Hello my dear friends of this blog on how I lost 100 pounds without gastric bypass or weight loss drugs. This month's Happy Heart February weight loss challenge is revealing to me how important healing the heart and mind is to fixing the body. If you're just tuning in, welcome but also fair warning. I've been sharing a lot of painful memories of parental gaslighting, abandonment, neglect, abuse, endangerment, exploitation, parentification and manipulation.
I'm uncovering and the roots of CPTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder), toxic shame and undeserved, chronic guilt. I'm dismantling my "stinkin thinkin" which has led to lack of self-care, self-harm and a life of misery. It's going to be a long road because I'm only just understanding now, what happened and how wrong it was. I'm now able to put these experiences in proper perspective. I'm learning to trust my narrative, not the version I was gaslit into believing.
Gaslighting, from a very young age, taught me to believe many dangerous and potentially deadly lies. It undermines everything. Self-confidence, it says, is prideful. Self-esteem is arrogant. Self-care is selfish. Not taking care of others is being a poor servant. Disagreeing is disobedience. Having an opinion is "sassing." Speaking up is talking back.
Respect is one way and is owed to anyone your parents decide to put in charge, regardless of whether they have earned it or give you respect in return. Responsibilities and rules are for you. Rights are for them. Anything they do is right even if they tell you it's wrong for others. You owe your parents everything while they owe you nothing.
These and many other lies built a wall, brick by brick, that imprisoned me in toxic shame. There was no way out. They had every exit barred and an answer for everything. I was being crushed under increasingly more expectation, excessive demands and crazier rules.
It's only been by kicking down the wall that I've been able to find some freedom and peace. I'm slowly starting to crush every brick, every wrong teaching, every shameful experience, every hurtful demand and reexamine it for what it was, and not the gaslighting lies I've been fed all these years. And it's exhausting.
If any of this resonates, please stay tuned. We'll kick down these walls together. Love, mar
No comments:
Post a Comment