I Would Like To Share With You, My Journey
The Part I Play In My Own Dysfunction... Yes, I am still trying to control my husband. I keep thinking that there is some way to get through to him, to make him see things the way they really are, here in the real world... POPULATION: billions. Instead of the demented world he created inside his head... POPULATION: just him. I can’t help myself, it is a sick obsession and I need to completely understand it, so that I can finally let go of it. I need to find a way to see the forest even when I am standing in the thick of the trees…
I do have control over what I am trying to control…. I KNOW that I cannot control another human being. My grip on reality becomes skewed every time I find a hidden backdoor that is unlocked. The front door is locked; I understand that, I cannot control the behaviors of another person. The only person I have control over is me. These are the things that I honestly DO believe…. I don’t want to abandon this concept, I want for it to stand guard, at the entrance to my thoughts and fight off any other idea that would challenge its validity. But…. My guard can only protect the entrance to MY thoughts. I know that they are safe but there is a scared little girl that refuses to believe she is safe. She is the one who wants me to believe, that there IS something I can do that will fix him. That is what she needs, it is him and the chaos that surrounds him, the tumultuous feelings that he evokes within me. I am not the one who finds these backdoors, and even if I did find one, I wouldn’t try to open it!
These backdoors are only traps, filled with illusions and empty promises. I know the only thing to gain from walking through one of these doors will be certain disappointment. They are all the same, but she buys in to every one of them she can get open. She needs to find a cure for him and nothing anyone says or does will make her abandon her mission. She does not have her own reality so every time she walks through a new door, whatever reality is waiting behind it, becomes real to her.
It’s like she is shooting at a target with a gun that has a busted scope. The calibration on the scope is automatic and changes constantly. Much like a dynamic IP address frequently changes for security purposes. The little girl is scared and she has no idea why, fear and uncertainty is all she knows, that is home to her. The reality she stepped into is telling her that if she can shoot this target enough times… she won’t have to be afraid anymore.
She finally has control of something that can help save her; help protect her from whatever it is that has her so scared. She begins shooting at the target with determination and enthusiasm, but she doesn’t seem to be hitting the target at all. This frustrates her but the frustration makes her try even harder. Because she is still not able to hit the target, despite her best efforts, she begins to think that maybe she just isn’t doing it right. Frantically, she starts blindly shooting as fast as she can everywhere hoping to get lucky enough times. Once that bout of panic has subsided, she realizes that if she continues at the rate she is going now, she will never be able to hit the target the desired amount of times before running out of bullets. Time to regroup…
When she is finally able to take her eyes off the target and take a moment to think about her next move instead of acting on raw impulses, she instantly gains the clarity she needed, enabling her to devise a plan of action. She fires the gun, but this time, instead of looking through the scope, she looks up toward the target and watches the surrounding area to see where the bullet hits. From there, she is able to make effective adjustments which move her closer to hitting the target.
Then…. Out of nowhere…. The dynamic IP address changes and she suddenly finds herself right back where she started. What used to work before, stops working. The elated feeling of accomplishment she was just floating so high on, is violently popped and she slams to the ground in defeat…. But it worked, her hard work and ingenuity found a way to save the day. She finally has a purpose, and feels worthy of an existence.
Back to the drawing board… With a renewed sense of determination, fueled by the belief that she CAN succeed… She fires another random shot, makes the necessary adjustments and begins her emotional climb all over again… Only to have the dynamic scope randomly change again. Each time she fails, she feels more defeated and her self-worth slips further.
I want him to change so badly that it makes her need to succeed in her mission carry even more weight. I use her to deal with the emotions that are too much for me to deal with myself. If you think of emotions as money, the negative feelings are like a withdrawal and positive emotions are like deposits. I had someone embezzling money from me and by the time it was discovered, I was too far in debt that it would have been impossible for me to ever recover.
Living in this world of constant pain and intense negative emotions was destroying me. I needed to find a way out but I was too broken to be able to get out myself. I was trapped in misery, just like people with severe debt get trapped. Constantly making minimum payments on your credit card debt will cost thousands of dollars and take you decades to pay off. I desperately needed someone to help me, but nobody was there. Despite my best efforts, I could not get anyone to help get me to safety and the longer I stayed in this world the more damaged I became.
I guess it was me, as a little girl, who finally came to rescue me… The one who sat at the bathroom door every day as her father confided in her mother, the terrible torture and emotional abuse he suffered throughout the day. Every evening, he would come home from work and hide from the world as he soaked his sore, tired, broken body in the bathtub. She listened to her father’s pain every day, completely powerless over the situation. She had to watch the man she adored more than anything in the world, allow himself to be beaten down because of his low self-worth. He isolated himself to protect the ones he loved. He knew that there were too many volatile emotions bottled up inside of him because he was unable to release his anger and resentment on the people who were causing it.
It is as if she is a ghost with unfinished business. When I was her, I couldn’t save my father. I don’t know if there was anything I could do to save him from his own self-defeating thoughts. But now that she is no longer a physical being, she has the ability to help me. If you were to imagine one person’s reality, and what it looked like while it is stored inside your subconscious, I would imagine it to be a long hallway of certainty and familiarity. Each situation they enter is like entering through one of the doors in this hallway. Each room’s reality is different because different aspects of the situation affect your perception of the reality while you are in.
She does not have her own hallway, she lives in my hallway and when I reach a point where my emotions get too out of control, she jumps in and experiences them for me, so that I don’t have to. The only way she is able to aid me in this way, is by continuing to be oblivious to the fact that she does not have her OWN reality, if she did, she would know that once she succeeds in her current mission, there is no fairytale ending. Happily ever after does not begin as soon as she conquers this room. This little girl saved me, I know that I will be eternally grateful to her for rescuing me when I needed it the most. She was there for me when everyone else in my life turned their backs on me. I do not want to turn my back on her, nor do I want her to fail. She has suffered through too much because of my dysfunctional life that I am going to repay my debt by ending her suffering and finally allowing her to feel a victory and allow her to stay in the victorious reality.
What once saved me, has become what will surely be my demise. Because she does not have a reality of her own, she is completely unaware that the only place she will be when she finally completes her mission… is in another room, behind another backdoor, on another mission that will only lead her to her next door.
A hermit crab does not generate a shell of its own. Instead, it moves into shells that other crustaceans discard. When the crab out-grows one shell, it must wander the ocean floor unprotected until it finds a suitable upgrade. By setting my little girl free, I will no longer be protected from the intense pain that has rendered me helpless and made my life so unmanageable. But I cannot continue to take advantage of the only person who cared enough about me to help me when I needed it most. She is now in the same predicament I was in when I needed help so desperately, and I am going to be the one who cares about her enough to take the incessant pain from her and set her free from the prison I created for her.
I do have control over what I am trying to control…. I KNOW that I cannot control another human being. My grip on reality becomes skewed every time I find a hidden backdoor that is unlocked. The front door is locked; I understand that, I cannot control the behaviors of another person. The only person I have control over is me. These are the things that I honestly DO believe…. I don’t want to abandon this concept, I want for it to stand guard, at the entrance to my thoughts and fight off any other idea that would challenge its validity. But…. My guard can only protect the entrance to MY thoughts. I know that they are safe but there is a scared little girl that refuses to believe she is safe. She is the one who wants me to believe, that there IS something I can do that will fix him. That is what she needs, it is him and the chaos that surrounds him, the tumultuous feelings that he evokes within me. I am not the one who finds these backdoors, and even if I did find one, I wouldn’t try to open it!
These backdoors are only traps, filled with illusions and empty promises. I know the only thing to gain from walking through one of these doors will be certain disappointment. They are all the same, but she buys in to every one of them she can get open. She needs to find a cure for him and nothing anyone says or does will make her abandon her mission. She does not have her own reality so every time she walks through a new door, whatever reality is waiting behind it, becomes real to her.
It’s like she is shooting at a target with a gun that has a busted scope. The calibration on the scope is automatic and changes constantly. Much like a dynamic IP address frequently changes for security purposes. The little girl is scared and she has no idea why, fear and uncertainty is all she knows, that is home to her. The reality she stepped into is telling her that if she can shoot this target enough times… she won’t have to be afraid anymore.
She finally has control of something that can help save her; help protect her from whatever it is that has her so scared. She begins shooting at the target with determination and enthusiasm, but she doesn’t seem to be hitting the target at all. This frustrates her but the frustration makes her try even harder. Because she is still not able to hit the target, despite her best efforts, she begins to think that maybe she just isn’t doing it right. Frantically, she starts blindly shooting as fast as she can everywhere hoping to get lucky enough times. Once that bout of panic has subsided, she realizes that if she continues at the rate she is going now, she will never be able to hit the target the desired amount of times before running out of bullets. Time to regroup…
When she is finally able to take her eyes off the target and take a moment to think about her next move instead of acting on raw impulses, she instantly gains the clarity she needed, enabling her to devise a plan of action. She fires the gun, but this time, instead of looking through the scope, she looks up toward the target and watches the surrounding area to see where the bullet hits. From there, she is able to make effective adjustments which move her closer to hitting the target.
Then…. Out of nowhere…. The dynamic IP address changes and she suddenly finds herself right back where she started. What used to work before, stops working. The elated feeling of accomplishment she was just floating so high on, is violently popped and she slams to the ground in defeat…. But it worked, her hard work and ingenuity found a way to save the day. She finally has a purpose, and feels worthy of an existence.
Back to the drawing board… With a renewed sense of determination, fueled by the belief that she CAN succeed… She fires another random shot, makes the necessary adjustments and begins her emotional climb all over again… Only to have the dynamic scope randomly change again. Each time she fails, she feels more defeated and her self-worth slips further.
I want him to change so badly that it makes her need to succeed in her mission carry even more weight. I use her to deal with the emotions that are too much for me to deal with myself. If you think of emotions as money, the negative feelings are like a withdrawal and positive emotions are like deposits. I had someone embezzling money from me and by the time it was discovered, I was too far in debt that it would have been impossible for me to ever recover.
Living in this world of constant pain and intense negative emotions was destroying me. I needed to find a way out but I was too broken to be able to get out myself. I was trapped in misery, just like people with severe debt get trapped. Constantly making minimum payments on your credit card debt will cost thousands of dollars and take you decades to pay off. I desperately needed someone to help me, but nobody was there. Despite my best efforts, I could not get anyone to help get me to safety and the longer I stayed in this world the more damaged I became.
I guess it was me, as a little girl, who finally came to rescue me… The one who sat at the bathroom door every day as her father confided in her mother, the terrible torture and emotional abuse he suffered throughout the day. Every evening, he would come home from work and hide from the world as he soaked his sore, tired, broken body in the bathtub. She listened to her father’s pain every day, completely powerless over the situation. She had to watch the man she adored more than anything in the world, allow himself to be beaten down because of his low self-worth. He isolated himself to protect the ones he loved. He knew that there were too many volatile emotions bottled up inside of him because he was unable to release his anger and resentment on the people who were causing it.
It is as if she is a ghost with unfinished business. When I was her, I couldn’t save my father. I don’t know if there was anything I could do to save him from his own self-defeating thoughts. But now that she is no longer a physical being, she has the ability to help me. If you were to imagine one person’s reality, and what it looked like while it is stored inside your subconscious, I would imagine it to be a long hallway of certainty and familiarity. Each situation they enter is like entering through one of the doors in this hallway. Each room’s reality is different because different aspects of the situation affect your perception of the reality while you are in.
She does not have her own hallway, she lives in my hallway and when I reach a point where my emotions get too out of control, she jumps in and experiences them for me, so that I don’t have to. The only way she is able to aid me in this way, is by continuing to be oblivious to the fact that she does not have her OWN reality, if she did, she would know that once she succeeds in her current mission, there is no fairytale ending. Happily ever after does not begin as soon as she conquers this room. This little girl saved me, I know that I will be eternally grateful to her for rescuing me when I needed it the most. She was there for me when everyone else in my life turned their backs on me. I do not want to turn my back on her, nor do I want her to fail. She has suffered through too much because of my dysfunctional life that I am going to repay my debt by ending her suffering and finally allowing her to feel a victory and allow her to stay in the victorious reality.
What once saved me, has become what will surely be my demise. Because she does not have a reality of her own, she is completely unaware that the only place she will be when she finally completes her mission… is in another room, behind another backdoor, on another mission that will only lead her to her next door.
A hermit crab does not generate a shell of its own. Instead, it moves into shells that other crustaceans discard. When the crab out-grows one shell, it must wander the ocean floor unprotected until it finds a suitable upgrade. By setting my little girl free, I will no longer be protected from the intense pain that has rendered me helpless and made my life so unmanageable. But I cannot continue to take advantage of the only person who cared enough about me to help me when I needed it most. She is now in the same predicament I was in when I needed help so desperately, and I am going to be the one who cares about her enough to take the incessant pain from her and set her free from the prison I created for her.
41-45, F