Pain, and more bad dreams

Another bad night, this time triggered by pain.
I woke up in the middle of the night with acute pain, it felt like period pain. It took me about a minute to remember when I did last have period, it was last week!.
So, what is going on?
At the moment I am not registered with the doctors, it was, actually is, still in my to do list. But it is my experience when I have had similar problems before that the doctors have not paid much attention, so I am not very motivated to go.
However I am a bit worried…. Am I being a bit a hypochondriac here?.

I got up after a while of not sleeping in order to allow my partner to get some proper rest. Felt asleep again in the morning and have ore bad dreams.
Again, my father keeps cropping up. The dreams are not all that bad, however I wake up feeling as if they were. Hard to explain. Emotionally very unsettled, and revisiting a lot of things form the past, even though they were not explicitly on the dream.

I had thought that I was done with this, relieving the past, the bad dreams etc.
It had been a long time since this was a recurrent problem.
I kept having the occasional bad night, or even a little flashback, but it had become sporadic. I had stopped being scared that it would happen any time all the time.
Now it was been three days in a row. And what is more worrying is that it happened last week as well, and I believe the week before then a couple of days too.
I didn’t think much of it at first as I was not too upset in the morning, but it is escalating. I still feel pretty much in control, but I am getting worried, and I am not sure what to do about it.

Bad dreams -- old ghosts

I had a terrible night. It was one bad dream after another.
I tried staying awake, thinking of something different, distracting myself for a while before going back to sleep hoping that would make a difference to the dream theme but it didn’t work. I got up very early, exhausted, feeling as if I had not slept at all. But I couldn’t face going back to sleep, even though it was hard to keep my eyes open.

The dreams were all about my family, and my father was on some.
I hate when I have dreams in which my father is there, as if that was the situation now in the present (my parents divorced about fifteen years ago, though he lived with us for a year a couple of years after they divorced).

I think I am worried about my family, things are not going very well for them, there are economic worries, but more than anything is all the personal stuff that worries me.
I don’t think they are doing very well in that department either.
However I feel unable to help. I tried talking to them quite a few times in the past, and I do when there is a window of opportunity now, but that rarely happens.
They do not want to talk. If I ask any of them about themselves, they are fine, is the others that have trouble I should talk to them. And that is what they all say.
Then form time to time there are arguments that I get to hear about; I believe there are many I do not get to hear about. I mostly hear from my mother, and when she tells me why she is upset I understand and empathise, but then she tells me what she is done about it or plans to do and… it is hard to explain. I can see how it is not going to work; she approaches issues all at once, mixing her feeling towards the ‘family’ or even ‘everyone’ into a confrontation with one person. She brings everything up when the issue sparks from one particular incident. Also there is a tendency of extending comments and criticism far beyond what is reasonable.
I’ll give an example. In an argument with my brother which started with work related issues (they work together) she brings up personal issues, between them, and even issues about who she disagrees on his behaviour towards other members of the family (the way he talked to my aunt), and complains about his clothes, his eating and drinking habits etc. So everything gets mixed up, and obviously nothing really is taking away by the recipient of this outburst.

I am very familiar with this. She has always been like this. And she is not the only one; it is more or less the way the family operates.
I find it impossible to deal with, I mean I can deal with it, I can take it when the outburst is directed at me, and I have managed over the years to stop myself counter-attacking in the same fashion (it is hard work, believe me) but what I can not do is stir things in different more productive direction. When it is about me I can negotiate what would I do that would make things better, but when it comes to the others I can’t. If I say anything about restricting the conflict to one issue, or about the hostility it is being dealt with, I get accused of being on the other person side, or not seeing the whole picture, or … whatever, there is always something (they are very articulate people).

So what does all this have to do with my dreams? Lots I think.
I believe I feel guilty that I have set myself apart from my family.
It was not just because they have not supported me about the issues with my father, which was very very painful, but also because I couldn’t find a way to be myself among them. I find the family dynamics asphyxiating. Problems don’t ever get resolved, just left to rest until next time. People don’t usually say what they really have a problem with anyway, it is all hidden in a discourse aim to make the other feel bad, and set oneself as righteous.

I needed to solve my issues, At some point I was close to ending my life. I needed to move on, to process, to heal, to learn to understand myself and not be controlled by my emotions, which seemed erratic and overpowering.

I relate to people in a very different way now. I don’t think I am perfect far from it; there are still many issues I do not handle well at all (as it is clear form the precious post I guess). But I am better. I feel better, and I believe I am better to others. I listen more, I reflect before I answer, I don’t just react.

When I go back home, sometimes I get sucked into the old habits again. It happens less nowadays than it used to though. I do not loose my temper anymore, but I do feel really on edge, and uneasy most of the time.
I am convinced that to leave close to family again would be to be unhappy. I can’t change them, all I can do is change myself. But the way they are, they react and even the way the view things gets to me, hurts me. I guess it shows me why things happened the way they did, about me, about my father, about no one noticing, about no one supporting me. First they didn’t believe, then they just ignored it. When I pushed things once, the reaction in summary was: that was long ago, you have to move on, don’t get stuck in the past.

My dreams where all about my family. About me being back home, living with them, trying to work things out for them. Trying to live in that constant battle. Living with my father, as it was back then.

I feel responsible for them, and therefore I feel guilty about being away.
But deep down I know I can’t help them, and I can’t live with them.
I have to have my life, and they have theirs. That is the way things should be anyway right?

Loneliness

I feel so lonely…
We moved a few weeks ago to a new city. We know some people here, but mainly they are friends of his. And so far we haven’t seen much of them.
But that is not why I really feel this lonely.
I think this is much deeper issue, I feel lonely because I have no one to talk to. I have my partner, but no close friends. This is not new really; it has been going on for a while. It seems that most of my friendships have… disappeared?
People move and I find it hard to stay in touch, but mostly over time I have distance myself from everyone in one way or another.
I have felt hurt by people and not found a way to work through it. I withdraw.
It is not always my first choice, I have tried to talk to friends about it, but it doesn’t always work. And then with me and/or them moving….
I don’t want to go through a list of what has happened with each one of them. I have some friends that I could talk to, but none of them leave anywhere near this city right now. And it has been a while since things have been like this It is making a dent on me now.
Also for some reason as I get older and I think I am finding it harder to connect with people. I didn’t use to find it hard to make “friends” but now I do.
Writing used to be of help when I felt like this, but it is not working anymore.
I have come back to this blog after a long time. I have not been active on the blogsphere for a very long time, and I am getting dishearted to find some of the people I used to follow not around anymore. Then there is also the fact that no one seems to be reading, or least no one who has left a comment, and I think that is just reinforcing the feeling of isolation.
I am having a hard time with the jobless situation, sending applications and hearing nothing back. So obviously being rejected.
Feel rejected (or neglected) by friends too. I have texted or email some people (haven’t said anything about not feeling very upbeat, I tend to do that) and most have not got back to me at all. They might do at some point, but it has been long enough for me to feel rejected.

Feels like any attempt on my part of reaching out, putting myself out there, professionally and personally is meet with silence. Feels so futile to keep trying…

Back to square one

Looking for a job, again. Without really knowing what I want to do.
It seems to me this is where I was when I finished university, many years ago.
Then I went back to university, and after some time working got myself into another course at university. Though this was mainly a practical course, and most of the time was spent on a placement, working.
So, I guess I count at least, three major “stops” when I have tried to decide what I wanted to do and yet I seem to not know.
During the last year, and particularly during the last few weeks I have done a lot of “soul searching” trying to figure out what really makes me “tick”.
One thing that I am not setting as a priority is being happy. It might sound a bit of a strange thing to say, do I mean that I was seeking to be unhappy before? No of course not. But in a way I was not really focussed on achieving happiness.
For starters I do not think I had much of an idea of what that really meant.
I was surviving, and I think happiness was to me like colours might be for a person born blind. It is something that you imagine, you hear people talk about, but you really don’t know what it is, how it is like, and you have no framework to help you develop the concept.
I think before I was motivated by the desire of eliminating the effect of my past.
I wanted to have the life I imagine I would have had without the abuse.
So, I chose a partner (well, over time more than one) that had certain qualities I liked but not someone who was not understanding of my issues, and my needs.
I worked really hard on the relationship and tried really hard to be somewhere I was not, to be someone I was not. I tried to be and feel like someone with a different past would have (or how I thought they would).
On a professional level I did the same. When I finished high school, it was decided I would go to university. This had been decided long ago and not really by me but by my parents.
In any case I was not unhappy with it. When it came to decide what I was going to study I consider studying psychology. However, this was not a profession that my family would value. Furthermore they seem to be very dismissive of the field, and there was a theory that only people who have a problem they do not wish to tell anyone studies or trains in that field.
Now, that really hit a chord on me because it was very true in my case that I had a problem I did not want to discuss. At the time I didn’t even really know what my problem was, I was utterly confused and thought there was something wrong with me. It is also true that I had an interest in human behaviour and development, but I dismissed the idea and studied science, physics. Something I was good at and that they would value. And probably, I thought was what I would have liked to do had I not have any trouble while growing up.
So, I was determined to have a “normal” life.
Over the years I have though of training for counselling several times.
I have always decided against, or put it off.
Now I find myself thinking about it again, and again finding reasons to not do it on the basis of practical reasons, and a feeling that it is now too late, and that I have already trained enough over my life.
I can’t figure out what would make me happy, I feel blocked in so many ways.