Responsibility for your pain
Posted on December 25th, 2016
What I read all over and over again:
You have to take responsibility for your pain.
It did sound a bit abstract to me at the beginning, but after thinking about it for some weeks I think my perspective changed. It did not make me feel better, but the state in which I used to be often: "I am useless, I will not make it, I should die", and what was really underneath it: "I will prove to everyone that I will not make it", this state is somehow gone. I no longer fight for recognition, I no longer wait for someone to come and say "poor you, you have suffered so much", or "you were indeed right all along", I no longer wait for "sorry for screwing up your entire life". Those will never come anyway.
A mind trick that helped was the following: "Okay, my parents screwed up and left a lot of shit behind, but you know what, they are too old to clean that shit up. They soon have to depart. Okay then, I will take this over from them. I know this is not my job, but if I do not do this job then nobody will, and this is the job that really has to be done.". In other words..
..I took over the duty of dealing with it, without making myself accountable for it.
Yes, that thinking helped me. It is an important distinction: responsibility vs accountability. I imagined myself telling the above words to my parents, and in that way I made some commitment, that now prevents me from slipping back into the "I told you I won't make it" mode.
Less waiting, more doing!