There's no hot water yesterday. So I didn't shower. The tech was fixing it but there's no ETA.
Someone in our condo said the hot water came back early in the morning, before 6am.
Then this afternoon there's no hot water again! I was about to yell at someone: "Which idiot turn off the hot water again? Why don't they turn it off at midnight when nobody needs it?!" 😡
There's no hot water yesterday. So I didn't shower. The tech was fixing it but there's no ETA.
Someone in our condo said the hot water came back early in the morning, before 6am.
Then this afternoon there's no hot water again! I was about to yell at someone: "Which idiot turn off the hot water again? Why don't they turn it off at midnight when nobody needs it?!" 😡
How do you define support? What kind of support do you need?
I have always felt that support means different things to different people. Sometimes people think that they have supported me, but I don't feel or see it.
For me, support is when someone gives me strength, courage, assurance, confidence, validation, etc., to do what I want to do. Sometimes it's to have someone on my side, by my side, to help me achieve a goal, or to protect me from harm or disadvantage.
But the kind of support I get (from my healing course) is that we are all going through the same challenge, even though we each do it alone, our presence and participation in the same challenge is a kind of mental support. Like I know that I'm not entirely alone, even when I don't share my struggles and pain with my classmates.
Then there's another kind of "support," like someone telling you to go ahead and do what you want (which sounds more like approval than support), saying that you've done a good job, telling you to keep going when you're frustrated and deflated, etc.
I realize I don't have a clear understanding and feeling of the kind of support I want. And I'm too used to not having support, and kind of resigned myself to not have it.
It's quite a disaster today. Same as yesterday. Didn't expect so much stress on a weekend. Actually, there were quite a few unexpected events all coming together at the same time.
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I still have to absorb the upcoming risks with CRA. Even after combing through the administrative chaos, the core issue still remains unaddressed: I have no way of checking my blindspot, and am still completely reliant on the issuer or the brokerage's reporting, and they don't report all or on time. I have mentioned this to my brokerage but still, no improvement. 🤷
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I am still in a dilemma as to what to do with my car and car battery, because the battery drains power as I don't use my car much, and I already have a maintainer but I don't park next to an electrical outlet, and I don't think I would my lifestyle just to keep the battery full. My car has become a liability more than an asset. But now I need to deal with it because the condo board wants me to move my car so that they can clean the underground parkade. 😒
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There are other problems that are less urgent, which I am chipping away a little bit at a time.
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Then there's this surprise email from someone I have stopped communicating with. This is the third email from him. The first two were apology emails. I am surprised because he seems to not be able to accept "no". When he didn't want to read my messages, when we still used to chat, and called me difficult, that was already his choice to throw away my friend. You can't just ignore someone when you please, and then claim them back into your life when you please, without realizing that the other person also has a choice, and her choice is no longer want you. I don't need this friendship. I never benefited from it. I was mainly the listener as he was always coming to me for his problems as he had no one else to talk to. But he only wanted a one-sided friendship where I had to listen but not listened to.
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For the last couple months I have been taking an herb to loosen up my stiff muscles and connective tissues. The loosening is rather unpleasant.
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When the loosening is in the pelvic region, it's difficult to even sit, because the muscles connecting to my sacrum are releasing the tightness, so it is very sore. That means, I can't work!
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Last few days I couldn't manage to sit long enough to focus on work, so today I tried to catch up. But then I had brain fog, although it's lighter than before but still reduces my productivity. 😒
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I have stopped taking the herb for about a week now, but I feel that the loosening effect is still in my body, and it's opening up my lower back, hips, and thighs, and so I have been laying on the couch for quite a bit. I feel like a handicap.
Yesterday I was watching a TV show about someone died and her family covered up her cause of death and told everyone that she died of illness. Then when friends and acquaintances came to ask how she died, the family also refused to tell them that she committed suicide.
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This story triggered my memory of my cousin's death. I never understood why she died, and I heard different reasons from different relatives which made me even more confused and frustrated. I didn't know that you can be wounded with grief like that.
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Even though many years had passed since my cousin's death, and I never got any clarification or explanation on it, because everyone I asked refused to tell me the truth. At best, they just say something very superficial to brush me off. Honestly, I was very angry, yet I couldn't do anything about it.
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So I did the grieving on my own, which included not just the loss of my cousin but also because I was treated like an outsider both with the cause of death and with the mourning process. None of my relatives included me in their mourning. I tried to connect to them, but they were too much lost in their own grief to connect to me. It's a very foreign feeling for me--being treated as family when they wanted to and being treated as outsider also when they wanted to.
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I have always felt like a soccer ball being kicked around by my relatives. When they were in the mood or have time, they embraced me, but when they were not in the mood, they pushed me away like I was a nuisance. It's emotionally confusing. I don't know how to deal with hot and cold relationships where the other side seems to be the one setting temperature and I can only adjust accordingly.
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The TV show I watched yesterday gave me a glimpse of why they would hide the fact from me, although that's not enough to help me process the overarching confusion of my place in the family.
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I mean someone who really sees you, listens to you, understands you, cares about you, supports you, respects you, cherishes you, appreciates you, or even silently be there with you and for you? Someone who lets you be who you are, accepts your idiosyncrasies even though they may not agree with them, and you're comfortable to say or do what you want in their presence.
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Someone who takes an interest in your passion, notices when your struggles, picks you up when you fall, rejoices in your success, encourages you to be your best.
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When I think of this, I feel blank, like it won't happen to me, because I don't deserve this, I'm not good enough to deserve this, or I should be so and so before I can be seen, etc. But no matter what I do, I still don't deserve this, because people will try hard to find faults in me, even when they can't see any faults as excuses for thinking that I'm not good enough, they will still manage to invent faults in me.
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I'm so afraid of external Invalidation and shaming that I keep a safe distance from people. In my hardest times, I am alone. There's no one for me to depend on, but at the same time, I'm afraid of being a bother to people, because I'm very sensitive to being seen as a baggage, which was how my mom saw me.
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When I was a kid, I watched other kids being loved by their parents, and thought, "Others can have unconditional love but not me."
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I couldn't work today, even though I wanted to continue with the new project I started yesterday, because my back was so sore and I just had to lay down.
But I didn't actually spend most of the day laying down. There were a few things I had to do, and I managed to finish them except one: unscrew the U shaped pipe under my bathroom sink.
Yesterday I bathed my guinea pig in the sink and he pooped a lot while in the water. So I flushed a lot of poop down the sink and the drainage was half-clogged.
I had moved all my contents out from under the sink, but I couldn't unscrew the nut to the pipe. It was practically glued, like the rubber washer inside had dried out and fused to the plastic threads. AI suggested a few methods, and I tried a couple but didn't work.
I guess I will leave it as is over night and try again tomorrow. I just don't believe the nut to be permanently stuck to the threads even though I have tried to uncrew it multiple times already without success.
Over time as I dive into my emotional neglect more, I discovered that my parents' neglect is actually their silent invalidation of me, then I discovered that I invalidate their invalidation of me, then I discovered that my invalidation was oppressed so I felt blank not because I had no feelings but my feelings were not allowed.
Then as I tried to release the oppression, I find that most of the time it's so highly compressed in my unconscious that even though I use my conscious effort to express those pent up emotions, they simply won't flow, but I know they're there and they're quite heavy.
Then I tried to force them to release, then I realized forcing healing is counterproductive. 😭
Then I got mad at myself for being destructive in my healing, like a second layer of invalidation on top of the oppression that I am invalidating by pushing against it.
Very quickly, going at this rate, my healing becomes a matryoshka doll, trapping myself with invalidation at each layer then locking myself in the neglect that I am trying to get out of.
So I look at myself, my layers of compression and invalidation, and see how I am keeping myself stuck in blankness, in neglect, in helplessness.
I notice I keep berating myself for not keeping the house clean. This thought started coming on after my boss came to drop off the work laptop for me last Friday. She didn't say anything about my home, but still I felt like I was being despised, condemned, ridiculed, etc., not by her, but by those before her.
The last time a coworker came to my house was probably 15 years ago. I had a couple of coworkers who came, separately, and they both had very strong opinion about my choice of furniture, my style of home decor, my way of life, everything about my private space was made into a joke, a mockery, a criticism that they couldn't stop voicing, as if they couldn't be satisfied with their attack unless I buckled over, but I didn't, because I was speechless and didn't know what nice thing to say back to them so to maintain that now seemingly pointless courtesy.
It wasn't my first time opening up myself to someone, only to be attacked, but each time I shut down more and more of myself until I no longer have friends who visit me.
So people invalidate everything about me, my life, my personal choices, my personal space, my feelings and thoughts and aspirations, etc.
When my boss said she would come over to give me the laptop, I was generally okay with it, after so many years of healing, but I noticed deep down, the wound from my past is still bothering me, thoughts of condemnation still swirling around my head unyieldingly, and I keep pushing them away, but I guess I should just open the wound up and do more healing.
I had a strange dream last night.
It was like a nightmare, because it replayed an incident similar to when my late father banged on my door repeatedly and aggressively, and in that incident I was palpitatious and trembling, fearing that my door would break down and he could physically harm me, but in the dream, he didn't bang on the door, though I was equally palpitatious.
In the past when my heart beat so fast in a dream, I would wake up from the dream with my heart still racing and I would not be able to fall back asleep for a long time. But last night, something strange or different happened.
In the dream, I stayed fully present with the fear, panic, and palpitation, not disengaging or dissociating. My heart was pumping really loudly, almost as if it would explode any moment. But I just stayed with the feeling fully, and after a while, the dream scene shifted to something more peaceful (and forgettable). Later when I woke up, it was from a different dream, but my heart was still palpitating, though not as long as it did in the dream, and I didn't have trouble falling back to sleep like I did in the past.
This is new to me. I don't know what it means. But in a recent nightmare, I was also able to dissolve some of the emotions in the dream, though that dream was about grief and being frozen from fear.
The staying present is something I practice everyday as part of my healing exercise, and it seems that my dream self also does it automatically now.
What I have noticed in addition to my inability to receive support without excessively troubling myself (to make the support usable or fit me) and feeling that I am not worthy enough, I also feel a lot of pressure while getting the support.
I had to do homework when I had sessions with my ex-therapist, I felt pressured because I wanted to make sure that I made enough progress in between sessions so that in the next session she could shift me to another level (otherwise we would be working on the same level and I felt that would not be an efficient way to use her), but with my emotional blankness most of the time I struggled to move through this cloud of emotions and often had to figure out how to navigate this cloud and kept trying to push myself.
I did make a lot of progress throughout my time with her, but at the same time, I felt overwhelmed because it kept triggering my ambitious need to achieve in order to be validated.
Now that I am no longer in therapy, I feel relieved, even though I don't know if I can make as much progress as I did. I have a bit of doubt and worry here, because I don't trust my ability enough.
In my last conversation with my therapist, she said the blankness that I am now facing needs a lot of stability and persistence, because it's quite thick, like an indispersible cloud, when she comes into contact with it, she sometimes sinks into it and gets drowned. This is what I am experiencing--blankness that comes from neglect. But right now, I am not thinking of outsourcing my problem, I will try to chip away at it bit by bit.
Often I go through my day with some level of numbness, or habitually dial down some of my emotional perception and reaction, and move through certain experiences mechanically, emptily, coldly even though there's something about it that bothers me, and I focus instead on what I want to get done or what's higher in priority.
This filtering has an invalidation or oppression of my feelings, even when I get trampled or violated. Then over time, I don't know what to do with the bottled up emotions that are reaching boiling point, or already gone past boiling point.
Yesterday I told my therapist about a minor incident that happens to me once in a while, about my balcony being used as a public space because it's on the first floor and is unfenced. But only mine is being trespassed, out of all the first floor balconies. Over the years I have been peeved by it, and have done different things about it, but of course to no avail and eventually just swallow my anger every single time, although one improvement in all this is that instead of getting more and more peeved, I am more and more stable and grounded as I experience it each time.
Today there's another trigger which is also a long-standing problem where I have no emotional outlet. A neighbor complained about our property manager charging him for another person's bill, but calling that as his "condo fee." Seems like quite a gross negligence and privacy violation, and he's angrily demanding some rectification. I don't have exactly the same experience as him but I have other grievances with the manager about their incompetence, professional negligence, lack of duty of care, misuse of authority, etc., which they and the condo board dismiss, so this results in me swallowing my grievances. I am not alone in my dissatisfaction with the board and the manager, but over the years we have all been dismissed and oppressed, then we gradually grow "smaller", no longer complaining though silently very indignant.
I think lately I'm coming to a point in my healing where I need to look squarely at all these different oppressive scenarios and my habitually repressed emotions, and open up those wounds. It's not just anger but grief too. There's this familiar childhood feeling of my parents not honoring my emotions and as a child I didn't know how to make sense of or deal with them, this sense of overwhelming helplessness and disorientation that is part of the emotional cluelessness I had in carrying myself around, then I just grabbed other things to override this emotional cluelessness, so it became harder for me to listen to my own feelings.
Previously I would eagerly look forward to the upcoming therapy session. Because I was too dependent on my therapist. I gave her too much power, and I underestimated (and invalidated) my own power.
Now I don't look forward to the next session. In fact, I dreaded it, wanted to postpone it, but felt that it's better to keep a more regular checking in, in case I slowed down or sidetracked or whatever.
But I think this is for the better, because she didn't seem to want to take me as her client anyway, I was because I was so desperate that she agreed, and I paid for all the sessions upfront, so I committed us both to a set number of sessions.
Now it's coming to an end. Tomorrow is my last session. I don't know what I will do after that, because I still feel powerless and not able to trust my ability. But I have less fear and worry about the future now. I don't know what my future will be like, I don't know if I can turn my life right side up by myself, but I don't panic or fret about it now.
I will just keep putting one foot in front of the other, and hopefully I will create the life I want.
I find myself keep coming back to feeling resentment toward my cousins. Although over time this feeling has lessened in intensity, but it's still weird that I cannot exit this pattern. Then I realized, it's because I keep harboring the hope that they would one day come to me to give me their attention, understanding, acceptance, etc.
And I realized, this habit of yearning for attention from someone who would never be able to give it to me, is from my relationship with my mother who was an emotionally cold person. As a child, I did stare into space for a long time, getting used to waiting and hoping for her attention, and repeatedly being disappointed.
I keep trying to exit this pattern, but I still fall into this pattern and get stuck in it often. As soon as I pine for someone's attention, I won't let go, even though that person has moved on, or does not even know or want to give me their attention, I will still cling on to the hope that they will one day come back to me.
So with my cousins, they deliberately ignore me, and I again activate this pattern of wanting and waiting, the more they ignore me, the more I yearn for their attention, then the more resentful I feel for being neglected and the more I find it unfair that they have become more and more neglectful, then the more I want them to see and understand the pain they have inflicted on me, but of course they won't so I feel even more hurt, etc.
It's a loop that has no end and just gets worse and worse every time I think of them.
Then when I realized it's because I am lacking attention and seeking their attention, I think I am able to exit this loop, because I don't need them to give me their attention. I can give myself the attention I need. I just need to retrain my habit.
So I am gradually training myself to see myself, instead of seeing them, and seeing their refusal to give me their attention. Focus on myself.
Lately, I have been struggling with self-expression in my online class. I have something to say, but I keep withholding myself, feeling that nobody will pay attention to me so there's no point in saying. They talk happily among themselves, but whenever I say something, nobody reacts. They all keep quiet, like they're all circumventing me. It makes me awkward, like I'm an elephant in the room.
So whenever I have something to say, I will ruminate in my head a hundred times, say or not say, what and how to say, whether there's a point or need to say, etc. Often, I will arrive at the decision of swallowing what I want to say.
In the rare case when I decide to say, then I will keep projecting the belief that nobody will give a damn, while saying what I have in mind. Then of course nobody reacts.
I find that this belief is quite strong and incessant. Even when I am conscious about it, I still can't stop projecting it outward, partly out of habit, partly because it's very strong. It's like a mad bull charging ahead, nobody can stop it.
I keep watching myself thinking repeatedly "nobody is going to respond to me", I can only agree with it, but I can't stop it. It's like I have fallen into my own self-validation.
Then it escalates to "since nobody wants to give me attention, then I don't want to engage with them," self-validation followed by invalidation of others. Ah, I've trapped myself in invalidation! 😮💨
I have just noticed one thing about the way I listen or understand. I tend to attract invalidation, or people who are opinionated and quick to judge, so when they speak, they tend to side one way or another, not neutral. So when someone who is more neutral speaks, I don't catch their meaning that much. Like it's not fully sinking in, and some parts just fly over my head.
I say this because my teacher answered a question from a classmate last year. A few days ago I re-listened to that Q&A. I sort of grasped more of it's meaning, but at the time it still didn't sink in fully. Gradually it started to sink in a bit more. Then I realized, the reason it flew over my head previously was because my teacher was very neutral, almost ambiguous, in her reply, and I was more used to the dictatorship or commanding style from an authoritative figure.
Specifically, the student asked if they should just observe and dis-identify with an issue about her kids. The teacher's answer was like the "yes and no" type, saying that it is her choice as to how much she wants to heal and face.
But now I see that this answer is about being okay with whatever you choose. It's not about judging what is right or wrong, good or better. It's very accepting, not biased toward any particular method or choice. And I realize I tend to ignore or dismiss this type of answer, opting instead for something more concrete which is usually more biased toward one way or another.
One of the effects of my childhood emotional neglect is that it's actually physical, and affects my ability to get my physical needs met. Because my mom had the final say as to what and how much I should have, when and how I should have, what I was not allowed to have even when I needed it, etc., so I developed the habit of waiting for my needs to be given to me, and when that didn't happen, I just kept staring into open space blankly, not knowing what to do because I was not allowed to ask for what I needed, because that would automatically be denied, and when I got really desperate and asked, I would be violently reproached and again denied.
So I learned not to ask, not just for emotional needs, but also physical needs, even when I was rightfully entitled to it, and the other person insisted that they had already given it to me but in fact didn't. Actually that's when it gets even more difficult.
If I prove to them that they were wrong, they would still insist that they're right, and then continue to deny me by genuinely believing that they have done nothing wrong and leaving me deprived and thinking that I should just go deal with my problem myself and not bother them further. At this point I fear demanding further because I'm afraid that they would lose their patience and lash out at me for disturbing their peace.
In one concrete scenario, my therapist said she would send me our recorded sessions, but she didn't, and insisted that she did. What she sent was actually the invitation to the online session that was already over, and I was left to figure out how to get the recorded session out of that invite. I had tried researching through several different ways, but failed. Eventually I figured out with her app, she needed to go to the history section to generate a link of the past session. I taught her how to use her app, and she managed to send me the right link where I could access the recorded session. But she didn't send me the preceding 14 sessions where she didn't generate the correct link. So I kept waiting for her to come to her senses, but realized, she didn't think she owed me anything.
Of course I could have just asked her outright, now that she finally figured out how, but my concern is not just in this specific scenario but in many other situations where people genuinely believe that they did give me what I was entitled to when they didn't, then they dismissed me when I tried to talk to them about it, not even trying to understand exactly what was wrong because they were so damned certain that they were right and I was immediately presumed to be the troublemaker.
Even when I was in the right, I still couldn't get what I was entitled. It's exasperating!