I CAN’T HANDLE
any more stress!

PREVIOUS: Dis-comfort & Comfort #1

SITE: 17 Habits of a Self-destructive person

1. NEGATIVE Comfort ➖➕
• all forms of addictions, inching ‘addicted’ to religious / ‘spiritual’ pursuits “They’re so heavenly minded they’re no earthly good”
• always complain but never change //refuse to be self-reflective
• always have to ‘be the ‘good’ one
• be controlling (trying to force PPT to be what we want)
• busy minding someone else’s business, rescuing, over-helping

• don’t risk trying new & better ways to live
• isolate / distance everyone // be invisible
• make excuses / blame all difficulties on others, never seeing our part
• look for others to rescue, validate & take care of us
• never rock the boat //  stay in denial // act dumb
• never use direct communication (leave out things, beat  around the bush, don’t stand up for our rights….) // justify, exaggerate, lie

• people-please / don’t say NO when appropriate
• stay connected to unhealthy family & other dysfunctional or dangerous people
• stay constantly busy, over-work / try to be perfect
• stay the victim / be in self-pity / ‘practice’ unnecessary self-sacrifice
• try to avoid everything hard or painful // regularly zone out, over-sleep, over-use internet, games, TV….
• try to “know everything”, be perfect
• use self-injury to ‘cope’ with too much pain

▶︎Think of all the ways you use to escape, & fill in the blue square ⬆️

Keeping these patterns alive, especially once we know better, insures that we stay stuck. It’s the WIC who is in charge of this resistance, & it takes a great deal of determination, correct info,  kind support & unconditional love —->to pry it loose from the toxic family system.

2. NEGATIVE DIS-comfort ➖➖
In this category we can look at the Nigglies that are discomforting, & Biggies – that are more obvious. But first let’s review ACoA reactions to experiencing pain over long periods – Under & Over – regarding how we interact with people, events & situations (PPT).

UNDER ‘feel’
As kids we had to clamp down on our emotions because we were punished or ignored for having them, no way of processing them, & had very little or no comforting when in pain.  That taught us to ignore feelings.
BUT they’ve never gone away – they just go underground & pile up until we’ve become one big sore – but blaming ourselves for hurting. The enormity of our accumulated pain is overwhelming, & not knowing that we can process them out, we have to shut down, so the pain turns into depression, or we use them to attack others, & for many of us – we do both.

Being in denial about the abuse we have suffered leads many ACoAs to emotionally & mentally under-react to most stressors. It’s not unusual to observe ACoAs smiling, even laughing, when talking about traumatic events, especially things that happened in childhood.
EXP: Recently Sara stopped in at a fast food joint down town. While eating her sandwich 5 local teens came in & sat at the next table. The were laughing as they compared beatings they used to get at home, one out-doing the others in their descriptions!

Sara wanted so much to tell them that being beaten is not funny, but rather painful, unjust, horrible, truly abusive….., but knew they would not have believed her nor welcomed her interference.
Clearly, they needed to protect the ‘value’ of the family at their own expense. Sara also knows that – at least 4 out of the 5, if not all wounded people – this pattern will be passed on when these teens have their own children, & likely with their mates as well – either as abusers or as victims!

Having to sit on all that disowned pain takes up a lot of psychic energy, making it very hard to pay attention to real difficulties when they occur in the present. So naturally, daily annoyances are more likely to be dismissed or overlooked as unimportant (T)! This makes sense, since we don’t have the inner quiet (serenity) to deal with them. We’re just trying to keep our head above water!

NEXT: Dis-comfort/Comfort #3a