Thank Goodness...

I'm taking a break from all my analyzing (LOL); no telling how much trouble I'd be in if I hadn't.  Driving home this afternoon, here's how i'm beginning to put 'it' toghther: I suffer from abandonment issues, but they weren't physical abandonment, they were emotional abandonment. Let's go with the shy thing again. So as a litle child, under 3 years old, I was feeling afraid around strangers. I was just then learning to segregate a 'Me' from an 'Us'. Babies typically think in egocentric terms, everything is 'them'. Mom and Dad, brothers and sisters, are all part of a 'me', we're all the same in their interaction with 'me'. Between 18 months and 3 1/2 the baby begins to identify with a 'me' that is seperate from 'others'. The word "no!", as a feeling, begins to be used, as does "mine!". A seperate identity is being formed. If the parents have shame issues around individuality, they may punish the child for it's new knowledge of what it wants in being 'different' from their significant provider or parent. As a shy child, I may (or may not) have been TOLD directly that shyness was 'bad', but the encouragement of "Don't be like that, say Hello" was misinterpreted as "Your feelings are wrong, what you are doing by 'acting' shy is wrong, you and your feelings are therefore wrong." This is the beginning of learning not to trust your own feelings, and instead looking to authority figures to please, in order to be 'right'. Codependent people-pleasing is all about not trusting your own feelings and trusting something outside the self to determine what's 'right', whereas your true feelings are part of who you really are and were instilled in you to protect your authentic self.  Now I'm at a spot where I've spent too much time caring for other's feelings, while trying to justify mine. The abandonment issue is that our feelings weren't acknowledged. I felt afraid, as a shy child. That's a real feeling, but I was told that it was the incorrect feeling, so that instead of having my feeling recognized, it was abandoned by the parent who was protecting their self-image for being a parent who knows how to raise an obediant child. A child 'should' be exactly like all the other children who are not shy. It wasn't done intentionally, but the connection was made by me that I wasn't good enough, that I couldn't trust my feelings, that there were some rules I didn't know about, so I'd better keep a sharp eye out for signals on how to behave so that others would be happy with me, (others being expanded from just parents). How I felt was not important, I was abandoned, emotionally. Codependency, in my case, is all about the shame of being me. That I don't feel 'right'. Others feel 'right', I don't. I am not good because of my feelings. Along with this is the child who then decides that if they behave, stay out of sight, and trouble, maybe their providers will let them stay around. The child learns to take other's feelings more importantly than their own, for survival purposes. The problem is, those feelings of a child continue on, become internalized, and the result is an 'adult-child'. A person who looks like an adult, but acts and feels lost, like a child. Understanding that the 'shame' is just the result of 'someone' else's subjective opinion, or THEIR shame, that they've asked you to protect so they don't feel bad about 'their' shame, is the "HOT POTATO" you give back to them. They have to learn to deal with their own shame. You are no longer going to protect them from shame. You've got your own issues to work on. Then you can begin to accept your shame as part of what you've become, and can intergrate it into who you are now, to accept that you need to change how you feel about yourself. That some of these  issues were given to you by how others 'think' and 'feel' life 'should' be lived, according to them and their needs; which have nothing to do with your needs, now. We are good. Flawed, imperfect. But all humans are flawed in some way. Once we begin to accept ourselves as we are, to quit playing the approval-seeking game from others, the sooner we can approve of ourselves. Learning that we have the right to approve of ourselves teaches us to love ourselves as we are, not according to anything outside of us. What we are doing is feeling a hole 'inside', a self that was abandoned to satify someone else's shame. You cannot fill that hole inside from the outside. No matter what food you eat, or drug you take, that empty feeling is not physical, it's emotional. And the only way to fill it is to love and accept ourselves as we are, 'mistakes and all'. That's my understanding so far...good thing I took a break!