[DianaJoy]

Step Six

I can respect my shame and anger as a consequence of my abuse, but shall try not to turn it against myself or others.
____________

I love to write stories. For three days last week I sat down and wrote for an hour or
more; it was glorious. I really think I write best when I block out at least an hour, preferably more, then just sink into the page.

I love to dance. I love learning a new bellydance routine, and I love just putting on music and letting my body move, 5rhythms style. Ideally, I would practice routines and spend some time free-dancing every day.

I know, and I have known for a long time, than I am happier when I dance and write regularly, and happiest when I do both daily. Yet, I still fail to do these things. So why can't I maintain a practice of daily writing and dancing?

Shame.

Way down at the bottom of my psyche, down where I'm still 8 years old, I know that it's my job to make my parents happy, to keep my father from getting angry and my mother from getting more depressed. Down there, I know that it's wrong to want to do anything else until I've met my parents needs, and taken care of my brothers and sister. Only a bad daughter would be selfish enough to want things just for herself, especially when anyone around her has needs to be met.

No matter how I describe it, I dance and I write because I love them. It may even be accurate to say that I <i>need</i> to dance and to write. And they're all about <i>me</i>. When I dance on stage, it's for the audience, but it's also for me. I find the most joy when I write what I need to write. I can do both for a little while. Then all this shame bubbles up, seeping through my psyche like cold through a too-thin blanket when the power goes out. I beat myself up for being so selfish as to take all this time to write when there's word to be done, or housekeeping, or any other task or project with an object other than my own joy.

In a very fundamental part of my psyche, I feel ashamed of doing things for myself. For a while, I can talk myself around this. Exercise really does help me be more productive, so I can do more for others when I exercise. But it's a logical loop that doesn't last. I don't keep exercising for other people, I keep exercising because I feel so good, so joyful, when I do. It's that very joy that triggers the shame from so long ago.

Imagine an amorphous boogey man, or an under-the-bed monster. All you can see clearly are the many, many rough-hewn clubs, and those only right before each one hits you, over and over. Each blow carries a message: <i>You don't deserve to take all this time. How can you be so selfish? A good girl wouldn't do that when there's so much work to do. If you really loved >>insert name of any person you care about here<< you'd take care of >>insert task here<< before you indulged yourself like this. You're not worth all the time you're spending on this. </i>

It's hard to keep writing or dancing with the shame monster lurking in my sub/semi-consciousness.

I've been working the ASCA steps for a long time. I totally get that I carry a lot of shame with my from childhood. Until a couple days ago, i hadn't realized just how much shame impacted my ability to keep doing things I love to do. I've been awash in the very shame all weekend. I want to be someone who spends her life doing things she loves. The shame monster is right there, ready and waiting to beat the joy out of me.

Contradictary as this seems, the shame monster really is trying to take care of me. I was taught that I had to take care of everyone around me, that I was only worth what I did for others. The shame monster is trying to keep me on that path. What I was taught is wrong. I'm not sure how to re-teach the shame monster.

[Emms]

I find it hard not to to turn my anger against myself and others at times. I'm better with this than I used to be but not as good as I'd like and also not as good as my family would like, esp my son and daughter. Can't really all them children anymore.

At the moment, for various reasons, I hate everybody including myself, but not you guys on here lol. Honestly, you don't bug me. The problem doesn't actually have anything to do with the abuse, just that I guess the damage done to me pyschologically means I'm not copeing well with my present situation.

[sunshinegirl]

[u][b]may trigger recalling self abuse and expletives//profanity[/b][/u]


im gonna work on step 6 because i am really angry at alot of things about the abusers.

Primarily I am angry at the abusers. I can get so angry at the people around me too and I am not sure that they are the right target.

The part in step 6 that I would like to resolve is that " i shall not try to turn it against myself or others".

Turn against myself:

For so many years I have self abused physically and in private to me it was a private thing not like cutting which i don't understand nor practise. Get the irony - I don't get cutting because I wouldn't like to hurt myself with a metal instrument. Hell no i'd only like to hurt myself by beating the crap out of my own body. anyways...
I have stopped this habit in the past few years or so. But i am left with these weird strong intrusive inclinations to really hurt myself. I get strong physical sensations to really scratch the crap out of myself and sometimes I just feel like ripping all my skin off. I have strong inclinations to completely shred all my skin to bits from my stomach area and arms and legs.
I just had this experience recently and it was full on! It was so overwhelming and all i could do was breathe or start cleaning the dishes or do something menial. Man I felt crazy angry.I can't believed I survived it and didn't hurt myself physically.

You know I have always had this thing where I want to beat the crap out of my stomach. Just a feeling of rubbing or grabbing made by clothing or people grabbing my waist makes me want to scream and fight. When I get this feeling in the past when I would self abuse I would hit my stomach really hard and I would also feel really well I am not sure how to describe it but I just was in a panic and freaked out. Even now when I am in bed with my partner I have started to scream when he puts his arm over my stomach.

I am still unpacking this sensation and associated feelings and I am not sure what it is all about. Something to do with the abuse for sure. And something that has been going on for sometime.

I remember when I was at university in another town not my hometown and my mother came to visit and we were walking down the road and then I got this sensation in my stomach and I told her that I had to go home and change my clothes because something wasn't right with them and it was a horrible feeling coming from my stomach that I thought would be corrected by changing to looser clothing round my waist. Anyways.. the thing that got me was my mothers response that was " i hate it when you do this, you always do this.." but this indicates to me that this response about a feeling in my stomach had been a reoccuring behaviour for sometime.

I am really angry at my mother. I remember one time when she had had facial surgery on her chin non medical and she called me to drive her because she couldn't drive after the operation. And she had not said anything to me about the operation and then out of the blue this happened. I felt really scared for her. I was really angry at her that she had not told me about something that was quite serious.
Then i picked her up and shes really embarrased and not wanting me to tell anyone and i had to swear secrecy and she was really covered up in glasses and headscarf and slunk down in the car seat and we went somewhere private and she was really f***king horrible to me verbally abusive and I felt so awful like I had done something so bad and wrong and I took her home and I was so upset and went to my grandmothers and beat myself with a clothes iron in front of her and well that was about when I stopped self abusing. I really hurt myself with that iron. actually I think that story is too separate parts not unrelated but didn't quite happed like that. maybe there was a gap of a few years in between each event. But I remembered them like this because of the private location I took my mother to and I went there and cried after I had hit myself with the iron. I felt like such a worthless piece of poo.

Turn against others:

So as I have said i am really angry at my mother really angry. She was one of my abusers and well she really put me in danger. I was raised in a f*****king brothel! I cannot believe that she thought that this would be ok. She is so into money that was what motivated her decision to raise me in a brothel. Nice one b!!!!!!!!!!!!h! I guess ....well I am stuck for words to describe the extent of my anger towards her.

I will list things that raise my anger towards her:

she does not listen to me
she does not acknowledge my abuse
she put me down for years and years
she told me how ugly my body was
she told me i was stupid and did not give me an opportunity to learn
she filled my mind with rubbish
she does not acknowledge me as something different from the illusions in her head she has of me
she put me in sexually vunerable situations
she exposed me to sex with her boyfriends when I was 6 years old
she exposed me to pornography moving pictures and still pictures
she made me clean sh*t out of the sauna and steam rooms in her massage parlours
she made me clean body fat off clients bodys that had stuck to the spa pool
she kicked me out of a moving car when I said that I felt depressed
she ripped me off thousands of dollars
she convinced me to rip of a man with a mental illness of 2 thousand dollars
whenever i felt down or sad she would tell me that something was wrong with me and my life and that I had to do this and this and this to make it all better
she made fun of my breasts when I was a teenager and at a party with my peers
she barges in on me when I was in the shower - this would happen alot when I was a teenager

she comments on how fat and ugly i am
she would start sceaming and hitting me for no reason at all when I was young
she made poor choices in a boyfriend and her would beat the crap out of me.
she made me lie on a bed naked while her and her boyfriend commented on my genitals. They made me open my legs to examine my genitals. they both touched me there too. like they were making a medical examination. Under the pretence of making a medical examination. I was all of 6 or 7! F***k shes mental. Who would do that!
Would a caring parent do that? What the hell was she thinking?
She would buy me presents that were inappropriate and then scream and yell at me when i didn't like them enough for her. She would throw
them at me.
she would leave me alone for days to look after myself from 6 yrs old and then she would beat me up when things weren't done like brushing my hair, cleaning my clothes. things that i didn't know how to do. When she was beating me up she would say that it was my fault and that i had embarrased her. This is a typical conversation: "How dare you embarrass me like this, how could you do this to me... slap slap punch."
she would call me a stupid little bitch, and make comments on my breasts!

I have never really understood the fascination with breasts that my family has, they would talk about them the size and the shape and whose were pretty and whose were not! I have wished manytimes to have mine surgically removed thinking that something was wrong with me.

All this i am mad at and I haven't even been able to talk about my sa experiences yet!
Man... I think I have got somethings off my chest for now. thank you asca forum.

post scriptum

reading over my stuff I think I have repeated stuff but I am gonna leave them in. The stuff that really has affected me I kept on repeating. I have kinda noticed that when I get annoyed and turn it inward that sometimes it just starts with feeling digusting about my body in combination with wanting to hurt my stomach,. The other night I just grabbed it and gave it a huge shake and thought I am digusting with this fat flabby thing. It felt like an alien and I wanted to get rid of it. Now rereading my stuff I can kinda see where I get these shit ideas from about my body. Well being abused means never a dull moment with learning about oneself! thats for sure....

[Emms]

I really hear you, Inpain. I'm so sorry you've had so much suffering in your life. My mother was also very abusive and manipulative towards me and very clever at hiding it and making others like her. It was weird cos there were times when she could make me feel like I was her beautiful princess and times when she made me feel like a fat blob with her insults, depended on her mood. I also know what you mean about hating your own body. I have flabby bits too which I hate so I don't often look at them. I've accepted them now, I lost a lot of weight a few years ago so as well as the fat that's left there is horrible disgusting loose skin which is wrinkled and abnormal, I hate my body. I don't hurt it now but I used to, but mine was cutting and sometimes hitting myself too but that stopped some time ago. I still hate it though and would love to cut it off, but I know I can't and I don't want to hurt myself most of the time, I don't like pain but I do still get so angry that I've done things like slapping my own head and ripping off my fingernails. I was watching a soap on TV the other night and there was a very abusive psycho woman behaving badly with her child and smiling to herself about it, that reminded me so much of my mother that I started to dig my fingernails into my own hands. I had to stop it and did, but it left me feeling very drained for a while. Sometimes I can watch these things I not get upset but it still makes me feel angry inside. It's very hard to get through this.

[sunshinegirl]

oh man I just wrote for like 40 mins a response post to you emms and it just got deleted. lol!

I was just in the throws of talking about my family of abuse and how religion and gods role play a huge part in sanctioning the abuse and allowing it to continue.

Before that I had made a journey from identifying with your self abuse and then recaling some more experiences from my family.

oh well... Im not gonna type it all out again and now i need a break from the computer so ill come back later

[sunshinegirl]

far out I cannot believe how far I have come... I reread what I wrote and it was less than a year ago.. dec 2011 and I was angry as and now I want to forgive my mother for all that. Even after I read it I am ready to put it behind me... wow.... I don't want to talk to her because she is a person that I cannot relate to at all. She is still verbally abusive and the put downs... Ahh. but I cannot believe that I am in such a different space to when I wrote that ... wow.! yay!
Actually I can believe that I am in a different space because I am not going out with that male copy of my mother and her boyfriend anymore.. going out with the ex was propelling me into anger land... When I broke up with him I was so angry towards him and I still am. I am kinda angry towards myself too for going out with him for so long... but I really didn't know any better and I knew something was wrong and worked hard to try and sort it out in my own time... well gotta learn I guess...

[Emms]

Yes, it's amazing how far we have all come since first posting here. I'd done a lot of my healing already when I started to post but I've improved a lot since then, esp with my self esteem. Don't know about other ppl but here I actually feel that I have some 'virtual' friends, ppl who actually get it, who know how it feels to be someone like me.