically, mentally, spiritually, cosmically, whatever. It was all my fault, and there was no real limit to the amount of responsibility for everything that I would try to absorb and then apologize for.
If it's supposed to be "fight, flight, freeze, fawn," well, if I wanted to "be a man," it should be fight. If I thought I could leverage my privilege, it would be flight. If I didn't know what to do in the situation, it would be freeze. (For reasons that will be explored in a later entry, it is almost never freeze.) But because it's my fault, fawn is the one that happens most often. Usually in the form of an apology for what happened. It's not just customer service voice and training and being part of a highly feminized profession where the expectation would be that someone apologize for things not working as desired, even if the reason things aren't working is because someone is being a blockhead and not listening to the person that's trying to help them. It can be because someone decided that she was only ever going to listen to a direct no and treat everything else as "convince me," and then getting upset and unhappy when told no, since that's what she said would work. Or if someone doesn't understand why their employee is having trouble with certain things and concludes that the reason must be that the employee is doing these things intentionally and needs to be punished for it so they stop doing these things that they don't want to do. It's a matter of willpower, right, and if you don't have any other framework to push back against that idea, then it must be you. It's always my fault, no matter what it is.
What's really helped this one become less potent is gaining frameworks that adequately explain what's happening without resorting to the belief that it's simply a moral failing that can be defeated with More Willpower. The falling asleep on the regular? How about sleep apnea interfering with a proper restorative rest? And then, finally, someone saying "yes, you seem like someone who has variable attention stimulus trait" and being able to recognize myself in the accounts of the people who do have it and being able to utilize corrective measures to help myself put my best foot forward, and apply appropriate concentration and task-switching. It's much easier to manage things when they stop being seen as failures of willpower and start being seen as things that need assistance. It's not going to be a panacea, of course, but it does allow for grace and forgiveness that previous frameworks did not. There's still more work to do, of course, because there's a lot of unlearning that needs doing, but I can say that, with time and experience and frameworks that work for me, it's not always my fault. Sometimes it really is random. And maybe, just maybe, some things really are someone else's fault.
#4: "It's always my fault."
This one is pretty straightforward to explain. The most consistent thing in my life when things go wrong is me. The thing that I can control in these situations is me. It's not that much of a stretch from there to assign responsibility and blame for what happened to myself. It provides an explanation and the seductive possibility of being able to avoid further misfortunes through increased self-control, increased knowledge, or achieving perfection in some manner. Unfortunately for pattern- and meaning-making beings, like humans are, the most difficult part of living in our universe is that most things in the universe and our own bodies and minds are sufficiently poorly understood as to be random.
Which often means that what meaning or pattern we match on is determined by which meanings and patterns are reinforced by our environment on us. "Normal" people generally have fewer encounters with people and systems that are looking to fling responsibility away from themselves or to entrench narratives where the Other, the Weird, are responsible for all the bad things that happen to them, through the future of their existence, and those kinds of people often have that narrative said about them behind their backs and also to their faces. It's not especially difficult for a "normal" person to find themselves in the ranks of the Other through those random events or through the deliberate action of other people. ("Trading Places," the movie, does get right how easily fortunes can be reversed, but what it also really gets right is when it reveals that the wager between the millionaires that resulted in all of the "trading places" was for one single dollar, which is their "usual wager." All that kind of fuckery for a single dollar shows is they were much more interested in messing with people's lives, rather than trying to make any money on it.) For people who have always been Other, having to not only contend with the randomness of life and the fuckery of others (whether from ignorance or massive), but with systems and people set up to blame you for your own problems and to steal away your successes if you happen to have any, it's exhausting and relentless and it tries very hard to instill in you the feeling that you are the problem and that things would work so much better if you weren't trying to do something as inconvenient as live a full life with happiness and that you should stop insisting the world around you change so that you can.
And, at least for me, it worked. Even though I have several bits of privilege working in my favor, for those spots where I was Other, but I didn't have the framework to help me with knowing that (and knowing that the world needed changing so I could be myself in it), it wasn't hard to act as though everything was my fault. I was the one forgetting simple things. I was the one who was having string emotional outbursts over "nothing," I was the one who couldn't be perfect, who couldn't recreate the life that someone else had become accustomed to, who couldn't stop falling asleep in situations where it wasn't appropriate. The one who had to win to be having fun. Me, me, me. And, as a measure of self-protection, I tried to find ways of making myself smaller and not expressing preferences and trying to manage other people in ways that would make them happy and therefore never have to consider admitting other than what they wanted, because I was pretty well able to go along with whatever was happening, even if it wasn't necessarily what I would have ideally wanted. It was safer to behave as though all the things that were happening around me, including the things that other people were feeling, or that were much more random, had an ultimate cause, and that cause was something I did. Physically, mentally, spiritually, cosmically, whatever. It was all my fault, and there was no real limit to the amount of responsibility for everything that I would try to absorb and then apologize for.
If it's supposed to be "fight, flight, freeze, fawn," well, if I wanted to "be a man," it should be fight. If I thought I could leverage my privilege, it would be flight. If I didn't know what to do in the situation, it would be freeze. (For reasons that will be explored in a later entry, it is almost never freeze.) But because it's my fault, fawn is the one that happens most often. Usually in the form of an apology for what happened. It's not just customer service voice and training and being part of a highly feminized profession where the expectation would be that someone apologize for things not working as desired, even if the reason things aren't working is because someone is being a blockhead and not listening to the person that's trying to help them. It can be because someone decided that she was only ever going to listen to a direct no and treat everything else as "convince me," and then getting upset and unhappy when told no, since that's what she said would work. Or if someone doesn't understand why their employee is having trouble with certain things and concludes that the reason must be that the employee is doing these things intentionally and needs to be punished for it so they stop doing these things that they don't want to do. It's a matter of willpower, right, and if you don't have any other framework to push back against that idea, then it must be you. It's always my fault, no matter what it is.
What's really helped this one become less potent is gaining frameworks that adequately explain what's happening without resorting to the belief that it's simply a moral failing that can be defeated with More Willpower. The falling asleep on the regular? How about sleep apnea interfering with a proper restorative rest? And then, finally, someone saying "yes, you seem like someone who has variable attention stimulus trait" and being able to recognize myself in the accounts of the people who do have it and being able to utilize corrective measures to help myself put my best foot forward, and apply appropriate concentration and task-switching. It's much easier to manage things when they stop being seen as failures of willpower and start being seen as things that need assistance. It's not going to be a panacea, of course, but it does allow for grace and forgiveness that previous frameworks did not. There's still more work to do, of course, because there's a lot of unlearning that needs doing, but I can say that, with time and experience and frameworks that work for me, it's not always my fault. Sometimes it really is random. And maybe, just maybe, some things really are someone else's fault.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-05 11:05 pm (UTC)And a non-fond farewell to Co-worker Not Awesome.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-05 11:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-11 11:43 pm (UTC)I am so glad you have gotten diagnoses that have helped you realize it's not your fault.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-11 11:52 pm (UTC)