Forum Replies Created
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P.S. You don’t necessarily need to look for a job in the corporate world, if this is something very foreign to you (it is to me too!) But you’d need to work on improving your self-confidence, so you can find a better job – a job that you’ll care about but where you’ll also be properly rewarded!
Dear Emma,
I think the greatest problem is your insecurity and lack of faith in yourself. I can relate because I was similar. You say:
I have a lot of technical skills, but I worry I am not good enough. But more than that I worry I don’t have the right sort of personality I need to get a good job.
You also say you worked too hard and stayed in difficult work situations where you were overworked, underpaid, and your hard work wasn’t recognized:
I stayed in many stressful, difficult work situations where I was underpaid, and thought if I tried harder and harder and tried to stay positive I would be recognized.
In your other thread, you say:
I don’t know how to stand up for myself or remove myself [from the situation with your boyfriend].
It’s hard for me to stand up for myself when standing up for myself kindly doesn’t work, or people won’t admit to the things they’ve done.
I believe that your inability to stand up for yourself and demand a higher pay and better work conditions is related to your inability to stand up for yourself in your romantic relationship. If you agree, and would like to share some more about the conditions that led to your lack of self-confidence (perhaps in your childhood?), please do so…
Dear Bananananananer (this was hard to replicate 🙂 )
reading your post, this part caught my attention:
I have pretty bad social anxiety, my family moved more than 50 times before I even turned 18 and I consequently attended several different schools a year,
This is a lot of moving, specially for a child! If you were uprooted so many times from your friends and the things and people you got attached to, it leaves a mark. Perhaps that’s why you can’t keep a job either, because subconsciously you just don’t want to get attached to anything, knowing that you’ll be leaving anyway? The pattern of leaving things and people and projects might be deeply embedded in your subconscious mind…
Dear sossi,
So here i am blaming myself for being lonely and lost in what to do. But ive struggled all my life. It would be nice to sit back and say, this is why my life has been so hard when others just cant understand it…ive always disappointed people. I could join the whatever is wrong with you club, and commiserate with other people..would that really help?
Yes, you are blaming yourself, you are very harsh on yourself, and it’s not helping. You believe you’ve always disappointed people and that there is something wrong with you. In my previous posts I’ve tried to highlight that even if you haven’t suffered physical abuse (which you’ve stressed several times in your posts), you did suffer emotional abuse at the hands of your narcissistic mother and your enabling father. And the consequences are visible today in your life.
The idea of “blaming” my state of being on my family doesnt sit well with me at all, since i always believed you could not blame others for your own mistakes or your situation
You don’t need to blame your parents. A therapist once said that healing is a fact finding, not a fault finding mission. In order to heal, you need to know the facts of your childhood and upbringing. And you need to heal the emotional wounds caused by that kind of upbringing. It’s doable. But you need to stop blaming yourself, and start having compassion for yourself as a child, and for yourself now, as a grown woman.
Dear Emma,
I agree with Sarah – he is manipulating you to get what he wants. He seems to have found a way to trick you into having sex without your consent:
And I observed with him, a series of manipulation… at first he would not stop when I said no, and keeps trying. Then his words don’t match his actions in the moment, he reassures me the opposite of what he is doing. Then if I say no, he asks for innocent things first and works his way up to what he wants like a ladder.
Each time I did not know what happened until 24 hours later, I have flashbacks to the night before and I confront him. And he says it was a mistake, he was caught up in the moment and now he knows better.
He says he knows better, but he keeps doing it, as it happened multiple times. He can’t say he is dumb or inexperienced, if he keeps repeating the same pattern, consciously.
The only thing that bothers me is he seems to never consider my opinion,
This is a big red flag. He doesn’t consider either your opinion, or your wish to not have sex and to go slowly. He doesn’t care about you. He only cares about himself. The following just proves it further:
He wanted me to be in the same mood as him all the time, he couldn’t tolerate it if he was outgoing and I was tired, or he was stressed and I was not.
It’s all about him and none about you. He is using your vulnerability and your trauma to hurt you even more.
I asked him then – are you sure, this is what you want, to be with someone who needs to go slow physically. And he said yes, it is my choice.
Is it his choice then to repeatedly hurt you, to cross your boundaries and then pretend he got caught up in the moment? Maybe it’s like a game for him, where he is proving to himself that he can manipulate a woman into doing his bid? I don’t know his reasons, but what’s for sure, you are getting hurt in it. So as Sarah said, please get out…
Dear sossi,
I would just like to add that you have been harmed not just by your mother, but by your father as well, because he never supported you:
Meanwhile and unfortunately i have a father who is very weak and will not stand up to my mother. When any conflict arose he would take her side, no matter what. … He wont go against her wishes, its a very twisted relationship and impossible to change.
So I can imagine you felt completely helpless in your childhood – there was no one to protect you from your mother, no one to see your point and validate you, no one to empathize with you. It’s soul-crushing for a child. And you are carrying this helplessness up to this day, and it manifest in your workplace as well. You are being attacked and mistreated, and yet, you can’t seem to do anything to help yourself, to get out of the toxic environment or assert yourself. When you do try to assert yourself, no one really takes you seriously:
Asserting myself. Yes, i think i have said that ive tried, and yet, people just dont want to take it from me. they will from others. There is respect for them, but somehow ive never found the key to respect. no matter how obviously i worked well, how much praise i got from clients, how many hours i put in of extra time or how much money i made for the company…im still treated badly, talked down to at meetings, left out of decisions etc
No one takes you seriously, because a part of you doesn’t believe you have the right to assert yourself. Or perhaps you fear you would be rejected if you would really stand up for yourself. This all stems from your mother’s dismissive treatment, and then your father taking her side. You were helpless then, and you feel helpless now. Only the truth is that now, as a grown woman, you are not helpless any more. Rather, it’s your inner child telling you that you are.
I believe the first thing in your healing would be to realize that there is a wounded inner child in you, a little girl who suffered so much and were never seen or appreciated, and was bullied and manipulated…. and to have compassion for her. To understand that it wasn’t her fault, but it was her parents who treated her poorly.
Just try to give compassion to that little girl, who didn’t get proper love, appreciation and validation. And who is still struggling to get that from her parents and other people. But she actually needs to get it from you, the adult sossi. You need to give love, appreciation and validation to yourself – that’s the only way out.
Though I run this site, it is not mine. It's ours. It's not about me. It's about us. Your stories and your wisdom are just as meaningful as mine.