Hi Dave,
I'd say just about all of them of the dysfunction thinking patterns could be applied to my mother. Since I've become a mom, especially, I've stopped myself in my tracks on many occasions and said to myself "you're turning into your mom!!". Which, it many ways isn't a bad thing, since she's had to face some seriously large challenges in her life. I find what makes it harder is that (like 99.9% of families I am sure) none of her absence was intentional. I have evidence from conversations I've overheard and things I've read that she just plain never understood what was missing..And I didn't either until I started this (extremely long) period of reflection. People just work with what they have, right? It's still a process for me to truly believe my family was dysfunctional and that I didn't create all of this myself. I can absolutely see the pattern emerging based on how my mom sometimes describes how she was treated by her mom, how victimized and full of blame she is, and how victimized I feel sometimes. She was never mean; she was just sad and emotionally unavailable. It's like being "stuck" in a childlike state and while I'm fully aware of it, it's hard to move on from it. Especially when I feel like all the decisions I've made to get me where I am today were made from that childlike state.
On the other side of the coin, your incident at Christmas was a healthy dose of perspective for me, as I've let my unleashed drunken rage out on someone who let me down, quite a few times over the last 2 years. I can see that I've lost all sense of boundaries with this person. And until I can get back on my feet, gain control over my terrible coping methods and feel less victimized, I think I need to stay away. I've come to realize that my behaviour is NOT acceptable anymore, even if this person will still accept me, and even if (and this scares me) I feel little remorse for my words because I'm still so victimized.
Dave you're a wise man. I went back to see my therapist yesterday as I was feeling like I needed some in-person reinforcement from someone I trust implicitly and she said your last paragraph almost entirely. "You're letting her problem be your problem". Something to think about,
And to end off, YES I absolutely think we all need to focus on our coping skills, assertiveness and changing our thinking habits. I am not assertive, and as I stop drinking as an anxiety medication, this is going to be a huge ongoing challenge for me. My backbone is mush because I don't even know who I am or what I stand for. When I assert myself it follows with severe guilt. Sometimes it terrifies me to think about how much work needs to be done to get to where I want to be. I've been encouraged to do a lot of relaxation and visualization which at first I thought was hokey. How could that take the place of the quick endorphin rush of alcohol when times get stressful? But over the year I've started to realize that the positive coping skills take time and persistence and are slow to show their effectiveness.. But they work. They develop into healthy habits that eventually take the place of the unhealthy ones. I agree and have meant to start a thread for us to maybe document situations that have been difficult for which we've used positive methods instead of turning to the bottle. Those things absolutely deserves more focus and attention because those are the things that will ultimately assist us in being successful.
