2019.03.22 8:49am Post Title: Confrontation Makes Me Go Grey
The first post directly addressing an issue concerning high anxiety disorder. One of the big contenders for the top trigger is having to confront anyone about anything at any time. Whenever I have to give someone an old fashioned talking to about something they've done or something they've said I puff myself up with exaggerated anger. Like some weird cousin of a pep talk, I drag the issue around and around in my head dragging it through cerebral dirt and mud until I have enough nerve to speak my mind. All the effort to gain the result of me meekly going up to the person and wanting to apologize to them for even bothering them. I don't back down from the issue and I get it addressed, but the stress I feel during the talk itself constricts my chest just enough to hurt, and with no evidence that the person would react badly I always assume they will.
I don't like pointing fingers at people because I know that for a good part of how things have screwed me up in the past was due to my misinterpretation of the situation. While I can be very good at reading people and get an instinctual impression of them I have the tendency to color that impression based on the overhanging emotion I feel during some situations. Add a little penchant for feeding into drama and the truth based on memory becomes skewed and blurred.
Nevertheless, I will mention that I have more than mulled it over for years. As a bit of an incomplete intro lets just say my parents are recovering alcoholics. While they did raise me to the best of their abilities and hopefully succeeded in teaching me to be a good person ( a thing I constantly agonize over), there is the saying its not if you screw up your kids its how. I think this particular confrontation thing may be a result of that. The big thing about being around let alone being raised by recovering addicts is what they call “King Baby Syndrome”. It is the name of the addict's overall tendencies of being over controlling, self-centered, self-absorbed, insecure, and blaming everyone else for their problems. Being raised around the recovering community taught me a lot of good things: you can't help people who don't want it, if you can't take care of yourself you can't take care of others, and the big thing that pertains to this post is that while your recovering addict loves you and wants what's best for you their decisions are mostly going to be about themselves. A harsh reality yet one that needs to be made aware of those who are considered what the recovering community calls “Al-Anon”. I.e. those like me but not necessarily limited to kids. Al-Anons can be anyone living and or caring for a recovering addict.
Getting back to the point of the post — how this whole other side of my parents' lives factors into the confrontation issues I have is simple enough. My confronting them on anything had the tendency to end in a number of not so great ways: they belittling the problem, they becoming affronted and recoiling, and perhaps the most damaging — the conversation turning into a huge fight where very hurtful things are said on either side. Concerning my memories growing up, of course, all the times they hurt my feelings just for disagreeing with them or speaking my mind are going to be the most prominent regardless of how often actually civil responses happened. For a long time, I didn't introspect on the matter and just clung to the distorted view I had on my childhood. I became untrusting and volatile towards my parents altogether bottling up my problems, becoming resentful, and ultimately becoming squeamish toward, you guessed it, confrontation. My only argument toward my defense that seems like it has any merit is that if you grow up hearing your parents say that overall your problems aren't big enough to address, and you grow up agonizing if any problem you have is worth the possibility of it devolving into a screaming match — you become an adult who agonizes over little disagreements and quails at the thought of just asking someone to not smoke in the same room as you.
That Al-Anon lesson didn't get taught to me until my early twenties long after some very dark years of self-torment that I won't get into just yet. I know not to take the things my parents say so personally anymore. I even have a very good relationship with my mother in particular now. We can talk to each other about our mental health problems for the most part. She had told me that a lot of the time my having emotional problems in my life made her feel like she was failing me which had lead to her belittling, recoiling, or the fighting. I told her how it made me feel like they didn't care about me enough to help me with my problems. We both reassure each other that neither of our insecurities are true in reality. She helped me see a therapist over my issues which lead to my diagnosis of high anxiety disorder. Even though it has been some time since I've seen that therapist due to money issues and my moving 12 hrs away — overall things are better. It isn't always sunlight and daisy chains as my parents and I still fight, but distance and better communication mean it's not nearly as much as it used to be.
I still find I fight with myself over whether or not my problems with someone or something is worth mentioning or confronting people about. Its a natural part of living in Society that I recoil from and have to fight all the time. I don't see that changing, well, ever. I hope it gets easier as time goes. Maybe becoming older will mellow me out. Although, I've already gotten to the point in my life where I'm getting tufts of grey hairs. It doesn't seem to have heralded a new age of less strain so much as a new age of wondering how else my age is going to show. Just more fuel for my freak out rocket.