Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Support Group
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i am wondering if one of the greatest healing gifts i have received from my peer support network on my long and winding recovery road might have been the exposure within a supportive environment to my polar oppisites. typically, these are the people i avoid fanatically in my daily life. the woman who reminds me of. . . the man who reminds me of. . . the know-it-all who makes me feel. . . early into my recovery, simply sharing a physical space with certain people catapaulted me into psychosis. moving in small steps from there has helped me learn tolerance and forgiveness. works still in progress with a growing doubt that those works ever end.
"when i point a finger at someone else, there are three fingers pointing back at me." ~AA
when i can accomplish enough tolerance and forgiveness to share thoughts and healing hopes with people i would not choose for my inner circle, i find strange and wonderous things i have not quite found words for.
thoughts? words for ^it^?
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I haven't written in my diary on my computer since May because I thought that my computer was dying. I got away from writing but my computer is hanging in there. I think that I will start writing in it again. It's so therapeutic.
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Years ago, I won a mirrored armoire from my job. It's in my bedroom but I rarely stand in front of it. Yesterday, I had to have a dexascan done so I had to change into a gown. There was a full length mirror in the changing room. I'm aware that I gained 5 to 7 pounds over the last year from cheating on Keto but I didn't know what it looked like. It was a reality check.
Just a thought of my own. My inner circle has been variable this last year, as a friend of 30-odd years ghosted me when Hubby went into chemo, but others have stepped up who were unexpected. Took me into their arms, gave me hugs, talked with me about non-cancer (a vital thing for sanity), it was quite the revelation on many fronts!
If I had words for "it", I'd share. I think this is one of those transcendent things that doesn't fit words very well, in my self.
oversexed bimbos are worth misquoting. .
my inner circles vary considerably, too, including the times i want to be part of someone else's inner circle. medical dramas are one of the places i drop out of inner circles. "avoidance" is my personal approach to medical science and i can't seem to detach from my hatred of the system. haters will hate and sometimes the hater is me.
Otherwise, we were different. He taught math, I taught the Humanities. He came from a tiny and very poor Appalachian hamlet (not even a town), I came from a capital city in South America. He spoke Appalachian English with its southern accent and nothing else, I spoke English Spanish, and Portuguese. He was married with 4 kids, I was single and never had any kids. He went to a very, very conservative Southern church, I served a small liberal congregation as minister. I have PTSD from combat and so forth, he didn't have PTSD and had never been in the military or even beyond the county where we taught and the West Virginia country neighboring it. And on and on. We were polar opposites.
We decided to have lunch together at the community college where we taught BECAUSE of how different we were, and we kept to lunch 3 times a week for the 10 years I taught at that community college. Then lo and behold, when I retired from Appalachia to Mexico, he proposed that we keep having lunch together via WhatsApp, and that's what we've been doing for 3 years now. We just had lunch together virtually today, by the way. We won't all of next week because he's going off to serve as counselor for his church camp.
Again, we chose to be best guy friends specifically because we're polar opposites. We figure how else are we going to learn what the other side thinks about things? We never try to persuade each other to the other's point of view, and that's a real blessing. That's made our hour long lunches so stress free for the last 13 years.
I do have great friends who agree with me and are a lot like me and believe in the same things I believe in. A couple are from here at DS. It's rewarding, though, that I also have this great friend who's my polar opposite to balance out the world view of me and my other friends like me. It's been one of the smartest things I've ever done in my life in order to learn more about the world around me.
it was, in actual fact, a polar opposite coworker/friend who first encouraged me to reach out to my polar opposites in my support groups. it was much harder there because the polar opposites so often share the same traits as my abusers. it was hard, but well worth the effort. i am glad i took that bit of sage advice.
gentle inventory
emphasis on "gentle"
you and i have not achieved friendship, but i consider you my antithesis. respectfully, of course, from a safe social distance. respect is a potent social skill.
as a teen seeking to escape child prostitution, etc., it became my lifeline to seek out my polar opposites and emulate them carefully. my craving was to be anything but what i was. my self-loathing was intense. i was equally repulsed by anyone who reminded me of myself.
as my healing journey progressed and i learned to accept and even love myself as i am, i still attract to and envy my polar opposites while experiencing acute discomfort around people who are too much like me. works still in progress. hope healing happens here.
perhaps the biggest discovery i found after i took the advice of my coworker and began seeking out my polar opposites in my support groups was that most of those folks were more like me than my psychotic comfort zone could appreciate. my craving to be liked by my true polar opposites was the source of many an unhealthy relationship. works still in progress.
Yet it's worked for 3 years well now, and I don't think it's so much in spite of our being polar opposites in those ways, but actually BECAUSE of our being such polar opposites.
As a missionary kid I saw how that narcissism of small differences divided Christian churches into so many different denominations, often over a small doctrinal dispute that outsiders wouldn't even notice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences#:~:text=In%20psychoanalysis%2C%20the%20narcissism%20of,of%20hypersensitivity%20to%20minor%20differences
"In psychoanalysis, the narcissism of small differences (German: der Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen) is the idea that the more a relationship or community shares commonalities, the more likely the people in it are to engage in interpersonal feuds and mutual ridicule because of hypersensitivity to minor differences perceived in each other.[1] The term was coined by Sigmund Freud in 1917,"
As polar opposites me and my Mexican family of caregivers are free of the narcissism of small differences that Freud talked about. Thanks for raising this polar opposites idea here. It's giving me lots of food for thought.
your mention of caregivers gave me an image of someone just like me providing my geriatric care. i'm still calming my flight instincts. not a job someone just like me should even apply for.